Transnationalism and Translation:
The Arab World from the Global Kaleidoscope
Between Margaret Litvin and Yasmeen Hanoosh
In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Margaret Litvin discuss the triangulation of translating Arabic literature and Soviet Russia into English, vanishing intertexts, and why translating Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice into a single language would have been like “putting salad through a blender.”
Yasmeen Hanoosh: You’re fluent in at least three languages—English, French, and Arabic. Could you tell us how your linguistic journey began and how it eventually led you to focus on Arabic-English literary translation?
Margaret Litvin: I’ve been lucky to encounter languages from four different perspectives: as a migrant, a student, a teacher, and a parent. All relate to translation. The summer I turned five, in 1979, my family moved from Moscow to Montgomery, Alabama. Growing up bilingual and stateless (we got U.S. citizenship in the mid-1980s) gave me a lot of experiences perhaps analogous to yours: reading Pushkin’s playful fairy tales with my grandparents, editing my parents’ English, and explaining to some idiots on the playground that no, we weren’t Commies, we had fled from the Commies. Luckily, my parents never insisted on speaking Russian at home: they wanted to be American, too! So I have no complexes about Russian.
Then in high school I was privileged to study French and Italian, studying abroad in Rennes and Rome. Italian gave me a beautiful bodily freedom—the teacher had us sing opera arias at 8 a.m.! My friend’s brother zipped me around on his Vespa! French was the opposite. I learned about the cours magistrale and a rigid view of authority. But thanks to the legacies of empire, French also gave me access to places I’d go later: Haiti, Lebanon, Morocco.
I began studying Arabic in 1997, having never heard it spoken before. I had been working as a journalist in New Orleans when the promising Oslo peace process, as it seemed to my 21-year-old self, collapsed. In a used bookstore I stumbled on an early Raja Shehadeh occupation diary, The Third Way. Clearly there were Arab voices I wasn’t hearing, Middle Eastern complexities our U.S. newspapers weren’t showing us. So I went to graduate school for Arabic, knowing no Arabs and not even sure whether to focus on literature or political theory. My dear late mentor at the University of Chicago, Farouk Mustafa, was a theatre guy and a translator. He always took students seriously and treated us like we knew more than we actually did; my teaching emulates that, even in this anxious edutainment era. My first book, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost, was really a tribute to Farouk. My translations, too.
YH: Fascinating. How does the parenting part come into play?
ML: In the past decade, I got fellowships to Sweden and Germany; my husband and the kids came, too. It was humbling to replay the immigrant drama from the parent’s side. I clung to the side of the pool, never learning enough Swedish or German to do more than function; my kids immersed, grew fins, and swam. They filled me with awe. So did the Arab families starting lives in Sweden or Germany at the same time as us (2015-16 and 2017-18). Unlike me, they bore so much loss and sorrow. And it wasn’t a game for them: they had no return ticket in their pocket.
YH: Using some of these languages, your work has explored Arab-Russian cultural ties through a range of compelling projects: your translations of the late Sonallah Ibrahim’s جليد Ice and Khalil Alrez’s الحي الروسي The Russian Quarter, your co-translation of the memoir of Palestinian communist Najati Sidqi, your co-editing of an anthology on Russian-Arab worlds, and most recently, your forthcoming monograph Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance. What first drew you to this Arab-Russian axis of cultural hybridity, and what continues to sustain your interest in it?
ML: The late Sonallah Ibrahim is on my mind right now – I don’t know if he believed in God, but I’ll say الله يرحمه anyway. In his prison diary يوميات الواحات, Sonallah writes of copying out quotes from Soviet literature, or even secondhand reports on Soviet writers, on cigarette papers in prison. By the time he got to see Moscow for himself, in his 30s (which was a terrible disappointment, squalid and inhuman), he had read a ton of Soviet literature but also nineteenth-century Russian literary classics. Other Arab writers were obsessing about the heroines in Turgenev, Tolstoy, or, especially, Dostoevsky.
The USSR had flooded the Egyptian market with these books, well produced and cheap. But that doesn’t explain why people were so attracted to them. How could one culture captivate another to this extent? And back in my world—the U.S. academic world, where postcolonial studies was busy reinscribing the centrality of the West—why was no one talking about it? So I became fascinated with these characters who had done the reading and made the journey in different decades: Najati, Sonallah, Khalil. I wanted to know what questions Russian culture answered for them, what hungers it fed, what triangulation it enabled.
