I’m a little late to this (so thanks to World SF), but Strange Horizons has reviewed Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s novella, Utopia. The review is by Sofia Samatar who is doing a PhD in African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin, and is therefore far better qualified than I am to pronounce on Egyptian SF. The thing that caught my eye in the review was this:
The English edition of Utopia contains all the quotations from poetry and lyrics of “orgasm music” present in the Arabic one, but the Arabic text also includes snippets of journalism which do not appear in the English translation. These bits of text are not referenced, and may be fictional, but they have the form of quotations from actual newspapers. The longest one—nearly two pages of small print—is a list of statistics on the assault, rape, and murder of women. According to the translator, Chip Rossetti, the editors of the English edition chose to remove the journalistic sections to preserve narrative flow. This decision does a disservice to the book, for it is only in these statistics that violence against women is presented as violence against women and not metaphor.
I am inclined to agree with Sofia here. I wish I had known about this when I met Ahmed Khaled (and the Bloomsbury PR people).
I’m a little shocked that you can remove important sections like that and still get to call the book a translation. (I’m over-naive on this, I know, but I’d expect a translation to guarantee a certain level of faithfulness to the original text, which would start by not omitting those sentences you found inconvenient in the narrative…)
Like Aliette, I find that rather shocking. That verges on censorship.
I just find it very sad that the Egyptian publisher was perfectly happy with such material, but the British one deemed it necessary to remove it.
A friend of a friend who sometimes translates things from Russian reports that trimming can happen from that language as well. (IIRC they pointed to Olga Slavnikova’s 2017 as a recent example.)
I can see publishers trimming anything they deem non-essential to save on translation costs. Utopia, however, is only a novella, and intentional or not this looks political.