Returning to The Return: Translation and Commentary on Life Writing

This MA thesis includes a translation and commentary of chapters 1 and 21 of Hisham Matar’s book titled The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between into Arabic. In this work of life writing, Hisham, a long-exiled Libyan, reflects on his return home, and narrates the story of his father’s abduction. In doing this translation, I draw on Smith and Watson’s extensive work (2010) on life writing to use as a tool in analyzing the author’s style of writing in terms of life writing features which are memory, identity and space. I also make use of Halliday et al.’s register analysis (1964) as adapted in Hatim and Mason (1990) to determine how to translate the dialogue that takes place in the book as it originated in both Arabic and English.