Translating Arabic Polyglossia
Between Jonathan Wright and Yasmeen Hanoosh
In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Jonathan Wright discuss Wright’s start in literary translation, its divergence from the sort of translation he practiced as a journalist, and his ideas about what he calls Arabic polyglossia.
Yasmeen Hanoosh: Take us back to your personal beginning of choice—Who is Jonathan Wright the journalist? Who is Jonathan Wright the literary translator? How did the first lead to the second?
Jonathan Wright: It’s all about words in the end, and there are many common threads here. As a journalist, I translated from Arabic (and French) regularly, often every day. It’s true that journalists often translate hurriedly and crudely, but when they have time, they can refine their work and think harder about their choice of words. In the kind of journalism I did, quality means accuracy, concision and clarity—elements of good writing in many forms. My approach to translation is that translators should convey, in their own language, the ideas or images generated by the original text, and that applies to all forms of translation. In other words, there’s an intermediate non-verbal stage between the original text and the translated, so translators of novels are really writers who are lucky enough to be handed the characters and the plot on a plate!
YH: Looking back at your dual career in journalism and literary translation—one defined by swiftness and immediacy, the other by slow deliberation and multiple revisions—how would you characterize your evolving relationship with language across these two modes of writing?
JW: It was quite a liberation really. In most journalism, there’s an aversion to long, complex or unconventional sentences and not much introspection. Fiction is by nature more playful and inventive, more fun. So it wasn’t a difficult or painful transition. I’ve had to expand my active vocabulary, because the kind of journalism I did would rarely use English words that might puzzle readers, but it’s been a pleasure to learn.
YH: You’ve been keenly interested in the diglossic nature of Arabic and the challenges it poses for translation. Does that sensitivity to multiple linguistic registers extend to your use of English as a host language—its mainstream journalistic prose, regional slang, and archaisms? Do you think such awareness is required from those who approach Arabic texts for translation?
JW: I have reservations about the term diglossia, since in reality there’s a whole range of possible registers. Perhaps “polyglossia” describes Arabic better. The challenge that Arabic’s multiple registers pose lies more in finding the appropriate English register for fusha. Logically we shouldn’t be translating fusha into standard contemporary English, which is the spoken language of at least tens of millions of people. We should be translating it into some imaginary language that preserves the morphology and phonology of Middle English, with some recently invented lexical items to handle changes in lifestyle. That would be the correct approach. But nobody would publish or read such a translation.
YH: Yes, I suppose a translation into Middle English would not be an economic or cultural success. Is it perhaps because fusha, at least in its modern forms, remains in everyday use, whereas Middle English is not? Users of modern English need not navigate multiple varieties of English for different purposes as Arabic speakers do—a defining feature of Arabic speech communities for which the linguist Charles Ferguson coined the term “diglossia” in 1959.
JW: For many people, fusha is only in everyday use passively—they don’t have to speak it or write in it much beyond the formulaic. I doubt many think or dream in it. So translators from fusha have to make do with a version of English that is very different. Of course, like any competent translator, I do attempt to replicate the register of the original text. Is it pompous? Is it vulgar? Is it romantic/poetic? But the use of fusha in Arabic literature tends to discourage such shifts of register, so the question doesn’t arise as often as I would like.
YH: That’s an interesting revisionist take on fusha. So you see fusha as lacking in multiple registers? Or just that register shifts don’t happen within a single literary text because one cannot transition from third-person narration to a realistic dialogue in fusha?
JW: No, I wouldn’t go that far, but fusha does limit the scope for a wide range of registers. What’s the fusha register for children, people in isolated communities, people who dropped out of school at the age of 15? Besides, and this is the clincher, it’s just a massive waste of effort that is bound to lead to an inferior result. People are quite capable of writing good and interesting literature in the languages they speak at home. Of course they can borrow from the formal lexicon as much as they like, just as speakers of any language do, there’s no need to “correct” their morphology or syntax.
