Translation and Solidarity in Times of Imperial Mass Violence

Translation and Solidarity in Times of Imperial Mass Violence

Between Elliott Colla and Yasmeen Hanoosh

In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Elliott Colla look into two dimensions of translation, which Colla calls the solidaristic and the hegemonic, and the particular role translation has played in the US military.

Yasmeen Hanoosh: Let’s start from the beginning. You’ve translated an impressive number of Arabic works that span multiple genres—from the Libyan desert fiction of Ibrahim al-Koni and the Palestinian satire of Emile Habiby to the Egyptian dissident voices of Ahmed Fouad Negm and Ahmed Douma. How did your relationship with translation start?

Elliott Colla:  Long before I began to work between Arabic and English, translation was part of my life as a student, as a reader, and as someone trying to think. I have always relied on translations to encounter ideas, texts, and thinkers I could not approach in the original language. My graduate studies entailed a lot of reading in continental philosophy and theory as it was rendered into English. My ability to think and see relies heavily on intellectuals like Marx, Fanon, and Bakhtin, none of whom I have read in their original! By the same token there are difficult texts in Arabic—such as the mu‘allaqat or the Mahdi edition of Alf layla wa-layla—which I learned to read in the original only with the aid of translation. Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Marmaduke Pickthall, and Michael Sells, to name just three translators of the Qur’an, have each helped me to encounter that text in the original. Every translation is a literary interpretation, an effort to grasp the text, a commentary that can help us reach a deeper understanding of things we want to know.

In my teaching, I very quickly began to see the power of translation—to change students’ views of the world, and to pull them into deeper study. Most students don’t take up serious study of Arabic simply because they have read something in translation that moved them. But I have seen it happen. The same is true for activism. Where would the Palestine solidarity movement be without translation? Where would the antiwar movement be without it?

So, as a student, teacher, scholar, and translator, I approach translation as a bridge-building activity. Just as learning a foreign language can pull you from one point of view to another, from one idiom to another, and from one cultural context to another, so too can translation. When you learn new grammars, new idioms, new literary conventions, new traditions of metaphor, and new techniques of punning, it can change the way you speak your mother tongue. And as we learn new ways to speak, we learn new ways to think.

We sometimes make the mistake of thinking of translation largely in terms of published works. But books are only part of the bridging impact of translation activity. When a translator is working, there are other forms of bridging that can happen. Sometimes, the impacts are small, personal, even private. You come back to your home language with expressions you’ve borrowed from other languages. You calque, you steal, you replace. These are not insignificant, especially for those of us who try to think in public. You begin to see that you’re not the first person to do this. Translation reminds us that our languages are not closed systems, nor were they ever. In other words, tongues drool. Dragoman and targum have been English for centuries. Take a shufty at English, and you’ll see what I mean.

With some translation projects, crossing from one language to the other is more like fording than bridging. What I mean is that sometimes everyone gets wet while crossing from one bank to the other. I’ll give you an example: I have had the honor to translate some of Ibrahim al-Koni’s best works. While I was working on Gold Dust, we spoke often on the phone. I had a lot of questions about lexical items related to specific desert geography, flora, and fauna. He patiently listened to me for weeks and then at one point, he said, “Look—no offence, but you’re not from the desert. I don’t expect you to understand these things very deeply. You’re American, right? You know Melville, right? What Melville has to say about the world of the ocean is similar to what I want to say about the Sahara. So, go reread those passages in Moby Dick, and you’ll get it.” He then proceeded to give me an impromptu lecture on Melville’s place in world literature. It was an amazing lesson. It was great advice.

So I used Melville as a tool for translating Gold Dust into English: the vastness of Melville’s seas helped me imagine the vastness of al-Koni’s deserts. As I did, I came to discover that the chapters in al-Koni’s novel, as in Melville’s, are essentially short stories: each has a beginning, middle, and end. In fact, this structural technique is how al-Koni made the leap from short-story author to novelist. I borrowed that technique from him in my own writing, working from chapter to chapter, giving each chapter its own complete arc. In fact, it was while translating him that I came to know that I wanted to write fiction. Since then, I have taken up writing. For me, that was a profound personal experience of fording: it had to do with me discovering something about myself, by way of translating another author, language, and text. And where did al-Koni learn to write like that? The Gorky Institute in Moscow. And how did al-Koni learn to read Melville? He read Moby Dick in Russian, in Moscow. These are not incidental to understanding his place in Arabic literature!

