On Translating Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
Emma Hardy in Conversation with Will Tamplin
William Tamplin continues his close relationship with the work of Palestinian-Iraqi novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919-1994) with a translation of Jabra’s novel, The Other Rooms – الغرف الأخرى. This engaging piece of modernist Arabic literature was made available to English-reading audiences by Darf Publishers in September 2025.
The novel places its readers behind the eyes of a man with no name or identity, as he is dragged through a labyrinth of disorienting scenes and thrown into rattling interactions with senseless characters. Written in the midst of Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian rule over Iraq, the feeling of endless exhaustion, confusion, and terror that pumps through novel’s pages evokes the experience of living under a regime that imposed intense surveillance, suspicion, and violence.
How did you come to be a literary translator? Why did you want to pursue it?
William Tamplin: I came to be a literary translator in Jordan, where I was a Fulbright scholar studying Bedouin poetry. I came across the work of the poet Muhammad Fanatil al-Hajaya on YouTube. When I met him in person, I found a folksy old poet in his late fifties who spent his time adjudicating tribal disputes, herding livestock, raising his grandkids, and pondering international affairs. He had the ethos of a cowboy, the lexical depth of Samuel Johnson, and the grand-strategic bent of Henry Kissinger. Abu Samer and I would stay up late discussing politics, religion, morality, poetry, history, you name it. We would visit Wadi al-Hisa, and he would narrate the history of this or that rise, ridge, pool, declivity, stand of fig trees, or pile of stones. There was a universe in his brain that I wanted to become familiar with and show the world. Also, his poetry was so enjoyable and witty, and so immersed in the Bedouin world that I am forever learning, that I wanted to introduce it to the Anglosphere.
If you could ascribe a philosophy to your translation method, what would you say that is?
WT: I try to be as faithful as I can to three entities: the writer’s voice, my voice, and the reader’s ear. I think I owe the most loyalty to the writer’s voice. But a rendering of that has to be faithful to my style because the translation is my work, copyright and all. I have to live with it. Yet you also have to consider what the reader will put up with. There may be idiosyncrasies in my style that the reader will find offputting or unacceptable, and I have to anticipate that. Translation lies somewhere between art and customer service.
How did it come about that you pursued this translation? What was your motivation for translating it? What draws you to Jabra’s work, and why do you feel it should be translated?
WT: The Other Rooms was one of two novels by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra that hadn’t yet been translated, so I got to work. I didn’t fall in love with this novel the way I had with Cry in a Long Night. But I grew to love it. Many of Jabra’s poems, essays and stories are still untranslated, so I invite anyone remotely interested in translating Jabra to join in.
I’m drawn to Jabra’s work for the same reason that I’m drawn to Philip Roth’s: there’s a compelling narrative, the artistry is grounded in the best of literary tradition, and it reads like a conversation with an erudite old friend on a winter’s evening next to a fire. Also, Jabra’s fiction is often about opaque characters. Human personality and motivation are enigmas that Jabra never stopped exploring, just as they were for Roth.
When I first came to Arabic literature as a college student in the late 2000s, I found fiction that was ponderously political. You could just see the seminar papers that were going to be written about said named novel in the context of said named political movement. How this character represented that social stratum. I’m thinking of Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns and Naguib Mahfouz’s The Beginning and the End, with all due respect to his later work. You could envision the New York Times book review that would tout a certain novel as a great local color piece on the political history of a certain Arab country, and what a great read it would be on the flight over. It’s the “window on the world” approach to literature that throws up novels inhabited by caricatures, not characters. The scene has become much richer since the 2000s.
Like Roth, Jabra is a sly old fox with regard to politics and literature. For example, In Search of Walid Masoud is a novel about a Palestinian guerrilla fighter who disappears mysteriously and whose friends go about piecing together his life and potential whereabouts. Walid’s personality is explored to its depths. The novel’s overt political valences lose their charge the more they are examined, and you end up with an incredible story. Jabra was a devoted reader and translator of William Faulkner, and I think he may have taken a leaf from Faulkner’s approach of exploring Southern stereotypes so comprehensively that they ceased to be stereotypes.
So while in the 2010s I was beginning to despair because I thought so much Arabic fiction read like bad Zola, Jabra’s complex characters saved it for me. When I discovered Jabra’s style for myself, I wanted to say to the English-reading world, as I had wanted to with Hajaya’s poetry, “look!”
In many cases translators have relationships with the authors. Seeing as this was not possible for you, were there any major questions that you had while translating that, if given the opportunity, you would have liked to ask Jabra?
