Translation as Knowledge Production

Translation as Knowledge Production

Between Samah Selim and Yasmeen Hanoosh

In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Samah Selim discuss authorship and adaptations in translated texts, Samah’s “Turjoman” project and the ways in which the field of translation is specific to location, her translation of Arwa Salih, and the “small arsenal of knowledge, resilience, and love” Salih’s work continues to bring into the world.

Yasmeen Hanoosh: Take us back to the inception point of Samah Selim, the translator. What first drew you to the emotional, intellectual, and physical labor of translation? Was there a clear roadmap from the start, or did the path unfold through a series of unplanned milestones?

Samah Selim: As an immigrant, I’ve been translating for as long as I can remember. We spoke Arabic at home, and I often had to translate back and forth for my mother. I was also very good at code-switching and doing this thing—I don’t know if it has a name—where you put on a foreign accent to pronounce English words. Is this something only Arabs do?

YH: You’re the second person to mention this unconscious phonological code-switching (that I don’t know what to name either). The first person to alert me to it was my son, who, since the age of five or six noted that whenever I spoke to people whose first language wasn’t English, my accent morphed to mimic theirs. I would not have been aware of it had it not been for his observation. I’m intrigued to hear that you, too, have this experience. I have no idea if it relates to Arab culture in any way.

SS: I used to do it unconsciously all the time—and still do sometimes. It feels like a courtesy and a form of respect for the non-native interlocutor. That’s also a form of translation, right? I also used to transcribe and translate pop songs for my cousins in Egypt when I was a kid. It was a big thing back then, and my services were in constant demand.

YH: Song lyric transcription and translation from English to Arabic was a popular activity among young people in the 1980s and 1990s in Iraq, too. In fact, I think it had a huge impact on the development of my English!

SS: And then it was my colleague and close friend Hosam Aboul-Ela who got me into literary translation when I was doing my PhD in the mid-90s. He was working as an editor in Cairo at the time for a new press that published English translations of Egyptian fiction. He hired me to translate Ibrahim Abdel Maguid’s Bayt al-yasmin, but the press folded soon after I got started on the book. (The novel was beautifully translated many years later by Noha Radwan). I loved the experience. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world: establishing a deep, productive connection between those two parts of my brain.

YH: You’ve translated an expansive range of texts—from historical and contemporary novels to memoirs and activist writings. Can you walk us through this journey across genres and eras? What inspired each shift, and how did one form or moment lead to the next?

SS: I’d say there’s been a 50/50 split between commissioned projects versus—la mu’akhadha—passion projects in my portfolio (which is not at all to say that I never develop attachments to the former). That’s the long and the short of it, really. As far as the passion projects are concerned, it was all about reading a particular book then stepping into its world. Each of these books spoke to some deep interest or concern of mine at the time. I’m a big fan of historical romance (I read all of Walter Scott back to front when I was in grad school) so it was a great pleasure to bring Jurji Zaydan’s hugely entertaining Shajarat al-durr into English. It was really productive for my research as well, because it kept me always engaged in a process of deep comparative thinking about history and poetics, Nahda and novel, and so forth. Each text has its own story with me, but that process is always the same.

YH: You’ve described yourself as a “perpetual migrant.” What does that liminal identity signify for you, and how does it shape your approach to translation—as both a practice and a field of theory?

SS: In the simplest sense it’s about constant physical relocation and the intellectual and emotional investments that result. Re translation, I would describe it as living in the space between languages and with every enunciation I must step into one or the other. It’s a form of mobility that’s always contingent and temporary, but also cumulative. I am the sum of these movements. This is why translation is a kind of release valve for me. It anchors this mobility in a method and a practice.

YH: You’re the first and one of only two translators to have received both the Banipal Prize and the Arkansas Arabic Translation Prize—for your 2009 translation of Yahya Taher Abdullah’s The Collar and the Bracelet  and your 2011 translation of Jurji Zaydan’s Tree of Pearls, Queen of Egypt respectively. To what do you attribute this remarkable achievement? Do you consider these two translations the pinnacle of your work, or are there other translations—published or forthcoming—that evoke a deeper sense of pride or fulfillment?

SS: Receiving both prizes was a huge honor, especially since the winning books were close to my heart. The Banipal award was completely unexpected. I had no idea even that I had been nominated for it! I don’t know about the pinnacle of my work. That’s not really how it works for me. Translators like other people are constantly changing, right? You do something you’re satisfied is the best you can do, you bask in the pleasure of that, and then you move on. The book I’m most proud of is Al-Mubtasarun, the most important in my opinion and the most difficult to translate.

