Laughter, gossip, and cruelty: face-work and pragmatic meaning in Le Gassick’s translation of Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley

Abstract

Humour and cruelty in Zuqāq al-Midaqq circulate beyond explicit authorial judgement through gossip, irony, and calibrated face-threatening acts. We examine how conversational implicature, allusive insult, and playful mockery are translated in Midaq Alley, and how these choices reorganise the novel’s social world. Drawing on pragmatics-informed translation theory and politeness/facework and impoliteness frameworks, it offers close parallel readings of selected dialogues in which neighbours gossip about Hamida, mock Kirsha, ridicule the poor, or comment obliquely on others’ misfortunes. We trace how Le Gassick preserves, amplifies, reframes, or neutralises indirectness, sarcasm, and double meanings through strategies of explicitation, mitigation, and reformulation. We argue that Le Gassick’s English translation tends to convert collaborative gossip into report by clarifying implicatures and making certain forms of aggression more overt, while simultaneously diluting other face-attacks into light humour. These systematic shifts recalibrate the Alley’s emotional climate and redistribute the balance between solidarity and cruelty, everyday verbal violence and communal intimacy, thereby reconstructing the interpersonal architecture of Mahfouz’s text in English.