WT: I can think of around two thousand questions I’d like to ask Jabra. Not only on issues of style and translation but about his life.
Your question makes me think of the sorry state of literary biography in the Arab world. A major writer in America will die, and three biographies of him will come out in the next few years. But exhaustive studies of writers’ lives don’t exist in the Arab world in abundance. Neither does a robust publishing culture peopled by literary agents, meticulous editors, publishing houses and millions of hungry readers. The demand for good fiction isn’t there. Most Arab authors get no agency representation and receive little editing support. I remember the culture-war hullabaloo following a United Nations report from around 2010 that exposed the stunted publishing culture in the then-300 million-strong Arab world, where the literary output per annum was comparable to that of the Czech Republic with its six million people. Sad but true. Also, the illiteracy rate in the Arab world is staggeringly high, especially for Arab women.
So I wonder whether this moribund publishing culture is a symptom or a cause of the dearth of literary biographies in Arabic. I also wonder whether a deep-rooted culture of honor and shame precludes bitingly honest appraisals of the lives of famous women and men who have writerly reputations to uphold.
Toward the end of his life, Jabra wrote an essay on the lack of regard the Arab reading public had for the lives of its writers. He marveled at the fact that universities in the West preserved the personal papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. H. Auden. Jabra’s anxiety about how he will be remembered bleeds through the pages.
“It is as if the nightmarish life of the labyrinth has become a lifestyle. Throughout many eras, and up until now, Iraqis have come to understand the labyrinth-as-lifestyle better than anyone else” (30).
I pulled this quote from Ahmed Saadawi’s introduction you translated for this book, as it reminded me of conversations from a course I took at Boston University on Arabic war literature. Conversations around identifying the uniqueness and critical context to the works we read, and understanding the necessity of learning what each author was experiencing or had experienced that led them to write what they did. How do you, as both a translator and someone who deeply appreciates Jabra’s work, feel in terms of how and why you might think it is critical that this story is understood and read within the context of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Jabra’s life experiences?
WT: Jabra claimed in an interview given just after he published The Other Rooms that all his novels were autobiographical. And coincidentally, the two novels of Jabra’s that I’ve translated stand out because they are not, at least superficially, about any particular time or place. In my view, if someone is avoiding something, that thing must concern them. What’s repressed is important. And because Jabra deliberately made this novel time- and place-agnostic, the time and the place must be crucially important here.
Cry in a Long Night takes place in a nameless city, with no date given, while society breaks down, weary soldiers man checkpoints, aloof elites vigorously debate vapid topics, and random explosions rock the city. That was Jerusalem in 1946. The Other Rooms takes place in a police state where people are corralled, interrogated, tortured, and murdered en masse. That was Baghdad in the mid-1980s.
I would be surprised to learn if Jabra had never been summoned and interviewed by agents of Saddam’s police state, especially given how ubiquitous they were and how high-profile Jabra was. In 2018, a professor of mine, whose aunt was close personal friends with Jabra, told me that Jabra had expressed his fears about Saddam and surveillance to him in Amman in the early 1990s. Again, his aunt and Jabra were old friends. When Jabra dropped by Amman in the 1980s and 1990s and my professor was there with his aunt, Jabra alluded to his fear of electronic surveillance. Jabra told my professor of a time when a representative of Saddam’s security service mentioned that the wall in Jabra’s study would look much nicer with a portrait of Saddam on it. Jabra put one up.
In tune with that, are there specific aspects of Jabra’s life that you think a reader needs to keep in mind when reading this book that would contribute to a greater understanding of the work?
WT: Here are a few aspects of Jabra’s life one should keep in mind when approaching this book: Jabra concealed the date, place and fact of his birth outside Palestine from his friends and acquaintances for his entire life. Jabra was friendly with Jews and Zionists, both in his youth in Palestine and in Iraq after he settled there–and that was after the Nakba. Jabra was a Freemason and belonged to a lodge in East Jerusalem whose existence spanned the British Mandate period, Jordanian rule, and Israeli sovereignty. Jabra married into the elite Iraqi family of a man who spearheaded a genocide against Assyrians, the ethnic community into which Jabra was born. In fact, the term genocide was coined in response to the savagery of that massacre. Jabra was a collaborator with CIA officers and the representatives of CIA-funded institutions during the Cultural Cold War, whether Jabra knew of their affiliation or not. And then, in 1979, Jabra found himself living in a dictatorship run by a paranoid, monomaniacal man who made affiliation with Zionism, Freemasonry, the CIA, and in many cases, the Iraqi elite Jabra had married into punishable by death. Jabra had reason to fear for his life.