YH: I would like to come back to this book in a bit, but first I want to ask you about knowledge production. As both a translator and a scholar, you’ve long engaged with the question of knowledge production. Could you distill some of your key insights—both theoretical and practical—on what makes a translation generate knowledge that resonates beyond its immediate field or context?

SS: Translation in general is a learning process, in the sense that the translator is constantly encountering different rhetorical structures and styles and the perplexing linguistic problems they generate. Working to solve these problems opens up new language pathways in the brain, so to speak. It creates a space for a kind of thinking between languages that allows translator and reader to engage in deep reflection on language: its politics, its historical and ideological substrata.

But there’s also a process of discovery that unfolds in the world external to the text. The world of the author and her times, the relationship of the time of the text to the time of the translation. This has been one of the most exciting aspects of translation for me. I’m working now on a translation of Inji Aflatun’s feminist writings, a series of three short books she published in the late 1940s. The first of them is a report on the founding Congress of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) which took place in Paris in 1945, which she attended along with two other delegates from the League of Women Students and Graduates, a short-lived Marxist feminist organization that was founded in Cairo a year earlier. I’m fascinated by this history, which is entirely new to me, and now I’m planning a research trip (which I’m very excited about) to see the Congress papers at Smith College. The WIDF Congress has a liminal place in the historical record because of its association with Soviet communism. Now we have this text that opens up a window onto a different framework and location from which to think about radical women’s history, in Egypt and in the world. The translation becomes the occasion for a practice of internationalist historiography.

YH: It’s fascinating to hear about these overlapping projects, especially since you’ve indicated before that “for a translation to mean something, it must mean on a number of levels.” I’d like to turn briefly to your monographs. In your 2019 monograph, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt, you shift away from the national paradigms and literary realism that shaped your first monograph—The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880–1985—to focus on commercial fiction and what you describe as “the literary margins” of the early 20th-century cultural landscape. One striking observation you make is that many of these popular novels presented themselves as translations or adaptations, yet intentionally obscured their source texts and original authorship. How has this shaped your understanding of what constitutes literary translation in diachronic terms? Does taking a historical perspective on translation inevitably invite a more relativized or context-dependent view on the ethics of literary translation?

SS: This is a very interesting question, Yasmeen, one that I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me! I’m grateful that you brought it up here, and I’d also love to hear your thoughts on it because I’m not at all sure that I have a good or convincing answer.

In the book, you see, I wasn’t just doing a survey of historical practices, I was trying to make a strong argument about adaptation—that culture in the broadest sense is a commons, not property to be hoarded and policed. Even today, adaptation is much more common than we might realize. Mostly between media (book or video game to film, and sometimes back) but also from book to book, especially when it comes to popular “fan fiction” genres. Think, for example, of the Jane Austin monster adaptations, or E. L. James Fifty Shades of Grey, which was an adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. People don’t see this type of adaptation as a problem, generally speaking.

Things become a lot more complicated on the other hand when talking about “literary fiction,” partly because author-function in the Foucauldian sense plays a much more powerful role in its institutional existence, and partly because translators and readers are more invested in reproducing some kind of authentic experience of an original text. For example, I’ve just finished reading Victor Pelerin’s Sacred Book of the Werewolf on the assumption that Andrew Bromfield’s fantastic translation is an “as close as possible” rendering of the Russian text. But what if it isn’t? What if Bromfield took “liberties,” snipping and inserting and re-writing? Would that have altered my readerly experience in any way? And where is the line between the acceptable and unacceptable liberty? How could I ever assess this in the first place unless I spent years studying Russian? Of course a Russian speaker can always come along and say, you know what, Bromfield’s translation is terrible, he practically rewrote some passages, they may be beautifully written but they’re inaccurate, etc. What then?

Something similar happened back in 2016 if you recall, when Deborah Smith’s controversial translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian won the Booker. Smith’s translation, with Han’s explicit approval, was highly “interventionist.” In fact, they were more like co-authors of the English version, no? Han was reportedly deeply involved in Smith’s rewriting. This kind of collaborative rewriting practice has some fascinating implications and potentials.

Or what about feminist translation practices, practices that actively seek to re-write the text in various ways in order to foreground or “hijack” its meaning? There was a whole school of translation that developed this thinking and put it into action.

