Wilding Language:
Salim Barakat Between a Kurdish Heart and an Arabic Voice
Between Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy and Yasmeen Hanoosh
In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy discuss the idea of untranslatability (and perhaps, by extension, unreadability) and the work Salim Barakat, and why, if a translation were complete and perfect, this would mean that the work was born dead.
Yasmeen Hanoosh: You wear many literary hats—translating fiction and poetry from Arabic to English and English to Arabic, writing both in both genres and languages, and conducting research across fields as diverse as comparative Arabic and Latin American literatures, environmental humanities, world cinema, and photography, to name just a few of your interests. How did this multifaceted journey begin? What experiences or influences have shaped your intellectual, artistic, and linguistic path?
Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy: I might say that I have been lucky in many ways. In 2014, I was given the opportunity to work as a cultural journalist at Al-Qahira, a small weekly newspaper in Cairo. I didn’t have a degree in journalism or work experience. All I had at that moment was my personal blog, where I’d posted a few literary essays, novel reviews, and translations of a couple of short stories from The New Yorker. The newspaper didn’t have enough money to pay trained journalists. What they were able to afford was someone like me who was willing to work for little pay and indirectly gain training in cultural journalism. From there, an editor at Afaq, small publishing house in Cairo, read a few translations I had done for the newspaper and asked me to retranslate Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and then later Steinbeck’s The Pearl. I was almost terrified by the offer, but I couldn’t say no. Half a century had passed on the old Arabic translations, which were in a completely outdated tone and style. I was just a young journalist from the small city of Suez who had been trying to navigate Cairo’s cultural scene for a few months. It was a time of despair, after what I call the catastrophic failure of the Arab Spring, which was crowned by Islamic governments in countries like Egypt and Tunisia and civil wars in countries like Syria and Libya. I sheltered myself away from all of that. The opportunity to learn cultural journalism and retranslate classics was the kind of escapism that suited me well.
YH: رُبّ ضارة نافعة as we say in classical Arabic! Can we say the mishaps of the Egyptian revolution turned out to be a personal blessing in disguise for your professional development?
MHR: Deleuze might have agreed with a version of that saying: There is a potentiality of opportunity in the heart of hardship. The potentiality as an element here implicitly refers to the necessary labor in such dark moments. In the midst of trying to find a place for myself in Cairo, a city where I never felt belonging or comfort, a coincidence took me to the next opportunity. I was covering the two-day event surrounding the annual Arab novel forum in the Cairo Opera House when a colleague fell ill. There, I met renowned Arab novelists in addition to many young emerging writers. Over lunch on one of these two days, I met a young Moroccan poet who later became a friend, and after a bit of an exchange on literary works, authors, and themes, that friend leaned toward me and whispered, “I think you will write a novel one day.” The whisper made me shiver. I already had a novel project that I had never shared with anyone. The confidence in her voice made me tell her about my project. She replied simply: You have to apply for the Arab Fund for Art and Culture Debut Novel grant. Again, a moment of trembling—the grant was a competition open to writers across twenty-two Arab countries. I applied, and the miracle happened. Out of 268 applicants, Jabbour Douaihy, the Lebanese novelist and grant-workshop mentor, selected seven. I was one of two Egyptians (half of the submissions were from Egypt) and the youngest among the seven participants (only twenty-five years old). A few months later, I found myself leaving Cairo on a plane headedd to Beirut for the first workshop. That was in the summer of 2016. I remember my first meeting with Jabbour in northern Lebanon, in the mountain village of Ehden. He said they selected my novel proposal because they really weren’t sure what I wanted to write, so they decided to bring me there to find out a bit more about my project. You can imagine everyone laughing in such a scene.
A couple of years later, a few months after the publication of my novel, I shared with a friend my plans to write a literary critique, in Arabic, that focused on the dystopian novel in Arabic literature that had emerged in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. The friend said that this could be a dissertation project! Before that, I had not thought about going into academia. My plan was to write this book in Arabic over a long stay in Tangier, Morocco, but the “academia bug” persisted in my head. I found myself preparing my Ph.D. application material and contacting professors of Arabic literature in the US and Canada. Again, the unexpected welcome in the majority of the responses was terrifying. The journalist/translator/novelist in Arabic now has to move to Los Angeles, California to start his five- to six-year PhD in a private school (The University of Southern California), and to write academically in English on the literature of his mother tongue. The definition of vulnerability.
