Translating Religious Trauma in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad: Strategies and Meaning Shift

Abstract

This article examines the translation of religious trauma in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, with particular attention to how Jonathan Wright’s English version mediates sacred language, sectarian identity, and traumatic affect for Anglophone readers. The study argues that religious trauma in the novel is embedded not only in theme but in discourse: prayer, saint veneration, church ritual, burial, curses, and divine punishment are repeatedly entwined with grief, fear, shame, and loss. Using a qualitative comparative-analytical approach, the article reads selected Arabic passages alongside their English translations to identify the strategies through which religiously charged expressions are preserved, attenuated, or reframed. The analysis is grounded in translation studies, trauma theory, and postcolonial criticism, with particular attention to domestication, foreignization, and the translator’s ethical role in mediating culturally and spiritually saturated language. The article contends that Wright’s translation does more than transfer meaning across languages: it actively shapes the visibility, intensity, and interpretive frame of religious trauma in the target text. By tracing these translational shifts, the study contributes to scholarship on Arabic-English literary translation, religious trauma, and the representation of sectarian suffering in contemporary fiction.