YH: I’d like to turn to your essay “Dragomen and Checkpoints.” There, you challenge the dominant humanistic assumption that translation naturally leads to cultural understanding or deeper empathy. In what contexts does this bridge-building model of translation break down most clearly?

EC: As I just tried to acknowledge, the dominant humanistic assumptions about translation are not wrong, only incomplete! It’s fair to start with the rosy humanistic metaphors that depict translation as an act of bridging, or crossing, or fording. But while they speak to truth, they do not tell the entire story. This was made clear to me in 2003, at the outset of the US invasion of Iraq, when the US Army made “cultural bridging” a central slogan of its desperate campaign to recruit Arab interpreters. These recruits were paid enormous sums, much more than literary translators are ever paid, as they were inducted into the massive military/intelligence translation effort that accompanied the War on Terror operations in Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11. They weren’t translating poetry or memoirs (though some perhaps did), but staffing checkpoints and interrogation rooms, which were some of the most violent and cruel sites of American empire. This makes me recall that one of the most gifted literary translators of Arabic fiction has spent most of his career working as a translator within the counter-terrorism bureau of an American military intelligence agency.

All these translators are performing bridging activities! Yet the connection between this work and military violence is an embarrassment or worse to humanistic conceptions of translation.

YH: You’ve translated several important literary works. How do you reconcile your literary translation efforts with your broader critique of Arabic–English translation as a “strategic project of full-spectrum dominance” at the institutional and infrastructural level?

EC: Your question makes me realize that I should more clearly distinguish between what I would call two separate aspects of translation in our times. We might call the first aspect solidaristic and the other, hegemonic.

Solidaristic translation creates opportunities for genuine understanding, inspiration, and solidarity. I’ll give you an example. In 2011, I was struck by the central role played by colloquial poetry in the social movements taking to the streets of Egypt (and elsewhere). As I began to publish on the phenomenon of “movement poetry,” I discovered that very little of this poetry has been translated—but without it, how could non-Arabic speakers appreciate how central poetry is to mass politics are in a place like Egypt? That tangle is part of what makes Egyptian politics so beautiful and human. You can’t understand the 25 January Uprising without its soundtrack. You can’t understand the soundtrack without the words of people like Negm and Douma and many others. Some, like Tamim Barghouthi, are well known. Others, like Kamal Khalil, are not so famous. So, in trying to explain the events to students and publics in the USA, I often had to start by translating original material that was otherwise not available in English. I’ve been doing this ever since, mostly with a collaborator in Cairo, the poet, lawyer, and translator Ahmed Hassan. I’m very excited to announce that we’ve just finished translating Negm’s memoir, El-Fagoumi, for Verso.

Samia Mehrez and her collaborators have articulated how translation might serve as a lens for understanding many meanings of the 2011 Uprising, and how people from afar—like me—could participate in some small way. This is a form or gesture of solidarity with those heroes who compose and sing poetry of revolution and those who languish in prison because of that revolution’s violent suppression.

Durkheim writes of mechanical solidarity, which is the kind of automatic, direct solidarity that arises among people living together under shared circumstances. But organic solidarity, he says, is something else: it refers to the way that groups living apart and under different circumstances might join in common struggle because of common interests, values, and goals. This describes at least my motivation for translating the words of Egyptian revolutionaries: I am here, with real freedom and privilege; they are there, under fire and threat. But I share their values and cheer their goals, and I want their values and demands and dreams and words to inform the world I live in. In part, I want them to know that someone’s listening to their words, and I have been told that this matters. But mostly, I want their words to make an impact in the place where I stand. At the very least, I hope that American social movements might learn some of the creativity and wit of poetic slogan-making in Egypt.

Some of this maps onto translation. Here, I would like to acknowledge what I have learned from the organized collective translation efforts in Cairo that were launched by the indefatigable Samah Selim, the Mosireen Collective, Turjoman, and The Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences, which places collaborative translation at the core of its curriculum. Each of these projects is an inspiration and a reminder that we are not alone. Maybe that reminder is the most immediate benefit of translation?