YH: And to translate from Arabic into English is a significant departure from translating from English into Arabic, your dominant and first language. It’s interesting that the term “vulnerability” stands out for you. Do you feel vulnerable as someone translating into his second language—one that you only began using in a literary sense as a young adult? (I elaborate on the violent rupture of my transition from Arabic into English as a young adult in my conversation with Marilyn Booth).
MHR: For a long time, I perceived English as the language both of precision and of suffocation. This relationship needed an encounter with John Berger, whose novel To the Wedding I translated into Arabic asإلى العرس . Berger was the one who made English warm for me. He opened a window to the possibility of poeticity in English for my Arabic imagination. Later, I had to water my English with a selection of readings that could keep this English soil in me sufficiently fertile. Vulnerability doesn’t evaporate though; I just had to learn how to coexist with it and accept being exposed to failing the way I accepted my need for a long daily walk to be able to think.
Another place of vulnerability is my relationship with Spanish. My program of comparative studies in literature and culture has a strong Latin American studies track. I found asylum there, both in the professors (my dissertation advisor Roberto Diaz) and in the subjects. The similarities, or mutual predicaments, between the Arab world and Latin America were unmistakable: the heavy military presence, the deep influence of religion, the economic fragility, the unsettled question of democracy, the ghost of misogyny, and the excessive extraction of natural resources. Slowly, over the last five years, I have been building a relationship with Spanish that is tender and intimate, but still tricky and fragile like porcelain. I travelled to Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Spain. The research project that started with focusing on the one genre of dystopia, in the Arabic language, became a multidisciplinary and multilingual one that investigates the entanglement of ecology and apocalypse in contemporary works of literature, film, and photography across the Arab world and Latin America. In this process, the project became heavily loaded (I would claim in a positive sense) with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, in whom I found freshness and a unique cosmic mind. Deleuze taught me that we are in a continuous movement, in a continuous state of becoming, something I carry with me. It gives me a profound orientation in my sailing.
I’m lucky to have been seen by others and to have been signaled a direction. The brutal part is that you always have to walk in those directions wearing no hats but rather the clothing of loneliness, wandering in the desert between uncertain territories. Is there anything more Arab than that?
YH: Indeed, at least insofar as “the Arab wanderer” exists in certain cultural imaginaries. Personally, I’ve encountered more lonely people in the Global North than any Arab society, and I’ve not wandered in a desert. (Did you, having lived in Suez and Cairo?) The imagery in your statement reminds me of a quote from Ibrahim al-Koni’s The Search for the Lost Place,البحث عن المكان الضائع :
“وكما يحدث دائما في الصحراء فإن الخلاص من البلاء لا يأتي قبل اليأس من الخلاص”
“As always happens in the desert, salvation from affliction does not come before despairing of salvation.”
I hope your pursuits and relentless quest for knowledge are bringing you a sense of anchoring despite the uprootedness of migration and disorientation of exile (however problematic that notion of “home” may feel). Do your diverse pursuits complement one another? Do they ever come into tension, or pull you in different directions causing the sense of “wandering” and loneliness of which you speak?
MHR: I love al-Koni! He is one of my favorite authors in contemporary Arabic literature.
YH: I share your fascination. Al-Koni’s language and themes are exceptional.
MHR: As for wandering in the desert, Suez is a small city overlooking the gulf, half surrounded by mountains, and open to the desert to its east on the way to Cairo and to its west on the way to Sinai. You can say the desert has been doing something to my imagination, even if I would like to resist this “orientalist” trope. But to go back to your question, the tension between these territories has always been there. My pursuits are geologically unstable and tectonically keep clashing into each other. It is a daily negotiation between languages: Arabic, English, and Spanish, as well as between modes of thinking: academic, creative, philosophical, and poetic. I am constantly trying to navigate these different territories with no guarantee of success. I prefer these constant negotiations, though. For me, one language is not enough, and one place is not enough. What I do is close to juggling in a circus, in the most playful but also the most serious sense.
YH: I can relate to that. It’s difficult to set confines to the pursuit of knowledge when there are so many possibilities, so much potential, and when the different fields of inquiry in the end overlap a great deal.