YH: How do Russo-Arab literary relations differ from Anglo-Arab ones? Given your rare fluency in all three languages, you’re uniquely positioned to reflect on this comparison!
ML: Russia or the Soviet Union never actually colonized an Arab country, so there’s less baggage. There’s much less of a hangup around mediated translations; for instance, no one really criticizes Sami al-Droubi’s versions of Dostoevsky, translated through French. There’s also no curriculum forcing Arab students to read Russian literature.
YH: Good points. Indeed, the people I know who went to study in the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s pretty much all came back with hyper-romanticized accounts of the Russian intellectual sphere. Hegemony did not factor into the Iraqi discourse on USSR culture as far as I remember it.
ML: What hegemony? Arab communists were usually persecuted by their local governments, and obedience to Soviet policy was mocked. “When it rains in Moscow they open their umbrellas in Baghdad,” that kind of thing.
YH: Another good point! I’d like to go back to what you just said about accessibility. It’s interesting to hear you mention that Soviet literature was easily accessible in the Arab world in Arabic translation. The cultural and political framing of this body of literature was certainly more favorable in the region given the political climate at the time. That body of literature was also accessible in the US in English, but the cultures it issued from—unless they were dissident or émigré cultures—were politically vilified, and, as you point out, had to vie with the intellectual supremacy assigned to Western European texts in American academic circles. All of this brings me to my next question, which is about the key nodes of Arab-Soviet literary exchange. What were they? How did we end up with an abundance of Russian literature in Arabic during and prior to the Cold War? You mention Sami al-Droubi. Who were some other authors, translators, and scholars central to these efforts, and what were their main goals and sources of support?
ML: An early node was the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, a 19th-century Russian missionary enterprise. IOPS schools produced many influential Arab translators and writers. Salim Qubayn in Cairo and Khalil Baydas in Palestine ran important periodicals and translated literature directly from Russian. Others, like Mikhail Naimy and Abdelmessih Haddad, emigrated to the Americas and became known as pioneers of mahjar literature. There’s a lot of material in Russian in the Haddad papers at Harvard! For what these kinds of “firstness” claims are worth, Zachary Foster has also argued that IOPS graduates were responsible for the first print uses of the term “فلسطيني” to describe the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. So these relationships were fruitful, and they created the soil in which later cultural relations could grow.
Later, after Stalin’s death, cultural agreements between the Soviet Union and Arab governments provided for scholarships and led to other cooperation such as Russian cultural centers, film screenings, art openings, and the like. Progress Publishing made books widely and cheaply available: not only Soviet but 19th-century Russian books. Particular translators played a big role: the Iraqi Gha’ib Tu‘ma Farman and the Egyptian Abu Bakr Yusuf were two of the greats who lived in Moscow and translated from Russian into Arabic. Meanwhile, inside the USSR, there were institutions like the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization and people like Egyptian Abdel Rahman al-Khamissi, who seemed to know everyone and helped connect their literary friends to scholarships.
YH: I’m delighted you brought up Farman. His remarkable work as both a novelist and translator deserves far more recognition than it has received to date. I’m currently translating his groundbreaking first novel, النخلة والجيران (The Palm Tree and the Neighbors), which will be published next year by AUC Press. I hope this modest endeavor will help shed greater light on his role as a pioneer of the Arabic social-realist novel—a sensibility he no doubt honed, at least in part, through his immersive experience in Soviet literature and culture.
ML: That’s wonderful! I’m so glad people are noticing Farman, and I’m excited to read your translation. He was such an important node going from Russian to Arabic, even though he rarely wrote about the USSR itself. Going in the other direction, Arabic to Russian, there was an initial wave of Russian Orientalism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, comparable to and derivative of the one in France. Pushkin incorporated One Thousand and One Nights motifs and wrote an “Imitation of the Qur’an.” As Russia’s empire spread to the Muslim lands of the Caucasus, it sparked imperial desire and curiosity about Islam if not Arabic per se. But in the 20th century, the readership for translated Arabic literature pretty much died down. During the Cold War, many Arabic works were translated for political reasons but never read.
YH: Never read?!
ML: Well, rarely. There’s a story (probably apocryphal) of Yusuf Idris coming to a library in Moscow and being thrilled to find one of his books in Russian translation—until he notices the pages are uncut. Soviet audiences were much more focused on the forbidden fruits of Western European and American culture.
