Translating the Nation: The (Re)framing of Cultural Identity in Three Anthologies of Palestinian Folktales, 1904-1998

This thesis examines the translation and framing strategies employed in three anthologies of translated Palestinian oral tales, Tales Told in Palestine (1904), Speak Bird, Speak Again (1989), and Arab Folktales from Palestine and Israel (1998). I employ Mona Baker’s narrative theory to show how the Palestinian cultural identity is (re)framed in translations of Palestinian folktales, and examine how Orientalist narratives of Palestine are constructed, and contested, in translation through juxtapositions of certain translation strategies with paratextual commentary. I form my analysis by employing Edward Said’s concepts of ‘Orientalism’ and ‘Imagined Geography’ and Ibrahim Muhawi’s analysis of the Palestinian folktale genre. In Told in Palestine, James Edward Hanauer frames Palestine as the ‘Holy Land’, a sacred site for the three monotheistic religions, and as a measurable landscape occupied by diverse ethnic groups with various beliefs, excluding the social and situational contexts of the oral narratives. In Arab Folktales from Palestine and Israel, Raphael Patai creates an illusion of visibility and credibility by juxtaposing the literal translations of the tales with paratextual commentary to recreate the stylistic properties of the Palestinian folktale genre and demonstrate how the genre reflects the mentality and psyche of all Arab cultures, producing as a result exoticized translations filled with stereotypes about Arabs. In Speak Bird, Speak Again, Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana contest Orientalist narratives on Palestine through their ‘thick translations’ of the folktales, framing the tales as performances of the Palestinian narrators’ communicative competence and narrating skills by ‘keying’ in the conventional narrative and linguistic properties of the Palestinian folktale genre to recreate an equivalent effect in the Target Text, and framing the tales as activities rooted in the rich social lives of the Palestinian community through extensive paratextual commentary.