The book is the culmination of four years of research at Dar al-Kutub, the Egyptian National Library in Cairo. Kesrouany’s interest in the subject was sparked when she was a first-year graduate student at Emory University in Atlanta. “I came across an Arabic translation of Molière’s Tartuffe (1664) asal-Shaykh Matlūf (1873) and found out there were a lot more of these,” she notes.  “I was both intrigued and hooked. I started researching and spent some time in archives in Cairo and Beirut, gathering some translations and continued with the project. I became very interested in what attracted the translators to these seemingly very alien texts and why they just could not stop translating and sharing them.”

"While the colonial secular works to separate literature as a modern discipline from religion as the traditional sphere of private faith, treacherous translation unsettles this separation and stages the undoing of narrative categories that we have taken for granted in the study of the Arabic novel, such as subject, narrator, and realist representation."

Kesrouany hopes that through this book, students of Arabic literature will develop an appetite for exploring early 20th century texts further. “My hope is this book will contribute to a new way of reading modern Arabic literature on its own terms, using translation to model a more comprehensive experience of reading in between places, languages, cultures, and histories, a mode of reading necessary for our world today.”

Prophetic Translation: The Making of Modern Egyptian Literature is available online at Edinburgh University Press, and at the NYUAD bookstore.