Between Travesty, Transposition, and Translation: The Challenges of Reading Bahāʾ Ǧāhīn’s al-Fallāḥ al-Faṣīḥ (2010)

Most commentators of modern Arabic literature maintain that the literary use of “Pharaonic” themes has yielded less than satisfying results. Islam, they assert, is too hostile to ancient Egypt to allow a profound integration of its cultural products within the mainstream intellectual milieu. In this article, I turn to Bahāʾ Ǧāhīn’s 2010 reinscription of The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant to argue that although this tension with Islam is true and integral, it does not minimize such literary engagements as much as it bends them out of traditional shape, tangling the relationship between hypertext and hypotext(s) in fascinatingly problematic ways. By focusing on the linguistic underpinning of al-Fallāḥ al-Faṣīḥ, I demonstrate how the struggle to mediate between historical heritage and religious ideology results in a (seemingly) unconscious activation of one of literary reinscription’s most scathing modes: the travesty.

Keywords: travesty, diglossia, reinscription, egyptian literature