Translating Trauma, the Trauma of Translating
Leri Price on Translating Samar Yazbek’s Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life: Voices from Gaza
In Conversation with Tugrul Mende
In Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life: Voices from Gaza, Samar Yazbek made it her task to meet with the survivors of an ongoing genocide. While news headlines inform, this book tries to bring forward the human element to the forefront of the genocide. In this book, translated by Leri Price and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2026, readers get a small glimpse of what Palestinians in Gazan have endured in the last three years, alongside a sliver of hope.
Here, Leri Price, who has a long working relationship with Samar Yazbek, talks about the referred trauma (and guilt) of translating testimonies from a genocide, how she worked with translators bringing the book into other languages, and the particular challenges of translating this book.
Tugrul Mende: This isn’t the first work by Samar Yazbek that you’ve translated to English (Where the Wind Calls Home, Planet of Clay). In what way was this book different to work on, for you?
Leri Price: The main difference was that the other works were novels, and this was the first time I had translated anything from Samar’s project of collective memory. This meant that I wasn’t thinking about the text primarily as a work of art, but as a means of conveying the voices it contains. It required different techniques of translation because each testimony has its own inner logic, but that logic isn’t necessarily consistent across the work as a whole in the same way that a novel or even a short-story collection is. Taken together, the testimonies form a new, awful logic, a sort of coherence that arises out of fragmentation.
It was also vital that readers get a sense of the individual giving their testimony. Samar’s literary writing has a very strong and distinctive voice, whereas each of the witnesses had a different voice. Tapping into that was a technical challenge, as well as an emotional one.
Finally, just knowing where these testimonies come from was devastating. I have translated plenty of upsetting scenes in novels which have usually been drawn from real events, but those scenes are part of a structure that also draws in other light and shade. Plus, in a work of fiction, you are more distanced from what you’re writing about. The sheer relentlessness of the testimonies was a new challenge.
TM: In an earlier discussion with Olivia Snaije, Samar talked about how it feels now—at the moment this book is emerging in translation—vs. how it felt when she was putting it together, in the context of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. How have the changing political landscape—and the things that haven’t changed—affected how you approached the book and the testimonies inside? How do you think about the process of shaping their voices in another language?
LP: I don’t think the testimonies themselves have been affected much. They describe the days and weeks following 7 October 2023, and what happened, happened. If anything, the accumulated knowledge we now have of that time (thanks to Gazans themselves) reinforces their truth.
But yes, the translation as a whole has been produced in an increasingly awful context. The past two and a half years have felt like an exploration of just how far political rhetoric will bend in order to accommodate the Israeli government’s derangement. It made the book feel increasingly urgent and necessary as a refutation to the politics that denies Palestinian personhood and enables genocide.
TM: This book is also translated into German. Are you in conversation with other translators from other languages? Has that ever been part of your process? And what about talking with Samar? How has she been involved in the translation?
LP: Not just German! It has also been translated into French and Italian, and I think the Swedish translation is currently in progress. This was quite an unusual process, as it was important for all of us that the translations appeared as quickly and consistently as possible. Considering how upsetting the text is, we also wanted to limit how much Samar was being asked to revisit it. Samar’s agent Yasmina Jraissati set up a shared document, and the translators put their queries in there. I was also able to see parts of the French translation which came out last year, and it was helpful to be able to see how other translators dealt with the text.
Generally, I do get in touch with other translators where I can. We help each other with queries (and encouragement). Larissa Bender and I often work on the same texts, for example. I really enjoy being able to discuss a work with other people who also know it well, and who can discuss the thornier parts.
TM: In the book, you wrote about a few of the difficult translational decisions, for instance about how to render missiles and bombs in English. Were there particular linguistic difficulties that were—if not unique—then particular to this project?
LP: Specific to this book, there was a phrase along the lines of “trapped under the rubble” at least once in every testimony. I wasn’t concerned about the repetition – it is part of the genocide – but I was concerned that if there wasn’t at least minor variation in the phrasing, people would skip over it, or it would lose its impact. The balance between drumming home the relentless nature of the bombings and keeping the language moving was a difficult one to strike.
TM: Certainly for Samar this choice of subject matter, and the way in which she presents it, was a moral act. How do you see your choice to translate it?
LP: Yes, it’s a moral act. I don’t feel capable of very much in the face of such overwhelming horror, but handling these stories with care and respect, being as truthful and as transparent as possible in conveying them to Anglophone readers, is something I can do.
