Last year around this time I met people I’d never heard ofThe Arab of the future. It happened in an apprenticeship school, where I carried out a survey on the condition of youth in France. I had found myself having lunch with the two ladies from the cafeteria who had finished their service. I don’t know how the discussion moved to art, literature, comics, and then to the Riad Sattouf series The Arab of the future, but I saw them stiffen. They hadn’t read it and they had never even heard of it. I had just caught a cold. It’s hard to know if they were embarrassed by their ignorance of the Parisian writer, if the Arabic word inspired them with apprehension, distrust or even fear of the future, but after trying to summarize the subject, I felt that my efforts to encourage them to discover this masterpiece of the ninth art would be in vain. I preferred not to insist.
Thus, among the thousands of information collected in this school, I realized that the hundreds of thousands of copies sold of the cult series had not flowed very deep into the national territory. Victim of my incurable ethnocentrism, I thought I could strike up a conversation on a unifying and consensual topic which, in reality, only united a certain category of individuals, of which I was, and of which the cantinières of Sainte-Foy-l’Argentière, who nevertheless represent the vast majority of people.
This anecdote came back to me after opening the sixth and final volume of the series. On page 2, where the author’s bibliography usually appears, there is an alphabetical list of the languages in which it is found The Arab of the future it has been modified. This list appeared from the second volume, growing to fill the entire page today, starting with German, published by Knaus, in Munich, ending with Czech, published by Baobar, in Prague, passing through the other 21 languages, including Croatian, published by Fibra in Zagreb, Slovenian, published by Lud literatura, in Ljubljana, and French, published by Allary, in Paris.
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A commercial product with an international reach?
I asked myself the question of the interest of this hit list. Would it be to encourage the editors of the Monts du Lyonnais to translate the series into the redneck language? Could it be information that Riad Sattouf would try to convey to her father who, he doubts, is following his son’s triumph from up there? That would be nice. But in this case, he would also have to provide him with the sales figures for each of the episodes of the series in each of these languages. And why not draw curves.
I don’t want to believe that it was about offending authors translated into zero foreign languages, and not being able to make such long series, they’re quite jealous like that, believe me. It could simply be a rod that the author of My circumcision (edited by Breal in 2004) proposed the literary critic who, treacherous, could not fail to notice that among all these translated languages, from episode to episode, the essential was always missing: the Arabic language.
After considering all these hypotheses and discarding them, I was left with the most hateful one: The Arab of the future would it not have become, due to its success, a commercial product of international scope? It’s possible. It wouldn’t be the first time a Little Prince has run the paper industry. Quality paper, as is also specified at the end of the book, which “has been the subject of a production usually reserved for art books: it is printed on creative paper, Munken Print cream 150g, and its binding is stitched”.
And basically, I said to myself before starting to read the book itself, what difference does it make?
Nothing, I ended up thinking about the end of my reading, since vanity doesn’t stain pure genius.
