International Workshop on Intralingual Translation

In 1947, Egyptian novelist, short story writer and playwright Mahmud Taymur (1894-1973) was awarded the first prize in short story writing from Cairo Arabic Language Academy. Two years later, Taymur was made a member of the prestigious scholarly institution whose main mission was to promote and defend the use of classical Arabic in modern Arabic literature. In both the statement made by the jury awarding the prize in 1947 and the welcome word delivered by the head of the Arabic language Academy, the fiction and dramatic work of Taymur which he wrote in classical Arabic was cited as much more mature than his other work where the use of the vernacular features prominently. This institutional canonisation of Taymur’s work in classical Arabic was an act of legitimation from the literary establishment at the time of the efforts he started a few years earlier which involved rewriting his work with the aim of minimising the use of the Egyptian vernacular. He even had to ‘intralingually’ translate his dramatic work from the vernacular to the classical Arabic, publishing some of his plays later in the two different versions.