Translation is an act of liberation. Not in the saviour sense, but in the sense of breaking open the gates and letting new movement in. This applies to both the text – no longer passively fixed in a time and place; it speaks to me and through me writes itself anew – and to language itself: the English I create is freer than the English I learned. In translating, as in writing, text and language are living things.
During my BCLT residency, as I thought and wrote about my relationship to translation more than I usually have the luxury to do, I found it particularly challenging to revisit specific questions or solutions from my actual practice. Why was that? Let me try to illustrate with two examples.
At a workshop I ran for MALT students and guests about picking your battles in the editing process, I brought examples from my own work with editors’ feedback. One was Najwa Bin Shatwan’s short story ‘The Roof’ (ArabLit Quarterly, 4:3).
My early draft of the opening lines:
Andrea Giordano was the night shift security guard of the town hall building of his town. By day, he was the football team’s goalkeeper.
During the first round of edits:
By night, Andrea Giordano was the night shift worked as a security guard of the at his city’s town hall, building of his town. B and by day, he as a goalkeeper for the local was the football team‘s goalkeeper.
In the final version that made it to print:
By night, Andrea Giordano was the security guard at his hometown’s town hall, and by day, a goalkeeper for the local football team.
When I received the edits at the time, I didn’t stop too long at the merging of the two sentences. There were other battles in the text that I chose to pick. But in the workshop discussion, it turns out that most of the participants prefer the rhythm of the shorter sentences. Other, new, possibilities come up too. I mention that Bin Shatwan has lived in Italy for years and sets many of her short stories, written in Arabic, in small Italian towns, and someone asks why ‘town hall’ is not ‘el municipio’? Of course! That would’ve been an excellent opportunity to give readers of the translation additional clues to the dual identity of the source text. And I missed it.
A workshop-revised version:
By night, Andrea Giordano was the security guard of el municipio. By day, he was a goalkeeper for the local football team.
I had to resist the urge to call the editors (who are good friends and repeat collaborators) and ask them to reprint the story!
Another example that I brought to a translation clinic was Mahmoud Shukair’s ‘A Letter to Kofi Annan’ (The Common, 23), a satirical short story about a Palestinian neighbourhood struggling with a proliferation of noisy street dogs in which a community elder suggests writing a letter to the UN Secretary General. His reasoning, in close word-for-word translation:
Why do they call him the Amin General? Because his job and occupation is to solve problems.
While translating, in an attempt to get close to the particular tone of humour that permeates the entire text, I shifted the emphasis in the line:
Why do they call him Secretary General, then, if not ‘cause he’s in charge of solving problems in general?
My reasoning: The word amin in Arabic carries a connotation of caretaking, of looking after things, which is no longer obvious in contemporary uses of ‘secretary’. A similar comic effect, I thought, would be to say ‘Isn’t he the Manager? I’m sure he’ll manage.’ But on revisiting, I was no longer sure if that effect was intended in the source text, or if I had read it into it because it befitted the overall style. The wordplay I created in the translation wasn’t as clear in the original as it was in my hearing of it. Each revisiting entails a question, a self-revision.
Paul Valéry once wrote, ‘un ouvrage n’est jamais achevé… mais abandonné’ (popularised – and revised, aptly making the original statement itself inachevé/unfinished – in W.H. Auden’s version as ‘a poem is never finished, only abandoned’). The act of letting go, when sending something in its final version out into the world, is, to an extent, arbitrary. There are many factors that play a part in the moment chosen for deciding this is the final version: publication dates, editor’s and translator’s schedules, their health, their sources of inspiration at that point in time, whatever else is going on in their lives or in the world. The text is deemed, for now, strong enough to stand on its own and speak for itself. But enough is not measurable in any absolute sense.
If reading entails an ease to sit back and allow yourself to be entertained – challenged, consoled, educated, inspired – by an immovable text, then perhaps translation trains you out of that ease. What you recognise is this: A finished piece of writing or translation, an ouvrage, is simply locked in the time and place of that arbitrary moment of being abandoned. Each revisiting, each (re)reading, has the potential to set it free.
Nariman Youssef is a Cairo-born literary translator and translation consultant based in London. Her literary translations include Mo(a)t: Stories from Arabic (UEAP, 2021), Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter (new edition, Interlink, 2020), Donia Kamal’s Cigarette No. 7 (Hoopoe, 2018), and contributions to publications like The Common, Arab Lit Quarterly, and Words Without Borders. In recent years, she has managed an in-house translation team at the British Library, and led and curated translation workshops with Shadow Heroes, the Poetry Translation Centre, Shubbak Festival and Africa Writes. Nariman holds a master’s degree in Translation Studies from the University of Edinburgh.
Nari’s BCLT residency project (Feb-May 2024) aimed to interrogate the language affiliation structures that define L1 and L2 translations and the relevance of those structures to bi-directional translators, or translators working out of their ‘mother tongue’.
