Whatsitsname in Baghdad: Colloquial Naming, Trauma, and Register Compression in Arabic–English Literary Translation

Abstract

This article examines how naming operates as a site of identity formation, trauma inscription, and social positioning in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein fi Baghdad and in Jonathan Wright’s English translation, Frankenstein in Baghdad. Rather than treating the creature’s names as interchangeable labels, the study argues that they form a layered register system through which post-2003 Baghdad is linguistically mapped. The analysis centers on three recurring designations—al-shasma, al-mujrim X, and alladhī lā ism lahu—and their English counterparts, “the Whatsitsname,” “Criminal X,” and “the One Who Has No Name.” Through close comparison of selected Arabic and English passages, this study combines Vinay and Darbelnet’s procedural model with Venuti’s domestication/foreignization framework and trauma-oriented linguistic analysis to evaluate how these naming choices travel across languages. The findings show that Wright succeeds in preserving semantic instability and much of the creature’s narrative ambiguity, but that the English version reduces some of the sharp register contrasts that distinguish colloquial, bureaucratic, and elevated forms of naming in the Arabic. Therefore, this article argues that the translation maintains the creature’s instability at the level of reference while partially smoothing the sociolinguistic architecture through which Iraqi cultural trauma is articulated. More broadly, it proposes that naming should be treated as a key translational problem in Arabic conflict fiction because it carries not only denotative meaning, but also voice, hierarchy, locality, and memory.