TM: When you look at the past years since the start of the genocide, do you witness a shift in literary/readerly interest? What do you make of the appearance of many more books about Palestine?
LP: Well, it’s a sad truth that interest in Middle Eastern literature seems to be correlated with how much any particular country is in the news. I believe there is often an anthropological interest, in the sense that readers want “explanations” for a conflict, rather than approaching translated texts as a form of literature. (Samar has also discussed her frustration about this.) Certainly, there is a tendency to consider literary innovation in translated Arabic texts as “difficult” rather than “experimental,” “ground-breaking,” “pioneering,” and the like, when it’s not just ignored altogether.
That being said, I’ve noticed that Palestinian poetry seems to be having more of a moment, which for me is a good sign that people are engaging with writing on a literary level rather than a merely anthropological one. And similarly to your previous question, there is also a feeling among some publishers that publishing literature from dehumanized groups is a moral act, which will naturally add to the number of books being published on that topic. I will always welcome more translations and more voices.
TM: Fitzcarraldo has brought out several important nonfiction works from Arabic in recent years: Alaa Abdelfattah’s, Bushra al-Maqtari’s, now this. How has it been working on nonfiction; how is your approach different from when you’re working with fictional narratives?
LP: I love Fitzcarraldo’s list and it has been an honor to be published alongside Alaa Abdelfattah and Bushra al-Maqtari. In terms of fiction and nonfiction… there are different kinds of nonfiction of course, so it’s hard to generalize. When I translate literary nonfiction from Samar, I am still aware of it as an artefact and a coherent whole. The testimonies, however, are by nature fragmented, inconsistent, sometimes incoherent. In nonlinear fiction (or nonlinear nonfiction), there is usually an expectation that inconsistencies should be identified and smoothed out, at least for the editorial team – the writer/translator/editor should be clear on what happened when, even if the intent is to disorient the reader. But the testimonies come from traumatized witnesses, and we don’t always know what happened, or where people had perhaps lost their train of thought and mixed up different bombings and massacres. Some of the events remain opaque to us, and the witness’ voice was our guide through this confusion. So, I think the main difference in this instance was the insistence on coming back to the voice itself, keeping the inconsistencies subordinate to the story as it was told to Samar, rather than the other way around.
TM: Sawad Hussain has talked a bit about the referred trauma of translating Bushra al-Maqtari’s What Have You Left Behind? How do you approach this aspect of the work?
LP: Well, first of all, it’s important to note that the rest of this answer is about the experience of translating the testimonies. I know that is an obvious thing to say, but I don’t want to suggest that I think there is any comparison between the translation process, and what Samar and the witnesses themselves went through.
I spoke a lot with Sawad about what it is like to translate works of this kind, and I’ve also discussed it since with a medical interpreter who works in a different language pair. I had already read up on Sawad’s experience and sought advice from her before I began, but even so I was unprepared. There were physical and mental effects – insomnia, nightmares, panic, anxiety, dissociation. You spend hours a day with these narratives over the course of months, and you don’t have the same mental cushion that fiction provides, in that you aren’t thinking about how to convey an effect or how an upsetting scene fits into the structure as a whole. This is simply what happened to people.
I tried various strategies including meditation, exercise, taking time to think about the witnesses at the end of the day, building in crying time. I worked in public where I could, because it was easier to transition out of that headspace both through commuting time, and also through being able to step out of the text and watch a different kind of life unfold around me if I needed a break. In some ways, though, it intensified the guilt that came with this work – what right do I have to get so upset when I can close my laptop and walk away, when I haven’t lost my family or my limbs, when I live in a safe place? Isn’t it self-indulgent to get so upset?
Part of the weirdness of this process was spending time in this all-consuming, deeply painful hell, and then having this entirely disconnected other life where things just carry on as normal and it’s impossible to communicate what in going on in that other, parallel dimension. In that sense, it was a bit like grief. Now the book is out, I have found that speaking to people who have read it, having the opportunity to discuss it with Samar on the bookshop tour, speaking to audiences about their experiences, has helped me process it. The truth is that however terrible it is, we have to carry on as best we can. I’m ready for the next one.
Tugrul Mende is a regular contributor at ArabLit.
Also read:
Samar Yazbek on Redefining Collective Memory