On Translation, Love, and Israeli Prison

This March, two new—and very different—translations by Addie Leak made their way into the world. The first was Bassem Khandaqji’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction-winning A Mask the Color of the Sky, in which a young Palestinian refugee borrows an Israeli ID he finds in a secondhand coat and takes on a new identity. The second was Areej Gamal’s Sawiris-winning debut novel, Mariam, It’s Arwa, a queer love story set around Egypt’s 2011 uprising. (Read an excerpt on ArabLit.)

Addie Leak talks with Tugrul Mende about the translation process, literary awards, and two very different translations processes: translating one book through a riot of multilingual voicenotes and another by an author who was inaccessible, in an Israeli prison.

Tugrul Mende: Mariam, It’s Arwa won the Sawiris Cultural Award for Emerging Writers in 2021 and came with a promise of translation. Can you tell us about your journey to working on this book for AUC Press?

Addie Leak: In 2021, New Writing North, a writing development agency in England, ran an Arabic-English/English-Arabic translation mentorship program that I was lucky enough to take part in. My mentor, Sawad Hussain, alerted me to an opportunity to translate an excerpt of Mariam, It’s Arwa for Words Without Borders’s queer issue, and I loved the book, so when Areej asked if I’d be willing to translate the whole thing, I said yes. Back then, Sawiris was still deciding how they wanted to use the translation funding, so it took some time before they struck a deal with AUC Press, but having Areej’s support gave me the confidence to continue working on the manuscript even without a signed contract.

TM: The novel address grief and trauma during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and it revolves around the stories of the titular Arwa and Mariam. How would you describe these two women and in particular the ways they navigate the political and social landscape of 2011?

AL: Mariam, who really feels like the heart of the book to me, was born in Riyadh to migrant parents and moved to Cairo when she was orphaned as a child. She was raised by a grandmother whose grief for her dead son colored everything about Mariam’s upbringing, and Mariam then struggled with illness on top of that, so she feels a bit directionless. Arwa, ten years her senior and with a much clearer sense of self, has just returned to Egypt from Germany for the first time since her own mother’s death, drawn to the change promised by the revolution. She has come to play the oboe for her comrades in Tahrir Square, to lift their spirits.

Both women seem to feel possibility in the air during the early days of the January Revolution, and their budding relationship mirrors that hope of building a new world. The stories they tell each other are heavy with past trauma, but the narration itself seems to me to be a way of sharing it and letting it go.

TM: This was Areej Gamal’s debut novel, after publishing short stories and other works. How did you work with her during the translation process—was it different from how you might work with a novelist at a different point in their career?

AL: In addition to being a writer, Areej is a translator from French to Arabic, so she’s already a pro when it comes to creating beautiful works of prose. As a translator, she also understood that her novel was occasionally a very difficult text to translate, and she was incredibly gracious about answering my questions. We communicated via email and WhatsApp, and my favorite messages were voice notes, a crazy mixture of Arabic, English, and French. Voice notes are great for artistic collaboration, if both parties have time for them . . . I feel like they break down any stiffness or formality that might get in the way of a translator asking “silly” (but super-important) questions; they add in a humanity that can be missing in email.

It’s possible that Areej was willing to spend more time responding to me because this was her first novel, but I think it had less to do with experience level and more to do with rapport and availability. Some writers have more straightforward texts or feel their work should speak for itself, and they prefer a more hands-off approach; some, like Bassem Khandaqji, are simply not available. A polite email with a few choice questions works for writers who prefer to be less involved, too. I try to take my cues from the writers I’m translating and the relationship we’ve built.

TM: How would you describe the language and style of Mariam, It’s Arwa? Were there novels you compared it to, in English or other languages, as you tried to work out how you’d render the style in English?

