On Translating Egyptian Village Life
On Translating Egyptian Village Life
With R. Neil Hewison
In this conversation with R. Neil Hewison, we discuss what brought him to Mohamed Mansi Qandil’s The Country Doctor’s Tale, the pleasures of the Egyptian village novel, Mansi Qandil’s attention to women’s pain, and what makes a “modern classic.” Also today: Read an excerpt from the novel in Hewison’s translation.
What drew you to translating this book? Can you talk a bit about what leads you not just to enjoying a book, but wanting to translate it? You certainly seem to be interested in novels about Egyptian village life.
R. Neil Hewison: I came across the book by chance — I was browsing in a Cairo bookstore and the cover grabbed my attention. I bought it, read it, and loved it. Apart from appreciating the direct and unpretentious writing style and the satisfyingly unpredictable narrative arc, I was certainly drawn in by the rural setting — a small, out-of-the-way village in Upper Egypt. I was raised in the English countryside, so I’m essentially a country boy, and the novel also resonated very much with my early experience of Egypt, when I lived in the Fayoum, at the same time the novel is set, the early 1980s. I taught English in Fayoum town but frequently visited student friends in many of the villages of the province — some, like the village of the novel, as yet unconnected to the electricity grid. (The cover photograph is one I took forty years ago of a Fayoum village I used to visit regularly.) So as I read the novel I could see the mist on the fields, feel the muddy lanes under my feet, and smell the mixed aroma of crops, animals, and kerosene lamps. I was familiar with the protagonist’s surroundings and neighbors, and with some of his travails. As for choosing to translate the novel — how could I not? It was made for me, and I for it!
How important do you think it is, as a translator, that you’re able to see, hear, smell, and visualize the work, when it comes to recreating it in another language? Would you be as ready to take on a compelling village novel set in Morocco or Kuwait, for instance (assuming you have not spent a lot of time here)?
RNH: I wouldn’t say it’s essential, but any kind of connection or affinity to the work is surely an extra stepping-stone in helping a translator engage fully with the text — it’s another level of understanding besides the linguistic and the cultural, and is thus likely to enhance the outcome. With no sensory experience of Moroccan or Kuwaiti milieux, in addition to other possible linguistic or cultural hurdles, I would no doubt have to work that much harder to reach a full enough understanding of such texts. It would be a challenge, though not necessarily an insurmountable one.
You mention a few other classics among Egyptian countryside novels in your afterword. If you were going to suggest other novels for people who enjoyed this one — or other novels to enrich their reading of this one — what might they be?
RNH: I would suggest Taha Hussein’s The Days and Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s Egyptian Earth for immersion in the reality of Egyptian village life. And then Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Diary of a Country Prosecutor and Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land for insight into the feelings of an outsider like our protagonist doctor (or myself) landing in the initially unfamiliar rural environment. There’s something very cinematic about The Country Doctor’s Tale, so I’d also recommend watching classic Egyptian films like al-Zoga al-tanya (The Second Wife), Du’aa al-karawan (Call of the Curlew), al-Ard (The Land, based on Sharqawi’s Egyptian Earth), and Shay’ min al-khof (A Touch of Fear).
All the books, in your list, were written by men. And indeed, many of the works about village life in Egypt that come to mind, for me, were written by men, with some exceptions, like Hanaa Metwally (يوم آخر للقتل) and Rehab Loai (قرية المائة), and of course there are Miral al-Tahawy’s exploration of Bedouin life. Has it seemed to you that women have been more likely to set their books in Cairo and Alexandria?
RNH: That’s an interesting observation. I’m not familiar with the two books you mention, and I’d like to take a look at them. Meanwhile, we should continue to look around and see if there really is an author-gender divide intersecting with the urban/rural divide in Egypt. And what about other parts of the Arab world? Perhaps somebody’s research topic right there!
And second, about Qandil’s complex and varied women characters: How does it change the story that they are such a dominating force? (Vs., for instance, a Hamdy al-Golayyel novel where women are largely peripheral?)
RNH: Yes, the presence of a variety of three-dimensional women characters in The Country Doctor’s Tale impressed me from the start. Their varied experiences of the patriarchy and the ways they weather, manipulate, or succumb to it are well drawn, I think. The way they are presented to us varies too: we get to know Farah and her motivations largely through the perceptions of the male narrator, with his foibles (see below), while we become more directly acquainted with al-Jazya’s mind through her epic performative narration of the story of her legendary namesake. Meanwhile, the narrator’s mixed standards with regard to women are all too human, and round out his own flawed character — he looks for sexual gratification from some (Farah, al-Jazya, the unnamed prostitute), but empathizes sincerely with others (al-Jazya, Jalila, the Umda’s wife, the old woman with the boil on her back); he listens to the voice of Fairouz on the radio for comfort of the soul, but places unrealistic romantic expectations on his former fiancée Faten. Most of the other men in the novel — Desougi, Eissa, Bastawisi, the ma’mour, the umda — are in general depicted less sympathetically than the women.
This isn’t a question, but: One thing that really strikes me is that he is so attentive to women’s pain, physical and psychological. (Not that the narrator necessarily is, but that the narrative is.) I find it odd to say but I think that, among the many doctor-writers, Mansi Qandil is one of the few that pays close attention to women’s particular suffering.
