Multilingualism and Translation in the Maghrebi Arabic Novel

Abstract This article examines how multilingualism and translation in the literary Maghreb manifest themselves textually and thematically in novels written in Arabic by two prominent bilingual authors, Rachid Boudjedra and Abdelfattah Kilito. Adopting situated close reading as a method, the analysis demonstrates that the worlds captured and refracted in these novels demand travelling to and inside the text. This is to tease out how multilingualism functions as a mode of writing that translates Arab-Islamic and pre-Islamic historical texts into the fraught postcolonial bilingual juncture (Boudjedra), and as a condition of writing that occasions the translation and reinvention of Arabic classical texts and writers in a literary world where Arabic is subject to the dominance of French and English (Kilito). Ultimately, I hope to show how the world of the text problematizes and thematizes issues pertinent to world literature, while challenging sociological theories and distant readings.