CORRECTED: On Translating the Omani Natural Landscape

On Translating Zahran Alqasmi’s Honey Hunger

Emma Hardy in Conversation with Marilyn Booth

Marilyn Booth’s translation of Zahran Alqasmi’s Honey Hunger was published in 2024 by AUC Press’s Hoopoe Fiction imprint, and the translation won her the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation earlier this year.

In this conversation, she discusses the challenges and intriguing issues she faced while translating Honey Hunger, and touches on the experiences and insights her career in translation has brought her over the years.

If you could tell us a little bit about yourself as a translator, and how you came to translate this novel? 

Marilyn Booth: I kind of fell into translation, as most of us do. Even from the time of my undergraduate honors thesis–I did quite a lot of translation for that. It was on May Ziadeh, and she’s quite a difficult stylist. And so, I started both becoming aware of issues around translation, and also really enjoying the process. Then, my PhD work involved a lot of translation of a very different sort. In that case, the big challenge was: how do you translate colloquial Arabic? What register do you choose? How do you make it colloquial but not too dated or too specific? On the other hand, how do you do it without losing the specificity? So, in my academic work I was constantly faced with translation issues. And then, while I was still finishing my thesis I was approached by a couple of people I knew in London (I was here at Oxford for my dissertation) about considering—or proposing—some translation projects. I did some short translations for the journal Index on Censorship; I was very involved with them. I wasn’t thinking of it as a professional focus because that didn’t seem possible, but I just really enjoyed doing it. I also felt it was incredibly important— it’s important politically.

One of my early impulses—I’ve said this before, I’m not really saying anything new here—was that at the time, Nawal El Saadawi was pretty much the only Arab female author who anyone in the West, aside from specialists, actually knew about. And with all due respect for Nawal’s career and her importance in various ways, I did not want to see women’s writing in Arabic represented solely by Nawal El Saadawi. I mean, I translated two works by her so I’m part of the problem, I suppose, but I felt very strongly that it was important to get other voices out there. So that’s how I started, and it went from there. It’s always been a kind of sideline because as an academic you don’t really get the scholarly publication credit you have to accrue with your institution by doing translations, which, of course, is hugely ironic because so much teaching is dependent on translation, as is so much research. I think that’s changing quite a lot, but it’s taken a while and there’s still work to be done on that front (which I and others are engaged in). Also, I love research, I love academic research, so I would never be willing to fully give that up in order to translate. But, now that I’ve retired, I have more time, so I’m doing more translation. Actually, this year is really interesting for me because for the first time ever I’m working on more than one translation simultaneously. I’ve never done that before and we’ll see how it goes, so far so good, but it’s a bit of a new adventure.

And I continue to feel, in this really frightening world we live in and with all the terrible things that are going on, that while sometimes it’s hard to feel like what I do counts, on the other hand, I do think translation is just incredibly important because it’s a way for, hopefully, people to connect with parts of the world— I mean, I want them to read these works first as literature, but there’s no getting around the fact that people pick up these novels in order to learn about other places. And where I once was a bit cynical about that, now I’m like, why not? If that means somebody becomes interested in Oman, then great. I have a more, I suppose, benign attitude than I did.

So—this one. Why this one, Honey Hunger? I started translating Omani literature by translating Jokha Alharthi. And that was really great, but at one point I said to Jokha, I want to read more Omani writers, who should I read? She mentioned a number of names, and one of them was Zahran, and through her I managed to get this novel and his earlier one — القناص [The Sniper]. I read them, and I particularly just loved this one; everything about it grabbed me. Among the translations I’ve done in my life, the ones that are, I think, my best translations and also the ones I’ve cared about most, are the ones where the voice just totally grabs me to the point where you just think — I have to translate this. I’m sure this is what most translators would say, I don’t think it’s unusual. I really love Zahran’s imagination and his writing.

One thing that drew me to the novel was its incredible precision. I am happiest translating writers whose work has a certain ‘boniness’—there’s no padding, every word is necessary. I feel that about his work, as I do about Jokha’s, and Hoda Barakat’s and some others’. These are writers who are fierce with themselves about how they write, and, I’m afraid, I have read things that some self-editing would have improved, in Arabic (and also in English). I also love the deep engagement with the land and the ecology—beyond ‘engagement’, it’s more a deep embedding in it. The land is a crucial character. The only other novel I’ve translated that I feel is so embedded in and motivated by its immediate surrounding, to the point that the inanimate becomes a character (although in a very different way, would be Hoda Barakat’s حارث المياه – The Tiller of Waters. That is set in urban Beirut, in an extremely, intensely drawn urban fabric, and literally fabric because a lot of it has to do with fabrics and production of fabrics. And for that novel, like this one, I had to imagine the space, its colours, its sounds, its being. One does that with every translation, of course, but some demand more than others. So, I think that’s definitely something that drew me to it but that also posed particular challenges.