RNH: That’s very interesting. Perhaps he’s just attentive to pain in general? I’m currently reading his Katiba sawda’ — in the opening chapter the pain and suffering caused by a brutal slaving expedition to a remote Dinka village in what is now South Sudan are vividly described and quite horrific, and affect a whole community: men, women, and children.
When translating words that are used as slurs, or derogatorily, what considerations do you bring to the process? I’ve seen several conversations on the Arabic<–>English literary translators google group about the translation of ghaghar, nawar, halebi. What are your thoughts?
RNH: The author uses the Arabic term ghagar — pejoratively when spoken by antagonistic characters, neutrally by the sympathetic protagonist, and proudly by al-Jazya, the “Gypsy queen” herself. I read as widely online as I could, and found that “Gypsy” is not always considered derogatory in English by members of the community themselves — some in Britain (where, as elsewhere, they are often marginalized and sometimes persecuted) prefer “Roma,” while some call themselves “Gypsies” positively. “Roma” is a specifically European term, not appropriate to the communities in the Middle East, who are sometimes referred to by sociologists (but not by the groups themselves) as Dom. And “Traveler,” another term sometimes used in Britain and Ireland, didn’t seem to fit here either. So I kept to “Gypsy” — and I certainly hope (as I’m sure the author does too) that nobody will be offended.
Do you think the reader misses out, at all, if they don’t know Abu Zayd al-Hilali or the Banu Hilal epic? Was there any moment where you felt the need to thicken the translation, to add in any extra background?
RNH: Al-Jazya’s performance is described so well, and the story-telling context in the great tent with the keen audience of farmers is so clear, that I don’t think it matters if a reader is unaware of the Banu Hilal epic: the well-established atmosphere and the farmers’ expectations and animated reactions to the telling all make it plain that this is a cultural event of long tradition and that the audience is familiar with how the tale is conventionally told, even if we are not. I don’t recall needing to add background to the epic, but I did insert a brief gloss at one point to explain the reference to “the months of iddah” as al-Jazya of the Banu Hilal secures her divorce from the sharif of Mecca: “the prescribed waiting period after a divorce before a woman can remarry” — a bit clunky, but it seemed necessary, to bridge a cultural information gap (and I hate footnotes in translated fiction), and of course al-Jazya the story-teller wouldn’t have needed to add that for her audience. By the way, I find this long passage (sixteen pages) devoted to al-Jazya’s narration structurally fascinating: it’s a tale within a tale, in the tradition of the Thousand Nights and a Night, that transports us temporarily far away and long ago to a different world entirely — which makes what happens next all the more disruptive and shocking. It also serves to reveal a lot about al-Jazya’s attitude to the relations between women and men.
You quote Shereen Abouelnaga in the afterword as saying that this novel was “one of the classics now.” Which is, I suppose, surprising for a book that came out less than a decade ago. What makes a book a classic? And what makes this book a classic?
RNH: I do think a book (or a film, or a play) can become recognized as an “instant” classic — not just after decades have elapsed. But quite how that happens may be a mystery. I suppose it’s some kind of general consensus that a work is more than simply a good read, that it stands out/apart on some level, marks a departure within a genre, sets a new, higher standard? Certainly a work to be admired or celebrated for a particular aspect, or aspects — whether prose style, narrative arc, character development, moral stance, bold breaking of taboos, or other elements of note. I’m happy to accept Shereen’s designation of The Country Doctor’s Tale as “one of the classics” — she knows far more about the field than I do. I don’t feel qualified to deploy the term myself, but certainly I find this novel outstanding, on multiple levels, and well worthy of the wider attention I hope it now receives in translation.
Some forms of humor can be very tricky to translate: language play, naturally, and humor that relies on a wider cultural knowledge. On the other hand, the darkly comic seems to translate relatively easily, perhaps because we can all imagine ourselves in these helpless absurdist positions, as when the doctor must bring in his ballots. Did you make any conscious effort with the humor? Or how did it play out, in your translation process?
RNH: Humor based on language play or cultural knowledge can be a real challenge in translation. There’s a passage in another novel I translated, Wedding Night by Yusuf Abu Rayya, where the humor depends on a hashish-hazed character misunderstanding the word sayyara in a verse of the Qur’an (12:19, where it means “a company of travelers”) as the Modern Standard Arabic word for “car” and insisting that in the Qur’anic story of the patriarch Joseph a passing driver needed water for his engine and in drawing water from a well pulled up Joseph in his bucket. (“Listen to this imbecile. What are you on about, a driver? Did they have cars in those days?”) It works in Arabic because while the character here knows “car” in Egyptian Arabic as ‘arabiya, he also has just enough education to know that in MSA it is sayyara. But how to convey the same verbal mix-up in English? I wrestled with this one and eventually used “traffic” for sayyara. (“What does ‘traffic’ mean, folks?” “Cars, of course.”) Not ideal, but the best I could do — and that’s the kind of translation challenge that language play can throw up. But fortunately for me, the humor in The Country Doctor’s Tale (as in the episode of the ballot boxes, in the doctor’s search for a hotel room in town, or in Mahrous’s innovative use of molluscicide) is situational and comes across easily in translation with no special effort on my part: it’s told with a straight face, so I translated it with one.