I’d like to turn to your multiple engagements with another wanderer between languages, the prolific Kurdish-Syrian author Salim Barakat. Since the 1970s, Barakat has acquired a reputation as a writer who defies categorization. At the same time, he earned the admiration of major Arab poets, innovators themselves, like Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish, who considered him “more than their equal.” His unconventional use of Arabic diction and syntax makes his work striking—but also notoriously difficult to read, let alone translate. Even Barakat’s other translator, the impressive Huda Fakhreddine, has admitted that it “seemed at some point that he was not only untranslatable, but unreadable”—the latter adjective sums up my own experience every time I try to read him in Arabic! What drew you to the formidable challenge of translating Barakat?
MHR: Maybe it has been fulfilling the masochistic part of me? But putting that aside, my gravitation toward Barakat indirectly goes back to how, until I finished my undergraduate degree, I had quite an antagonistic relationship with the Arabic language. I didn’t feel belonging to either its classical literature or its contemporary one, especially the literature from Egypt (Naguib Mahfouz’s school of realism, which he moved beyond with his late style). There was a monotony that the 21-year-old me found unbearable. There were exceptions of course, but they easily faded away. Things changed profoundly through my encounter with the poetic novels of Ibrahim al-Koni, the Libyan Tuareg author. His 1992 novel The Bleeding of the Stone نزيف الحجر was an event for me. Soon after that, I was exposed to Salim Barakat’s work. I remember reading “Bleeding” نزيف, the prologue to his 1980 childhood autobiography The Iron Grasshopper الجندب الحديدي. You can say that it was a moment that made me feel that miracles are real. “Bleeding” was like a lava of poetry and prose that burned and pleased at the same time. Arabic felt madly alive in his voice. I found myself devouring many works of his gigantic oeuvre over the following four to five years.
YH: It’s interesting that you should point out the “monotony” of Arabic literature. I recall that a similar attitude existed in Iraq toward the Arabic literary classics when I was growing up there in the 1980s and 1990s. People who considered themselves serious readers of literature read translated Euro-American and Slavic literature, not Arabic literature. Today I think back at this attitude as a form of auto-Orientalism, or what Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm has compellingly problematized as “Orientalism in Reverse”—Arabs’ own denigration of their literature as a lesser literature and their language as a faulty, half-dead language.
Speaking of Orientalism, as a young person, I used to paint—often attempting life size replicas of Caravaggio and other Renaissance artists. I believed that by copying “the masters,” I could absorb their techniques and better understand their work. Is translating Barakat, for you, a similar kind of exercise? A way of reading him more deeply, more exuberantly—perhaps of understanding how he “rewrites” the Arabic language from the inside out?
MHR: I welcome the accusation of auto-Orientalism then! I sometimes say that I enjoy my self-orientalism when I revisit the legacy of al-Andalus, for example. Something there is magical enough to create that orientalist response, is it not? I am saying all of that half smiling.
To go back to Barakat, there is no escape, at this moment, from seeing how my relationship with Arabic went through its own metamorphosis through being exposed to Barakat’s wildness. My imagination gained another dimension as I approached the language. I knew I would never be able to imitate Barakat. Such a realization liberated me. His work was the wind I needed to ride to gain my own voice. For me, what Barakat manages to do is to wound the living tissues of the Arabic language and decorate these wounds with his poetic inky sparks.
Geoff Dyer says something deeply beautiful about his relationship with John Berger—that he doesn’t need to find his way away from Berger, he doesn’t find a logic in losing Berger’s company. I feel something like that when it comes to Barakat. The epigraph of every chapter of my 2018 novel Maps of Jonas خرائط يونس is a quote from his poetry. The idea of translating his childhood autobiography had been haunting my imagination for a decade (2013-2023) until I signed my translation contract with Seagull. The dearest dream project to my heart is still to translate Barakat’s 1990 novel The Feathers الريش. He is one of the pillars of my dissertation, as his 2015 poetry book Syria سوريا is for me the ultimate apocalyptic epic poem. I don’t devour him in the same amounts as I used to though. I think it is healthier this way.
YH: Barakat’s works remained unavailable in English for decades, if I’m not mistaken. Yet just in the past few years, Seagull Books has agreed to publish three of his books, thanks to the arduous translation efforts of you, Huda Fakhreddine, and Jason Iwen. Is it merely a coincidence that these translations are appearing all at once, or do you think there’s something more significant about this moment of Barakat’s recognition in the Anglophone world?
MHR: I find it hard to think in massive-scale terms like “recognition” and the “Anglophone world.” These are big statements for me to make. But I think what is different at this moment is that it took a couple of translators who have a real relationship with Barakat’s work but also have a bit of financial security and some space and time to dedicate their energy to do the labor of translating Barakat first and then figuring out how to launch his texts through the English-language publishing world.