When you first read the novel in the original Arabic, do you recall anything that stood out to you as a translator? Anything you knew would be especially challenging or interesting to translate?

MB: That’s a really great question. Again, particularly the precision about place, so crucial to the novel. The names of trees, which just drove me crazy, and also the rituals—not just rituals but details—of beekeeping. Zahran doesn’t use beekeeping simply as a loose metaphor. It has metaphorical weight, for sure, but because it is such a formative aspect of this character, the specificity of it has to be understood and traced. I think people don’t always realize that translators often do quite a lot of research. I don’t know, maybe that’s obvious, but I sometimes feel like people don’t understand that—they think we simply deal with words on a page. So much of what we do is to think about what are the inferences hovering around those words, and which ones must the translator bring out? That often requires research.. So, I did a lot of reading about beekeeping. I could’ve simply asked the author, he’s great, he’s always ready to answer questions, but I wanted to do my own research and come up with things and then maybe ask him about certain points. I learned a lot about beekeeping (and about wild bees, the complex relation between these), which was completely fascinating. And then of course, the other thing which I found both fascinating but very difficult, was the use of Omani dialect—or dialects. Zahran stages the fact that even Omanis don’t always understand each other—here, you have the Bedouin and the village lad, and it’s explicitly said that they don’t always understand each other. So dialect was a huge challenge, and as part of that, the absolutely beautiful song poems that open every chapter. I loved those, but I have to confess that I didn’t always understand and I had to ask Zahran for a kind of Fusha-ized translation—which I then didn’t necessarily completely follow because it was helpful to have that, but I also had my own sense of the poem fragment.

I wrote a question, actually, about using the local names for the plants in the book and, from my perspective, it’s important to use those local names for plants, but if you could expand on why you think it was important for you to do so?

MB: Well look, in any translation you’re always trying to find a balance between wanting to really honour the original and to be as close to the original as you can. I’m actually quite conservative in my translation practice; I really try to stay very close to the text. I usually find, for me, that this the most satisfying and the best way to translate. I want to bring the original into the translation, at the same time, of course, you don’t want to alienate the reader. I guess what I tried for with the names was to use a lot of local names, but sometimes I used English to anchor the landscape somewhat along the reader’s horizon of familiarity. Some of these don’t have English names. Again, I did quite a lot of research on the Internet, looking up names, looking up pictures, getting the Latin name of a plant and then trying to figure out what it might be in English. But also, occasionally the English equivalent, if there is one, would not be appropriate. The best example of that is the sidra tree. The sidra is among iconic trees in Oman. The most common equivalent English usage is Christ’s thorn. But in the Omani context, I’m not going to call it that. But also, I preferred sidra because it’s important locally. I want to broaden readers’ vocabulary as well as their understanding, if I can do that without alienating the reader. Then, perhaps a reader will see a reference online to a sidra tree and they’ll be like—oh I know what that is! It’s always a matter of proceeding by feel—I know what I want to do, I know I feel that it’s important to retain a lot of the local terms, but when you’re mucking around in the text, you’re just trying to figure out what will sound right. All ‘theory’ goes out the window, you’re just there with the text trying to figure out how is this going to work?

There is something unique about a translator’s perspective because you spend a significant amount of time with text. How did spending time with this book influence how you understand the story? Are there aspects of the story that you think readers should be especially aware of while reading?

MB: I think that spending a lot of time with it primarily made me think more about the main character—and because I did spend a lot of time thinking about this character, it suggests that he’s a character worth thinking about! Trying to get inside the head of that character as seen by the author, but also, of course, as interpreted by me. How would this particular character speak? And in this context, I would mention another recent translation of mine, Safe Corridor by the Syrian Kurdish author, Jan Dost, where the narrator is a growing boy—basically, a young adolescent during the period that he is narrating this. That was challenging because I had to think about what kind of language would a young adolescent use, but then also trying to get inside his head a bit. Because it was narrated in the first person, not the case with Zahran’s novel, it seemed even more important to try to do that. The novel is enacted not only from the character’s point of view, but through his voice—playful, agonized, sardonic, irritated …

In Zahran’s novel, beyond the character, I try to live inside of the text. It’s such a privilege. With every draft I do, I will notice new things and sometimes it’ll be a matter of—oh, I didn’t think about that before, sometimes it’s more like — oh, I thought I understood that but now I think I don’t. Very deep reading, akin to (but different from) the approach of a critic or literary historian focusing on a particular author or work. With translation, of course, you’re having to grapple with every word and so you ponder everything—every comma, every sound. There are times where you go through these horrible moments where suddenly nothing seems to make sense and you can’t find the right language and you just think—I’m a complete failure at this. I think that’s a feature of spending so much time with the text. You know that feeling, when you hear one word repeated over and over it starts to sound like nonsense? The deeper you are in a text the more it means and hopefully the more you pull together, but there are times when you just start thinking, maybe I just have the whole thing completely wrong.

