Alex Elinson on Translating the ‘Bold, Punchy, Gutsy’ Night Bird

On the heels of our conversation with Algerian novelist Amara Lakhous, translator Alex Elinson talks about how he wanted to translate Lakhous’s طير الليل even before he knew it existed, how he’s translated in conversation with his Italian and French counterparts, and the other books he’s in conversation with as he translates the “bold, punchy, gutsy” طير الليل.

When did you first come across Amara’s work, and when did you say, YES, THIS IS MINE, I WANT TO TRANSLATE IT?

Alex Elinson: I wanted to translate this book before I even knew it existed!

I first met Amara Lakhous at an event in 2016 at the Alwan Center for the Arts in New York City, where he was reading from and talking about three of his novels — Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet, and Divorce Islamic Style — all of which had recently been translated into English from their original Italian.

Since then, I have introduced his work into numerous classes I teach at Hunter College. I have invited him numerous times to speak with my students about his recurring themes – migration, transnationalism, translingualism, translation, and auto-translation.

After teaching Amara’s Italian novels (in English translation) for a number of years and wishing he would write something in Arabic that I could get my hands on as a translator, Amara published طير الليل (The Night Bird) in 2019. I love hard-boiled crime fiction and after reading the first sentence, I was hooked!

But beyond the form that brings to mind the best noir novelists from around the world, the book provides a brilliant deep-dive into Algerian history of the last half-century, an extremely readable account of the Algerian fight for independence from France that served as a model for revolutionary movements around the world in the 1950s and 1960s, and its descent into corruption and violence that continues to this day. It is a fast-paced examination of the precarity of popular revolutionary movements and how power can corrupt idealism and recreate the systems it sought to overthrow.

Does this become a four-way project, since Amara is working not just with you, but also with the French and Italian translators? Do you also communicate with them? How does that change the translation process (and end result)? 

AE: The bulk of the English translation work was done in conversation with Amara only. However, at some point in the process, the four of us — Amara, Lotfi Nia (French), Francesco Leggio (Italian), and I — started discussing and comparing translation strategies and solutions. Some of the discussions were technical, focusing on word choice, sentence structure, the novel’s title, the spelling of proper and place names, and the presentation of Algerian history. However, our discussions and exchanges also dealt with more abstract topics, such as the different ways readers of French, Italian, and English might receive and respond to a novel written in Arabic and how our respective language communities might interact with the colonial history that is so much a part of Algeria’s past and present. It is often said that writing and translation are solitary endeavors, but working on this novel has been anything but solitary, and I think the translations are richer because of that.

What sort of audience and reception do you imagine for this book in English? How do you see it conversing with other works in the English-language literary (or film, or theater) landscape? What does it bring, what might it inspire?

AL: This book will provide the English-language reader with a fast-paced crime novel on par with the best crime fiction from around the world (Leonardo Sciascia, Georges Simenon, Arnaldur Indridason, Anita Nair). It will be a welcome addition to English of cutting-edge contemporary Arabic fiction from one of Algeria’s most exciting writers. Both from a literary and historical perspective, the novel will quickly find a home on countless university syllabi dealing with North Africa and the Middle East, revolutionary movements and dashed hopes of independence, post-colonial literatures, and more. The book makes direct mention of Gillo Pontecorvo’s film “The Battle of Algiers” (1966) and engages in many of the same themes including the brutality of French colonial rule and the equally brutal Algerian response to that brutality, resulting in an independent Algeria still struggling to find its way.

Can you talk a bit about the sonic landscape of the book and what you wanted to recreate in English?

AE: As I said before, I was a fan of Amara’s writing well before he wrote The Night Bird (which we have provisionally entitled The Fertility of Evil in English) and the noir genre more generally. I have to think that Amara’s Arabic is inflected with all the languages he speaks, reads, and writes — Kabyle, Arabic, Italian, French, and English. Generically speaking, the Arabic reads as one would expect from a noir murder investigation novel — bold, punchy, gutsy. Just as the writer draws from their own language experiences, so too does the translator. As I read the Arabic, I couldn’t help but hear the distinct rhythms and cadences of noir fiction authors I have read in English, such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Walter Mosely, and others. I wanted to recreate the economy of language and sharp, staccato-like rhythm common to these writers, resulting in short, punchy clauses that hit us squarely in the gut.

Just as I asked Amara — what other recent Algerian books have you enjoyed? Especially, of course, noir or crime fiction, and those we might not know about?

AE: It seems that all I have read lately from Algeria is noir and crime fiction!

Like his other works, Amara Lakhous’s The Prank of the Good Little Virgin of Via Ormea is a “whodunnit” that takes on issues of multiculturalism, multilingualism, racism, and questions of national identity, all with his usual astute observation to detail, keen sense of humor, and natural ability to tell a great story!

Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, a counter-narrative to Camus’s The Stranger, uses two murders — that of Camus’s unnamed Arab (given the name Musa, in Daoud’s novel) and Musa’s brother Harun’s murder of a French settler in 1962 — to challenge the silencing and negation of Musa by the French prior to independence, and Algeria’s slide into violence and injustice following independence. The book is wonderfully haunting and creative in its assertion of Algerian identity and erasure in the face French colonialism and its aftereffects.

I am also finishing work on a translation of Saïd Khatibi’s The End of the Sahara, which won the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2023 in the Young Author category. Revolving around the murder of a local nightclub singer, the novel takes place in the forty days leading up to the October riots that exploded in Algeria on October 5, 1988. The riots capped off a series of political, economic, and social crises and led to a modicum of democratic reform and the end of the single-party rule of the National Liberation Front that had held power for the 66 years since Algeria’s independence from France in 1962. Unfortunately, democratic reforms and the era of multi-party elections of the early 1990s would be short-lived after the rise of political Islam, the government’s cancellation of elections, and the onset of Algeria’s so-called Black Decade which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Those autumn days in 1988 that create the backdrop for The End of the Sahara marked a turning point in the historical trajectory of Algeria from which the country has yet to recover. The translation will be published in 2026 by Bitter Lemon Press.