The analogies between solidarity work, collaboration, and translation experiences remind us that we should expect that what takes place in one political arena—or language—will be radically divergent from what happens in another. This difference is a positive value and a challenge, but even so, we can join together in a shared struggle, we can borrow from one to another, and we can find inspiration for adaptation. Part of what is produced might be a rendered text. But the experiences and relationships might be more important. Is this the same as organizing material aid to the families of martyrs or prisoners? Is it the same as direct action against weapons manufactures or going on hunger strike? Not at all. But translation is definitely part of the spectrum of solidarity in which these other actions also take place.

Now for translation in the service of hegemony. All of what I described above is taking place in the shadow of imperial power. All that solidaristic translation in Egypt happens in a country that is both vassal to the USA and co-warden to the Gaza ghetto. These relations of domination are held in place by a vast military-intelligence structure that seeks to secure American-Israeli hegemony—and translation is an integral part of that system. On the ground, there are terps in body armor at military checkpoints, on patrols, and on night raids. There are terps and linguists at forward operating bases, main operating bases, airfields, and training camps. There are also brigades of civilian linguists doing signals intelligence in Northern Virginia and providing real-time signals support to American patrols in Falluja or Kabul. There are military linguists poring over documents confiscated during raids, circulating in classified reports and occasionally leaking them for publication as part of a broader propaganda campaign. At each of these sites, translation performs key tasks in that system of control.

In terms of budget and infrastructure, there is no comparison between these two forms of translation activity. The hegemonic aspect enjoys massive funding, or at least it did until it started to replace human translators with machines. It employs thousands of translators, interpreters, and linguists at middle-class salaries. In contrast, the solidaristic aspect is mostly volunteer. But the material difference is just one dimension. Unlike those who work in the solidaristic sector, employee translators of the hegemonic sector are not free: they do not choose what to work on, and they are not at liberty to comment meaningfully on the conditions in which they work. I have heard amazing stories from Iraqi interpreters, but to my knowledge, none of them have published an account of their work in torture chambers or checkpoints. They may have left the employment of the US Army, but they are still not free. Their stories would transform how humanities scholars talk about translation.

YH: You’ve written that “Translation is not so much an antidote to war and dispossession but one of its central practices.” Can translation produce war and dispossession or merely accompany or reflect them?

EC: How could anyone working in Arabic-English translation not be aware of the scale of the violence and dispossession that takes place within the empire? Throughout my entire life, my country has always been at war with some part of the Arab world. I used to think of them as far-off wars in distant places, even if they were conducted in our name and with our tax dollars. But there is no firewall separating “wars over there” from life in the metropole. Where I live—Washington, DC—there are lots of people who’ve fled the violence and ruin caused by US empire in the Arab world, and lots of people who made their careers working for the US empire—whether in the military, intelligence, diplomatic service, or auxiliary services such as USAID. I live a few blocks from an excellent bar called the Green Zone. It’s one of the most popular bars in all of DC. Consider the ironies: its name originally derives from American football terminology but is now mostly associated with occupied Baghdad. The owner is Iraqi-American, the food and drink is Arab, and the clientele is absolutely mixed, and it includes white Americans who are nostalgic about their time in the CPA and diasporic Arabs who want to hear the incredible DJ Basbousa on the turntables. No doubt, more than a few ex-torturers have come to party in that place. War kills and it gives birth, it pushes and pulls on us in all sorts of directions. I mean this as a description, not a celebration.

This is the terrain where Arabic-English translation operates. Gramsci teaches us that language is a key component of all systems of control and domination. In situations of foreign military occupation where language is an especially fraught component of control, translation plays an outsized role. Translators (and interpreters) are the mediators—middlemen—who work the line between colonizer and colonized, occupier and occupied. They work along the frontier wherever that is.

YH: You also argue that there is a sharp discrepancy between translation as a “sacred” or redemptive practice (as theorized by St. Jerome, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and others) and the actual sites where Arabic–English translation most often takes place, historically and today. Could you elaborate on this discrepancy?

EC: There is a very old theology that casts a long shadow across the practice of translation. The miracle of the Septuagint is only one part of how this manifests. For instance, in some languages there is a sense that language is divine or that it is God-given. This is very explicit in the Abrahamic traditions. If God speaks your language, then certain things follow! Some words and phrases possess inherent powers and must be handled with great care, by people with special training. Mispronunciation can be a moral failing. Change is not a banal fact of language, but a sin. If your language has sacred zones, then blasphemy is a real thing. These issues come up when translating.

