Translating Noir: On ‘The End of Sahara’
Translating Noir
Alexander Elinson in conversation with Tugrul Mende
Saïd Khatibi’s The End of Sahara, translated by Prof. Alexander Elinson, has just been published by Bitter Lemon Press. The novel is set in 1980s Algeria, opening just before protests erupt across the country. In this conversation with ArabLit’s Tugrul Mende, Elinson talks End of the Sahara, plus how literary prizes affect the translation landscape, the draw of detective novels, and how he hones voice in a novel with many starring characters.
In 2023 Saïd Khatibi won the 2023 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the young author category. Did that have anything to do with your decision to translate the novel? What role do you think Arabic literary prizes play in the ecology and economy of literary translation?
Alexander Elinson: I honestly don’t remember how I first came to read and translate The End of the Sahara. Saïd and I were introduced to one another in early 2023 by Amara Lakhous, a mutual friend, whose opinions and recommendations on literature I take very seriously. It may have been following that introduction that I decided to take a look at The End of the Sahara. Of course, Saïd Khatibi was not completely unknown to me prior to 2023, his Firewood in Sarajevo having been shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2020.
To speak to your question about the Sheikh Zayed Award, though, I can honestly say that having won that award definitely pushed the novel up on my “to-read” list, and after reading just a few chapters, I knew it was something I wanted to work on. While the importance of literary prizes is not entirely unproblematic in the marketplace of publishing and translation, I do think it is undeniable that prizes allow works to travel far beyond local readerships and markets. That these prizes result in expanded readership in Arabic, and potentially translation into other languages for even more readers, is a positive thing. While I think I would have found my way to The End of the Sahara, prize or no prize, I can’t help but imagine that prizes provide an imprimatur for those outside the Arabic literary scene who might not be familiar with what is being written, published, and read in Arabic. The End of the Sahara is the first Arabic novel in translation Bitter Lemon Press is publishing. While I can offer a certain amount of experience and expertise with the proposals for translation and publication that I send out to publishers, I imagine that a work that has won a major literary award might stand out more than a cold call from some random Arabic translator living in Brooklyn!
Book awards and prizes and their selection processes can be influenced by economic, political, and personal factors. The value of these prizes both financially and in terms of exposure is significant, and the money and potential notoriety that stems from these prizes risk becoming goals in and of themselves. Nonetheless, I think the benefits of these prizes are substantial, raising the profile of writers both within the Arab world and encouraging works to be translated into other languages, thus allowing them to reach readers across the globe.
This novel—The End of the Sahara—is set in southern Algeria, during September and October 1988 and could be described as a detective novel. You’ve been drawn to detective novels in the past. What draws you to the genre? And what sort of detective novel interests you most?
AE: I love a good detective novel. Classic whodunit, police procedural, noir, hardboiled, I’ll read them all, as long as there’s a murder! What I love about novels that have a murder investigation at their center is that the crime of murder tends to pull back the curtain on so many secrets and taboos, be they personal, social, or political. A murder is so shocking, so surprising, so out of the ordinary. It shakes a community to its very core, and the ensuing investigation reveals secrets and truths that have often been concealed for decades behind carefully constructed narratives and defensive strategies. Under questioning, every character is at their most vulnerable, forced to account for everything they do, say, and feel. Murder and its investigation shatter people’s defenses, revealing secrets that may or may not have anything to do with the murder, but are illuminating nonetheless.
Do you read detective novels in your spare time? Are there other novels you thought about, during the translation process, while you were working on The End of the Sahara’s voice in translation?
AE: I do. Raymond Chandler, P.D. James, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Leonardo Sciascia, Walter Mosely, Amara Lakhous, and others. I hear voices from all of these novelists when I read The End of the Sahara. From the opening sentences, we feel the noir-quality of The End of the Sahara. The languid rhythm. The gritty atmosphere. While the story is told by ten different narrators, each with their own distinct voice, the over-arching tone is dark. It is punchy and raw, full of wisecracks.
This story is told, in successive chapters, by a range of different characters. How did you manage to set different tones in the chapters for each character? At what stage of translation do you hone voice, and how does it work?
