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Here I’m reading a critic on Arabic literature, thanks to a recommendation, having almost no acquaintance with it on its own. In the opening essay “In the Mirror��, Kilito quotes the French Arabist Charles Pellat who, after a lifetime of sacrificing himself to it, came to the conclusion that Arabic literature is boring. Kilito admires the honesty while seeing the tragedy in it. Kilito notes that written Arabic hasn’t changed in over a thousand years; the literature goes back to the desert, whereas European literature only goes back about five centuries, having arrived much later than civilization. In fact, to read earlier French or English writers (or Japanese ones too), translation within one’s language is required. Is this Arabic constancy something to be proud of, or an emblem of a larger problem?

Kilito makes an honest observation himself: he feels his language has been robbed from him when face to face with a foreigner who speaks it as well as, or even better than, a native like himself. Where did they learn that Moroccan nuance? An interesting thought when put up against the philosophy that we are just borrowing language when we use it, especially when it’s our own. I love thoughts like these that recognize the limits of language. Express yourself as much as you want; it’ll only take you so far.

This book makes a fine companion piece to Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura’s book on the dominance of English language in the world literary marketplace. They are on two sides of the globe, but they are making similar, important arguments:

“The ancients examined, realized, and used all the rhetorical possibilities, and they even went so far as to belittle and dismiss literature. They talked at length about its falsity and inutility, but they did so within its own framework and discursive norms. It never once occurred to them to look at it from the outside, through the lens of another literature. They never thought that the question of translating it would one day be raised. But that happened in the middle of the nineteenth century. Al-Shidyaq represents a turning point toward the shock of a bitter discovery: that Arabic literature is untranslatable, and that on the whole it matters only to Arabs.��

It looks like I've wandered into another world. Every other review on this site is in Arabic. Nice.