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Reading Iraqi Women's Novels in English Translation: Iraqi Women's Stories. Ruth Abou Rached (London: Routledge, 2020). Pp. 120. $59.95 cloth, $60.00 paper. ISBN: 9780367857172
Ruth Abou Rached's latest work, Reading Iraqi Women's Novels in English Translation: Iraqi Women's Stories, activates alternative and counter-hegemonic readings of six novels by Iraqi women writers, written and published in different temporal moments and political climates, in their original Arabic and translated iterations. Engaging these works largely in a chronological order of their publication, Abou Rached tackles important questions related to uncanny imaginaries; the “audibility” of Iraqi women's literature; polyphony within Arabic and across languages, time and space; and the question of multiple authorships within a novel and as mediated through its para/translation.
One of this book's points of methodological success is the fact that Abou Rached does not impose a prepared theoretical model onto the novels under study, but rather relies on feminist para/translation practices that aim to unsettle the boundaries between concepts such as “text” and “para/text” as well as “translation” and “para/translation” as critical lenses for reading each work. Her close readings are well-informed and substantiated by an expansive network of seminal theories on the gendered politics of language, sociopolitical power relations, and gender-conscious translation practices. And yet the dynamic framework of language, gender, and power never supersedes or overshadows the author's close and insightful readings of each novel in Arabic and in its English translation (of which there often are multiple versions). Instead, cutting-edge translation theories, including Helen Kolias's approach of “listening translation,” and the author's close reading work together in a framework...