Omani Literature and the Translator as Intruder
Between Zia Ahmed and Yasmeen Hanoosh
In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Zia Ahmed discuss approaching Arabic translation via English and Urdu, the layers of “outsider-ness” in translation, and the boom of narrative fiction in Oman.
Yasmeen Hanoosh: You came to Arabic translation from a linguistic background in English and Urdu. How did your relationship with Arabic, and Arabic literature as a source text, develop? Take us to the beginning.
Zia Ahmed: I’m embarrassed to admit I’m a newcomer to Arabic. I was fortunate to learn from some fantastic teachers—in Arlington, Virginia of all places—before going to Jeddah for my job. That was 15… no, 16 years ago. A decade later, I was back in Virginia, brushing up on what little I knew before moving to Oman. It was during Covid. I miss that time, that sense of having no professional responsibilities other than immersing myself in the language. I remember one morning, watching an interview with Adonis, saying to my wife: This is my job? Wow!
Although in another sense, as someone who grew up in Karachi, my relationship with Arabic, like every Pakistani’s, started in childhood—albeit very superficially. Hardly anyone actually speaks the language there, but there’s a sort of reverence around it. Kids learn to read the Quran out loud, without any understanding except for some words that are also Urdu. It’s cultural imperialism, really. We’re a doubly colonized people: recently and properly by the British; and in our minds, however imperfectly, by the Arabs. It’s tragic, I suppose, but it does bring the gift of language.
My wife Anna and I often read aloud to each other when we come across something interesting. We were living in Oman when I picked up a book by Hamoud Saud and came across the most exquisite description of Muscat—the sort of lyrical, heartbreaking writing that’s his trademark. I still have this memory of saying to her, “Listen to this!” I suspect she was struck more by my passion than my clumsy translation. I said, “I can’t believe nobody’s translated this!” And she said, “Why don’t you?” The next day, I was joking about it with my dear friend Hamed. He’s a real translator—translated Yuval Noah Harari’s work into Arabic—and he said the same thing: “Why don’t you?” And that’s what got me seriously into translation.
YH: You’ve also been writing in Arabic and translating your own English writing into Arabic, which is, from what I understand, your third language? What inspires these endeavors? Are there specific audiences that you want to reach in Arabic who would not access your writing otherwise?
ZA: Oh, I’m horribly insecure about my Arabic writing. I have a hard time believing there’s an audience for it, other than a few Arab friends. Sorry, Yasmeen, I wish I had a more thoughtful answer. It’s what that Englishman said when asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. “Because it’s there.” Well, writing in Arabic is my Everest—although I suspect the average Omani schoolkid can casually hop over my Everest.
I’m really grateful to Fatima al-Harthi—she’s a Saudi writer and translator. She started me out by taking pity on me and publishing a couple of my shorts in her wonderful online magazine Sard Adabi. I suspect she was amused by the idea of a foreigner writing in Arabic.
YH: You’ve written that “the act of translation can be a leap in the dark,” one that you couldn’t have taken without the help of Hamoud Saud, whose short story collection, The Raven of Ruwi, you recently translated. Could you elaborate on this “leap”? In what ways is translation a leap in the dark for you and in what ways has Saud made it possible and even remarkably successful?
ZA: You should talk to Hamoud. The man speaks entirely in Sufi parables. I’m only half kidding. It’s the poetry of his words, the cultural and linguistic depths in his writing: translating him was very much a leap in the dark. I’m astounded by the sheer audacity of the act of translation, especially for an outsider like me—outsider to the language, to the society, to its history. Imagine the chutzpah of just showing up one day, reading a book in a language that’s not yours, and having the self-confidence to think, yeah, no problem, I can take this to, say, an American reader.
YH: I can imagine. That’s exactly what many translators from the Global North do with Arabic texts, without your compunctions! If anything, coming to Arabic from Urdu gives you a lot more access to the language and its cultures, and yet that doesn’t map out well with the level of confidence we carry around our translation pursuits. We’ll turn to the source of this anxiety in a second.
