I recently read through Adam Talib’s translation of Khairy Shalaby’s The Hashish Waiter, out this spring from AUC Press. Adam was kind enough to get into an email debate over such questions as whether Shalaby’s descriptions sometimes work at cross-purposes and what it means to sound pretentious. Read on to find out what would cause “the whole literary community” to “have a heart attack, stroke out, and soil themselves.”
When I first began gathering “rules for translating,” in the vein of these “rules for writing” (and these), I was expecting newspapers and magazines to elbow each other out of the way for such illuminating material. Really.
Australian writer and publisher Carmen Callil, one of this year’s Man Booker International judges, certainly has had her share of quotables this year. The most famous one—about Philip Roth sitting on her face—unfortunately has nothing to do with Arabic literature.
Iraqi poet and Poetry Translation Centre (PTC) workshop leader Worod al-Musawi has called translation “the most exhausting form of creativity one can do.” She recently spoke to The Conversation Papers about translation and Iraqi poetry. Here at ArabLit, she answers questions about her work with the PTC. This is part II of a series that began with PTC founder Sarah Maguire.
Since a trip up north isn’t in the cards, I sent some questions to Jennifer Chevalier, the center’s Assistant Director. She very helpfully separated my questions into two piles and directed some to PTC founder and poet Sarah Maguire and some to Arabic-language poet and PTC translation-workshop leader Worod Musawi. What follows is the first half, the Q&A with Sarah Maguire.
For many years, the field of Arabic-English translation was dominated by a very few. Denys Johnson-Davies, who Edward Said called “the leading Arabic-English translator of our times,” was the first professional Arabic-English translator. For several decades, he was virtually the only literary-minded author who turned Arabic books into English.
Humphrey Davies’ translation of Eliash Khoury’s 2007 كأنها نائمة, As Though She Were Sleeping, is now available in the UK. I wish the Marilyn Booth translation (Archipelago, 2012) were out at the same time, so we could compare their strategies. This book is a particularly complex beast: Khoury’s novels have long been interested in what language can’t (and can) do, but كأنها نائمة is perhaps his most language-obsessed work.
Edward Said once called Denys Johnson-Davies “the leading Arabic-English translator of our times.”
During the discussion portion of the “Al Thawra al Daahika” talk yesterday, translator Humphrey Davies asked presenters: Would you, then, sacrifice any laughter in the reader?
