‘Bidayàt’: Aldo Nicosia on a Collection of Beginnings
The forthcoming collection Bidayàt, ed. Aldo Nicosia, brings together the openings of twenty-two different Arabic novels; these are translated into Italian by Nicosia with the help of two other translators. For ArabLit, Nicosia sat down in front of the mirror and conducted a somewhat impertinent interview with himself about the project.
Interviewer: Mr. Nicosia, why Bidayàt? What new does it add to the Italian cultural landscape?
Aldo Nicosia: Bidayàt is an anthology that, as its title suggests (it means “beginnings”), covers only a long incipit, or I’d better say, the opening pages of 22 Arabic novels, published from 2011 to 2023. That’s about 2000 words for each novel.
I: Why to start from 2011?
AN: I chose to focus on a date that marks a proper watershed: the uprisings that overthrew some regimes in North Africa and sparked still-ongoing conflicts and civil wars in the Maghreb and Mashreq. All this brought about social earthquakes, crises of values, counter-revolutions, chaos or greater freedom of expression in some cases. I also wanted to include the novelties that come from Arabic literature, especially the novel ties of new thematic trends that came with those events.
I: (Gives his interviewee a mocking smile.) Do you think that 22 novels for a dozen countries can represent sufficient examples of certain trends?
AN: Obviously, I don’t make this claim, and I’m aware that my selection doesn’t cover all Arab countries, and that it won’t do that in a way that reflects the multiplicity of styles, themes, and aesthetic sensibilities. In Bidayàt, I offer pages of historical novels featuring famous characters who left their deep marks more than a thousand years ago, some others in which realism is mixed with surrealism and magic, or others still that deal with ecological problems and dystopian visions, especially in the Egyptian context. There are pages of reflections on the ongoing consequences of the abovementioned 2011 uprisings/revolutions, and the sediment of conflicts that occurred in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Kuwait in the last decades of the twentieth century. Of blinding passions, traditions, betrayals.
I: On what bases did you choose this or that novel?
NA: First of all, I chose according to my personal taste, in the sense that in many cases I was impressed by those initial 6-7 pages, which propelled me to complete the novels. And also, according to an acquaintance and/or friendship with the authors.
I: So something private … entre vous? No criteria of critical or readerly success?
NA: It seems to me that you’re insinuating who-knows-what kind of shenanigans, but can’t one suppose I have friends who are also excellent writers? Some of them I don’t even know personally, but they were immediately very enthusiastic about my project. I remind you that all 22 novels are still unknown in the Italian publishing scene: i.e., unpublished. Only four out of 22 are available in English, French or Dutch translations. Some of them have already won prestigious awards. Others are so new that they haven’t been analyzed by critical studies.
I: I didn’t mean to imply any of what you say. But if you talk to me about friends, one begins to get suspicious. And, well, here we have 11 male and 11 female writers. Nothing accidental, I suppose…
NA: Yes. I wanted to create equal opportunities for both. I would also add that these 22 writers belong to different generations.
I: You’ve done well to provide perspectives from several generations. But tell me, in all honesty, are these opening pages of the 22 novels really so compelling that they make the reader angry at you for seducing and then abandoning them? Or maybe they’ll be grateful to you for sparing them the rest of the pages, if these aren’t masterpieces?
NA: (Laughs.) Ha ha ha. Many authors are aware of the crucial impact of the first few pages on the reader. And, as a result, they create scenes, draw or sketch atmosphere and characters with great care, in such a way as to promise immersive and engaging fictional worlds. It’s their job, after all. But… perhaps longer novels should, theoretically, require more pages…
I: (Interrupts.) So you should have given more pages to the longer ones?!
NA: I don’t know. It came naturally to me to give each novel the same space to express itself, with a variation of 10% more or less, at least to close the text in the least brutal way possible.
I: In addition to the phenomenon of the seduced and abandoned reader, it can also happen that some writers present in the anthology may be disappointed, for a similar reason: you translate them, they’re happy, and after a few pages you leave them behind, moving on to another novel and author.