YH: You point to a significant discrepancy between Arab societies’ perception of fusha and their actual applications of it. Encountering Ferguson’s article as a graduate student of Arabic linguistics marked a paradigm shift in my understanding of my own linguistic reality as an Arabic speaker. In his conception of diglossia, Ferguson describes how this kind of bifurcated linguistic situation functions: fusha is often deemed the “High,” superposed variety by Arabic speakers and as such is supposed to serve certain elevated social purposes, while ‘ammiyya is perceived as the “Low” variety, and is consigned to other purposes. The binary may appear binding but it’s not. It also may appear arbitrary or fluid, yet Ferguson argues that it is remarkably stable, persisting for centuries and changing only under significant social or political shifts.
The categories he outlines in the chart below may not be perfectly distinct—fusha and ‘ammiyya continually blend into one another. What is striking, however, is that modern literary prose is conspicuously absent from his list. Do you think Ferguson simply didn’t know where to situate it within the diglossic binary?
JW: I think that’s a very strange omission. I have the impression that literary writers in Arabic are judged initially on whether they meet the fusha standards for morphology, syntax and orthography. If they fail at that stage, they’re in trouble with the critics.
YH: Exactly, and hence the many social constraints to keep writing in fusha. Let’s turn to a work that defied these normative linguistic expectations. Your first literary translation, Taxi by Khaled al-Khamissi, immersed you immediately in a text written almost entirely in Egyptian colloquial—a text that itself was a bold departure from conventional Arabic fiction at the time. What specific challenges did the dialect pose for you compared with your subsequent translations of novels written primarily in Modern Standard Arabic?
JW: Again, translating a text from a colloquial Arabic is easier, more natural, than translating a conventional Arabic text. A question at the heart of the translation process is “how would we say that in the target language?” But when no one would ever utter the text in the first place, the question becomes more complicated. I remember a translator and academic saying in a lecture that sometimes she felt that writers in Arabic had already translated their thoughts—into fusha. I agree with them. Sometimes, we translators from Arabic have to go behind the text and imagine what the writers would have said if they had written without going through that transference process! This is especially evident in texts that are describing what I might call ‘physicalities’—body language, the way bodies move, as well as light and sound and emotions. We have a highly complex lexicon to describe specific gestures, moods, or impressions but those can only be distinguished from each other when the referent is repeatedly matched to the word in the real world. The meaning of those words has to be shown: it can’t be acquired from a dictionary. In one novel I translated this year, the author answered several questions about aspects of body language by acting it out and sending me a video clip. It worked perfectly. I knew exactly how to say it in English, though I couldn’t have guessed it from the written text.
YH: These concepts raise so many questions for me. As an Arabic speaker, it is true that sometimes I have to translate a thought or a feeling from my native Iraqi ‘ammiyya to fusha as I try to write it, but the reverse is also true: at times, I have to render a more abstract image or complex idea I acquired through reading from fusha into ‘ammiyya when explaining it aloud to someone. Linguists have noted that, in a sense, we are always translating our thoughts—regardless of the language we use—because we are continually searching for the register most suited to each communicative moment.
JW: Languages that have rarely been used in literature need time to develop narrative strategies and styles of their own, but it’s bound to happen sooner or later. Writers can choose whether they want to take part in that creative process, or whether they want to go on doing what their teachers taught them. It’s up to them.
When you say ‘most suited to each communicative moment,’ I suspect the main criterion you’re thinking of is social appropriateness and not effective communication. Surely, as people interested in language, we believe it’s possible to saying almost anything in any language.
YH: Sure, but social appropriateness has a considerable impact on the effectiveness of communication. If you walk into a college classroom to deliver a lecture on translation, for example, and you deliver your lecture in a register not suited for that environment, wouldn’t you risk compromising your authority on the topic and hence your effectiveness as a communicator? At least until the register norms shift, as they shift in every society with the passage of time.
JW: As always, some brave person has to lead the way.
