There’s a message from Olga on the screen of my phone. I read the words “be happy.” Be happy, I repeat bitterly. It’s not until that moment that I tell myself that I won’t return to Mombasa, I won’t go back to Chris.
I look up from the screen and find Nour toying with the cigarette butts in the ashtray. He’s daydreaming, sad.
I sleep most of the way back to Beirut from the South. Nour drives silently and doesn’t want to talk.
He calls me in the early evening, at the very moment I return to Beirut with Olga. I haven’t seen him for five days. I’ve been going to the hospital with Olga for her chemotherapy. I’m tired and don’t answer his call. He sends me a short text, asking me to meet him one last time. The next morning he’ll fly to Chicago.
I text him back, “Have a nice trip back home!”
Translator’s Note
Like so many translators of creative literature, I am rarely satisfied with my work. So my initial experience of rendering Iman Humaydan’s third novel, Other Lives, in English came as somewhat of a surprise. When I first started working, words came to me more easily than they have in the past. Over long sessions I felt as if the ideas and aesthetic properties of the text were merging together into a readable English. At a certain point, I felt that this novel would perhaps not simply be the easiest I have translated, but the best work I had ever produced.
But this confidence and feeling of ease did not last long. The process of reworking the translation from the draft produced by these first attempts into a final form was as painfully difficult as translation can be. I spent hours looking at specific passages, and even specific words, convinced that I had not conveyed either the ideas or the emotions of the text in Arabic. I could not possibly show what I had produced to Iman, let alone send it to the publisher. Despite my years of experience, I was surprised at both my initial feeling of confidence and my subsequent feeling that it would be impossible to translate this work.
Why was transforming Hayawat Okhra into Other Lives so easy and so difficult? I have used this question to structure some reflections on the process of translating this novel.
The idea of “intimacy with the text,” as invoked by some scholars of translation, has helped me think through my own translation process for Other Lives. Developed in some depth by Gayatri Spivak in her well-known article “The Politics of Translation,” the idea is that translators— particularly white women translating texts from the so called third world—must have a deep knowledge of not only the texts they are working with, but the source and target languages and literary cultures. Intimacy here means knowing more than just what the words “mean,” but also calling upon the layers of meaning words create within readers and reading cultures on both sides of the translation’s linguistic divide.
In a series of “Rules for Translation” that I produced for the popular blog Arabic Literature (in English), I put this simply: (1) Choose a text you love and (2) Respect the text. But these prescriptive statements are much easier to make than they are to either quantify or fulfill. Indeed, I do love Hayawat Okhra for many reasons and I have endeavored to respect it while changing it into Other Lives. But claiming an intimacy with the text, as a white, non-Arab translator, is a more complex proposition. Part of what gave me a sense of closeness with the book was my deep awareness that even as I related to it I was inevitably distant from it as well.
First and foremost, I am not Lebanese; I did not live in Lebanon during the civil war. While the kinds of questions and issues so central to Other Lives are familiar to me and essential to many people I know—particularly the question of being permitted to forget or forced to remember—they are not central to my own life. I do not have the long history with Lebanon, the close family ties and proximity to the terrible violence of the war that Myriam and the other characters experience.
But when I think about “intimacy with the text,” I must also consider how my close friendship and comradeship with Iman Humaydan provides a unique advantage in translating her work. Because she and I have talked extensively and share certain bonds, I can at times get inside the language of the text in ways that I would not have be able to without her. My understanding of the depths of her creative work owes a great deal to this connection and to her generosity in spending the time to work and think together about language and the issues that underlie her writing.
I also translated Iman’s second novel, Toot barri, as Wild Mulberries (Interlink, 2008), which offered me a familiarity with her style and themes, as well as an established working relationship. This fact also presented me with a challenge, to keep the works somewhat consistent in style and approach—to create a voice for Iman in English. This is something that I have advocated for in my academic writing on translation politics, but which I have not had the opportunity to do previously. Translating two novels by the same author gave me a privileged position inside the text and author’s worlds. I am aware that claiming a bond with the original writer of the novel means that I am claiming that she “authorizes” my translation and this gives it weight. But I know that I am still very much an outsider to the text, language and world that Myriam and the other characters inhabit in Other Lives. Some intimacies are forged through such connections but other gaps can never be bridged—despite whatever respect and good intentions a translator has.
Precisely the thing that is meant to make a translation “better”—this elusive intimacy with the text—at different points threatened to stall the entire project. An example of this is the hauntingly tragic scene of the death of Myriam’s brother Baha’. The violence that Myriam witnessed and experienced affected her body. She had nightmares and often felt suffocated. As I was working on these sections—particularly the descriptions of Myriam’s nightmares about trees—I could often experience Myriam’s sense of suffocation. The experience felt real to me. It seemed impossible to try to convey, in translation, the emotion of passages that had such a deep impact on me as a reader.
The first time I read the novel, I did not experience this same visceral reaction. In fact, the passages that affected me the most upon the first reading were those about Myriam’s reactions to Olga’s cancer, her contemplation of their long friendship and the way she supported her friend at the end of her life. My reaction to the passages about Olga’s cancer seemed “natural” to me, as it is close to my own embodied experience—I was undergoing cancer treatments myself while translating the book.