AL: The writing style is lyrical, sometimes surreal and dreamlike—a kind of fever dream. There are times that one of the two protagonists will break into the other’s section, or suddenly we’ll hear another voice speaking in someone’s memory (Mariam’s grandmother, for example, or Arwa’s mother), and they aren’t always marked in the Arabic with quotation marks or dialogue markers. This technique can make it unclear who is talking, blurring the characters and their experiences in a really interesting way. I don’t remember specifically seeking out comparisons for that aspect of the voice, but there are some I can think of: Han Kang’s We Do Not Part (trans. e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris), which I’m reading right now, or Muriel Barbery’s Thomas Helder (trans. Alison Anderson), which I’m editing. For Areej’s book, I ultimately tried to clarify some more confusing areas by adding in the occasional quotation marks or italics, but I refrained from doing so too often: I think the confusion is an important part of the reading process. Areej also repeats passages on different pages, which echoes what Nawal El Saadawi does in A Woman at Point Blank.

The novel is also divided into two parts—the first narrated by Mariam, the second by Arwa—and one way Areej differentiates between their voices is by having Arwa narrate in an Arabic that is closer to Egyptian dialect rather than the Modern Standard Arabic usually used in literature. That choice makes a lot of sense; Arwa was educated in international schools and has been living in Germany for years by the time she meets Mariam, so her formal Arabic has grown rusty from lack of use. But it did add a new challenge for me. I’m inclined to agree with Jonathan Wright that, as translators into English, we can’t really reflect that diglossic split between formal and colloquial Arabic, so I didn’t aim to use, for example, some kind of English dialect. The way I saw it, Arwa is basically just speaking more concretely than Mariam, who considers herself a failed poet and is more given to lyricism and metaphor. So I made myself a set of rules and restrictions for Arwa’s voice as I translated, things like more staccato sentences, more idioms, and a more colloquial register, using occasional “world English” that reflects her exposure to both US and UK ways of speaking, as well as Arabic- or German-inflected turns of phrase.

TM: How does this fit in the landscape of other novels set around the Egyptian revolution? Are there others you recommend reading along with Mariam, It’s Arwa?

AL: Noor Naga’s If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English (Graywolf, 2022) takes place in the aftermath of the revolution; it’s another novel about two disparate worlds colliding romantically, and it has a similar dream-like quality, if decidedly less hope. While I was translating scenes from the revolution, I also read Ahdaf Soueif’s Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed (Pantheon, 2014) and Ashraf Khalil’s Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation (St. Martin’s, 2012). Two books I didn’t get a chance to read during the process but still want to(!): Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins (MCD, 2017), a novel about two young people on the front lines of the revolution, and Yasmin El-Rifae’s Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution (Verso, 2022), which tackles the sexual harassment and assault that was prevalent (as glimpsed in Mariam, It’s Arwa) during the protests in Tahrir and how the protestors fought back. Alaa Al Aswany’s polyphonic novel The Republic of False Truths (Knopf, 2021), as translated by S.R. Fellowes, is another classic of the revolution.

TM: How do the current sociopolitical landscapes of Egypt and Palestine—particularly that of ongoing genocide in Palestine—affect your reading of the novels and your approach to translation?

AL: It certainly makes me more certain than ever of my career path . . . I’m so grateful to be involved in bringing these voices into English, and I know that my career has spanned enough disparate worlds that people who might not otherwise have picked up a novel by a Palestinian or Egyptian author will now. I’m glad to be able to hand them Bassem Khandaqji’s novel, for example, and know that they might come away with a clearer sense of Israeli apartheid. Engaging with fictional worlds instills empathy that has been sorely—and incomprehensibly—lacking in western countries when it comes to the Palestinian cause, as well as, more broadly, to the political upheaval and war occurring in Arab countries in general. So I’m glad I can bring Bassem’s and Areej’s characters into English, to a new audience.

TM: A Mask the Color of the Sky won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. What affect do you think does this prize has on the “world literature” landscape? Do you think people are more eager to review, discuss, and engage the novel in translation because it won this prize that’s affiliated with the Booker?  