AE: I think about voice, and the diversity of the individual voices, quite early on. Of course, the original Arabic reflects the multiplicity of voices through a given character’s diction, vocabulary, cadence, rhythm, and more, so even with the first reading, I am aware of the different voices. I pay close attention to the ways characters speak and narrate, listening as much as I can to what they say and how they say it. Beyond that, it is so important to really understand the character, to form an image of how they dress, how they walk, stand, talk, argue, interact with others. All of these aspects of their character will help me bring their voice into English.
It is true that my first or second draft might be quite raw and literal, but as I edit and polish the characters’ voices emerge. After reading through the novel a number of times and combing through my English drafts, the characters come into sharp relief, speaking an English that best captures who they are: the college-educated videotape shop owner, the poor shepherd, the self-conscious lawyer, the police investigator, etc. In early drafts, I might start giving voice to the characters according to general stereotypes. After that, though, and especially in a novel that is so skillfully written and richly composed, the characters start to emerge as individuals with rich backstories and ways of acting and speaking that are unique to them.
Did you have a favorite character (or characters)? Any that particularly resonated with you? And do you think there are elements to these characters, and the way they interact, to which non-Algerian readers might not be privy?
AE: Although the novel takes place almost forty years ago in small city in the heart of Algeria, I have to say that the characters are entirely familiar and relatable outside of the Algerian context, which is one of the things I love so much about this novel and Saïd Khatibi’s writing. While the setting, history, and social and economic context of the novel are very specifically Algerian, the characters are familiar. We dislike them and we sympathize with them. We understand them and we reject them. Whether it’s Ibrahim, a college-educated underachiever who has dreams of success in the music business, Achour Hadeeri, a proud shepherd forced to leave his village for the larger city and live in poverty, Noura Arkoub, a struggling lawyer who strives to challenge her patriarchal surroundings and forge her own way, or her brother, Faudel, engaging in petty crimes and brawling around the neighborhood with his gang of fellow toughs, we know these characters. We grew up with them. We went to school with them. We worked with them. We got beat up by them. For better or worse, these are people shaped by pressures we can all relate to.
I don’t think I can say who my favorite character is. There are characters I can imagine getting along with more than others, but I don’t think that’s what your question is getting at. There is no character whom I feel I know better than the others, at least among the principal leads (the narrators). But even the supporting characters come with vivid and believable backstories that make them plausible, human, sometimes contradictory, but mostly sympathetic.
The novel is set in 1980s Algeria, and in a city where you have (probably) never been. What kind of research did you do in order to get a handle on the setting and the events of that period?
AE: I have never been to Algeria although after spending so much time with The End of the Sahara (and Amara Lakhous’s The Fertility of Evil, which I have also recently translated) I would love to go and be able to add real images to the imagined ones I have constructed in my head! I have been teaching about Algeria, the Algerian Revolution, the political and economic crises of the 1980s, and the black decade of the 1990s for years, so I came to this project with a good deal of familiarity with the general history of Algeria during this time. The novel takes place over the course of a period of weeks leading up to the October 5 riots of 1988 in a small unnamed city on the edge of the desert. While the city resembles Bou Saada, the author’s hometown, it is meant to represent any small city the lies on the margins of society. A city far from the center of things, from grand historical narratives. The draw of this novel is that, while the larger historical context is important, what the reader sees is how that context is lived and experienced on the ground, by real people. With the drop in oil prices in the 1980s, the Algerian economy suffered. We understand this suffering through Ibrahim’s sketchy and shoestring VHS cassette rental business, Faudel’s petty criminality and hustle, Achour’s hardscrabble life in his village, and later in the meadow slum where Zakia Zaghouani—who ran away from home to try to make a life for herself—met her death. History is important in understanding the context of the novel, but that history is incomplete without understanding its real-life effects.
Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with Said Khatibi as it unfolded during the translation process? How did you work together (or not work together) on the novel?
AE: Although we have not met in person (yet!), we have developed a strong working relationship and friendship. While working on this translation, we were in constant contact. He read and commented on drafts, and he provided guidance with certain aspects of Algerian Arabic, specific terminology for objects and concepts that I might not be familiar with, historical references, and more. Beyond that, Saïd is a very close and careful reader, and he often challenged me to find just the right way of saying something in English. We might debate a word or a phrase for days over email and Zoom! I often took his advice and suggestions, but even when I didn’t, the translation ended up stronger for the open discussions we would have. It is a very collaborative process.
And . . . what are you working on next?
AE: Let’s just say that I’m working with some familiar friends.
Tugrul Mende is a regular contributor at ArabLit.