On Multiplicity in Translation 

On Multiplicity in Translation 

Nisrine Mbarki and Rahael Mathews in Conversation

In January 2022, Moroccan-Dutch poet and translator Nisrine Mbarki Ben-Ayad published her debut collection of poetry, Oeverloos (Shoreless or Boundless), for which she was nominated for the C. Buddingh’ Prize for the best Dutch-language poetry debut of the year and the Herman de Coninck Prize for the best Dutch-language poetry collection of the year. Here, she talks to Rahael Mathews about translation, multilinguality, and not being bounded to “one place, one language, one life, one role, and one form.”

Rahael Mathews: I want to start with “oeverloos,” the name of your collection, and—to me as a reader— your orientation to language and writing. What are the banks you float amidst, what shores do you drift through?

Nisrine Mbarki: The word “Oeverloos” has always been appealing to me. It sounds beautiful, it has this earthly sound but is also smooth like a wave with the oo and oe sounds. Daarnaast heeft het een dubbele betekenis. Literally it means shoreless, a thing without a shore, implicating a body of water without a shore. Tegelijktijdig is de betekenis ook eindeloos en die combinatie is fascinerend. Does that mean that a thing/ water without a bank or shore is endless?

Literal shores and especially banks are places that fascinate me. The biotopes of banks are very interesting, because this is by definition the place where water and land meet. This is where reptiles and amphibians come together, nests are built, and specific kind of plants live. I see this place as a passage from one world to another world. Such spaces are where I like to be, look around, and wander because they are not defined by one dominant species, language or ideology. You could say that the bank is an in-between space when new forms and new lives emerge. The word also has the connotation of a boundary or border, and it is in these places where new forms, hybrids, melting pots, new creations and imaginations sprout. Borders are very inspiring and painful places. As a child, borders were places I feared and was excited about. Of course, also because we had to cross different European borders when visiting my parents’ homeland and that was always scary and exciting as people of color crossing the European continent. I felt my parents’ tension, though they were European citizens.

These tenors and connotations of Oeverloos resonate a lot with my research while I’m writing. I also consider languages as banks or vice versa. In my mind banks and languages are affiliated somehow. Maybe this has to do with the fact that those different worlds and biotopes, forms and structures meet. This is what language is for me—it is tangible in these banks, where nothing is defined and where possibilities lie for creations and hybrid forms in being.

Favorite banks and shores are literally the Mediterranean, because that is where my worlds and histories meet. My African, European, Arab beings and their inheritances all find purchase  at these shores. Other favorites are the bank of multilingualism, the bank of memory and history, the shores of childhood, the imaginary banks, and shores of poetry and stories that span around us.

RM: I love that banks are convergence and origin at the same time, it’s a very generous and encompassing way to think about language. And if I’m translating you correctly, there’s an endlessness that is implied by oeverloos, at the same time a shorelessness. Would you say that it is the shoreless, the convergence you try to bring in your writing? Or is that feeling of being untethered in a way because of the precarity of those very borders, that your writing is in tension with? Or your languages? Specifically, also because you don’t fully translate your poems, or your conversations, which I think is a wonderful thing, this opacity (to borrow from Èdouard Glissant, whom I know you admire). 

NM: In my writing, I try to delink from the dominant idea of the being bounded to one place, one language, one life, one role, and one form. You could also say that I’m attempting to deconstruct borders, geographies, and languages but also literary forms and genres for myself. I understand these frameworks as a simplification of the human being; sowing neat beds of syntax to fit in the hegemony of monoculturalism, and monoligualism.  This is the theoretical view on my writing.

So in a way I’m an advocate of full opacity when it comes to writing, specifically poetry. By bringing all my languages to the stage and letting them be, I simply try not to deny any part of my being as a Dutch, Moroccan, African, Amazigh,Arab female poet of color. The suppression of our indigenous languages resulted in shame, erasure, marginalization, and dehumanization of our literature and culture, and by extension our bodies and lives. The muzzling of the multiplicity of interiority has led to a lot of pain and uninteresting poetry and literature, besides the erasure of epistemologies and the historical erasure of some many languages and cultures. So when I decided to concentrate full time on my writing, this was the first thing I settled with myself; I would never ever restrain my writing to the political-historical one language policy and dominancy. I’m not contributing to and continuing that colonial narrative. This didn’t start as a political or activist vision at all; it was a personal and artistic choice I made in order to be true to my literary voice. But as we know, the personal is political and so is art. My writing could be seen as a personal attempt to shift paradigms from Eurocentrism to linguistic autonomy.

Monolingualism is a violent concept imposed on so many colonized peoples all over the world, extinguishing both mouth and memory. I’m trying to rediscover and reclaim the origin of my own language. In doing so, I find myself on the edges and invisible borders of realities and, on these shores, interesting things happen within the language and memory because that’s where they meet, in the liminal space of reality and materiality. In this space, I find myself being free and being able to tap into the imaginary that is never subdued by borders nor by specific languages. Of course, the imaginary is much faster and more intangible than a shore, but the shoreless is closer to the imaginary, the endless, the fast, the space, the universe.