My story is that of a reader who is fascinated by the author’s imagination and language and who has been living in the host language long enough to negotiate his own poetic territory. In addition to this context, life circumstances play a crucial role. At the time of translating the childhood autobiography, I had a PhD stipend and a quiet slow summer. Those provisions allowed me to put into English the book that I had been revisiting over the past decade.
Without doubt, it takes a brave and authentic publishing house like Seagull to welcome Barakat’s poetry first, and then his prose. I would still say that there is something magical in Barakat’s voice that touches the ungraspable side of the imagination and punctures something in the soul. Publishing such a powerful and unique literary voice is an honor before anything else.
YH: You’ve translated Barakat’s childhood autobiography, The Iron Grasshopper, which he wrote at just twenty-nine. What did it mean for him to write an autobiography so early in life? It also seems to mark a turning point in his career—from writing primarily poetry to turning toward fiction. How do you see this shift reflected in the autobiography itself?
MHR: I think writing the childhood autobiography early made the memories come to him more vividly and more violently melancholic. It was indeed a turning point in his writing. For ten years, Barakat exclusively wrote poetry. Only after publishing his childhood autobiography did he start to write prose. Since then, he has been vacillating between prose and poetry. It seems to me that he had to gaze into his childhood wounds first, which liberated his imagination and allowed him to seek domains of fiction that fascinatingly move in a circular fashion between realism, magical realism, the historical, the absurd, and the experimental.
YH: It sounds like Barakat’s subversion of form and structure, and his unconventional imagery, are in large part what drew you to his bewildering Arabic language. What led you, then, to focus on translating Barakat’s prose rather than his poetry? Did you find that his prose, with its own rhythmic and unconventional imagery, called to you in a way that felt as poetic as his verse? Does his prose echo the same innovative language and techniques found in his poetry?
MHR: Maybe I translate his prose because I am afraid of what I call the rivers of impossibilities in his poetry! Besides that, something in me leans toward storytelling. Something in the indirectness of poetic language as it appears in the fabric of narrative stirs my imagination. I sometimes half-jokingly say that I am looking for poetry everywhere except in poetry books. Poetry for me is a way of seeing the world that might happen to be found in a novel, a film, or even architecture. You don’t need to write a single poem to be a poet. The poetic quality will show itself in whatever you are doing.
I have to mention here that Barakat refuses to make a distinction between the language of his poetry and his prose, and I agree with him to some extent. You find his poetic sparks glimmer in his prose intensely. What I might say is that this exploration of narrative as a mode of imagination forced him, even partially, to maintain some sort of cohesiveness in the novel that he didn’t really need for his poetry. As I mentioned earlier, I think of his poetry as a wild river of linguistic impossibilities.
With that said, the narrative structure of a novel forces Barakat to articulate himself a bit more, especially in his earlier novels, as in The Feathers for example, which with all its poetic feast is one of the most carefully structured Arabic novels I have read. Later in his career, he found his own way of sneaking out of what he seems to find as constraints in the narrative structure. The novels he wrote in the first decade after moving to Stockholm reflect his refusal to articulate the self.
YH: Has translating his work been an insurmountable challenge for you, or more doable than expected? Were there parts of his writing that you ultimately had to leave out because they proved untranslatable? What have been some of your most difficult encounters with his texts? What was the process like, and did it differ in any significant way from other translation projects you’ve undertaken?
MHR: Translating Barakat was like wandering in two territories (languages) and trying to find a path between them all at once. I was in an ongoing process of navigation between the topographies of Arabic and English. There is something indescribably tender in his violent melancholic wildness. It was a violent experience for my brain and my capacities. Barkat’s work carries what I call a virtual untranslatability. What I mean by that is that, even in translation, his work is not fully there. As a translator, I need to depend on a reader who is willing to participate in bringing him fully to the host language. It is a collaborative work between the translator and that virtual reader who might have the audacity to touch the wordlessness in Barakat’s voice.
YH: We, translators, talk a lot about translation loss and the challenges of creating equivalence, but it’s also true that translation is a way of digesting a text, isn’t it? And part of that digestion is perhaps sharing our reading with an implied reader with whom we partake of a similar affection for the source text?
MHR: There is a digestion in translation no doubt, but even biologically, digestion doesn’t necessarily mean that things become clearer or take on more concrete shape. There is a lot of violence in digestion, too.