In terms of what readers should know—in one of the possible questions you sent me, you mentioned the motif of the campsite and the lost lover. And I completely agree, that’s such a resonant motif here. I could’ve written a long afterward talking about Omani literature and the imprints of poetry, and these motifs, and how they connect. I’ve done that in a couple of cases in the past (not for Omani works), but that was more because I felt the actual language of the novel in its own historical context could be misconstrued by Anglophone readers and I felt I needed to explain. That was most important to me when I translated Latifa al-Zayyat’s feminist classic from 1960, The Open Door, الباب المفتوح. I really felt like I had to give readers a map of what this novel meant at the time and why it was so important. But I don’t feel that way, usually, with more recent novels, and I also feel readers can do research and I don’t want to tell a reader how to read the novel. I don’t want the reader to start reading thinking — oh the motif of the campsite, that’s Arabic literature, I need to find that here! I believe that very interested readers might look things up, as one can do now, and find something out, but other readers don’t need to do so in order to enjoy the novel. The motif works within the story world. I didn’t feel any particular need to explain it.

That makes sense. I was reading a book a few months ago and I, of course, read the introduction before reading the book, and as I was reading it, I wished I hadn’t read the introduction first, because what the translator had said was influencing how I was reading it.

MB: When I did the introduction to The Open Door, it was particularly about the historical context of the novel, and what feminism in Egypt meant in 1960, and why this novel was so ground-breaking and controversial. Whereas if you read it as an Anglophone reader when it came out in English, in the 90s or early 2000s, you might think—so what? This sounds so outdated … and I wanted to explain my sense of its ongoing resonance. I wrote another introduction recently, I’ve just had my first 19th century translation come out, with Oxford World’s Classics. For them, you have to do an introduction and explanatory notes and a timeline. You want to give the reader historical and biographical context. For contemporary novels, I think that is usually much less necessary. And I agree with you, you don’t want a translator to tell you how to read the novel; I mean, they’re already telling you because the translation is their interpretation. You’re reading the translator’s interpretation of the novel, so already that’s enough intervention!

The bees are such an interesting aspect of the novel and the place that they hold, as you said, has metaphorical weight, but it was also just very fascinating to read about beekeeping. Is there anything you’d like to share about this element of the novel?

MB: A key feature of Zahran’s work is that his precise and poetic evocations of the natural world are also absolutely about humanity. I’m now translating his next novel, that’s one of the ones I’m doing this year, and it is equally the case with this one though it’s the geography and engineering of water resources, rather than bees, that’s central. Bees and people in Honey Hunger are rather similar. The bees are going here and there, and they’re gathering nectar and so forth, and they’re also extremely wary of people, for very good reasons. And they both cooperate with each other and are in a kind of competition for resources and space. And as humans, we are social, we live in groups, and yet we don’t usually trust each other, as can be seen, sadly, from contemporary politics. We have to be sociable but, at a certain point, we cannot be, it seems, because the competitive urge gets in the way. (At least, bees aren’t greedy the way humans can be, I don’t think!) There is also a real sense for these characters of belonging with the bees, a kind of humble admiration and affection, even though at the same time, human keepers are extracting the products of bees’ labour. Isn’t the novel telling us to think about different kinds of community between humans and animals and plants? And that we need to think about community ourselves. Zahran does that gently. The fiction is metaphorically resonant and very grounded in the story world, as I think the best fiction is.

Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University. She has translated many works of Arabic fiction into English. Her translations of Omani author Jokha Alharthi include Bitter Orange Tree and Celestial Bodies, which was awarded the International Booker Prize. She has also translated Hoda Barakat, Hassan Daoud, Elias Khoury, Latifa al-Zayyat, and Nawal al-Saadawi. Her research publications focus on Arabophone women’s writing and the ideology of gender debates in the nineteenth century, most recently The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt.

Emma Hardy is a recent graduate of Boston University where she earned her B.A. in Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures, with a focus on Arabic. She is an editor for ArabLit and a continuous student of the Arabic language.

Also watch: “On Translating Oman,” a conversation with Bushra Khalfan, Zia Ahmed, and Marilyn Booth