ZA: For me, the author-translator relationship is crucial. How else would I know a word in Omani dialect that’s not in any dictionary? Or recognize an arcane historical reference? Or know anything about the scent of a species of tree that’s almost extinct and grows only on the slopes of Jabal Akhdar? Without Hamoud, without our constant back-and-forth over WhatsApp, I would have given up on the first page.
But that’s the bumbling outsider’s perspective. What about you, Yasmeen? Did you chat with Elias Khoury about A Man Like Me? Will your work suffer now that he’s gone?
YH: No, unfortunately I did not get a chance to communicate with Elias Khoury about any of my translations of his work (there are three forthcoming books), all of which are projects I started after his death. My translation, or at least the translation process, would certainly be enriched had I been able to consult Khoury directly and receive his feedback on some of my questions.
Fortunately, in the case of A Man Like Me, the first two volumes of the Children of the Ghetto trilogy are available as points of reference. They were beautifully translated by Humphrey Davies, who, sadly, is also no longer with us to answer my questions. The novel’s subject matter is familiar to us (unfortunately), as it centers on the tragedy of Palestinian ethnic cleansing and genocide, making it easy to understand the cultural and historical references. My translation that did suffer from the absence of author–translator connection is that of Khoury’s first novel, On the Relations of the Circle. This is an experimental work, markedly different from Khoury’s later writing in its unconventional use of language and imagery. I would very much have liked to ask him to clarify certain arcane passages that are now left to my own conjecture, or to the more informed interpretations whose readings I trust more than my own, in this case (His friend Anton Shammas and Lebanese literature scholar and poet Huda Fakhreddine).
In a way, translating an author’s work posthumously also feels like a form of intrusion. Speaking of which, just now and also in our first conversation you expressed unease about your role as an “intruder” on the Arabic language. What’s the source of this unease? Can translation function as a form of cultural appropriation, or does the translator’s labor complicate that accusation?
ZA: [Laughs.] The source of this unease, hmm. Let’s see: Insecurity? Honest self-appraisal? It’s not imposter syndrome if you are an imposter. But seriously, it amazes me that more translators aren’t uneasy. Once I was part of a panel discussion on the challenges of literary translation. Two Arabs, a white guy, and me. The others were all established translators, with published books—I won’t name names. I blabbered about being an intruder, my worries about cultural appropriation, what gives me the right to do this work as an outsider, etc. Then I asked the other panelists what they thought. You know who spoke up? The Arabs. Both women, incidentally. You know who said nothing? The white guy.
YH: You’re not imagining. I’ve witnessed these dynamics in several contexts. Do you think some white men’s translation confidence is a reflection of the Anglo-American cultural imperialist legacy in the MENA region or is it something else?
ZA: Oh, a man’s confidence is gloriously unbounded and often unfounded, as Anna will tell you. Pakistani men will lecture you on American history with equal ease, so I’m not directly linking translation confidence—what a fun expression!—to cultural imperialism.
Going back to your first question, is it cultural appropriation, rendering Hamoud Saud’s lyrical prose in American idiom, pretending to capture even a fraction of its intensity and depth? Yes, I believe it is. But, if you’ll forgive the presumption, I humbly claim certain rights. Oman was my home for three years. In some ways, I felt more at home there than I do here in Virginia. There’s an untranslatable word in Urdu, takalluf, this sort of beautiful formality that can permeate even close relationships. Salman Rushdie describes it in Shame. It’s what you say to a guest at the dinner table: please, have more, no need for takalluf, this is your own home. And that’s how I feel about Oman, about Arabic. No need for takalluf. I may be a boor, but it’s my own home.
YH: That’s a lovely use of the term “takalluf,” which exists in the same sense in Arabic too. In what ways does your own linguistic or cultural identity—and your sense of being at home in Oman and with Arabic—shape the kinds of transgressions you permit (or deny) yourself in translation and writing?