YH: In Red Mecca, you open with a personal encounter with Anna Arkadievna Dolinina (1923–2017), renowned Russian scholar of Arabic literature whose Soviet-sponsored academic path also led her to study the Arab reception of Russian literature. You recount her skepticism toward the very premise of your book—what you evocatively call “tilling poisoned fields.” What motivates you to revisit these fraught relationships today? And how do you position your own Arabic literary scholarship within this context?
ML: I’ve been working on Red Mecca since 2007, and the context keeps changing. At first, I was blowing dust off Cold War tomes, and no one knew why I was looking at Russia at all. Then Putin started cozying up to Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and backing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and so forth, and suddenly it was like, of course, Russia. That neo-superpower stuff also reactivated the cultural ties. Russian Cultural Centers and Arab alumni clubs of Soviet grads sprang back to life; in Bethlehem, an Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society school opened on Putin Street in 2014. You can see why studying transcultural or translingual connections in that context could be a little icky: one doesn’t want to play into the propaganda. But since 2022, as Russia has brought its fighting experience, its impunity claims, and some of its actual military personnel from Syria to Ukraine—but then Ukraine has in turn distracted Russia from supporting Bashar al-Assad, who has fled to none other than Moscow—since then, I no longer know how to feel. I’m just going to foreground the contemporary Arabic writers who respond intelligently to all this madness, who mock Russian and Arab and Euro-American cultural pretensions alike, who question macho nationalism, who speak beauty to power.
YH: Which Arab authors do you have in mind? Do they have Russian counterparts?
ML: To be honest, I don’t know a lot of contemporary Russian literature. In terms of Arabic writers: my book ends with chapters on Alexandra Chreiteh, Mohamed Mansi Qandil, and Khalil Alrez: novelists from Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria respectively who escape from nationalist frames through either bawdy gender-bending humor, a Balkans-to-Bengal Muslim spiritual heritage, or a devotion to pure literary beauty. The way they remix the history of Russian or Soviet ties is so exciting.
YH: You’ve said that both your scholarship and your teaching aim at the larger goal of reinscribing modern Arabic cultural production into its rightful global context. Could you share some examples of how you’ve pursued this transnational approach? What insights has it offered into Arabic literature that might otherwise go unnoticed?
ML: I look for what I’ve called “vanishing intertexts.” For instance, I found the French source of the earliest Arabic Hamlet adaptation. For 100 years, everyone had derided Tanyus Abdu’s 1901 text for its happy ending, allegedly pandering to its backward Arab audience that couldn’t grasp tragedy. That ending turned out to come verbatim from the French Hamlet by Alexandre Dumas! Hamlet survived, not because Arab playgoers were rubes, but because French culture had a highly developed sense of order and justice. Learning where things come from isn’t definitive, but it can puncture some prejudices.
YH: Growing up in Iraq, I remember reading abridged versions of Shakespeare in English as part of my secondary school curriculum. Of course, he was also read in Arabic, though I don’t recall much about the translators. What became of Shakespeare in Arabic? Your first book Hamlet’s Arab Journey explores this transformation. Could you walk us through Shakespeare’s transnational literary journey?
ML: The schoolteachers did what they do: browbeat people with Shakespeare’s intricate English. Is that what your school did?
YH: For sure, although I think the texts we read were significantly simplified because the average Iraqi public school teacher at the time wouldn’t have had the linguistic ability to read Shakespeare in the original. Unlike places like Lebanon or Morocco, the majority of Iraqi grade-school teachers in the second half of the twentieth century were trained locally by other Arab teachers, without any significant contact with native speakers of English.
ML: Don’t worry, U.S. students can’t read Shakespeare’s language either. A few years ago, I had a student bring in a No Fear Shakespeare and ask me, “Professor, is it ok if I read Hamlet in this English translation?”
But in the theatre, it’s easier. So on the Arab stage, Shakespeare took another path, channeling or camouflaging social and political critique. This worked precisely because Shakespeare had this gold-plated high-cultural prestige, and it’s why Soviet and Eastern European approaches resonated so well with Arab directors. In Iraq, for instance, Romeo and Juliet became a cry against tribalism and arranged marriage, and it licensed the first onstage kiss between a male and a female actor; Hamlet denounced the “rotten state” and the way King Claudius spies on and executes his opponents. The great Baghdad-based Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra was complicit in both trends: sanctifying Shakespeare and using him as a cry for freedom.