No one can ever really “read” an author unless they go learn the language that author wrote in. But then we wouldn’t need translators, would we?

YH: I share your view that the line between acceptable and unacceptable translation liberties is blurry, context-dependent, and historically in flux. This is why studying the ethics of translation diachronically is so fascinating, and why several of our colleagues have acknowledged the brilliant intervention you make in your book.

SS: Just as an aside I want to quickly comment on the word “commercial” that you used above to describe the kind of fiction I wrote about in the book. It’s very interesting, first, because there was no distinction in the cultural paratext of the time between the commercial and the literary, and second because there is no translation for “pop” or “commercial” fiction in Arabic. I discovered this when I was revising Amir Zaki’s wonderful translation of the book into Arabic. Actually, there is not even a word for fiction in Arabic!

YH: That is a true and important observation—and the literary subgenre used to classify fiction—mostly for commercial purposes—also don’t map out well between English and Arabic, do they? Nor do concepts of authorship, which is something I’d like to ask you about. In this book, you engage with Abdelfattah Kilito and Michel Foucault’s elaborations of authorship—Kilito portraying it as a fragile, even flimsy notion in contrast to the fixity and specificity of genre, and Foucault framing it as a theological construct, anchoring the sanctity or creativeness of writing. How do you see these discursive practices, what you term “attitude towards authorship,” reflected in 19^th and early 20^th century Arabic texts? Are there lessons from this historical lens on translation and textual authority that might offer insights—or even coping strategies—as we navigate our own transition into AI-mediated literary worlds, where authorship and source transparency are likely to become increasingly obscured or contested?

SS: Absolutely. I think that with AI some of the ethical questions in relation to literary fiction may well start to become moot. If the bot can be a co-author then why can’t the translator be one, too? What you might get in this type of scenario is a return to the practices I talk about in the book, where both author and translator become transit points in the journey of a story.

YH: That’s fascinating, and also scary considering the speed and velocity at which literary protocols are transforming. Let’s turn to the implied audience, which is also transitioning to reading differently with the advent of AI-powered writing. When translating into English, what kind of implied audience do you find yourself addressing? You’ve spoken in several places about the “target audience” for the translated text. Is this the same as the implied audience you imagine while translating or is it the actual audience one measures in retrospect? How often do these two align in practice? Is it possible or useful to anticipate a target audience in advance, or only to discern it retrospectively, after the translation has circulated?

SS: I think this was from my essay on translating Arwa Salih, yes?

YH: Yes! Which is an excellent essay that I highly recommend to our readers!

SS: What I meant by target audience is something more emphatic than the word “implied” suggests to me. I translated that book as a mode of communication with a set of readers that was very clear in my mind. The book was maybe unique in that sense. First because it is itself a political message directed at a specific audience, or set of audiences, and second because translating it was essentially my way of routing that message onward. None of the other books I’ve done worked that way for me.

YH: You’ve described your readership as “translinguistic.” Could you elaborate on what you mean by that term, and how it shapes your translation choices?

SS: I think this question is linked to the one above. In the specific context of The Stillborn, what I meant was that I intended the translation not for a specific national or linguistic community, but for a specific political community with the ability to read English. It may be a minor difference but it’s an important one, especially when it comes to paratext. The translation was published in Kolkata, by Seagull Books, and it was important to me that the book circulate in South Asian intellectual and activist communities. Now that there’s a French translation of the book, its journey will expand even further.

YH: Congratulations on the French translation! Were you involved in that production too?

SS: Not at all. I heard about it quite by chance from a colleague after it came out in 2024. It was translated by Khaled Osman as Les Inaccomplis: Désillusions politiques et personnelles d’une militante communiste égyptienne.

YH: I’d like to turn to your translation of Arwa Salih’s المبتسرون (The Stillborn: Notebook of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation in Egypt) in more detail. You’ve recounted how the translation of this work, even before its publication, revived Salih’s memory and led to the unexpected reissue of the original Arabic. Could you speak to the timing of this dual release in Arabic and English? Why were Egyptian readers so ripe for this text in 2017?

