The Maritime Adventures of The Count of Monte Cristo as a Modern Arab Epic The Translation of Bishāra Shadīd (1871) and Its Reception

This article analyses the 1871translation of The Count of Monte Cristoprinted by theEgyptian private press Wādī al-Nīl and undertakenby the translator Bishāra Shadīd. Unlike the previous Arabic translation of the novel (Beirut 1866), which aimed to recreate the original novel in itsfulllength, structure and even word order, Bishāra Shadīd radically reshaped Dumas’novelinto an abridged version that wears the clothes of an Arabicmaqāma, which is a text in rhyming prose. This article argues that the success of the 1871 Arabic translationby Bishāra Shadīd was due to several factors: the specific rhymed prose form that echoed the oral narratives of Arabic epics;the adventurous character of the story;andthe values of revengeand long-awaitedjusticethat underlay it. These valuesappealed to readers across the Eastern Mediterranean and wereembodied in the phantasmagoric protagonist of Dumas’ novel, Edmond Dantès, and in Napoleon, the overarching political hero in Dumas’ works. Through an analysis of the translation strategies adopted by Bishāra Shadīd, the article also suggests that the work can be regardedas an example of ‘popular literature’ (letteratura popolare) as definedby Antonio Gramsci.It is, above all, a translation that conveysthe political and social aspirations of a social class through a process of “domestication”, through whicha nineteenth-centuryEuropean novel finalized for individual reading becamea rhymed prose text,possibly used for collective reading and listening.