But one does not need to profess a particular faith to hold a theological approach to language. What else can explain the centrality of “untranslatability” within contemporary translation theory? Like the category of the sublime, untranslatability poses a theoretical problem without resolution. And yet somehow, in practice, people manage to translate the untranslatable. They may fail in some aspects, but others try. Look at some of the recent accomplishments in Arabic-English translation, and you’ll see what I mean. Humphrey Davies’ translation of Shidyaq stands out in this regard, as does Michael Cooperson’s translation of Hariri. My point isn’t that they are monumental successes—they are—but that they are experiments with translating dense, complex texts that some would call untranslatable, and they build upon earlier experiments.

I love languages and am in awe of things that happen in language. But I am not a believer in the notion that any aspect of language is sacrosanct. Language is something that is created by humans and belongs to us as humans, just as it belongs to this world, not the Hereafter. Other people are free to describe the natural ambiguities of language in terms of the divine. They are welcome to ascribe sacredness or purity to language, and I can’t stop them. Languages belong to everybody, and folks have a right to believe that “in the beginning there was the word” if they want to. But that doesn’t mean that the theological approach should have the last word. Maybe I say this only because my mother tongue is a mongrel mercantile language in which God never revealed anything?

YH: Is this sacred/profane duality of translation specific to the power dynamics between imperial languages and Arabic (and other so-called “strategic,” “critical,” or “less commonly taught” languages in U.S. military and security discourse), or do you see similar dynamics operating even between more linguistically and culturally proximate European languages?

EC: I am admittedly spitballing here, but I’m trying to draw some distinctions between how humanist and military translators approach language!

I see two approaches to language—and thus translation. On the one hand, there is an approach that celebrates the ambiguous aspects of language—how the meaning of texts and utterances can be undecidable or elusive. This approach has wide purchase in those schools of translation theory that don’t look at ambiguity as a challenge to grapple with, but rather as something to admire or contemplate for its own sake. In this approach, untranslatability is like an aesthetic sublime, a test case for the limits of intelligibility. On the other hand, there’s another approach—mostly absent from the humanities—that treats language as a wholly referential phenomenon.

We might think of these as two poles: the first places ambiguity at the heart of language; the second places denotation there. The first looks for (and invariably finds) ambiguity and then describes it in terms of sacredness and untranslatability. The second, which is wholly profane, seeks to reduce language to its referential plane. How does this profane pole approach translation? It attempts to legislate a system of equivalences.

Military translation projects are dedicated to this profane approach and proceed from the assumption that there’s an equivalence for every lexical item under the sun. Why is that? Perhaps it’s because our militaries are positivist institutions that don’t indulge in constructivist or historicizing epistemologies­. This has some implications for language. First and foremost, militaries seek to establish authoritative terminologies for their fields of operation: words should have fixed, clear meanings and nothing else. This referential approach brackets out the other common aspects of meaning-making, such as connotation, resonance, and so on. Polysemy and the ambiguities of figuration are not things to celebrate, but glitches to purge.

The desire for precision and clarity is not crazy: we probably don’t want killing machines that conduct their operations with a love of ambiguity and indeterminacy! Still, this approach fundamentally misunderstands the nature of language—which is why the military’s effort to stabilize language is never ending.

Maybe the clearest way to see this is in the fact that militaries love nouns—especially proper nouns. This belies an Adamic approach to language and the world. Every mission gets an individual name: Enduring Freedom; Cast Lead; Epic Fury. Sometimes, locations are rebaptized. In Iraq, the Americans quickly bestowed American names on Baghdad neighborhoods and streets—Main Street, Canal Road, Colorado Boulevard. When nouns become unwieldy, militaries turn them into authorized acronyms, each of which becomes a new name: FOB, CO, PX, SITREP, FITREP. These are organizations dedicated to the extreme nominalization of the world. I suspect this stems from a desire, a will to power, for pure referentiality between words and things.

In translation, this means they attempt to establish fixed tables of equivalence between words in one language and words in another. All dictionaries do this to some extent, of course, and dictionaries are exceedingly useful. But a translator who adopts a purely dictionary approach to language will produce objects that are wooden and dead.

