Cultural encounters in Arabic-English translation: Cultural Translation of Martyrdom and Mourning in Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer

Abstract

This paper examines the cultural translation of martyrdom and mourning in Sinan Antoon’s novel The Corpse Washer. This self-translated Iraqi war novel explores the psychological and ritual aspects of loss in post-2003 Iraq. Complex cultural signifiers, including shaheed (martyr), funerary rites, Latmiyat are negotiated through the paradigm of self-translation. Integrated with Berman’s (2000) deforming tendencies, Venuti’s account is the analytical framework used to analyze the cultural references in the translated version of this novel. This paper analyzes Antoon’s methods of depicting the affective and religious representations of mourning and grief rituals or overly exoticized signifiers. The findings show that Antoon employs a strategy of restrained foreignization, invoking poetic density, and disrupting reader comfort. Antoon's dual role allows for a rare cohesion between narrative voice and translational intent. The findings also have implications for cultural translation, postcolonial narrativity, text-world theory, and the politics of grief in global literary circulation.