SS: I guess 2015 was a watershed moment in Egypt in a way. It was the moment when the full reckoning with what had happened in the previous four years—the revolution and its sudden, bitter end—really got underway. I gave a lecture on Salih at Cairo University that year where the Q and A kind of exploded (in a good way). My impression was that this was the first public discussion of Salih and her book for the young people in the audience (and maybe for anyone). They were the ones drawing the lines between 1972 and 2011, casting about for ways to make sense of what had happened to them and their generation in the “unbearable lightness” of those heady years. This project took on a life of its own then, this aching exploration of memory and melancholy, and it went in all kinds of directions. But the days when (older) people lowered their voices to talk about Salih were long gone after 2017.

YH: You’ve described the text as a lost, almost legendary text—one you’ve, in a sense, rescued from oblivion. You’ve recounted your years-long search for it, how Salih was remembered but rarely read, and how her work remained out of reach for many. Do you think she wrote with the slightest expectation of being translated? To be unearthed? To be read by an Egyptian youth protest movement from a different era? To be read by non-Egyptians? To have an afterlife following the literal and figurative “death of the author,” in Roland Barthes’ sense?

SS: Yes and no I suppose. I don’t think she would have envisioned or even wished for a journey of translation and re-discovery in other languages and places, first because very little was translated out of Arabic in the late 80s and early 90s to begin with—and especially not this kind of text—and second because her cohort was extremely suspicious of the ongoing colonial agendas of the western powers. I mean, a big part of the book is about this, about the US-backed Zionist project in the Arab world.

Come to think of it, I wonder what trans-Atlantic solidarity movements might have been like back then, or whether they even existed.

In a different vein, I think she wrote the book in the shadow of her own death, and that this shadow gave her work an immediacy and an urgency that made no room for an eye on posterity, except in a very specific sense. In the sense that the book conveys its message to its intended readers, the “next” generation, a fully embodied audience, and not necessarily in the form of a book, but as an idea and a “dream” that inevitably survives all attempts to destroy it.

YH: As a communist, activist, Egyptian, and author, Arwa Salih, you note, “was a woman in a world of men.” Do you think this lopsided gender dynamic necessitates that the translator be a woman too? How might’ve your gender as a translator affected the creation and reception of the translation, if at all?

SS: I don’t like to insist on identity as the main criterion for translation competency. I really believe that men can produce sensitive and luminous translations of women’s writing, and vice versa (I mean, I recently attempted this myself, with what I hope are favorable results!), and that sometimes that difference can actually be quite productive. In this case, there were times when I felt that I was the one who was being translated; that I was only able to translate her words after coming to know myself through her eyes, if that makes any sense at all. I think it was this synergy that made the work so special to me, and it was also perhaps what made the book reach out and grip people the way it did.

YH: You’ve characterized The Stillborn is a “formal experiment that resists easy categorization.” Both the author and her critics deemed it flawed and less readable. Do you think this defiance of genre would have registered as a strength (originality, authenticity, innovation, etc.) had the text been written by someone more privileged within the discourse community (for instance, a different gender, political status, or authorship record)? Is this why it urgently needed the framing you provide in the introduction as an endorsement, to support its complex form?

SS: Honestly, I’m not sure anyone other than Arwa Salih could have written this book. It is so utterly unique to the life and experience and thinking of this one person, something that comes out even more strongly perhaps in the Arabic text. My introduction was definitely part of the work of making this uniqueness more legible to an English-language reader who may well have even stricter genre expectations to begin with than the Arabic-language reader.

Complexity is one thing and readability is another, though. Apart from the introduction I let the text’s rich form speak for itself. I remember being nonplussed at first by the mixed genre codes: literary criticism and aphorism embedded in passages of strident social analysis, for example. And of course the letters. I puzzled over those letters, and how to connect them in thought and word to the rest of the book. But in the end, I realized that the heart of the book, its power and relevance, resides in these sudden juxtapositions and crossings.

Another aspect of Salih’s unique writing style is the way that her sentences read as if she was writing out loud. They are long and winding, sometimes coming to abrupt and perplexing ends, as a train of thought will do, and often sealed by tumultuous and unpredictable punctuation. Translating this rhetorical style for maximum readability while preserving its mood and cadence was quite difficult.

YH: Tell us about the book’s titles. In your article, you discuss your decision to change the title from the literal translation of المبتسرون, which would’ve been something akin to “The Premature,” to The Stillborn. Some sources also mention a publication after Salih’s death tilted سرطان الروح  (Cancer of the Soul). Are these two different texts or the same? Were you involved in the decision-making process that led to the final Arabic title?

