‘Today, We Need to Write at Least a Thousand Syrian Novels’

Tugrul Mende, in conversation with Fadi Azzam and Ghada Alatrash

In April, Interlink Books published Fadi Azzam’s Huddud’s House—which was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction back in 2018—in Dr. Ghada Alatrash’s English translation.

As Kirkus notes in their starred review, “Huddud’s house is a real place in Azzam’s elegantly unfolding story, a ramshackle maze containing 170,000 Arabic books and 12,000 manuscripts.“ The house enters the picture when Dr. Anees returns to Syria in 2011, at the dawn of the revolution, to the family home, which was left to him by his uncle. This, naturally, complicates his project.

Azzam and Alatrash have been working together for several years; you can read an excerpt from the novel in translation, “From Behind the Camera,” that we ran in 2022.

Here, author and translator talk about their work on Huddud’s House.

You started working on Huddud’s House in 2012. How does it feel to see it now published in English?

Fadi Azzam: For any writer, it is important to be published, because your hope is that people will read your story. For me, my story is about Syria and what took place inside Syria. I’m grateful for the work of Dr. Alatrash. After all these years, we can talk about Syria again and re-open the topic. Syria is still alive for me, and the revolution still lives.

What brought you to this book? And how has your relationship with Fadi and his work changed through the process of translating Huddud’s House?  

Ghada Alatrash: I am an academic—a professor and a researcher, and I translate on the side. As part of my teaching, I teach Syrian art and literature—both pre-2011-Syrian revolution including Syrian prison literature and I teach art and literature that was born to and after the Syrian revolution. As you can imagine, the difficulty in teaching these topics is in the lack of translated material—I think we need an army of translators to fill in this gap, and I am doing my small part in it—for example, on prison literature, I have had to literally sit and translate some of the pieces that I wished to teach, like stories by Syrian writers Ibrahim Samui’l and Ghassan Al-Jibai (amongst others).

As for translating Fadi’s work, my research, in part, speaks to the Syrian Diasporic experience since the 2011 Arab Spring, and I had been desperately looking for Syrian voices that spoke and wrote about their lived experiences in their own voices and pens (that is, instead of being written about by an Orientalist pen), and here I coincidentally stumbled across Fadi’s poem “If you are Syrian these days.”

And it was sort of like love at first sight—I knew from the first few lines of this poem that I had found what I had been looking for! “If you are Syrian these days” acted as much-needed witness-literature that documented the Syrian human condition, and as importantly, it embodied a searing indictment that the author unabashedly addresses to an apathetic humanity. Shortly after, I moved onto another piece for Fadi: “This is Damascus You Sons of Bitches.” This poem was first published in Arabic in 2005, that is pre-Syrian-revolution, and it describes, in a most captivating way, the history, the charm, the pride, and the defiance of the city, and most enthrallingly, Fadi writes Damascus as a woman—empowered and bold. He writes, “She is Damascus, a woman with seven wonders, five names, and ten titles; she is an abode for a thousand saints, a school for twenty prophets, and an inspiration for fifteen gods. . . She has enough patience to wait for a climax with the force of an earthquake, and enough shoes and slippers hanging in al-Hamidiyah market to whack fifty deserving dictators.”

As for Huddud’s House—well, it is a narrative that tells the story of the mighty Syrian people as they revolted against injustice and tyranny; the novel tells us about the courage, resistance, and resilience of the Syrian revolutionary spirit. As I translated this novel, I felt the pulse of the Syrian people (and Syrian Revolution) in each line and in every word, and that pulse sounded like the beating of drums. Today, I stand humbled and honored to have been given the opportunity to deliver this work to the English reader—I did my very best to come up with the translation nearest, in meaning and rhythm, to the original Arabic, yet while acutely cognizant of the impossibility of this aspiration.

As for our relationship as translator-author, it was made up of daily conversations, where at the end of the day (Canada time), I would wrap up and gather any questions that I had, and then wait for Fadi to wake up in Qatar so that we could discuss them. He was always generous with his time and patient with my questions. And as I came to “The End,” I was sincerely saddened as I didn’t want the translation to end nor the conversations, and I cried!

What is the meaning behind Huddud’s House? When did this idea behind the novel emerge?

FA: The idea came to me after what took place in Syria, beginning in March 2011. We needed to think and talk about what happened, literally. It was very difficult for me to sit and watch what was happening every day. I felt the revolution in every living moment. I saw everyone taking part—my family, my friends, everyone. My country was turned upside down. I tried to rebuild, to make something, through my imagination, and to reproduce what happened through the lens of this human question: What does a human, any human, do during the mighty great moments that will forever change the geography of history? We no longer have the luxury of writing about simple things, but at the same time, it is not easy for art to be mixed with blood, pain, and reality. Huddud’s House was my way of proclaiming my story in a country where people are killed and turned into numbers. This is how the idea became a novel. Writing is about what words can teach us.