When I’m writing, words appear on their own in the language they are made of. So my characters never speak in one tongue and the narratives and “voices” in my poems are as multilingual as I am. I do not translate within my work because I don’t want to submit to the dominance of European superiority in language. There is also French and English in my work and that doesn’t have to be translated so why Arabic or Tamazight? If people are interested, they can look things up or just accept the fact that they have no access to that part of my writing. It’s not up to me to translate for them, I refuse. I wholeheartedly believe in the power of opacity and refusal when it comes to writing and translating. Most people on this planet are multilingual, and Arabic is one of the largest languages in the world, but it is considered a small language in Western Europe. I think that is a total misconception of reality. By writing in the languages in which I live, I hope to give the readers a taste of this multiplicity that people like me live and that is very recognizable for many of us.

RM: In sitting in this opacity, then, do you find that the act of translation takes a different shape for you? Often translation is equated to something revelatory, explicatory. How does that relationship to the visibility of a language change for you?

NM: Personally, translation for me has nothing to do with revealing, explanation, or adaptation. I struggle with these notions and visions on translation, and I cannot reconcile with them because they are rooted in an imperial colonial Western dominance that is still tangible in the existing translation theories and in the way we translate into European languages until now. The whole birth of translation in the West is problematic since it was religious, violent, and colonial and based on the power dynamics of these structures. In essence, you translate that which you don’t have access to and want to enclose, but these notions implicate adaptation to the Western reader, which means the texts are being manipulated, simplified, explained, literally adapted. Readership in the Global South has access to Western languages inherent to our colonial history, but people in the West still “translate” the South into their own languages on their own terms. Colonial strategies and flows of power are still what impresses upon and affects the value, visibility, and circulation of literary works from the South. Changer la laungue c’est changer de monde as Frantz Fanon said.

I love translation, and it is a wonderful way of exploring the literary traditions and worlds of cultures that we don’t have access to, and we want to explore. But we must be open to see and receive them as equals—in their own conditions and forms—and not adapt them for our own sake. These conditions have to be respected and acknowledged in their own terms. When translating within the dominant paradigms of traditional European academia and structures, we lose the aliveness, the specificity and literary unicity of these texts. I like to think of this process as relational, through Glissant’s concept of the rhizome. His understanding of the rhizome, much like my own of shorelessness, comes back to the earth – to a comprehension of being rooted that is both enmeshed and errant at once.  It’s this kind of relationality I’m looking for when thinking of languages and translation in relationship to each other; ways in which one is extended, invited into another.

In my own practice as a translator, I try to preserve these literary qualities of texts, and I advocate for opacity, refusal, and multilinguality in order to loosen up the rigorous idea of translation as explanation or adaptation. The use of multilingualism provides me more freedom as a translator, the same freedom that I experience as a writer. When embracing opacity, my translator’s mind works in a different way; it finds the freedom to dwell on the shores and discover. It finds more possibilities in searching for creative solutions; it allows itself to maintain certain notions, even if they are not clear, so there is no need for explaining concepts for a certain reader, because that’s where we lose the aliveness and the literary specificity and quality of poetry. I find myself giving more space to the rhythm, sound, imaginary, and literary qualities of the text. This is the only way for me to practice translation in an artistic and ethical way without the risk that any poem I translate—whether it’s Ibn al-Hallaj, a contemporary Palestinian, or a 17^th century Moroccan—sounds the same.

The visibility of languages in general is very relevant for me, especially when it comes to the “small” languages in the West. As I said before, that’s a Eurocentric misconception. These languages are parts of us and define us as human beings. Making our, my, heritage languages, living languages, mother and father tongues literally visible is a form of resistance and a form of acknowledging ourselves, a form of epistemic justice. Our histories, our cultural backgrounds, religions, loves, food, and myths are the essential cells of our belonging and what parts of the world we are connected to. It’s time to accept and reclaim our linguistic complexity as human beings. I think the relevance of this is of great importance for our future, especially for artists, and even more as poets, writers, and translators. For me, the beauty of humans lies in our ability to be so much more than that monocultural, monolingual being that we are supposed to be—it’s imposed on us but it’s violent.

My resistance is born from a personal need to write in a way that is true to my being, which is linguistically complex and rich. There is no way for me other than this way, because if I would write in one language, I would lie to myself, and I would never be the same writer as I am today. Whole parts of my history, childhood, and love would not be voiced in their own tongue. Poetry is about the essence of being human and relating to the surrounding world. I can’t do that if I’m half a human.

Nisrine Mbarki Ben-Ayad (she/her), is an Amsterdam based multilingual versatile poet, feminist, writer, curator and literary translator. Her literary work covers different genres like poetry, novels, short stories and theatre. As a literary translator she translates poetry from Arabic and English into Dutch. As a curator she works for different international literary festivals and is member of several literary juries and boards in the Netherlands. In January 2022 she published her poetry debut oeverloos (shoreless) for which she was nominated for the C.Buddingh prize, a prize for the best Dutch debut of the year and for the Herman De Conick prize, a prize for the best Belgian and Dutch poetry collection of the year. Her newest work Kookpunt, published by Uitgeverij Plum; is forthcoming in September 2025.

Rahael Mathews is a master’s student of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests are in decolonial theory, affect theory and archive studies. She is also an editor at Out of Print Magazine, in Bangalore, India.

Photos: Willemieke Kars (cover), Bart Grietens (above).