YH: Maybe we will start to have more such stage adaptations of Shakespeare elsewhere as fascism revisits the Global North.
ML: Oh for sure. Corrupt gerontocracies demand this stuff. There was a very on-the-nose Julius Caesar at New York’s Public Theatre in 2017.
YH: In Hamlet’s Arab Journey you introduce the idea of the “global kaleidoscope.” Could you explain what you mean by that?
ML: I just meant that writers have options. Different shards of world culture come into view at different moments; some shine more brightly. An Arab writer is more like Hamlet, inundated with ideas and scripts, than like Caliban growing up on an island. As Egyptian-British novelist Ahdaf Soueif wrote in her beautiful book Mezzaterra:
Growing up Egyptian in the Sixties meant growing up Muslim/Christian/Egyptian/Arab/African/ Mediterranean/Non-Aligned/Socialist but happy with small-scale capitalism . . . In Cairo on any one night you could go to see an Arabic, English, French, Italian or Russian film. One week the Russian Hamlet was playing at Cinema Odeon, Christopher Plummer’s [BBC film] Hamlet at Cinema Qasr el-Nil, and Karam Muṭāwi’s Hamlet at the Egyptian National Theatre . . . Looking back, I imagine our Sixties identity as a spacious meeting point, a common ground with avenues into the rich hinterlands of many traditions.
YH: I love this quote, which vividly conveys the image of a global, multilingual kaleidoscope. (It also makes me quite a bit jealous because Ahdaf’s Sixties Cairo is nothing like my Nineties Baghdad!).
You’ve also argued that very few literary texts are truly monolingual—that most texts are inherently translingual, shaped by the interplay of multiple languages and cultures. How do you approach this complexity in translation, which is all too often naively misconstrued as a transfer process between a single source language and a single target language? Could you share examples from Arabic texts you’ve translated that illustrate this multiplicity?
ML: In Syrian novelist Khalil Alrez’s الحي الروسي (which I’m translating as The Sleepless Giraffe of Damascus), there’s a dog named Raisa Petrovna. Raisa is just a name, like Mikhail Gorbachev’s wife Raisa Gorbacheva. But one translator who tried an excerpt of this book named the dog “President Petrovna.” You can see where the error comes from: the translator not being attuned to the possibility that the text might not be 100% in Arabic. Now look at any piece of travel writing from any period, from Ibn Fadlan to Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, etc. Translingual puns are all over rihla literature. Same thing with literature from hybrid contexts; for instance, as Lital Levy has shown, Emile Habibi’s Pessoptimist contains Hebrew-Arabic puns and German-Arabic puns. So hybridized situations lead to translingual writing. But is there an Arabic context that’s not hybrid? The challenge is to hear the Russian under the Arabic, or the Arabic challenging the Hebrew, or whatever it is.
YH: With the example of “Raisa,” I feel that either translation would mean the readers are missing the pun if they don’t know the meaning of the word in both Arabic and Russian. “Raisa” here is only funny when one understands the double entendre of the word. Do you think some shades of meaning and linguistic elements are also inevitably lost when a translator isn’t proficient in all the languages or cultural references embedded in a text, as in the example you just gave? Should translators refrain from working on texts that incorporate languages or expressions they don’t fully understand?
ML: I’m not going to tell anyone they’re unworthy to translate a book they love. There are always going to be things you don’t know. But it’s good to get a broad array of friends with different, unexpected language sets and cultural backgrounds, and consult them on all occasions, even when you’re not sure there is an occasion! In the memoir I just co-translated with two students, Palestinian communist Najati Sidqi describes an Uzbek Communist Party official offering him a vodka toast with the words, “it’s a pure drink.” I didn’t catch the blasphemously hilarious Qur’an reference. But one of my students did!
YH: That’s a brilliant piece of advice! Strong translation as a collective effort worthy of the multiplicity and duplicity of languages contained in each text.
In translating Sonallah Ibrahim’sجليد (Ice), you were working with a novel set in Moscow and rich, therefore, in Russian vocabulary and cultural references. What guided your decisions about which Russian words to retain and which to render in English—or another language? How did you make the Russian elements legible for an English-speaking audience? Do you think these foreignizations in the text are more accessible in your translation for English readers than they might be in the original novel for Arabic readers?