YH: Speaking of bravery, in searching for the right register, you’ve mentioned once considering the use of Cockney slang for Taxi, before dismissing the idea as “disastrous.” What kind of equivalence were you hoping to achieve through that experiment, and in what ways do you think it ultimately would have failed?
JW: I was thinking of a regular column that used to appear in the British satirical magazine Private Eye, supposedly written by a London cab driver, using his natural language. It might have been possible, but it would have lifted the monologues in Taxi out of their Cairo context, which would have missed the point in several ways. Taxi was very much an ethnography of Cairo, so it was best to leave it like that. There’s also the significant difficulty that Cockney is not my language and I would have had to do extensive research to pull it off.
YH: That is certainly a legitimate concern. Do you also consider the reception of your translated work as you settle on a translation strategy? For instance, I imagine Cockney is also not the main language of most readers of your English translations. It would have significantly limited the reach and reception of your translation, wouldn’t it?
JW: I think that factor is less important for an author or translator, more for a publisher. In Europe, we have people writing literature in Slovenian (2.5 million speakers) and Catalan (nine million), for example. No one tells them they should write in Spanish or Serbo-Croat. Yet there are at least 30 million speakers of Cairene Arabic. A Sardinian friend has translated Zakaria Tamer’s short stories into Sardinian (one million speakers) and had it published. Passion often plays a part in translation choices.
YH: That’s such an important point.
JW: But I do have great admiration for two translators who have worked wonders with non-standard forms of English. Firstly, Michael Hofman’s brilliant translation (from German) of Alfred Doeblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz uses Cockney language for the working-class Berliners. At first it sounds a little strange, but after a while the similarities in lifestyles and attitudes come through strongly. The other example is Michael Cooperson’s very idiosyncratic translation of al-Hariri’s Maqaamaat, which is witty, clever and delightful, but doesn’t in fact reflect any variety in the register of the original maqams.
YH: That’s fascinating. I will have to see if these works are accessible to a reader of English as a second language, like me. You’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Egypt. Did the relative accessibility or difficulty of Taxi’s Egyptian colloquial language influence your decision to translate it? Or was your motivation primarily thematic, cultural, or literary?
JW: I heard about the book, read it, and loved it. As a journalist, I went to interview Khamissi about it for a story and, at the end of the interview, I casually said it would work well in English. He asked me to prepare a couple of chapters and then by chance he found an English-language publisher. So there wasn’t much forethought. Egyptian Arabic is very well documented, my wife is Egyptian, and I had a session or two with Khamissi face-to-face to go over some points. So basically one thing led to another.
YH: That’s a beautiful story of straightforward, smooth communication between author and translator. What about the Iraqi novels and short stories you’ve translated? The colloquial elements in those must have presented an additional layer of difficulty?
JW: Perhaps you’re not aware of Bulbul al-Sayyid, the novella by Hassan Blasim written entirely in Iraqi colloquial. It’s about 29,000 words and Hassan believes it’s the longest piece of fiction written in Iraqi colloquial, with the possible exception of works in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic in the mid 20th century (I’m not sure about that). My English version came out this summer in a collection called Sololand under the title “Bulbul,” along with two novellas translated from fusha. Iraqi Arabic is not so well-documented, and I had to ask Hassan quite a few questions or post questions to a translators’ group on Facebook. This is a fictional memoir by a lower-middle-class Baghdadi of only moderate education. The translator’s task is to imagine how this character would tell his story if he happened to speak English. So no, the “colloquial elements” don’t pose a problem as long as the meaning is clear. We don’t translate words or texts. We translate “utterances in context,” so the form of the original is secondary.
YH: No, I’m not familiar with Bulbul al-Sayyid, although I try to keep up with Blasim’s exceptional fiction. What made him decide to shift from his relatively straightforward MSA interspersed with some colloquial to writing exclusively in Iraqi colloquial in this instance?