ZA: In the Gulf, where it feels like more people are South Asian than Arab, I felt like knowing Urdu was a weird superpower. I’d be out for breakfast in Muscat, at some little roadside place serving shakshūka and karak, and my Omani friend would complain that he was the one who had difficulty placing an order.
Occasionally, it helps me trace an etymology. I’ve been working on a novel by Mohamed Alyahyai, who won the Katara Prize a couple of years ago. Somewhere in it he mentions “bahari dahin” (بهاري داهن). Who or what is bahari dahin, you ask? No clue. I couldn’t figure it out and was too ashamed to ask Mohamed. The only contextual clue was Ravi Shankar. Well, it turned out to be a transliteration into Arabic of “pahari dhun”: Urdu for “mountain tune,” which is how I chose to translate it. Jabal Akhdar (the Green Mountain)—site of the Omani Imamate’s tragic last stand in the late 1950s—features prominently in the novel, so I had this glorious moment when everything suddenly clicked. It’s a private conceit, but I like to think readers will only get the reference to this lovely sitar piece in my translation; hardly anyone would have decoded the Arabic and made the connection to the Jabal. For this intruder, that’s a rare example of something being gained in translation, not lost as things invariably are.
So, yeah, that’s the kind of transgression I permit myself—every once in a while when I feel like, with my background, I can contribute something meaningful through the act of translation.
But that’s the outsider’s cautiousness. For someone like you, at home in both worlds and languages, what sorts of reckless transgressions are okay for you?
YH: What a wonderful example, of what I would call a polyglot translator’s contribution rather than transgression! My reckless transgressions, hmm. I think the fact of having dared to translate from my mother tongue into the language of my exile that I only began using at the age of seventeen, which itself is the language of the destruction of my country, of the uprooting of my community, and the dissolution of my own personal past, has been and will always be my most reckless linguistic transgression. Learning to function in the exilic language that’s forced upon you by circumstance is one thing, and to translate a language that’s intimate and personal into the language of the uprooter and the occupier is a whole other undertaking. But maybe that’s a story for another occasion.
Speaking of translating from margins to centers of power, you’ve focused your translation work on Omani literature, a literature that has received very little attention until recently, and which continues to be marginalized in comparison with Arabic literature from countries like Egypt and Lebanon. When translating from a marginalized culture into a dominant one, how do you resist cultural flattening without exoticizing the source? Can you share some examples from your recent works?
ZA: Small but mighty, that’s Oman for you. Incidentally, Hamoud dedicates The Raven of Ruwi to “the margins, the marginals, and the marginalized.” Marginalized literature can have universal elements, no? Love, loss, exile, death: I hope we can all relate to these themes with or without exotic settings. I don’t flatten, at least not intentionally. I’d prefer the reader to do some work. An early reviewer of The Raven of Ruwi gave me this advice: no footnotes, only sparing endnotes. My hero is Deepa Bhasthi, the translator of Heart Lamp [last year’s International Booker winner]. She wrote this glorious afterword about not italicizing Urdu or Kannada words because it makes them stick out and seem exotic; without italics (or footnotes) there’s a chance that the reader would absorb a foreign word naturally from the context.
What’s your philosophy? Has your thinking changed in the two decades since you won the Arkansas Translation Prize?
YH: Not so much my thinking has changed but rather my abilities in a foreign host language have improved (or so I would like to think!). This has had an impact on my translation strategies. Whereas in the beginning I was focused on proving myself as someone who has the capacity to carry my native Arabic into idiomatic English, for example, now I’m more likely to demand my English readers handle bits and pieces of the Arabic idioms that I carry over intact without feeling the need to domesticate Arabic texts. I think these shifts in attitude and strategy had a lot to do with the changing level of confidence in my English, not Arabic.
Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I also take more liberty now in omitting Arabic words or phrases when I give up on the possibility of conveying them successfully in English. I just accept the loss, which seems inevitable no matter what I opt to do. This takes me to my next question. Have you come across instances where cultural references or other aspects of an Omani text felt untranslatable? Do you consider untranslatability a failure of language, culture, or the translator’s imagination?