ML: The macaronic nature of Ice was what attracted me, and I needed a strategy to do it justice. As a novel about being strangers in a strange land, Ice contains two sets of cultural references that are foreign to my English reader. I decided to treat them differently. For Arabic terms relating to matters like clothing, food, music, literature, religion, or politics, I tried to domesticate the text, conveying the meaning without footnotes, stealth glosses, or italics (for example, “stuffed baby eggplants and cabbage leaves” instead of “malfouf and makdous”) except at some instances where there are non-Arabs in the scene for whom the Arab cultural realia are new and marked. For Russian and Soviet terms, by contrast, I used conspicuous transliteration, italics and explanation, marking these foreignisms nearly as heavily as Ibrahim’s Arabic text does. These strategies aim to replicate the experience of the novel’s original intended reader, who would find the Russian cultural references exotic but the Egyptian ones familiar.
In one case I actually emphasized the exoticism: there’s a scene where the narrator and his friends drink coffee with morozhenoye, glossed in the text with the English word “ice cream.” I inserted the Russian term for this concoction, borrowed from French: café glacé. I’m still not sure if that was the right choice, but it made me smile to smuggle that bit of my Russian childhood into the book. Sonallah and I once joked that he finished his degree and left Moscow in September 1974—a few weeks after I was born there. We just missed each other!
YH: To sum up, what do we stand to gain from foreignizing a translation? Have you found that editors are generally open to this approach, or is there pressure to smooth out and domesticate the translated text? How do you navigate disagreements over translation choices with editors or reviewers who may not be proficient in the source language(s)?
ML: My one full-length translation experience is with Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice, and in that case the editor at Seagull—a very caring and detail-oriented editor—really seemed to want the text to be smoother and more digestible for the English reader. For instance, where I wrote “I looked in the window of the magazin,” the editor wanted to change it to “shop window.” I had to keep explaining that Sonallah’s texts are not smooth. They are lumpy with historical newspaper clippings, literary references, song lyrics, and in this case, linguistic and ethnographic observations. And that’s the whole point: the lumps of realia, not the plot. They would be utterly boring if they were smooth. It would be like putting a salad through the blender.
YH: Sonallah’s novel translated to a single language is like putting salad through a blender. I will remember this image. Finally, if you had the chance to interview your favorite Arab writer who meaningfully weaves more than one language into their texts, who would it be—and what would you ask them? Would you find yourself code-switching in your own questions?
ML: I don’t speak Hebrew, but Mahmoud Darwish did. According to the documentary film Write Down, I am an Arab, by Ibtisam Maarana-Menuhin, he also wrote Hebrew beautifully. I found that film very moving, and the interviews with Darwish’s ex-girlfriend Tamar Ben-Ami gave me a new perspective on his Rita poems, how complex they are. (I even assigned my literature class to “write back” to Darwish’s speaker in the poetic voice of one of his addressees: his mother from “To My Mother,” or the Israeli soldier in “Identity Card,” or Rita in “Rita and the Rifle”). Complex and… slightly selfish, maybe? I just mean, in the way that William Carlos Williams ate his wife’s plums and wrote this lame apology, “Forgive me, they were delicious,” but then went and published it, so it’s like he ate the apology too. Maybe that’s what you get for loving a poet.
Anyway, the thing is, as Robyn Creswell pointed out, those last two conversations would have been in Hebrew. I would have liked to ask Darwish about that: what it’s like to hold a language inside you that has inspired so much love and so much anger. I can’t analyze the details; this is just a curiosity. But I wonder if he had first drafts or messy notebooks that included Hebrew words, similar to the way the Hebrew-language poet Yehuda Amichai had drafts in German.
All of us carry ghosts within. Do polyglot writers carry them differently? As Khalil Alrez says, “Every intellectual is a hybrid person. There is a polyphony of different thoughts, memories, and feelings in my head, those of other artists of different nationalities that I have found in their books, films, plays, paintings, and music. Likewise you will find in my memory different people whom I met in different places and with whom I shared a life for years or months or moments.”
And what do you do when parts of that polyphony turn bitter in your mouth?
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 Samah Selim: Translation as Knowledge Production
Yasmeen Hanoosh with Huda Fakhreddine