JW: Hassan explains his motivation in the novella, and I agree with him. It’s the last taboo in the Arab world—after religion and sex. I think he would say Arabs cannot be truly free until they move beyond fusha for communicating with each other
YH: That makes sense, especially if we consider the strong ties between fusha and Islam, whereby the endurance of fusha can be attributed in large part to its social status as a divine language. Now I’m even more eager to read “Bulbul”!
In works such as Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad or Hassan Basim’s The Iraqi Christ, the original Arabic weaves together different social registers and tonal shifts—from the bureaucratic to the streetwise. How do you handle these register changes in English without flattening their texture?
JW: As I think I said earlier, I really do believe it’s often the other way round. Relatively speaking, the fusha text is often flattened and we translators come under pressure from editors and publishers to “liven it up.” Extremes such as the bureaucratic and the streetwise come across by default because they are evident in the original text, but writing in an artificial language does inevitably reduce the scope for playfulness and experimentation.
YH: You once said to me, “I am looking forward to the day when Arabs write in the versions of Arabic that come naturally to them, just like authors in most languages.” Why do you (and Blasim) think they are not doing that? Do other Arab writers you have spoken to who write in fusha share the view that fusha does not come as naturally to them as their local dialects?
JW: Some share my view and most don’t. But look, if fusha came naturally to them, they would be able to speak in perfect fusha for ten minutes non-stop. Only very few people can do that, so I’m surprised you even ask this question. There’s a massive difference between fusha and, for example, standard English, where there is a critical mass of tens of millions of people who speak it in the kitchen, in bed, in anger, in love.
YH: Spoken English is on the same grammatical and lexical continuum of literary English, but I’m reluctant to describe the English spoken in daily life—at least in the United States—as literary English. To me, literary English occupies a higher register than everyday speech and is not anyone’s first language, much like fusha in that sense. Most native English speakers must engage in extensive reading and formal education to move beyond the vernacular and produce literary English. That’s why writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac were seen as innovators—they defied literary norms and dared to write in the language of daily life.
JW: Obviously I disagree. We have so many examples of people writing literature in the version of language they speak at home—Trainspotters and A Brief History of Seven Killings are just the extreme examples because they use non-standard spoken English—but there are hundreds of others too, including most works published these days. Besides, in contemporary culture, using a particular register does not make the text qualify as literature. What makes it qualify is surely the thought and care that has gone into it, for a whole range of possible purposes. Sally Rooney, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Rachel Cusk all write literature using ordinary people’s voices. Hemingway and Kerouac were writing more than 50 years ago, and even then the gap in register was only in lexicon, which is superficial compared to morphology and syntax.
Since I’m rather obsessed with this distinction, I routinely eavesdrop on people’s conversations around me in London to check that my assessment is correct. I assure you that where I live 97 percent of all the utterances I overhear on buses and trains are in standard English that is morphologically and syntactically impeccable. This is the language I speak at home and when I write this note to you. So many Arabs I have known really struggle to write fusha well, not because they are stupid, but because it is not their natural language. It takes years of study to master it and, once they have invested so much time and effort in it, many people feel it should give them some advantage, status, and prestige. This is well-known in societies historically. Just look at the role of Latin and Greek in European civilisation.
YH: I think where we may differ is in your characterization of fusha as an “artificial language.” Linguists generally agree that Arabic diglossia (or polyglossia) extends as far back as our recorded knowledge of the language, which makes fusha an integral part of our current sociolinguistic reality rather than an artificial construct.
I agree, of course, that fusha is not the first language of most Arabic speakers and is therefore less sustainable as a medium of spontaneous verbal expression. My earlier question about why Arab writers continue to write in fusha was a genuine one. I tend to think that this persistent attachment stems from the widely held belief that fusha is inherently superior to the spoken varieties—“more beautiful, more expressive, more logical, endowed with divine sanction,” and contains even more registers than ‘ammiyya. Moreover, formal education reinforces this hierarchy: children learn to read and write in fusha, not in ‘ammiyya.
Do you think that’s the main reason, or are there other forces at play that lead Arabic speakers to write in a language that, in your view, lacks the registers of lived experience and is not their first language?