ZA: Oh, absolutely. I’ll give you an example: the word baysara. In the Gulf, it’s a slur for a person without tribal lineage. Huda wrote a fascinating baysara character in Things Are Not in Their Place [shortlisted for the Bait AlGhasham Translation Prize]. What a nightmare of a word for the intruder-translator! You can’t look it up in a dictionary. And if you ask people, they look around furtively and change the subject. The effect is a bit like using a highly offensive racial slur in conversation. So I had to thoroughly embarrass myself before a friend took me aside and told me to stop being offensive. Then he explained the word’s sociocultural baggage. Which I kind of understood intellectually, but can someone from an urban, non-tribal culture really get it? Probably not. It’s like trying to understand the concept of color if you’re color blind. At best, you might acknowledge the existence of an attribute called color, which seems to matter a great deal to other people. But will you ever appreciate the five distinct shades of blue-green in the sea at Bustan beach? And then how do you tell other color blind people, who have never been to Muscat, how achingly beautiful the sea is just before dusk? It’s absolutely a failure of the translator’s imagination—the sea is beautiful even when the translator can’t see it.
But these are the outsider’s challenges. Can I ask how you do it, Yasmeen? You’re an insider. Your imagination doesn’t fail. You see the full spectrum of colors. And how do you deal with color-blind outsiders like me when they mansplain the defects in fuṣḥā or lecture Arabs about how to use their language?
YH: That’s a beautiful analogy, despite the anguish of loss it expresses! I think we’re all outsiders to something (by virtue of being insiders to something else). In my case my blind spots are primarily in English as I mentioned, but also when I translate a text from an Arab culture that’s less familiar to me—colloquial expressions or images from a country or a region that I haven’t visited, for example. Examples abound. The trick is to be humble like you, admit our limitations and limits, and crowdsource knowledge by asking others for help. What bothers me more than the occasional lack of Arabic proficiency among some famous western translators of Arabic is the cultural superciliousness and false authority with which they tell others how to think about Arabic language and literature. It’s sheer arrogance, but that’s the domain of those who inhabit colonial and imperialist social structures, which, as you know, generate power dynamics that extend well into the postcolonial aftermath.
Like other translators, sometimes you’ve made the choice to change certain wording, such as the title of Huda Hamed’s story “الغِبطة” to “Envy”. One of the biggest challenges for translators is managing their open-ended options and their interpretive freedom. Where do you personally draw the ethical line between creative interpretation and misrepresentation?
ZA: غبطة was tough! I just couldn’t find an English word for it: this feeling of joy or bliss at someone else’s good fortune without wanting to take it away. Envy, strictly speaking, has a sense of resentment or malice. But that’s not always how we use it in real life. Just yesterday, I said to a friend who was leaving for vacation: I’m so envious! Have a great time! That was my feeling of غبطة, the good kind of envy. The word “envy” has evolved; Merriam-Webster just hasn’t caught up yet.
Another example is the ubiquitous Omani expression الأمور طيبة (things are good), which is usually—but not always—meant to be taken literally. Here I had the opposite problem: not that there isn’t an English expression but that there are too many! How to pick one that captures the Omani spirit, the ethos of being understated, uncomplaining, sort of fatalistic, really, coupled with just a hint of sarcasm. You know what I did? I asked my eight-year-old. First he said, “Everything is awesome!” (He’s a Lego fanatic.) I asked him to tone it down a bit. Then he comes up with, “It’s all good!” Which was pitch perfect, because it captures the relaxed response to كيف أمورك؟ (how are you?), while preserving space for political irony.
So where’s the line between interpretation and misrepresentation? I’d say it’s where the author says it is. Huda—who’s great, Yasmeen, you should meet her—Huda, for example, was skeptical at first, saying, um, wait a minute, isn’t envy ḥasad? We talked about untranslatability and the “good kind” of envy—which I forced one of her characters to say awkwardly in English—until she was satisfied.
YH: I’m impressed that you convinced Huda. For me hasad carries very different cultural connotations than ghibta due to the almost-supernatural powers assigned to the concept of envy in Arabic. You must’ve made a pretty persuasive argument!