SS: Thank you for this question, Yasmeen. (And yes, these are two different texts!) I’m so glad to have a chance to talk about the title at some length here, especially since I know that there have been a lot of opinions about my choice. Whether as a reader, writer, or translator, the music of language is very important to me. When I put words together on a page I’m always as keenly attentive to rhythm, cadence, and sound as I am to meaning. In fact, I feel that meaning is absolutely shaped by these aural effects. The title of the book is a single word, and so it was essential for me that this word be as powerful and expressive in English as it is in Arabic. In English, premature is an adjective (and an adjective that starts with a prefix no less!). It was my very strong feeling that to have used it here as a noun would have turned an imposing title into a very weak one. That was not going to happen. So I decided to take the book at its word and use the Arabic title’s connotative meaning for the translation. A stillborn birth can also be a premature birth, after all. I felt my choice was justified by the bitterness and desolation of Salih’s portrayal of her generation’s failure. It was a liberty, but a liberty from my perspective that could only add to the book as opposed to detract from it. Nevertheless, I completely understand and acknowledge the differences of opinion on this point because there is definitely a counterargument to be made around the interpretation of Salih’s final verdict on the future of revolutionary politics in Egypt.

YH: You explain your choice compellingly! It’s rare that everyone would have the same opinion about a title. I see the value in the decisions you made. Do you believe your translation of The Stillborn is primed for yet another political afterlife, perhaps a new layer of reading by the international left as we descend into the current, more macabre dimension of fascism—what Naomi Klein has termed “End Times Fascism” to distinguish in facets and scale from previous waves of Euro-American fascism? Would any aspect of your translation of Salih’s work be different had it been informed by the present moment in Gaza and the United States, in addition to the context of Egypt and the Arab world in 2011?

SS: Wow, that’s a hard question. Everything feels so intense and raw these days, a different order and degree of terror. I think my translation of Al-Mubtasarun was tied to its era (the one that culminated in the global 2011 uprisings)—in the same way that the book itself was tied to its own time. I can’t imagine what the journey of translating it for the first time would be like now, in this time of genocide. I’m a different person now, I keep moving and don’t look back. But who knows what readers in 2025 might find in it? A small arsenal of knowledge, resilience, and love with which to face this new world, I hope.

YH: You’ve described political translation as a complex field of semiotic relations—a “contextual speech act that constructs a plastic and dynamic filed of meaning between different agents.” Do you think the perceived gender or ethnicity of the translator has an impact on the reception of a translated text?

SS: Definitely in the US because of the way identity politics work in contemporary culture there. Do you recall the huge controversy when it was announced that the poem Amanda Gorman read at Biden’s 2021 inauguration would be translated by Mariaka Rijneveld, a white, Dutch non-binary writer? Gorman herself had chosen Rijneveld for the job, but the backlash was pretty fierce nonetheless. I remember being taken aback at the time at the level of social media outrage at the very idea of a white person translating the work of a black person. I don’t like this kind of logic because to me it forecloses the possibility of solidarity.

Cultural and linguistic immersion is at the heart of translator competency. A translator who has visited the country of the source language a couple of times is not the same as one who lives there (and there’s a whole range of degrees in between). “Living there” can also be virtual in a sense—at its most intense, a form of deep engagement with a society’s literary traditions, cultural politics and historical memory. But it can also take the form of attachment to a beloved genre for example: an English to Arabic translator who specializes in fantasy because they are and will always be a fantasy geek.

YH: In your paper “Politics and Paratext,” you cite Maria Tymoczko’s observation that translations grow old, with activist translations aging the fastest. Do you share this view? How do you relate to your own political translations over time? Have you found they age more quickly—or differently—than your literary translations?

SS: Yes and no. I tried to explain in the essay why I don’t necessarily agree with Tymoczko on this point, through a survey of the way in which the translation’s afterlives come into play and renew the text’s relevance in a variety of contexts. In Al-Mubtasarun, Arwa’s purpose was to reach out to the future about the mistakes of the past, and that’s a purpose that never grows old, especially and, unfortunately, in a world where history seems to constantly repeat itself. On the other hand, a lot of the activist translation work that I did in 2011 and 2012 ended up being ephemeral in the sense that it has vanished (documents for political parties, platforms and manifestos and such) or “dated,” in the sense that it’s become part of an archive. The work I did subtitling for the radical video collective Mosireen falls into this latter category. But to me this translation work is no more dated, no less real than anything else I’ve done. To me it’s as alive and present as the books that people can buy on Amazon or wherever. This comes back to the relation between translation and knowledge production. The translation act—no matter how ephemeral—always brings new knowledge into the world, and knowledge never grows old.

