Mistranslation and the Subversion of the Citizen–Migrant Binary

This chapter foregrounds how themes of failed translation, mistranslation and translations with missing originals are used in contemporary migration literature to defamiliarise, subvert and reroute discourses of authenticity, both in relation to the notion of the Arab exile writer and the way that the category of the migrant is constructed in opposition to the citizen. It analyses Hawra al-Nadawi’s 2010 novel, Tahta Samaʾ Kubinhaghin (Under the Copenhagen Sky), a coming-of-age story of a young Iraqi-Danish woman, along with Abbas Khider’s 2008 German-language novel Der falsche Inder (‘The counterfeit Indian’, published in English as The Village Indian) and Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Swedish-language play Invasion!. Under the Copenhagen Sky is written in Arabic; however, the protagonist, Huda, writes her story in Danish and enlists an Iraqi translator who, she hopes, can transform her Danish narrative into an Arabic novel and thus transform her into her image of an Arabic exile writer. The eventual failure of both the project and her attempt to reposition herself as an authentic Arabic-language exile writer challenges the gendered hierarchies that translation theorists have argued govern the relationship between ‘original’ and ‘translation’ and forces her to rethink hierarchies underpinning her desire to transform herself from migrant to exile, on the one hand and the notions of authenticity in ethnic-based national belonging, on the other. The chapter compares the collapse of the translation project in al-Nadawi’s Arabic-language novel to the way that failed translation of various sorts become productive sites of new meanings in Abbas Khider’s novel The Village Indian and Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s play Invasion!. In these texts too, mistranslation is linked to an undoing of discourses of authenticity, but the target in these texts is not Arabic exile literature but rather media discourses that would seek to make the figure of the male migrant both generalisable and constructed in opposition to the citizen. This comparative analysis demonstrates that themes of failed translations, mistranslations and translations with missing originals serve to defamiliarise categories of belonging that rely on authenticity across different gender, genres and audiences.Conventional understandings of translation often operate through a discourse of authenticity, which posits a binary and hierarchical relationship between an original text and its translation.