The phrasebooks published by and for militaries are great examples of this approach—and we should be studying them more seriously, looking for how they introduce distortions and misunderstandings. In graduate school, I was struck by a passage in Orientalism when Edward Said tears apart Bernard Lewis’s discussion of the word “thawra.” Lewis, infamously, attempts to establish that the meaning of the word is to be found in its root “th-w-r,” which, according to Lewis, describes the action of a camel rising up. That lead me to spend some time with Bernard Lewis’s first publication, A Handbook of Diplomatic and Political Arabic (1947), which he authored during his service as an officer in Mandate Palestine. It’s an English-Arabic/Arabic-English handbook. While perusing it, I noticed some odd asymmetries, including one having to do with revolution. In the Arabic-English section, Lewis lists “coup d’état” as the translation of the word “thawra.” In the English-Arabic section, Lewis lists “inqilāb” as the translation of the word “revolution.” Imagine the poor British soldier in Nablus who is trying to wrap his head around this. No matter what the restless natives say about revolution, Lewis’s phrasebook is there to say that it can only mean “coup d’état”! The authority of this linguistic hall of mirrors is based on the promise of one-to-one equivalences. A philologist might correctly point out that the Arabic vocabulary of revolution—qalb, inqilāb and thawra—was in flux in the first half of the 20^th century. But Lewis’s handbook is not interested in word history and shifting usages, only timeless equivalences.

YH: It’s so interesting that you caught this tautological translation. This example also reminds me of how the term “intifada” has been isolated from its basic denotative meaning in English, severing it from other comparable uprisings in world history to create a linguistic imaginary for Palestinian resistance as a unique form of collective violence. 

Reflecting on the post-9/11 Arabic–English translation boom, you’ve noted that a significant proportion of translators and interpreters worked as military personnel or contractors in conflict zones. How does this context render translation a more “secular,” even “profane,” practice, in contrast to its idealization as sacred or ethical labor?

EC: That gets to the core of it! Humanist theorists of translation have yet to grapple with the scale of this other kind of translation that is going on all the time. This other kind of translation—military or hegemonic translation—is indeed profane, which may be why the theorists of “translation as sacred” don’t want to consider it. But to my mind, these are two halves of the same sphere of activity.

YH: Beyond the paradoxical and often complicit role of the military interpreter, you argue that interpreters were among the first individuals to be targeted by insurgents in places like post-2003 Iraq. Why were interpreters so vulnerable?

EC: To appreciate their vulnerability, we need to consider first the issue of collaboration. There is no history of military occupation without local collaborators. Empires have always known this truth—the Spanish in Mexico, the British in India, the French in Indochina. Empires also know that collaborators are not born. People become collaborators by way of circumstance, structure, and incentive. Thus, every successful military occupation develops strategies for conscripting collaborators. Usually, they start by exploiting pre-existing weaknesses, tensions, and fractures within the target society. Minorities who suffer discrimination, elites who are disaffected, those who live on the most precarious margins, those who harbor grievances and resentments, whose rights have been denied, and whose aspirations have been stifled. The list is not short. If a society’s solidarity is strong enough to resist these conduits of conscription, other forms of vulnerability can be generated: people can be blackmailed, shamed, and threatened. For decades, these have been routine tactics for the IOF wherever they operate in highly solidaristic societies, such as Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

Here’s the important thing: collaboration always exists within a moral economy. In every culture I’ve heard of, there is a strong moral aversion to collaborating with outsiders against one’s own community and a fierce condemnation of those who do it. People who collaborate are usually called traitors, and the punishment for treason is typically drastic. This moral economy seems entirely warranted. But it does get in the way of understanding the specific life circumstances and motivations of those who work as collaborators.

These questions apply directly to understanding the lives of translators and interpreters[1] in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. In this moral framework, it didn’t matter whether someone joined up because they were starving or because they thought the Americans would punish their enemies, or because they were naïve people who believed in the lofty principles outlined in CPA memoranda. When you go to work for the people who are holding your country at gunpoint, most people will judge you as a collaborator, or traitor. Translators knew this, which is why they hid their personal identity at work and hid their work from others in their family and community. This is true for the Iraqis in my extended family who went to work for the Americans in 2003, and for every Iraqi translator I’ve met. Some of them speak about their experience, but none boast of it. And none of them speak publicly about their experience. I wish they’d publish memoirs of their experience!

YH: I wish they did too! Maybe there’s an oral history project waiting to be pursued.

EC: Many of those who chose to work for the Americans learned a hard lesson: switching sides does not make you liked or respected by your new friends. Iraqi and Afghani interpreters quickly came face-to-face with the racist and Islamophobic culture of the American military and intelligence services. Yet, racism was only one aspect of the American aversion towards their own translators—for reasons that have to do with the moral judgment against those who collaborate. So strong is the aversion-condemnation of collaborators that people from opposite sides of a conflict will look at collaborators with the same contempt. US soldiers treated their translators with such suspicion that they invented a slur for them, terp, even as they depended heavily on them as guides and native informants for navigating all aspects of language, culture, and terrain.

