The Lebanese-American author Rabih Alameddine has seen his works translated into Hebrew, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, to name a few languages.  But none of his books have ever been published into his native tongue, Arabic. “I’ll be in Korean before I’ll ever be in Arabic,” he noted ruefully.

Alameddine, whose latest book, The Hakawati, garnered considerable praise in the United States, has a simple explanation for the lack of Arabic translations of his work.  “Censorship.  No doubt about it,” he said.   The Hakawati is often sexually explicit, while his previous novel Koolaids: The Art of War juxtaposes the story of a Lebanese woman living in Beirut during the darkest days of the civil war with accounts of the AIDS epidemic that ravaged San Francisco’s gay community during the 1980s.

At every turn, Alameddine has run into a government censor wielding a red pen or self-censorship from within Middle Eastern publishing houses.  He thought he had achieved a breakthrough when the rights to publish The Hakawati were purchased by a subsidiary of the Makhzoumi Foundation.  But after paying for the rights to the book, the publishing house summarily canceled their plans to publish an Arabic translation.  “We just got an e-mail yesterday saying, ‘Oh my God, there’s sex in this book!’” remembered Alameddine.  “It was in the contract agreement that they would not change a single word.  And then somebody read it!”

Alameddine’s tribulations are symbolic of a larger problem facing literature in the Arab world: the notable lack of foreign works translated into Arabic.  While there have been efforts in recent year to publish translations of the pillars of the Western literary canon, obstacles to new writers who challenge established convention still remain very much in place.

In 2003, the United Nations Development Program published the Arab Human Development Report, written exclusively by Arab scholars, policy analysts and thinkers, and it sent shockwaves through the Arab intellectual world.  The report condemned the lack of intellectual freedom in the Arab world, focusing particularly on the absence of quality translations of foreign works into Arabic due to state censorship.

The report backed up its charges with some shocking statistics.  The authors found that “the number of books translated in the Arab world is one fifth of the number translated in Greece,” despite the fact that the Arab world has a population of approximately 300 million people, while Greece is made up of around 11 million citizens.  Only about 10,000 books have been translated into Arabic in the entire past millennium – equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year.

Following the Arab Human Development Report’s release, there have been some attempts to address this problem.  Most notably, the oil-rich emirate of Abu Dhabi has launched a nonprofit organization called Kalima, whose mission is to undertake translations of foreign works into Arabic.  Kalima has announced the lineup of its first 100 books slated for translation.  While the list does include Khaled Hosseini’s recent best-seller The Kite Runner, most of the books slated for translation are either Western classics such as John Milton’s Paradise Regained and Virgil’s The Aenid, or non-fiction classics such as John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment and Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

However, even if Kalima publishes translations of foreign works, the more than 20 state censorship bureaus in the Arab world will still have the power to outlaw their appearance on bookshelves.  Kalima will also be forced to deal with more mundane problems, such as the lack of an established distribution network to local bookstores in the Middle East.  Though the Nobel Prize-winning Yiddish-language author Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Collected Stories,” are scheduled to be translated this year, it will undoubtedly be some time before one can pick up an Arab translation in their local Aleppo bookstore.

Nor can classics directly challenge contemporary social taboos in the same way as modern works are able to.  Rabih Alameddine’s failure to find an Arab publisher for The Hakawati speaks to the fact that significant obstacles still remain.  “I thought that we have gotten to the place where someone was willing to stand up and say ‘enough,” noted Alameddine.  “I guess they want to translate Disney books.”