If a revolution could be revisited and its dynamism invoked anew, this is precisely what Translating Egypt's Revolution would be. The book, completed a little over a year after the 25 January Revolution erupted, is the outcome of what its editor Samia Mehrez describes in the introduction as a “revolutionary seminar”, a sort of academic reenactment of events carrying the same title. The seminar was born of the involvement of many of the American University in Cairo's students and faculty in the revolution in Tahrir Square, through the period from 25 January to 11 February, the day the then president Hosni Mubarak finally stepped down. This was, incidentally, one day before the end of AUC's spring break and the resumption of classes at the university. With the aim of sustaining the university community's involvement and interaction with events, AUC's faculty members designed courses whose aim was to address various aspects of the Egyptian revolution. The endeavour, Mehrez writes, “attracted a team of Egyptian and non-Egyptian students with multilingual knowledge (who) maintained informed comparative perspective of their tasks as translators and at the same time, a collective awareness of global linguistic, geopolitical and cultural relations”. Mehrez, the founding director of AUC's Center for Translation Studies, is a professor of modern Arabic who teaches translation studies and theory. Herself a distinguished translator of modern Arabic literature, she is well-versed in the complex and ever-evolving theories of translation. She describes the collective effort presented in Translating Egypt's Revolution as a journey in time as well as place. On that journey, the translator is the protagonist who brings to the medium being translated just such awareness. Contributors to the chapters that make up the book are researchers and students of multilingual and multicultural backgrounds. The content that they “translate” on the level of language, symbols, and cultural context is provided by the countless events, images, bloggers, poetry, street art and videos that emerged during the Egyptian revolution. The book's eight chapters span the different facets of the revolution, each of which contributed to making it at once singular and emblematic of the universal “revolution” — a major transformative event that challenges predominant political and social norms. The first chapter of the book entitled “Mulid Al-Tahrir: Semiotics of a Revolution”, is written by Sahar Keraitim and Mehrez. It captures the unique essence of the Egyptian revolution, setting the theme for the chapters that follow. “Mulid Al-Tahrir” vividly illuminates the carnavlesque nature of the revolution in Tahrir Square, which unfolded in the wake of the initial violent confrontations of the first three days between the revolutionaries and Central Security Forces (CSF). In the next, heady 18 days, Tahrir Square became a charmed circle that brought together Egyptians of all denominations. The chapter demonstrates how, like traditional popular celebrations of saints' and Sufis' anniversaries all across Egypt, the barriers of class, gender and social prejudice melted down. The festive atmosphere of Tahrir becomes in itself a radicalising force that induces ordinary Egyptians to take part in the revolution. Bearing testimony to this extraordinary moment of unison are the book's illustrations, which depict photographs of people, young and old, men and women, rich and poor who all mingled in the square, chanting as one: “the people want to bring down the regime”. Tahrir became a political Woodstock that incorporated drama and performance, poetics and visual signs, street art and music and, most characteristically of Egyptians, revolutionary humour. Novel forms of expression abounded: poetry, lyrics and visual arts from the older generations of the 1960s and 1970s morphed into new modes reflecting the younger generation that was at the helm. Tahrir Square became the symbol of birth of Egyptian people's freedom, encouraging them to take it into yet more new spaces out of the midan. The exhilarating sense of liberation spilled over into other venues and into all of the Tahrir Squares in Egypt. Despite the occasional overriding of academic theorising in several of the book's chapters, here is an exceptional and detailed insight into the dynamics of the Egyptian revolution. The “translators” who are the medium between the reader and the “language of Tahrir” are, as Mehrez expresses it, “at once literal and metaphorical travelers, whose migratory movement between languages, texts, geographies and cultures has involved an understanding that the translation zone they occupy is not neutral, but fraught with the politics and ideologies they bring to it”. One fascinating aspect of the book is the photographs accompanying the text, of which some of the most evocative are those of the “tent-city” of Tahrir. The center-piece of these photographs, taken by Mehrez, is a massive tent that looks much like a carnival marquee, occupying the heart of Tahrir Square during the apogee of revolutionary festivities and surge. Other images were taken by Laura Gribbon, another contributor to the book, and countless others by photographers and bloggers. Many of those became well-known because of their recording of and participation in the revolution. Their photographs capture charged, and often highly symbolic moments of the revolution. They thus become, in and of themselves, “material for translation and interpretation”. There is a still from activist Asmaa Mahfouz's defiant video, shot prior to 25 January, in which she incited her audience to take part in the protests that were scheduled to take place that day in Tahrir. Yet another photograph depicts a tearful Wael Ghoneim, who was the administrator of the revolution's flagship Facebook Page, “We Are All Khalid Said”. Ghoneim was abducted by security forces in the early days of the revolution, and remained in their custody for eleven days. The image is from his appearance in a popular TV talk show: it shows the moment he was overcome with emotion when he found out for the first time, right there in front of the TV audience, about the deaths of several of his friends in clashes that occurred with the CSF in and around Tahrir Square. The most significant and perhaps most moving of the images, however, remain those that depict the ordinary Egyptians, the nameless faces that filled Tahrir. An old man plasters his mouth with a poster bearing the word irhal, “leave”, which brief imperative was the Egyptians' mantra until the moment Mubarak stepped down. There are the ever-resilient peddlers and street vendors with their lupine beans and chickpeas firmly catering to the throngs. An elderly husband and wife peruse revolutionary pamphlets, while a young man has his head shaved at the make-shift shop of “the Barber of Tahrir”. In Tahrir Square children and soldiers also abound, and tanks mingle with flowers. The subjects that were captured by these images may no longer be in Tahrir Square as they once were, but their spirit continues to inform the Egyptians' innate desire to realise a better world and a nobler existence, for themselves and their children. Mehrez makes no apologies about her propensity to be a part of the revolution. And this is the sense that one has in reading Translating Tahrir: that translation is never as much in its element as when it empathises, takes part in and anticipates as yet unwritten conclusions. “It is precisely this incompleteness and un-determinateness of both the text of the revolution and its translations… that accounts for the… shared moments of euphoria, innocence (and) anxiety at what the ‘end' of the text might be,” Mehrez concludes. Perhaps this is the prime message of Translating Egypt's Revolution: the Language of Tahrir: that the multi-faceted revolution's ebb and flow remains, on all levels still, an open text. Reviewed by Aziza Sami