This combination of suspicion and disdain was further intensified when the armed resistance began to exploit the weakness of the American dependence on translators in two ways: on the one hand, resistance agents—including armed militants—infiltrated the ranks of the local interpreters. On the other hand, the armed resistance began to specifically target translators, with the understanding that this would leave US units more ignorant of and disconnected from the context of their operations.

YH: You bring up the nineteenth-century figure of the “dragoman” while discussing modern warzone interpretation. Who is this figure, and what structural role did he play in imperial mediation? In what ways does the dragoman anticipate the modern military interpreter (“terp”) and reflect Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said’s theorization of the “native informant”?

EC: This is a real can of worms! I am not sure I would know how to theorize the dragoman, but if I were to, I would begin with what we know of the actual people who took up this role. First, for the most part, they were mostly liminal or marginal within the social worlds in which they operated: Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Levantinized Europeans, renegades. Their authority was not that of a native at all, but of someone who stood at an intersection. This in-between status was clearly crucial to how they did their work as linguistic, cultural, political, and economic guides. Second, they appear to have been heavily armed. It could have been just for show, but this fact is ubiquitous in the literature, painting, and photography. If we want to theorize the dragoman, we could start there: the translator who is armed, liminal, and appears to be formidable, if not dangerous.

YH: That’s a fascinating and terrifying character, and I’m glad to have learned about him through your essay. If the dragoman, the military interpreter, and the native informant are paradoxical figures who are supposed to speak “authentically” for a culture but are allowed to speak only within frameworks imposed by Western epistemology, does that truly set them apart from the literary translators embedded within the same epistemological frameworks and market restraints dictated by an imperial/colonial receiving culture?

EC: I appreciate this question a lot because it makes me realize that dragomen as historical personae have nothing to do with authenticity! One of my favorite dragomen is Giovanni Finati, an “Italian” who is conscripted into the French Army, then defects to the Ottoman army, then converts to Islam, and then works as a dragoman in Egypt before emigrating to England, where he ends his days as a Christian again. Finati’s authority stemmed from his familiarity with various “Others” and his ability to cross lines, change sides, and live in-between. He was a shape-shifting Other who knew how to move among and navigate between. He’s a man of prepositions, not identities. Representing some authentic Self was not Finati’s job. Rather, he performed the particular Self he needed to be depending on the context of his work. This is why he, like other dragomen, was as feared and mistrusted as he was handy and useful. I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect given the age and context of the Italian phrase, “traduttore, traditore” that it was first uttered to describe a dragoman like Finati.

Maybe because of this history, literary translators have been taught to emphasize their fidelity to the text. No one wants to be accused of betraying the original! And no one wants to be inauthentic. It’s as if we have been disciplined to make sure we are nothing like those dragomen of old.

YH: Given the shift toward remote warfare, drone technology, data-driven military operations, and AI, do Arabic–English translators and interpreters still primarily operate within conflict zones today? Or has the spatial and experiential location of translation changed alongside contemporary warfare?

EC: I can see why militaries might want to get rid of human interpreters—they are fallible middlemen with their own interests. But machine translation will not remove this problem! AI translators are fallible middlemen that work for the interests of their corporations.

There is an abiding dream for seamless perfect translation without human mediation. Douglas Adams called them Babel Fish. Today, you can purchase translation earbuds, like Timekettle and Galaxy Buds3.

YH: Does your analysis ultimately suggest that war and dispossession are untenable, or at least significantly less effective, without translation?

EC: The US Department of Defense thinks so, and I see no reason to disbelieve them.

American military and intelligence services spent billions of dollars on translation and interpretation in the years that followed 9/11. They hired thousands of native Arabic speakers from places like Baghdad and Karbala and Dearborn. Some of them died violently. Some were abandoned. Some were helped to immigrate to the USA. The scale of spending is astounding, as are the institutional investments they created, as are the stories of the translators and their families whose lives were changed by this history. It is thanks to a few researchers, such as Mona Baker and Madeline Otis Campbell, that we know anything about this.