YH: You’ve emphasized that paratext is central to meaning-making in political or activist translation. Could you speak about the paratextual elements that accompany your own translations—introductions, footnotes, covers, blurbs, etc.? How much agency did you personally have in shaping them, and do you feel these paratexts achieved their intended effects?

SS: I haven’t had the chance to fully explore the potential of paratext in my own translation practice yet, but the essay of mine you mentioned above does lay out a possible blueprint. In The Stillborn I put a huge amount of work into the introduction—this is where the Venn diagram of my intended readership took shape. I also played around a bit with footnotes, but just a little to test the water. Footnotes are very versatile, you can do so much with them, don’t you think? You’ve used them, too, in your translation work. I love it when editors and translators really lay it on thick with the footnotes—that’s one of the reasons I love those amazing NYRB editions. In retrospect, I don’t think Seagull would have minded at all if I had included more paratextual elements—it’s that kind of publishing house. I do plan to go crazy with the footnotes for my Inji Aflatun translation though, and I’ll hope for the best when it comes to publishers. I suppose I could always publish the footnotes online or something if they’re refused.

YH: Yes, the scholar in me loves footnotes! However, the literary translator in me is perpetually uneasy about disrupting the flow, tone, and register of the fictional world of the source text with notes from a different storyworld, the translator’s reality outside the text. I like your idea of setting the paratext apart as an external intervention by publishing the notes separately or at the end of the book as afterward or endnotes.

SS: Of course as you note it’s a much more complicated question when it comes to fiction, and especially contemporary fiction. I think the practice of historicizing fiction through footnotes makes more sense when it comes to older texts. And I also agree that putting the notes at the end is always a good idea (I always use a bookmark to keep my place in the end notes as I read).

YH: I hadn’t thought of this distinction between contemporary and older fiction. It makes sense. Let’s turn to collaborations. While literary translation is often a solitary pursuit, you’ve actively worked to build networks of exchange and collaboration among translators. Could you tell us about your involvement with the Cairo-based collective Turjoman? How did it come into being, and what vision or unmet needs shaped its formation?

SS: In 2015, fellow translator and comrade Hussein Al-Hajj, who was working at the Cairo Contemporary Image Collective at the time, approached me about starting a reading group to introduce Egyptian translators to the relatively unknown field of translation studies. I put a bibliography together and the two of us, along with Amir Zaki and Ahmad Hassane, decided on the text list and the pedagogical structure of the meetings, and we put out a call for applications. We were a group of about twenty people at all levels of experience in the profession who met bi-weekly over the course of six months. It was wonderful. It really brought home to me the many ways in which the translation field is specific to its location. We learned from each other so much about the landscapes of translation into Arabic in contemporary Egypt, and there was a lot of hearty critique of the TS field from a south to north perspective.

It was this reading group that turned into Turjoman. The four of us who had founded the group and who are now the core of the editorial board wanted to build on all the knowledge that had been generated in those encounters. We wanted to create a structure through which translators could come together to articulate a shared identity and mission—one that could be used as a tool for education, advocacy, and publication. It’s been a long, slow process because we’re entirely self-funded, but we’ve come a long way since then.

Turjoman is a three-pronged project. We have a web platform that publishes translation-related content in Arabic: essays on translation, bio-bibliographies of noted twentieth century Arab translators, interviews with contemporary translators, a keywords glossary (short essays on the translation of specific terms in philosophy, cultural studies and social theory into Arabic)—and the list will keep growing. We run translation workshops which combine theory and practice. Participants practice collaborative translation methods on the essays they read for the workshop. Last but not least we have a book series where we co-publish translations of radical or forgotten texts in the humanities with local presses. The idea here was to create an alternative to the market for translators with passion projects. We were quite ambitious at first, but as this is the most expensive part of the whole endeavor, we had to scale back. So far, we have two books out. The first is the brilliant veteran translator Ahmad Hassane’s translation of Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh’s classic “history from below,” The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (co-published with Kotob Khan) and the second, Translation Crossing Points (with Hunna Press) just came out this year. It’s an edited anthology of essays on translation produced by the participants in one of our recent collaborative workshops. The book launch was amazing. The intensity and urgency of the discussions made us decide to start planning a symposium for fall 2025.