Each of those revelations is a bombshell. I had to track down old Bethlehemites and go digging through obscure memoirs and the archives of universities, the British Colonial Office, and CIA-funded cultural programs to figure all that out. Jabra became for me the Walid Masoud his characters went in search of. And because that information is all potentially derogatory in the eyes of Jabra’s Arab readers, it’s no surprise that Jabra wasn’t forthcoming about it in his two autobiographies. Those details could have wrecked Jabra’s reputation during his life.
Those details also probably account for the tension in The Other Rooms about identity. Jabra knew that certain people — whether they were Saddam’s investigators or pesky literary biographers like me — would one day discover those facts about his life. Because of the amount of puzzling details I’ve recently discovered, I still wonder: What other facts about Jabra could we find out if we kept looking under the hood, and what larger truths would they reveal about Jabra and the literary history of the Arab world?
When I began publishing on Jabra’s life, I hoped my revelations would lead to frank, if uncomfortable, discussions about his life, identity, and the complex twentieth-century Arab literary scene. The opposite happened. Scholars in the field assumed the worst about my intentions, and I was treated like I had farted in church.
On the one hand, scholars downplayed the significance of my revelations, or denied their novelty altogether. “Of course everyone knew he was born in Adana and not Palestine; this is a minor detail,” one academic claimed. (No one knew it, and if it was a minor detail, why did it upset so many people?) On the other hand, in person, I was told that my peers thought I was trying to undermine the Palestinianness of Jabra, as biographers had been accused of doing with regard to Yasser Arafat and Edward Said. I was disinvited from edited volumes and conferences about Jabra. One scholar published my original work without citing me, passing it off as her own.
That closed-ranks, defensive reaction to my work on Jabra speaks volumes about the state of discourse in Arabic literature studies today, about what you can and can’t say. It’s so silly, so petty. Not a fruitful environment for spurring conversation and thought. Facts don’t matter as much as the interpretation of them. It’s the kind of environment that would have caused the Freemason, freethinking, old-school liberal Jabra cringe.
There is this crucial and poignant moment when the narrator describes his feelings toward a his friend who has recently committed suicide: “‘Your love for life was great, for when you discovered that life couldn’t withstand all that love of yours, you rejected it. A world controlled by killers, lowlifes, and tricksters—you could not but reject it. And you were right. Your rejection of it was total, complete. You took your own life and put us all to shame’”(124). As a reader it almost throws you off, because this man who cannot remember anything about himself, recites this intensely emotional and seemingly political memory. If you could explain in your own words the importance of this point in the book and why you think Jabra included it?
WT: The sudden return of the narrator’s memory certainly does raise questions, but I don’t think we gain much by trying to apply logic to a novel written to defy reason.
When I first read that passage, the window-on-the-world reader in me thought, “This must be about Saddam’s Iraq, the limits of free speech there, and the deep-seated political corruption, nepotism, summary killings, and paranoia causing the country to rot from the inside.” The literary historian in me was reminded of Naguib Mahfouz’s existentialist novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s, in which the theme of suicide lies heavy.
I’m also reminded of Jabra’s many other characters who are “half in love with easeful death,” to quote one of Jabra’s favorite poets. Many of Jabra’s autobiographical protagonists flirt with suicide or kill themselves.
Jabra was a devotee of Western literary modernism. He had read Camus, Woolf, Joyce and Kafka, who all had something to say about suicide. Jabra also translated to Arabic Germaine Brée’s biography of Albert Camus, whose long essay on the myth of Sisyphus begins with the question “why go on living in an absurd world?” That’s a question Jabra may have asked himself repeatedly throughout his life, which was governed by the absurdities of forced displacement, genocide, and constant indeterminacy. I don’t know if Jabra thought about committing suicide. Suicide isn’t uncommon in the survivors of the kind of trauma Jabra experienced, or in their descendants. So I don’t think it’s anomalous to find ruminations on suicide in Jabra’s work.
The end of the passage you quoted contains a call to resisting the absurdity that surrounds the characters. The narrator’s spirited call is loudly applauded by dinner guests later revealed to be actors placed there by the authorities. The actors are later gunned down. In this novel, everything is staged and then revealed to be real. It reminds me of The Truman Show.
Emma Hardy is a recent graduate of Boston University where she earned her B.A. in Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures, with a focus on Arabic. She is an editor for ArabLit and a continuous student of the Arabic language.