Barakat says that he writes to a reader who is smarter and more profound than himself. I am not sure how many of those readers we can find.
As for the challenges, they might need a whole other conversation. But I might say that his distortion of the borders between the past, present, and future tenses, for example, is profoundly exhausting to bring into English. His way of assembling what are seemingly unrelated worlds in his images is one of the places where we can see how he enjoys threatening the zone in which language makes sense. Barakat, in a Deleuzian sense, deterritorializes the Arabic language through which untranslatability becomes an inevitable inherited feature of his poetic voice.
YH: You’re certainly not alone in this interpretive predicament. Ammiel Alcalay has described Barakat’s poetry as “exceedingly resistant and exhilaratingly strange verse—paradoxically written by someone who seems absolutely rooted to the depths of the earth while yet able to see humanity as if through the mind of some other being.” What did you do to cope with these predicaments? Did you turn to other writers in English who similarly defamiliarize or break up the language by way of thinking through your own approach?
MHR: I wish there was any writer in any language I know who could give me a hint on how to translate Barakat!
YH: Even though translating him might seem like a Sisyphean undertaking, through Barakat’s Deleuzian “deterritorialization” and his other iconoclastic acts upon the Arabic language, we also see vestiges of rather classical features of Arabic in his texts. Take repetition, for example. What role does repetition play in Barakat’s text? Elsewhere you reference the other Deleuzian idea that repetition relates to something unique and singular, with no true equivalent. What does it mean to carry this repetition into the English translation? Does English have the capacity to create equivalence in Barakat’s case, or does repetition in English inevitably give rise to a new set of meanings and reverberations?
MHR: If I may repeat this part of your question: Does English have the capacity to create equivalence in Barakat’s case? My answer would be NO. For me, translation is always incomplete. However, I think this incompleteness is what allows the work to gain another life in the host language. Think of it from an embryogenesis perspective. If the translation were complete and perfect, this could mean that the work is born dead. Something in any creative act, including translation, is ontologically incomplete.
YH: That’s a compelling analogy!
MHR: As for Deleuze, repetition is a necessity for any potential creation of the new as a philosophical concept. Repetition also carries this musicality, the birdsong refrain that potentially gives the base for an infinite number of compositions as Deleuze and Guattari put it in A Thousand Plateaus. Barakat knows this intrinsic power instinctually. He is an animal in the best earthly sense. He writes poetry with his bodily senses. The body here can be a human, a bird, a jackal, or even a river, as The Feathers’ protagonist Mem undergoes many metamorphoses. I think that this earthly immanent human-nonhuman experience of the self is what gives Barakat his aura of cosmic transcendence as an unearthly figure. Maybe this could be a response to Alcalay’s perception of Barakat as a “mind of some other being.”
YH: Yes, it’s been repeatedly suggested that Barakat “pushes Arabic to a point just beyond its linguistic limits” (as noted, for instance, in the endorsements of the poetry collection Come, Take a Gentle Stab). Do you agree with this description? What are some of your favorite examples where Barakat stretches Arabic beyond its linguistic boundaries?
MHR: I agree with a variation of this description. For me, Barakat pushes the imagination of the Arabic language beyond what the language itself conceives as its own limit.
As for the examples, you might find this stretchiness of language in any page of any of his works with no exaggeration. If I have to give one example for now, I might mention again “Bleeding” نزيف, the prologue of Two Autobiographies السيرتان, the book in which he collected his childhood and boyhood autobiographies a decade after publishing them separately. “Bleeding” is two pages of dizzying, intoxicated/ing Arabic. It will be the first thing you read in the English translation of the childhood autobiography. Here is the last paragraph of “Bleeding” in Arabic and my English translation of it:
What about you? What work did you like of what you read by him?