NA: In theory, you’re not wrong. But writers, if they’re truly friends and understand how hard it is to translate, should at least appreciate my effort. I remind you that no one is financing me and I should be grateful to the publisher Progedit from Bari (Italy) for accepting this new challenge in the Italian book wasteland. While we’re on the subject, I want to tell you something that happened. I was looking for an author of a certain origin and, thanks to a friend, we came to contact one, after many unsuccessful attempts. Of course, I won’t mention his name. Well, he didn’t want me to insert the first pages of one of his novels, saying in a few words: “Either you translate it all or nothing.” Perhaps he was afraid that, in this way, his text could be “burned”? I don’t know what else to say. Among other difficulties, it also happened that some of them gave me a non-final version of the novel in word form, so I had to double-check all the text, and change the translation to the first text received. One of them gave me a chapter in the middle of the novel, perhaps because she liked it better? I had figured it out, from the tenor of the text, but I was completely certain after I bought the whole book. Thank goodness it was only a matter of translating 2000 words.
I: You have included an appendix with the original texts, albeit only the first 500-600 words, so it is evident that you have conceived this anthology as a text for educational purposes for students of Arabic, or for scholars of Arabic literature. But what will the others do with those final pages in Arabic?
NA: Yes. I imagined this target audience to which you refer, but also the potential target of publishers … Who knows, maybe they’ll be convinced to publish the whole novel. Moreover, I have included the appendix to ensure a certain transparency and quality control—as you know, some translators sometimes do not trust their colleagues and want to go and check the original. I also imagined that this appendix could also be useful for the Arabic-speaking students of Italian studies, for reverse translation exercises, that is, to return to the initial text.
I: You didn’t answer me about the common, non-Arabist reader.
NA: I was getting there. I must admit that Arabic literature does not have a large following in Italy… So never mind, if the reader has an Arab friend who doesn’t know Italian, he could share with him the pleasure of reading the same text. I wanted to propose to the publishing house that they publish the texts only on their website, accessible with a code to those who buy the book, and perhaps longer than those present here. But for me paper sings and… dances, too!
I: I noticed that you changed some of the titles of the originals. What criteria did you use?
NA: Let’s say that I avoided inserting difficult Arabic names, especially realia, those unknown to most, and replaced them with nouns. Sometimes I added names of places, countries, or cities in the title, to make them more easily recognizable right away.
I: Paraphrasing the words of the critic Yves Reuter, which you quote in the full-bodied introduction, the beginning of a novel is a premise and, so to speak, a promise. Do you think it is always maintained in each of the novels you have chosen? Or underneath a layer of gold coins shimmering on the surface, is there only scrap metal or less noble metals?
NA: Well, it also happens in life that something gets off to a good start and then gets lost along the way. In novels, it can be the other way around, but by then you may have already lost a few readers. It’s a matter of personal taste. And anyway, if you don’t like the beginning of a novel, after all you have lost only less than half an hour of reading. There are 21 more left, with different characters and settings. Or 20, 19, 18, and so on. According to the law of large numbers, no doubt any reader will find something interesting.
I: I read that only two of the 22 novels were translated by two other colleagues, Arianna Tondi and Barbara Teresi. Why so little cooperation?
NA: Well, first of all, I would like to thank these two colleagues who agreed to translate the beginning of a novel, also taking care of the excellent critical presentation of their respective texts in the introduction. I had asked others to contribute literary translated texts, but perhaps the deadlines I had set were not very generous, or perhaps because… translations count for little in the judgement of the commissioners of the Italian university qualifying competitions. In this regard, I have to confess one thing: this book contains some proposals for translation of novels I’d sent some years ago to different publishing houses, which have trashed my emails, or else turned me down. So I exhumed these texts that did not meet with luck in the difficult Italian publishing world.
I: If I remember correctly, you are already a “recidivist” on the “recycling” of literary translations. You did the same with the Arabic and Maltese stories included in your students’ degree theses, published in the volume Kòshari (2021). I have more to ask you, about the contents of the novels, their styles, the difficulties of translation. Or maybe you’d like to talk to me about other aspects.
NA: First of all, an indispensable clarification: in Kòshari, I tried to give new life to some of my students’ theses, and, after the joint work of revision, I published those translations, together with others of mine, obviously in their names. Speaking of style, it differs from text to text. There are historical novels with their technical and lexical specificities, others that concern current events, with livelier dialogues, even in dialect, interior monologues, prologues that announce sparks, and—
I: (Interrupts.) By the way, I remember having glimpsed in the appendix a text written entirely in Egyptian Arabic. Am I wrong?
NA: You are right: it is a sort of autobiography of an Italian Jew, named Na’ila, who was born in 1930s and lived in Egypt. It was written very spontaneously, as if she were conversing with someone, rather than as though she were writing. And it’s actually the text transcribed by her daughter, without major changes.
