Introduction: Translating Revolution: An Open Text

By the time this volume is published, more than a year will have passed since the beginning of the January 25, 2011 uprising in Egypt that deposed former President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011 and which continues to remap, in many complex ways, the future of Egypt as well as its position in both the region and the world. This is to say that the Egyptian Revolution, with its ongoing proliferation of narratives, and our attempt here to translate such plurality, each resists and defies unified or unitary meaning and closure. From thawra (revolution) to fawra (uprising) to inqilab (coup)—not to mention global translations of this uprising via the “Occupy” movement taking place in hundreds of cities worldwide, and which were all arguably inspired by the Tahrir model and experience in Egypt¹—the very naming and framing of Egypt's revolution attest to the complexity of its meanings and significations. To use Umberto Eco's formulation, both the revolution and its translations remain “open texts” at the literal and semiotic levels.² Just as Egypt's revolution continues to unfold and accumulate new meaning and signification, so too does the endeavor to translate this remarkable moment in Egyptian modern history. Indeed, as a multilayered text, revolution and its translation(s)—not just in Egypt but in many countries in the region—is not to be read as a string of meaning or a single, linear line of signification, but rather, as layers of narrative and fields of meaning that are at once open and dynamic. On a certain level then, both the revolution and its translation(s) can be seen as “writerly” texts, in Roland Barthes's sense of the term, where the reader and translator are confronted with multiple undetermined signs and codes that challenge their expectations of narrative unity and call upon both to renounce the passive receptivity of the consumer and to embrace an engaged effort as producers of “a text” that continues to be written on several levels.³ This is a particularly perilous task for the translator, since one of the basic rules of translation is to read the text to the end before embarking on its translation.⁴ If we seem to stand in violation of this basic rule because we have embarked on translating the revolution, as text, when it continues to be written, it is precisely because it is a “writerly” rather than a “readerly” text with a predetermined beginning and end. Readers of the various chapters in this volume will therefore sense that the translations presented here offer a parallel text, one that has been produced alongside and not after the writing of the text of the revolution as it developed over the past year. The Egyptian Revolution and its meanings have not ceased to challenge its ‘translators’ at all levels. Consider, for example, a few pivotal moments in this fluid and volatile narrative: the January 28, 2011 Friday of Rage that ushered in the “Independent Republic of Tahrir”; Egypt's “Second Revolution,” which erupted on Saturday, November 18, 2011 and left forty-four martyred and thousands injured;⁵ the unprecedented participation in parliamentary elections that started on November 28, 2011; and the initial indications of an early victory of the Islamist parties and coalitions amid continuing demands for a national salvation government and an end to military rule by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). It is precisely this incompleteness and un-determinedness of both the text of the revolution and its translation(s) in this volume that accounts for the intimacy between them and their shared moments of euphoria, innocence, and naiveté, but also anxiety, fear, and apprehension of what the ‘end’ of the text might be. If Egypt's revolution continues to be a narrative in progress, so too then are its translations.