Today, more than ten years later, we are still alive. We have seen how people can make change happen. And although there are things that have remained unchanged, and even though we lost so much, we at least still have the stories—the Syrian stories. Huddud’s House is a story about Syria and Syrians, and I hope that it has done justice and delivered some of what happened in my country. And it is for this reason that I say to my friends and the youth who are working on narrating their stories: Today, we need to write at least a thousand Syrian novels. It’s a way for us to not forget or reconcile.

What sort of research did you need to do to translate this novel?

GA: As mentioned earlier, I am fortunate in that my research as a professor happens to be on Syrian art and creative expression as resistance to dictatorship—and I believe that within this context, Huddud’s Houseacts as one powerful example of creative resistance. For Syrians, art and creative expression have contributed to the building of a national collective memory for the Syrian people, and they have come to document the history of a peoples in their struggle for freedom and dignity against tyranny and injustice—one only needs to visit a site like the Collective Memory of the Syrian Revolution to see the outpouring of cultural production that flooded to the Syrian revolution (to date, over 12,600 pieces are archived on this site). Our hope is that the English translation of Huddud’s House can also be part of the documentation and historicization—and also help elevate the Syrian revolutionary experience to the level of the universal, so that it is written as part of a universal collective memory beyond the borders of Syria and the Arab-speaking world, “lest we forget—lest we forget.”

What draws you to difficult novels like Huddud’s House and what made you decide to translate into English?

GA: It’s the least that I could do as a Syrian—For more than 13 years, I had been witnessing the courage and the resilience of the Syrian people who took part in the revolution, one that I was not part of. I didn’t march the streets as they did nor was I able to chant with them “Ash-sha’b yruid isqat an-nizam” [the people want to bring down the regime]. I was far off, a spectator—I felt like a bystander, and it was an awful feeling. What I was able to do in my place of privilege as an academic-activist was to research, teach, and translate stories; I translated Syrian narratives so that the voices of the peoples are delivered and heard, and when I came across Huddud’s House, I couldn’t imagine a more powerful and complete work to tell the story of the Syrian people and their struggle for freedom, and I knew that I had to deliver it to the English-speaking world as a responsibility.

What particular translation challenges did you face with this novel?

GA: The most difficult part about this novel was in translating the human pain, the blood that smeared its pages, a pain that speaks of a reality and a human condition that continues to be lived by the Syrian people. There were times when I felt literally nauseated as I translated the text—for example, in the chapters that told the horror of what takes place underground in Syrian prison cells, or the chapter that speaks to the psychiatric ward that hosted the political prisoners, or that chapter where Fidel is behind the camera documenting the horror as narrated by a father holding the charred body of his daughter, and so on; during these times, I had to put the novel away for the rest of the day as I could no longer stomach what was, and as importantly, continues to be lived by Syrians.

As you know, Fadi is a very descriptive author and he does not spare the reader any details—he loves his adjectives, and he has a way of activating our five senses through his writing; I could literally touch, see, hear, smell and taste the bitterness, the blood, and the pain in some of the scenes, and to translate Fadi’s writing in a way that could do it justice was not an easy feat, to say the least.

With this in mind—on the flip side of pain, the same descriptive language was present in the happy and hopeful scenes and in the love scenes, for where there are thorns, there were also roses. I am thinking of ascene between Samia and Anees. In this scene, I tried my very best to preserve the beauty and richness of vocabulary and adjectives in the Arabic language. Imagine the Arabic original when the English translation turned out like this: “The gentle resistance waned and was transformed into frenzied sighs. She let out a trumpeting groan, surged, and rode him like a saddle on a horse, scurrying across vast steppes fueled by an inner aah, her hair flying at every moment as she thrashed on his ground. She galloped and he ran; she raced and he panted; she neighed and he roared; she thundered, he snickered, and they whinnied together, their pores secreting delicious sweat as they melted into one another.”

Here’s the Arabic original: 

تتلاشى المقاومة اللطيفة وتتحول إلى تنهدات محمومة تطلق آهًا هائجًا، فتنطلق فوقه مسرعة كأنها تتمكن على ظهر حصانه. تتحرك بسرعة على السهول الواسعة مصحوبة بآهات مُحرقة، وشعرها يطير مع كل ارتطام على الأرض. تتسارع ويتلفظ، تتسابق ويتنفس، تنهق ويهميء، ترني ويزمجر، وينبعث عرق شهي من مساماتهما ليمتزجا

I still don’t know if the English does it justice, but what I do know is that it was such a fun challenge to translate these sorts of lines!

Which particular character or characters were the most compelling for you? The chapters mostly stay with one particular character; could you identify with one more than the others?