Textual intimacy is a concept often invoked and difficult to define, as is how it is connected to embodied experience. Perhaps what makes Iman’s writing so powerful is how deeply it touches and exposes human experiences, particularly those that we often do not speak—most particularly, the lives of women marked by violence. We see Myriam as a woman who often feels disconnected from the people around her and the places she inhabits. She is restlessly in motion, searching for a home she cannot find. Her inability to settle is meticulously laid bare and depicted in all its raw emotions. Iman gives readers a privileged insight into Myriam’s psyche, the places inside Myriam where her unspoken emotions can be expressed.
This concept of textual intimacy, however, offers little practical insight into the specifics of the translation process. In this translation I have used a number of techniques that are based on the principle of allowing the text to “read as a translation,” in order to capture the beauty and haunting qualities of the Arabic original. I have worked closely with the editor of this work, Hilary Plum, to create a balance in the novel between a smooth or easily readable text and a text that continually reminds the reader that it was not originally written in English. For example, the words that appear in italics in the translation are all written in Latin letters in English in the original novel. Preserving the italics gives the reader a sense of the layering of language in the original.
In rendering this work in English, I also had to face the challenge of Hayawat Okhra’s mix of narrative styles. The novel unfolds through both deeply personal, excrucia
tingly and intensely depicted passages and dry, factual, almost disconnected narrative passages. To reproduce this in English is difficult. The short declarative sentences written in deceptively simple Arabic work differently than such sentences might in English, where they may sound inconsistent or boring. I did not wish to sacrifice this aspect’s of the work’s narrative technique for the sake of making the translation smoother or more—as the translation theorists say—“domesticated.”
Another challenge specific to this novel was how to represent references to the Druze community, particularly implicit references, with which many readers presumably would not be familiar. I decided that my overarching goal was to preserve the aesthetic qualities of the novel, so I chose not to include a glossary or to “cushion” passages with explanations not available in the original. Some of this sort of cushioning exists in the Arabic novel; the author explains such things as the transmigration of souls and how this belief circulates amongst Druze characters. But I have not added additional references. The most important example is the layered meanings of the title Hayawat Okhra, and its use of a relatively esoteric Arabic plural of the word for life, which can imply a Druze understanding of “lives.” The English title, Other Lives, cannot convey these layers of meaning.
All translation from Arabic into English faces the challenge of how to translate tenses. The most important translation strategy I used in Other Lives was to render much of the novel’s narration in the present tense. This novel moves back and forth between times and places so seamlessly that the confusion of tenses adds to the text’s meaning rather than detracts from it. Motion, Myriam’s physical and spiritual restlessness, is a major theme of the work. Because Myriam herself confesses that she experiences time as nonlinear—she describes time as a spiral—I have conveyed as much of the text’s main narration as possible in the present tense; this means that some of what is written about in the present tense here happened “in the past.” Creating this confusion and questioning about time within the narration itself challenges the reader constantly to be aware of the importance of space, time and chronology in the novel. This very much mirrors my own challenges as a translator who has sought to give “other lives” to this novel by transforming it into English.
Michelle Hartman, Montréal, January 2014
Translator’s Acknowledgments
First and most importantly, I would like to acknowledge Iman Humaydan’s participation in and contributions to this translation, not only as the work’s author but also as a colleague and friend. Working with Iman has been a true collaboration; I have learned so much in the process of talking about language and literature together and for this I am extremely grateful.
For a number of reasons, this translation took some time to appear in print. Thanks to the people at Interlink for making it happen and to Michel Moushabeck for his patience. Much more than a line of thanks is due to Hilary Plum. It is not a cliché to say that her work is truly more than that of an editor, even a really good one. Her careful and thorough eye, together with a love of and flair for literature in translation has made this translation as good as it is. The bulk of this translation was finished in Lebanon and I would like to extend the warmest possible thanks to Yasmine Nachabe and all the Taans for providing me with space and conversations that greatly improved the work. Much of it was completed in Yasmine’s office at the Lebanese American University and she, along with other friends and colleagues at LAU, offered me the opportunity to teach translation theory and politics while working on it. Merci kteer to Elise Salem, Mariam Marroum and Nada Saab. I would also like to acknowledge the participants in my 2011 LAU seminar on translation: Zeina al-Abed, Eylaf Badreddine, Hicham Kharroub, Mona Majzoub and Yasmine Nachabe. Shukran to Abbas Beydoun for helping facilitate the opportunity to talk about this translation with Iman in Sour. Students at McGill also contributed to this translation—thanks in particular to Dima Ayoub and Shirin Radjavi, as well as Katy Kalemkerian, for helping it take its final shape. Rula Jurdi Abisaab and Malek Abisaab provided conversation and support that helped me to complete the translation, as did Aziz Choudry and rosalind hampton. As always, I must acknowledge the women whose work allowed me to complete this work. Thanks in particular to my mother Julia, sister Amanda, (Mama) Rachel, Alison, Marie, Amar, Randa and Farah.
This book follows Myriam’s trajectory from Beirut to Adelaide to Mombasa and back to Beirut, tracing her path as she searches for a way to fit into this world and find home. A life journey that encompasses Sialkot–South London–Christchurch–Montreal is different but shares many similarities; I dedicate this translation to someone who has trod that path and to others on their own journeys to find home.
Other Lives Page 13