YH: I wish I could answer this question in a more compelling or at least constructive manner, but, in all honesty, the embarrassing fact of the matter is that I found Barakat’s texts unintelligible each time I tried to read one. The first attempt was when my then-doctoral advisor Anton Shammas recommended him to me. When I complained about the difficulty of reading Barakat, Shammas advised me to suspend “understanding” and let language do its magic through Barakat’s words. I still have the email where he wrote:
I think you should maybe approach Barakat’s work from a totally different angle. “Understanding,” in that case, would be the wrong angle. Leave that at the door when you enter his world. I started following Barakat in the early eighties, and gradually realized that what’s so fascinating about his writing project was that he lets language itself speak, Heidegger style: writers don’t speak, it’s language that does the speaking. So what matters is what he does with the Arabic language, being just the conduit, the medium. In some ways, reading him is similar to reading Jahili or classical Arabic poetry – we don’t “understand” all the words and the constructs of Ṭarafah or al-Mutanabbī or Abu-Tammām, but we enjoy the magic of their poetry, the pure siḥr, and we succumb to that with total abandon. It’s similar in some ways to what Beckett and Joyce and Nabokov (e.g., the opening pages in Lolita) do with language as such, or with the 17 languages that Joyce uses. Language becomes the main “character,” instead of being in the service of a character. In Barakat’s case – it’s the grandeur of the Arabic language that performs the magic. We don’t “understand” magic, as we’re meant to just enjoy it.
More recently, it occurred to me, when I read one of Huda Fakhreddine’s translations of Barakat, that I was finally understanding his poetry, but then I went back to believing it was just an illusion. Now I’m more inclined to think that Fakhreddine has written her own beautiful English poems, remotely inspired by Barakat’s sleight of hand. And I haven’t been able to suspend my quest for “understanding” yet, but I check from time to time by attempting to read Barakat in Arabic. I guess I haven’t attained the required wisdom to receive Barakat’s magic yet. Have you been able to suspend understanding when reading Barakat?
MHR: I think there is truth to a great extent in Anton Shammas’ perspective. Maybe a way to think of Barakat’s playfulness with language is to think of it as sweet hallucinations. Sometimes I say jokingly that you have to be naturally “high” to find your way to him. But that might be also a temporary symptom in the early stages of the encounter with him. With time, his lexicon becomes recognizable, and one might say sometimes while reading him that: Huh, I know where you are going now! The puzzlement with the strangeness of his language shifts to swimming in his massive sea of wide vocabulary and unique poetic images. An expression like لقد تقوّض الأبدي “the eternal is folding up,” for example, is apocalyptic and dark in its poetic puzzlement and at the same time opens a possibility for a kind of liberation. In its context, you hear him signaling something like, your childhood is not a curse on you by some sort of transcendent figure, you still can find a way to coexist with your earlier wounds, and then he ends by making light of the whole ordeal without flattening it: ثم ماذا؟ بك أو بدونك، كل طفولة ميثاق ممزق، كل طفولة محنة (Then what? With or without you, every childhood is a torn contract, every childhood is an ordeal.) This is Barakat at his best.
YH: You said that reading more of Barakat makes his lexicon more recognizable. Do you think Barakat’s bilingualism in Arabic and Kurdish plays a significant role in the unique collocations and unconventional syntactic structures he uses to construct (or suspend!) meaning—what 4Columns has described as “inventive to the point of miracle”? In other words, do you know if Kurdish grammar and semantics—not just its imagery and lore—inform the crafting of Barakat’s Arabic texts? I often wonder if his texts feel less strange or at least more accessible to readers who are proficient in both languages, not just Arabic?
MHR: I don’t know Kurdish, but I also know that Barakat’s access to Kurdish is quite limited. Kurdish is his spoken mother tongue that he never got the chance to learn properly. It faded away with time and escaped him. Arabic was the sea that had enough depth for him to swim in. If I may put it another way, I would say that it is this magical triangle between the image of a lost mother tongue, the profoundness of the literary tradition of Arabic, and his raw but pure talent as a poet that crafts his voice in such a miraculous way.
I sometimes say that Barakat would have been Derrida’s obsession more than Blanchot had he been writing in French. He might have been the equivalent of the Cuban poet Jose Lezama Lima if he were writing in a neobaroque style in Latin America. Barakat is what Deleuze would have called a persona, a rupture in the fabric of Language. He doesn’t just write poetry; he builds baroque cathedrals for which the density of the Arabic language gives him the raw material. Saying that, I believe that he would still have built his own cathedrals in whatever language he might have found himself. It is never a question of one element but an encounter between various elements which obscures the question of one clear dominant identity.
YH: In your paper “The Strangeness of Language as a Wound out of Displacement,” where you discuss your process when translating Barakat’s autobiography, you open with a biographical note about Barakat’s Kurdish upbringing during a time of fervent Arab nationalism in the region. “There was no place for such a young Kurdish writer in Arabic,” you wrote, “who wanted to write about the mountain around his childhood’s town, the mountain that was the only true friend for Kurds.”