To my eye, this is the big translation story of the past quarter century, especially for anyone seeking to grasp the role of translation along the linguistic frontiers between English and Arabic. For reasons I do not understand, translation scholars, as it exists within the humanities, have not noticed this much.

YH: What kinds of mistranslation, simplification, or erasure are most central to military occupation and counterinsurgency?

EC: Translation involves mistranslation: meanings are lost and gained as we work between languages. Some things are erased and simplified. Some things are revealed and expanded. For philosophers of language, such processes pose vexing questions. For some, it even poses existential questions about translatability and the possibility of meaning. This can be exciting for theoretical reflection, but it doesn’t always touch on the work of translation. A translator attempts to render sense and meaning from one system to another, and typically that is a practical, not theoretical, activity. Translators may fail. Some would say we always fail. But even so, something happens in the attempt, and it adds—or subtracts—from understanding across the divide of those systems.

I hope you don’t mind if I go off on a tangent about literary translation for a moment. We are so conditioned to fetishize individual book translations as either uniquely brilliant or uniquely faulty. We dismiss the latter as “mistranslations,” as if that were the end of the story. I think we do this because the field of Arabic-English literary translation is relatively underpopulated—there are many great works still untranslated and very few works with multiple translations. This is in contrast to many other literary fields where it is normal for multiple translations of a literary work to exist. How many English translations of The Oresteia exist? Of The Divine Comedy or War and Peace? Many! Does any one of those translations render all others worthless? Not at all. In those traditions, individual literary translations are treated as single experiments that occur in a longer chain of experiments. Some appear uniquely successful, but the assumption is that even the best translations will one day be surpassed by later ones. This seems like a great model to steal—and it would change the way we talk about mistranslation.

An experimental approach to literary translation would be a huge improvement. It would facilitate a richer, more playful approach to the questions of ambiguity and slipperiness that are inextricable parts of language. In translating literature, we can marvel at ambiguity, or not.

But whereas ambiguity in art often seems beautiful or interesting, ambiguity in life is usually a source of deep anxiety. Ambiguity in the context of a violent foreign occupation is a hinge between life and death. There’s an anecdote from Iraq that gets at this:

One day a pickup truck from the countryside rolled up to a checkpoint at the edge of the city. The truck bed was full, though you couldn’t see what it was, since it was covered with a tarp. But it was a heavy load, you could see this from how low the chassis sat. The Americans stopped the truck and ordered their interpreter to ask what was in the truck. The men didn’t hesitate. They shouted, “Rummān! Rummān!” The interpreter, who was not very good, translated it as, “Grenades!” The Americans opened fire, instantly killing the driver and passengers.

As Arabic speakers know, rummān refers to both pomegranate and grenade. It depends on context. Anyone with a curiosity about etymology will quickly see how European words for the fruit are related to the history of Arab Spain and how later they came to figure—in Europe—as the proper name for hand-held bombs. Later, this figurative usage was adopted in Arabic as well.

I heard this version from a former interpreter and other versions from people in other cities. In each case, the story serves to illustrate the dangers of mistranslation, ignorance, and polysemy. I find this anecdote useful because it illustrates how fragile life is when it is forced to depend on translation. The interpreter seems to have mistaken one sense of the word rummān for another, with fatal consequences. The problem is not one of untranslatability, even though there is a misunderstanding. More importantly, I think, is that the problem of mistranslation is just a proximate reason those farmers were murdered. The broader context—the US occupation­—is the deeper cause. In other words, it’s not about translation or mistranslation as an independent variable, but rather about translation that takes place in a condition of domination.

This is where we come back to ambiguity, that commonplace feature of language and thus translation. We should expect to find ambiguity in military translation—and wherever we do, we can expect the kind of brutal violence described in the story of the pomegranates.

YH: What a harrowing story! You suggest that much of translation theory has been developed through work between European languages that share grammatical structures, literary genealogies, and cultural frameworks—conditions that Arabic and other more linguistically distal languages do not share. How should this insight reshape the teaching of translation and literary studies in more ethical, candid, and materially responsible ways, especially when translators’ lives—among other lives—are at stake?

EC: In his essay, “Translation, Transduction, Transformation: Skating ‘Glissando’ on Thin Semiotic Ice,” the linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein talks about some of these questions quite forcefully. Silverstein reflects on experiences of translating between European languages and Native American languages—languages which are distant from one another. It’s not just that the language structures are so far removed from one another, but that they are rooted in cultures and histories that share little. To work between distal languages entails bringing pieces of these contexts into the picture. This is in contrast to working between languages that share grammatical structures, vocabulary, cultural references, and so on, as do what Silverstein calls “Standard Average European Languages.”

