The Arab Cultural Center, which has divisions in Casablanca and Beirut, plans to release all four volumes of Stephenie’s Meyer’s Twilight quartet in May. The company bought the rights to the books last October while at the Frankfurt Book Festival and has had all four books simultaneously translated by four different translators.
“Of course, we would have liked to have just used one translator,” says Haissam Fadel, sales director of The Arab Cultural Center, “but we observed that when customers went into a bookstore to buy Twilight they tended to buy multiple volumes, so we wanted to have them on offer all at once.”
He says that when the company bought the rights, the books were not yet quite as well known throughout the Arab world as they were in Europe and the US. “The movie changed all that,” said Fadel.
Though Meyer’s books were the bestselling titles around the globe last year, Fadel is reticent to anoint them a surefire hit, citing the modest sales of the Harry Potter series in the Arab world.
The company has more experience publishing literary authors, such as Milan Kundera, Haruki Murakami,
Fadel says that part of the potential appeal of publishing Twilight was the lack of sex or drug use, something that would not be tolerated to a Muslim reader
In all Fadel is optimistic, “We’re excited by the possibility, but also a little scared, he said, “This is a new territory. Young adult fiction is not something you often see in the Arab world. It has a lot of potential and if it works it could bring us a lot of new readers.”
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