Do you see Barakat’s defamiliarization of Arabic as an act of aggression against the language of a hegemonic majority culture that has rejected and harmed him as a Kurd? Or do you interpret his linguistic iconoclasm in a different way, perhaps as a form of resistance or a way to reassert his own hybrid cultural/linguistic identity?
MHR: I think there is truth in all the possibilities and directions you touch upon here. What he is doing is an act of aggression no doubt, a creative aggression if I might put it that way. If you think of Arabic as cloth, it has an incredibly dense fabric (1500 years of literary tradition) that requires so much aggression to make a tear in it. His childhood autobiography gives us a bold scene of the early times that shaped his relationship with the Arabic language as the official language of the state but also as the language in which he found his voice as a poet. He says in one of his very few interviews that he forced Arabic to undergo a metamorphosis to express his Kurdish identity.
Much as this heavy oppression of the dominant language on the minorities across the Arabic speaking world led to the uniqueness that Barakat managed to create, I would still think that introducing innovation and creativity to a language don’t necessarily have to happen through oppressive dynamics. Arabic has been, for the majority of its history, in an ongoing exchange with other languages. The Qur’anic text, for example, is full of non-Arabic words and expressions. Translation from Greek and Persian was a mark of what’s known as the golden age of Islamic Civilization. It is a sad but late phenomenon that the language found itself entrenched against and resisting any “other.” I am aware of the history of colonialism and postcolonialism and how that could shape the ideological orientation of the speakers of a language. Still, there is a need for a different approach to the relationship with the self and the other if it necessarily has to be in such a dichotomy.
YH: You’ve also expressed keen interest in the poetry of the late Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan, another exilic poet who expressed an unresolved tension between the languages of her world—Arabic as the language of alienation, French as the language of colonialism and cultural domination, and English, more or less the language of her liberation and artistic expression. Where and how do Adnan and Barakat intersect in your work?
MHR: There are some obvious similarities that emerge from reading Barakat and Adnan comparatively. Barakat is a Kurd who writes in Arabic, and Adnan is an Arab who wrote in French and later in English. They are both outside what is supposed to be their own mother tongue, but also not fully outside. Adnan for example says: “I paint in Arabic.” While Barakat says: “I transformed Arabic language to suit my Kurdishness.” They are what Deleuze and Guattari might have called Minor Literature that breaks with the major literary tradition through its creation of the new. Both of them are painters, too. Etel participated in many exhibitions and gained some recognition late in life, while Barakat never liked the idea of exhibiting his paintings. He preferred to use some of them as covers for his books though, which is another form of exhibiting, no?
In my dissertation, I read Barakat’s Syria comparatively with Etel’s The Arab Apocalypse. Each, in a profoundly different way from the other, offers a book-length poem that is epic in proportions, rhizomatic in structure, and apocalyptic in language. Both works express refusal of the narrative tendency of the classical epic poem. The two works carry what I earlier called virtual untranslatability. The poet’s language collapses on itself, shatters, and explodes in its depiction of what appears to be an ongoing apocalyptic event, whether it’s the Lebanese Civil War in Adnan’s case, or the Syrian Civil War in Barakat’s.
Here is how I open my chapter with a quotation from each work:
Salim Barakat, Syria
*
Etel Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse
Focusing on only one of the two works could have been material enough for a whole dissertation. To comparatively read them in one chapter in a four-chapter dissertation might be more evidence of my masochism?!
YH: I wish you writerly strength, adequate funding to complete your dissertation, and the wisdom to suspend “understanding” while you write about these works, as Anton Shammas advised us. May you tap into Adnan and Barakat’s “magic” gracefully. Thank you for this interesting conversation.
MHR: Thanks, Yasmeen, for your generous invitation. It was a pleasure to have such a conversation. I look forward to your next episodes.
Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy is a novelist and poet in Arabic from Egypt, and a literary translator (Arabic-English). He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture program at the University of Southern California. His dissertation titled “Apocalyptic Ecologies: Nomadic Narratives Across the Arab World and Latin America” inhabits a Deleuzian mode of thought investigating the entanglement of ecology and apocalypse in contemporary works of literature, film, and photography across the Arab world and Latin America as a South-South comparative study.
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 Margaret Litvin: Transnationalism and Translation
Yasmeen Hanoosh with Huda Fakhreddine: Translating Gaza/Gaza Translating Us