I: At this point, if you were the interviewer, what would you ask yourself?
NA: (Chuckles.) This is the usual trick of those who want to avoid trivial questions and ensure better content. Anyway, I’ll go along with it and ask the question: Why should an Italian read Bidayát?
I: Ah, then allow me to answer, dear Nicosia?
NA: Sure, as long as you’ve read the anthology carefully…
I: In addition to the text just cited, on the Italians of Egypt, I remember two other novels with Italian characters, set against the backdrop of Italian colonialism in Libya—one in the Giolittian period (1911), the other in the Fascist period—including that anomalous love story between the Italian girl and the Libyan prisoner. And then other Italian characters, events, and places appear in the historical novel about the Ottoman sultan’s dragoman. Ah, even a Sicilian who founded Cairo, about a thousand years ago! But it seems to me that it just dries up.
NA: Well, you don’t necessarily have to look for the Italian characters. The setting in the Mediterranean or the Near East would be enough, as those are closer than other worlds, at least in geographical terms, and perhaps in certain values, too. Crises, passions, and individual and communal tragedies that are bathed by the same sea should worry us as much as, or even more than, those of other continents. Think of the Middle Eastern conflicts in which Italy has had and still has a role, sometimes minimal, passive, or even complicit.
I: I’m just trying to put myself in the shoes of the classic provincial Italian who tends to his own backyard. Maybe you can take this opportunity to invite your fellow translators to revive their aborted translation projects, so you can make an anthology that can be of interest to any Italian.
NA: Honestly, I don’t expect much from the Italian public. When the Italian experiences at home the conflicts that he now sees on TV, perhaps then will he be able to identify deeply with the dramas of the most invisible others. Yes, because there are others and others, especially those from the south of the planet. We are here to build bridges to these others, to make us imagine journeys to known and unknown worlds, or to ourselves, as the Sufi scholar Ibn ‘Arabi said.
I: Thank you, Mr. Nicosia. Good luck with Bidayát.
NA: Inshallah. God—and the sovereign nation of readers—willing.
Parte Prima: dal Medioevo alla fine del XX secolo
1. Il pasticciere, di Rīm Basyūnī – Egitto (2022) (trad. di Arianna Tondi)
2. Il dragomanno del sultano, di Muḥammad Ḥasan ‘Alwān – Arabia Saudita (2020)
3. Pavimentare il mare, di Rašīd al-Ḍa‘īf – Libano (2011)
4. Scatolone di sabbia, di ‘Ā’iša Ibrāhīm – Libia (2022)
5. Fuga da Ustica, di Ṣāliḥ al-Sanūsī – Libia (2018)
6. Na’ila, nata Marie, di Nādiya Kāmil – Egitto (2018)
7. Tre vite, di Būmidyan Bilkabīr – Algeria (2018)
8. Professori di illusioni, di ‘Alī Badr – Iraq (2011)
9. I fantasmi di Faysal, di ‘Ā’iša ‘Adnān al-Maḥmūd – Kuwait (2022)
10. L’orologio di Baghdad, di Šahad al-Rāwī – Iraq (2016)
11. Mister N, di Nağwà Barakāt – Libano (2019)
Parte Seconda: Il XXI secolo
12. I sorrisi di Sami Ya‘qub, di ‘Izzat al-Qamḥawī – Egitto (2019)
13. Vacanza nel quartiere al-Nur, di al-Ḥabīb al-Sālimī – Tunisia (2023)
14. La cartella gialla, di Amīra Ġanīm –Tunisia (trad. di Barbara Teresi) (2023)
15. Pazzia, di Buṯayna Ḫālidī – Tunisia (2019)
16. Donne di Bruxelles, di Nisma al-‘Aklūk – Palestina (2019)
17. Due donne di Jeddah, di Hanā’ Ḥiğazī – Arabia Saudita (2015)
18. Ritorno a Damasco, di Fādī ‘Azzām – Siria (2017)
19. Il figlio del pozzo, di Zahrān al-Qāsimī – Oman (2022)
20. Ibrahim e il riccio, di Muḥammad al-Aš‘arī – Marocco (2021)
21. L’uscita, di ‘Izz al-dīn Šukrī Fišīr – Egitto (2012)
22. Universe, di Raḍwà al-Aswad – Egitto (2023)
Editor’s note (where the editor is not Aldo Nicosia): You can find a list of the 22 selected novels here.