YH: That sounds like a wonderful collaboration and mutual-enriching opportunity. I’m so glad you’re doing it and I’m sure many others appreciate this collaborative space too. You’ve noted that many Egyptian and Arab translators work under challenging material conditions. Do you think translated literature has a greater chance of circumventing market pressures and reaching readers in Egypt than in the United States? Put differently, does the production and circulation of knowledge take different, perhaps more subversive, routes in a society newly subjected to neoliberal logics than in one long shaped by them?

SS: I’m not really sure though which society is which in the question! I feel that both Egypt and the US have been long shaped by neoliberalism, no? The difference maybe is that Egypt started out with a strong state sector presence in culture production, but that was largely decimated beginning in the nineties of the last century.

YH: Yes, that’s what I meant by new. Egypt enjoyed a socialist, pan-Arabist identity under Gamal Abdel Nasser and earlier—at least in the eyes of other Arabs like me. No such counterpart has existed in the US.

SS: State publishing has historically played a role in the dissemination of translations in the Arab world, and this is a key difference with the US. Whether these institutions still exist, in what form, and to what extent is another question. What’s your sense of this from the Iraqi perspective?

YH: I’d say Iraq followed a similar trajectory—from having a state-operated cultural infrastructure to privatization and neoliberalization following the dismantling of the socialist, anti-imperialist state more decisively after 2003. The timelines are a bit different, though. Iraq’s transition to privatization came about a decade or two behind Egypt, but Iraq’s cultural production, already limited compared to Egypt, was severely interrupted before the dismantling of the Ba‘thist regime due to wars and severe economic sanctions.

SS: In Egypt, the National Translation Center still puts out a decent number of books per year. Many of these cheaply priced books are non-fiction, works in the humanities and so forth, or translated from non-European languages like Persian or Korean, books that wouldn’t necessarily find a private publisher. It makes a hugely important difference to have this one large non-market actor on the scene. Nevertheless, most translators I know here work at commissions from private presses and what they end up translating will depend on current fads as well as practical considerations like copyright and translation-rights pricing. A lot of publishers these days are assiduously digging up literature that is out of copyright for their catalogs. That’s the main criteria: not having to pay for the rights, which can be hugely expensive now especially because of hyperinflation. In the US, the closest equivalent to the state publishers would be the academic publishers, I suppose. But even academic presses in the States don’t much like translated non-fiction, so there is unfortunately very little of that available in the US.

YH: That’s such a helpful overview of the Egyptian publishing world. To close, I like to ask my interlocutors about intertextual influences and imaginative affinities. If you had the chance to sit down with one pseudo-translator, turjoman, or text “mover” (ناقل) from late 19th- or early 20th-century Egypt, who would it be? And what lingering questions would you hope they might answer?

SS: Hands down Tanius Abdu. He was a hugely prolific and popular Cairo-based Lebanese translator of French fiction. Readers of his serialized translations were reportedly in the habit of sending him urgent telegrams to demand the plot move in a certain direction, and the book editions of his serialized adaptations became immediate bestsellers. He also published a couple of important fiction periodicals over the course of his career. He was a dedicated lover of the novel in its most exuberant moment and a veritable translating machine. I would choose him because anyone who translated all seventeen volumes of Ponson du Terrail’s Rocambole novels (Les Drames de Paris) into Arabic is a hero in my book. I would love to ask him about whether all the notorious stories about him are true (i.e., that he translated from memory) and why he chose to dedicate himself to the ephemeral and effervescent du Terrail instead of the much more celebrated Eugene Sue, whose 1367-page Les Mysteres de Paris was the novel that set off the craze for urban gothic in the first place.

YH: I love it! Thanks for introducing us to the world of Tanius Abdu!

SS: And thank you for this wonderful conversation, Yasmeen.

For other conversations in this series, see: 

Yasmeen Hanoosh with Marilyn Booth – Toward a Gender-conscious Translation

Yasmeen Hanoosh with Mohammad Salama – Translating Islam: The Qur’an between Arabicity and Euro-American Centrism

Yasmeen Hanoosh with Mona Kareem, On Textual Violence: Cultural Imperialism and Monolingual ‘Translation’

Yasmeen Hanoosh with maia tabet, Translation and the Diasporic Subjectivity

Yasmeen Hanoosh with Huda Fakhreddine