Abstract
Algerian author Boualem Sansal’s French-language novel 2084: La fin du monde [translated into English as 2084: The End of the World] adapts many of the themes of George Orwell’s 1984. My article will explore both the “translation” of Orwell’s novel into a different cultural context and Sansal’s use of an invented “Eastern” language, Abilang, through the lens of Edward Said’s Orientalism. I will particularly discuss Abilang, the invented language that corresponds to Orwellian Newspeak, and which did not change in the translation of 2084 from French to English. I will ask how this invented and untranslatable language builds on, and differs from, Orientalist stereotypes of Eastern languages as not conveying accessible knowledge or requiring translation.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout this piece, I have quoted the English translation of the novel, except where linguistic choices of the original are discussed, in which case I have provided the French and English side by side.
- 2.
Popular examples explored in the comprehensive volume Techno-orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media include popular TV shows like Battlestar Galactica and Firefly, films like Blade Runner and Star Wars, as well as the media and cultural conversation that surround them (2015).
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- 5.
Unlike other dystopian novels to which it has been compared—including London-set 1984 and Houellebecq’s Parisian Soumission—there is no geographic location named as any part of Abistan (although some readers have attempted to locate the capital city of Qodsabad on the ruins of Paris, somewhat unconvincingly, and Algiers, rather more persuasively, given its Casbah and location within walking distance of the sea).
- 6.
As previously discussed, other words—particularly place names—have Persian roots. There are also a very small number of elements of abilang , like the –lang in its name, that come from French. It is important to acknowledge here the limits of my own linguistic analysis: as a speaker of English, French, and Arabic, I am likely to have missed other potential source languages. However, I hope to have demonstrated through these examples the preponderance of Arabic influence: I was able trace an Arabic-language correspondence for well over two-thirds of the italicized abilang vocabulary in the book.
- 7.
The English translation keeps all words and spelling identical to the French original, whereas the Spanish translations make some small phonetic edits for pronunciation (“makoufs” becoming “makufs” and “moussim” becoming “musim”). As of the time of publication of this piece, 2084 has not been translated into Arabic.
- 8.
As Deepika Bahri discusses in her article “Hybridity, Redux,” one of the common critiques leveled at Bhabha’s theory of hybridity is its ahistoricism, though Bahri maintains that Bhabha’s anchoring of his theory in the “postcolonial space” (Bahri 2017, 143) saves it from such criticisms. I would argue that abilang , which largely seeks to erase any questions of coloniality or provenance is—if not totally separate from Bhabha’s imagining of hybridity—at least an example of some of its less-historicized and thus more contested applications.
- 9.
Sansal’s texts use the exact English words “Big Brother” rather than the French translation “Grand Frère,” following the convention of French translations of Orwell’s 1984.
- 10.
This division is not an entirely strict one: its boundaries have shifted over time with policies of Arabization in the public and administrative spheres, as well as the reduction in French’s presence in the education system. It is further complicated by the divisions between the “Classical” Arabic associated with religious matters, the Modern Standard Arabic used in modern media and literature, and the dialectal Arabic spoken in daily life, as well as the importance of Amazigh/Berber languages in the Algerian linguistic landscape. However, at the very least in the years both leading up to and following independence, the division between French for administrative matters and Arabic in the religious sphere exerted a great influence on the development of Algerian politics and history.
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Twohig, E. (2021). Speculative Orientalism? On “Eastern” and “Western” Referents in Boualem Sansal’s 2084. In: Campbell, I. (eds) Science Fiction in Translation. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84208-6_7
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