In “Embargoed Literature,” an essay written twenty-five years ago, Edward W. Said noted that “of all the major world literatures, Arabic remains relatively unknown and unread in the West.” How is it that one of the world’s great literary corpuses, as rich as those of classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Chinese, has so little echo in English? Is Arabic literature untranslatable? The obstacles in this case are political as much as they are linguistic. Taking its cue from Said’s notion of a “perfect inequality” between the two languages, this essay argues for a situational—rather than literal—approach to translation, emphasizing the intellectual gains (and risks) to be had from thinking of translation as an act of cultural interpretation rather than verbal substitution.

中文翻译：

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阿拉伯语不能翻译吗？

在 25 年前写的一篇文章“禁运文学”中，爱德华·W·赛义德指出，“在所有主要的世界文学中，阿拉伯语在西方仍然相对不为人知和未被阅读。” 世界上最伟大的文库之一，像古典希腊文、梵文和中文一样丰富，怎么在英文中却如此少回响？阿拉伯文学是不可翻译的吗？在这种情况下，障碍既是语言上的，也是政治上的。从赛义德关于两种语言之间“完全不平等”的概念中汲取灵感，本文主张采用情境而非字面的翻译方法，强调将翻译视为一种行为所带来的智力收益（和风险）文化解释而不是口头替代。