AL: Oh, for sure. I think the IPAF and the genocide in Gaza both affected general interest in the translation. It came out exactly one week before Mariam, It’s Arwa, but I’ve definitely seen a bit more chatter about Mask, which is amazing on the one hand and disappointing on the other (I love Areej’s novel, and I want it to get more love, too!). The IPAF is doing so much to raise the profile of Arabic literature in English, though it’s my hope that publishers and readers will also adventure beyond the shortlist because there’s definitely a lot more out there.

Every prize-granting body naturally has its own culture and set of expectations, so IPAF winners provide only a partial vision of what’s being created within the larger Arabic-language context. I hope to see more Anglophone publishers use them as a jumping-off point to get excited about Arabic literature.

TM: This novel was written entirely from behind bars and unlike some other prison novels, the setting is not a cell. As you’re one of its closest readers, can you see ways in which the context in which it was written appears in its style, its language?

AL: The amount of research Bassem did is impressive; it’s a real feat to write with this much detail about things on the outside he wasn’t able to access. It’s clear that he used every resource at his disposal, including the knowledge of his fellow detainees. His own voice and experience are most clearly present in the character of the protagonist’s best friend, Murad, who also used his time in detention to continue his education, honing his knowledge of political science and colonialism and finding hope in writing.

I would also imagine that Bassem’s use of letters and voice notes in the text may have resulted from the way he was forced to write due to restrictions on writing materials and the very real danger that his work would be confiscated; they read like an inner monologue, the way someone living largely inside his own mind, or writing within his mind, might eventually commit words to paper. For that matter, the imagined conversations between the Palestinian protagonist, Nur, and his Israeli “mask,” Or, whose identity he has assumed, might also reflect the prison setting; we tend to have imaginary conversations in our heads with people we’re angry with, frustrated by, or trying to understand. It’s a way of clarifying our thoughts, right? Without access to another outlet for such conversations, it makes sense to me that Bassem would have Nur engage in something similar.

TM: How was it working on a novel where, until recently, you didn’t have any access to the author? Did it change any of your translation decisions?

AL: I translated very deliberately, that’s for sure. For most of the process, I relied on myself and on colleagues I queried about sticky points, but toward the end, shortly before Bassem was released, I was able to reach out to his brother Yousef, who was a big help in answering the few questions I still had. A colleague of mine also recommended I look for other translations of the novel to see if those translators had any insight I was lacking, and I was able to use the Italian translation to cross-check one issue I had been waffling over.

TM: Since you’ve now published two big translations (in the same month), do you have any advice for emerging translators who want to find their footing?

AL: Network network network! I started my career translating French, and because it’s one of the “big three,” along with Spanish and German, it felt really hard to break into; there was kind of the sense of “there’s not room enough for the both of us, kid,” so I didn’t get the guidance or connections I needed to navigate the practical aspects of the craft. I think it was also bad luck; I didn’t meet the right people—perhaps because I didn’t look hard enough for them. Luckily, thanks largely to Sawad, I now feel like I’ve found a home among some insanely warm, friendly translators from Arabic to English, who have encouraged and supported me from the get-go. Like I said, Sawad is the reason I did the excerpt from Mariam, It’s Arwa. And my Arabic translation practice has just snowballed from there.

TM: What are you working on now? 

AL: Right now, I’m looking for a home for A Year of the Radio, by the Lebanese author

Renée Hayek. It was longlisted for the IPAF in 2017 but somehow hasn’t yet made it into English. It’s a Sally Rooney-esque story about a young speech therapist in Beirut who has two crises at once—unemployment (she’s fired for daring to ask for boundaries at work) and a car accident—and finds herself working as an unpaid radio presenter, doing a segment on speech and behavioral problems, where parents can call in and ask for advice. She uses the gig to get private clients and can earn a little money that way. She lives with her parents, struggles to find a healthy relationship, and longs to emigrate but can’t seem to pull together enough cash. It’s darkly funny and very relatable, but all from a Christian Lebanese perspective. I love it.

I’m also judging the American Literary Translation’s National Translation Award in Prose, so I have stacks and stacks of books to read through, and I’m reveling in it.

Tugrul Mende is a regular contributor to ArabLit.