ZA: That’s my nightmare, though. That I’m a clueless cultural appropriator, misrepresenting texts and writers, some kind of wannabe Coleman Barks. By the way, my Arab friends don’t care much for Rumi. I guess anyone who didn’t write in Arabic was kind of second rate. But in Pakistan he’s super popular. People say the Masnavi is next to the Quran. So it’s mind blowing that some guy who doesn’t speak Farsi is the one whose translation is how most people find Rumi.
Another irony of the colonized mind: people like my father—who’s a great reader, with a spiritual bent; he even went to Konya on pilgrimage—people like him read English more easily than Urdu. Hardly anyone knows Farsi in Pakistan anymore, so reading the original text is out of the question. It was the language of high culture less than a century ago. Well, I guess we should thank Coleman Barks for bringing Rumi to the Pakistani educated classes.
YH: Coleman Barks is a great excuse to ask you about translation fidelity and betrayal. Where do you locate translation (yours or in general) on the spectrum between fidelity and betrayal, and why do you think “betrayal” remains such a powerful metaphor in translation discourse?
ZA: Can I be quite candid? Total fidelity is impossible. Every translation betrays something: the question is what is betrayed, why, and how much? I’m an ordinary person. My fidelity begins with people: my friends, the writers I translate. I’d hate for Hamoud or Huda to think I’d betrayed them. But their texts? I fear I betray them to some degree the moment I begin. It’s a banal point, but fidelity in translating verse is extremely stressful for someone like me, who’s neither a poet nor an Arab. In one of Hamoud’s stories, there’s a scene where an old man hears a song playing on a car radio. It’s a snippet from Fairuz singing “Al Bouab.” For Hamoud, it was probably just a fun detail. But I fiddled with four little lines for weeks until the result wasn’t completely ghastly. We Urdu speakers have a lot of angst about the amāna/khiyāna dichotomy. It’s almost religious.
May I ask you the same question? Is your fidelity primarily to the source text? Or to your reader?
YH: Good question. I think my fidelity is primarily to the gist and the overall tone of the source text, but in order for that to be imparted in the host text, of course one has to account for the cultural and linguistic capacities of the reader. I don’t think we can fully achieve fidelity to one thing without accounting or the other.
I’d like to close by asking you if you can you name a translator or author who has inspired your craft and/or interest in Omani literature? How did they do that?
ZA: Well, Hamoud Saud, of course. What a guy! My wife jokes that I should publish his WhatsApp messages as a volume of Sufi sayings.
YH: I love this idea. It sounds like a new writing genre that’s waiting to emerge. It reminds me of the Saudi novel Girls of Riyadh, which is composed of a series of weekly emails. Why not be one of the pioneers of text message fiction? Your wife is on to something.
ZA: I’ll let her know. I also want to mention Jokha Alharthi, who is such a kind, witty soul. Soft-spoken but doesn’t suffer gasbags gladly. Once I blurted out something totally pretentious about jāhiliyya poetry—way above my pay grade—and she asked, really gently, “So what’s your favorite muʿallaqa?” I’m also very fond of Mohamed Alyahyai. Al Ḥarb was really contemporary and approachable. It’s incredibly satisfying when a novel is a fun and easy read, yet says something deep that stays with you for a long time. It’s kind of miraculous that just three million Omanis have produced such literary riches.
YH: Thank you for these suggestions, which will hopefully bring readers closer to Omani literature. I, for one, look eagerly forward to reading Saud and Alyahyai.
ZA: Thank you, Yasmeen! I’m so happy that we got to talk. Do you know what I look forward to reading? A “Between Two Arabic Translators” interview with writer and literary translator Yasmeen Hanoosh. Keep me in mind, please, when you need a guest host for that episode.
YH: That’s is so generous of you. Thank you for this gesture!
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 Jonathan Wright: Translating Arabic Polyglossia
Yasmeen Hanoosh with Huda Fakhreddine: Translating Gaza/Gaza Translating Us