JW: Again I disagree in several respects. For a start, Modern Standard Arabic has been heavily influenced by translation from European languages, especially English and French. It’s riddled with ugly calques from those languages. Jaroslav Stetkevych’s paper “Foreign Modes of Expression” is excellent on this. In fact, there are some features of early Arabic that are better preserved in spoken forms of Arabic than in fusha, where they have been overtaken by artificially created alternatives. The use of Arabic in Hadith collections, for example, and the field research of the earlier grammarians suggests that diglossia was not a reality in their time. You speak about the widely held belief that fusha is “more beautiful, more expressive, more logical, endowed with divine sanction.” Of course, that belief exists and that’s why some people such as Hassan are challenging it, with good reason. That’s exactly what people used to say, erroneously, about Latin and Greek, leading to the psychological torture of millions of schoolchildren.
YH: Indeed, these popular beliefs have been challenged by several fiction writers over the years. Gha’ib Tu‘ma Farman is another Iraqi author who was invested in amplifying the use of Iraqi colloquial (and for that reason perhaps his brilliant novels have hardly been noticed outside of Iraq, but I’m hoping to contribute to shifting his glaring absence through translation). I’m currently translating his debut novel, which was written in the 1960s and set in a working-class neighborhood of 1940s Baghdad. The dialogue is written entirely in the local dialect of that time and place. What drew me to this project is the sense that such a linguistically and culturally specific and realistic portrait of Baghdad deserves to be preserved and made accessible in English. Yet the more I translate, the more I realize that it’s precisely this specificity that tends to be lost first, no matter how I approach translating it into twenty-first-century English—the day-to-day objects that have become obsolete, the clothing items that are no longer recognizable, the cultural allusions once trendy and accessible to the reader but no longer convey much when taken out of context—all of that is practically lost in translation.
Since dialects inherently encode regional and social identities, do you find that Arabic novels written in colloquial forms risk a greater degree of cultural or semantic loss in translation? And how do you navigate that loss in your own work?
JW: Yes, there is a greater risk of loss in translation in such cases. But the corollary of that is the texts are richer and more enlightening than a sanitised fusha version would be. Clothing, foodstuffs, and cultural allusions are in fact often among the most problematic details that translators face. There are several approaches but none are perfect.
YH: When facing particularly thorny translation choices—especially those involving dialect or idiom—do you ever consult other translators’ approaches for reference or inspiration? Are there particular translators of Arabic fiction whose work has influenced your own?
JW: The resources available to us translators have proliferated massively in the 16 years since I started doing this. Large language models are going to transform our work. I came across a good example of this very recently when I was researching usage of the Iraqi word, or rather dialogue marker, انوب. The few dictionaries that address Iraqi colloquial have little or nothing to say about this word. But ChatGPT will give a detailed breakdown of possible uses, with sample snatches of conversation to illustrate them. Arabic lexicography, which set the highest of standards a thousand years ago, has fallen way behind. It’s now being overtaken by brute electronic technology.
But no, I don’t often consult other translators’ approaches because they are not always readily accessible. I don’t always have searchable copies of their translated texts or of the original texts they are working on. There are many translators of Arabic fiction I admire, and the standard of our work is improving steadily. But I don’t read vast numbers of Arabic novels in English translation. There are only so many hours in a day and I do think translators should read all kinds of literature, not just literature in or translated from the language they most often work in. Some of the translators I admire most are not translating from Arabic—Frank Wynne, for example, is a brilliant translator from French and Spanish, and Michael Hofmann from German.
YH: Thank you for these insights and recommendations. It’s been a pleasure to deliberate about Arabic translation with you.
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 Mahmoud Hosny: Wilding Language: Salim Barakat Between a Kurdish Heart and an Arabic Voice
Yasmeen Hanoosh with Michelle Hartman: Translation, Politics, and Solidarity
Yasmeen Hanoosh with Huda Fakhreddine: Translating Gaza/Gaza Translating Us