FA: Everyone has stories to tell, but not everyone is a writer. Writing is about the style and the way a writer tells their story. It’s an art. To be honest, I don’t know why I chose to divide the chapters the way I did. Now that I think about it, maybe I wanted to humanize the stories by choosing human names as titles; some of the chapters have titles other than names, but for the most part, they are named by the first names of the characters. In a way, the names also helped me delve inside of each person’s being. The first final draft was seven hundred pages—that’s how much was inside of me! I had to cut it to about 400 pages before publication.

This is a novel of love, war, and human relationships in a difficult moment in history. What aspect was the most interesting for you?

GA: What I loved about Fadi’s work in general is his courage to call things out as they are. There is no sugar-coating of the truth in his work.

Putting aside the translator’s role for a moment, as a Syrian woman, I loved how the women in Huddud’s House were, or eventually became, empowered. I saw a poignant parallel between the revolt of the people and the revolt of the women in the novel. The author makes it clear that he is a feminist; as a woman, this was very meaningful for me, and it also created more of a spirited drive for me as a translator.

As for interesting subjects, I have great respect for both Layl and Samia—they were women who defied the patriarchal, the social, the political, the religious, and all that was conventional. In Huddud’s House, women were revolutionaries.

How personal was this novel for you?

FA: I am always asked this question—which character in the story is you, and is it you in this chapter? I was never sure how to answer these questions until I came across Orhan Pamuk’s The Naive and Sentimental Novelist. He talks about how, in 2008, he published his novel The Museum of Innocence, and he complains of the same problem. He had this hero, Mr. Kamal, and everyone asked him, are you Kamal? He then explains that he came up with two answers—no, I am not Mr. Kamal, and yes, I have something of Mr. Kamal in me. So basically, he is saying that he is and he is not. It’s like people want to read about reality, something that is real, not only imagined. And so, my answer is this: I am not 100% here, and at the same time, I am there and not there. It is difficult to explain.

What is imaginary and what is real is separated by a very thin layer, like that moment between dreaming and wakefulness.

Back in 2018, Huddud’s House was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. When did you made the choice to translate this particular novel?

GA: The minute I finished reading the last page of the novel, I knew that I had to translate it and deliver it to the English reader who would not otherwise have access to our literature and voices had it not been for translation. On a personal level, as a reader, the story took my breath away. On an academic level, I thought it was epic. And, as a researcher and translator, translation is about adding another work on the Syrian subject that can come to counter a dominant Orientalist Western knowledge, and most importantly, as written by a Syrian person—a work that can act as an anti-Orientalist narrative and one that may come to re-story, re-narrativize, re-historicize, and humanize.

When Huddud’s House was longlisted, how did it help you with other writing projects?

FA: I am currently working on a new novel, but I don’t know when it will be ready for publication. The last book I published was in 2019, and it wasn’t a novel. I take my time and never rush, and when my work is ready, it has a way of letting me know on its own.

The prize doesn’t make me write faster. Sure, a prize can spotlight my work, and it can also motivate people to read. But it is not enough. I think we need more prizes, more attention given to writers.

Today, Damascus is destroyed, Beirut is suffering, as are many cities in the Arab world. Two thousand Arabic novels are produced every year, and I think that the prizes awarded to some of the novels can act as a guide for readers and at the same time, the prizes help writers to be seen. I think that Huddud’s House being longlisted helped but it was not the only reason it won recognition.

While working on this novel, what did it teach you about translating that will help you with future projects?

GA: Gayatri Spivak describes translation as the “most intimate act of reading,” and I have come to learn and understand, in-depth, the meaning of this sentence; in particular, after having translated for the first time an entire novel with which I had spent an entire year of my life, holding it close to my heart and mind day and night. It was like I had formed a relationship with this novel. I got to know it very closely in its lines, contours, and features; in its different fluctuating moods and different tones and pitches; I felt the words, each word, and responded to their sensitivities and, at times, vulnerabilities; and it was through this process I learned that translating a novel is indeed the most intimate act of reading.

Also on translation, Homi Bhabha teaches that it is through the act of translation that marginalized narratives are recentered, whereby a third space, an in-between space, emerges, as cultures come in contact with one another, and where differences and boundaries “are constantly being negotiated and transformed.” And it is my hope that Huddud’s House in English will offer these spaces of negotiation and understanding where new possibilities for meaning and interpretation are fostered. And to take part in the building of this much-needed third space in our humanity is indeed an incredibly inspirational drive for me as a translator, as it helped put the theory into practice.

Poetry by Azzam, in Alatrash’s translation:

Azzam’s ‘This Is Damascus, You Sons of Bitches’

Azzam’s ‘If You Are Syrian These Days …’

More Syrian short works, translated by Alatrash:

Ibrahim Samui’l’s “The Stench of Heavy Footsteps”

Ghassan Al-Jibai’s “Nails”