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Yuval Evri, King’s College London

Against the backdrop of the intensifying national conflict between Jews and Arabs, a multilingual cultural project emerged in Palestine at the turn of the 20th century. While the increasing hostility between Jews and Arabs also opened a linguistic breach between Hebrew and Arabic, a group of local Arab-Jewish intellectuals insisted on holding on to both languages, positioning themselves on the borderlands between them, and using translation as a political and cultural tool. Over more than five decades, from the 1880s to the 1930s, they published hundreds of essays, political commentaries, translations, collections of fables and folktales, short stories, and poems, mostly in the local Hebrew and Arabic newspapers. Moving easily back and forth between Arabic and Hebrew, they marked the first modern phenomenon of Arabic-Hebrew literary bilingualism, inspired by the great Arab-Jewish poets and philosophers of medieval al-Andalus.

Their translation work was not merely an intellectual exercise but embodied an alternative political possibility of shared Jewish-Arabic society in Palestine. It shares an exceptional translational model: translation without stable original source which do not belong to a specific geographical sphere or to a single linguistic tradition, but rather span multiple linguistic, geographic, and religious traditions.

By exploring the work of this intellectual group this paper focuses on the politics and history of Hebrew-Arabic translational and linguistic relations. It explores the politics of translation in multilingual settings in a period dominant by monolingual and nationalistic conflicts. It investigates the role of translation as a vector of power; discipline and surveillance while at the same time a vehicle of resistance, activism and platform for shared binational and bilingual social and political space.

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6.01
Virginia Woolf Building
22 Kingsway, London, WC2B 6NR

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