Consider translation between Italian and French: they share so much in terms of grammar, cognates, motifs, and Catholic cultural referents. Or between French and English, which share some grammar, a lot of vocabulary and motifs, and if not Catholic, then at least Christian cultural referents. Silverstein points out that most Western philosophical reflection on translation posits its theories on examples drawn from renderings that take place between exactly these sorts of languages, the “Standard Average European Languages.” If this is the norm for translation theory, Silverstein argues, then the intellectual work involved in rendering more distal languages is not translation. The useful phrase he employs is transduction—which I understand as rendering not just linguistic elements, but enough pieces of the cultural context of those works as to make them meaningful.

Silverstein’s observations invite us to take seriously the weight of spoken Arabic dialects even within the formal written register, and to think of al-lugha al-‘arabiyya not as a single entity, but as something plural. Arguably, it takes more work to render Baghdadi colloquial Arabic into Upper Egyptian or Moroccan urban Arabic than it takes to translate Portuguese into Spanish: why are these latter two languages imagined as separate but Arabic is considered to be one? The answer to that question goes back to the ideological concept of what is known as Fusha Arabic as a sacred language, whether that quality can be traced back to the Qur’an or Michel Aflaq.

YH: Finally, how might activist, feminist, or decolonial translation practices complicate or actively resist the claim that translation enables conflict, a claim you substantiate so powerfully through the case of militarized interpretation during the U.S. occupation of Iraq?

EC: I have learned late—very late—the value of collaborative projects. For a long time, I looked to the solo translator as an exemplary kind of literary genius. But to be a solo genius was not my destiny!

For the past five years, I have been working a lot with an Egyptian friend, Ahmed Hassan, who is a poet and activist and talented English-Arabic translator of Gramsci in his own right. In our work together, Ahmed and I have been translating a lot of Ahmed Fouad Negm’s work. We have completed one book, a collection of forty of Negm’s poems, translated with short commentary. We also translated Negm’s memoir, El-Fagoumi, which is coming out next year with Verso. Negm’s memoir­ is his only major work of ‘ammiyya prose, and it shows the poet as a master storyteller. There’s nothing like it in Arabic literature! But neither Ahmed nor myself could have done this work by ourselves. Translating colloquial Arabic is quite different from translating fusha.

Why collaboration? While I enjoy all sorts of privileges, I have come to appreciate my limitations as a thinker and translator, particularly as a non-precocious white guy who’s working with the words and ideas of other people in a language that isn’t mine, in a culture that isn’t mine—and not only that, but also in a place and a society that has been viciously ravaged by my people and government. Working with Arab collaborators helps me face some of these shortcomings more squarely.

Does this decolonize the process? Doubtful. But shifting to a collective labor mode has compelled me, as a translator, to make my choices more intentional, more deliberative, and less monologic. For these collaborations to work, we need to agree on an approach that is pragmatic rather than theoretical. We don’t proceed from the notion that some things are untranslatable. Nor do we imagine that we are the ones best poised to translate everything. We’re just translating things. It’s an experiment, with successes and failures. There’s nothing sacred or divine about the work we do.

While this approach hopefully improves the quality of the product, what I learn from the experience, and from the friendships that emerge from these experiences, are a value I have learned to treasure as much as the product. When I reflect on all this, it makes me think about Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s PROTA project, which was founded on collaborative work. She was wise.

At present, I have a few other translation projects afoot—all of them collaborations! Shout out to some of the brilliant grad students I’ve had the honor to co-translate with at Georgetown: Yousef Haddad, Fuad Saleh, Nina Youkhanna, Ahmed Saidam, and Mysoon Furani. A group of other students and I did a translation of Habiby’s Six-Day Sextet. And more is on the way. Language is a collective project, so it’s only natural that translation might also be done collectively.

YH: Beautifully said. Thank you for this rich conversation.

[1] Students of military translation distinguish sharply between these two kinds of conscripts. In these answers, I use them interchangeably, because the distinction is not so relevant in this context.

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 Zia Ahmed: Omani Literature and the Translator as Intruder

Yasmeen Hanoosh with Huda Fakhreddine: Translating Gaza/Gaza Translating Us