Translation as Service: The Case of Arabic Literature

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Recently, my translation of the short story “The Cat” from the Arabic was published in ArabLit Quarterly. The story was written by the pioneering Lebanese feminist author Laila Baalbaki; it is the third story of hers to ever receive an English translation. There are two other translations from the same short story collection Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon (which “The Cat” is part of), one by literary translator Maia Tabet and another by literary translator Denys Johnson-Davies.

While the works of Arabic female authors such as Hanan al-Shaykh continue to be translated and go on to receive critical acclaim, the works of earlier authors such as Baalbaki are largely ignored. This erasure is unfortunate, especially since the Arabic literary feminist movement we celebrate today owes itself to people such as Baalbaki—in fact, Baalbaki was once al-Shaykh’s geography teacher.

People outside literary and/or academic circles usually don’t understand the purpose of translation; after all, as Shawkat Toorawa once said, “The main reason translation is an act of love is because it’s thankless.” The translator fades into the background as the work itself comes to the foreground. If readers cannot tell the work is a translation, this is a sign the translator has succeeded.

But translation is an act of love in many ways. First, you must love the text and the author, the ideas the text presents, and the language itself. You must be drawn to it. But perhaps more importantly, you must find the text so valuable and beautiful—or somewhere in between these two—that you are willing to do the labor of translating, knowing that you will be sidelined.

If translation is an act of love, it is also a service. When I translated Baalbaki, I wanted to recover lost stories—Baalbaki’s own story, as well as the stories she wrote. To the non-Arabic reader—and oftentimes even the Arabic one—Baalbaki does not figure into their perception of history, be it the history of feminism, modern Arabic literature, or world literature (in English— Baalbaki’s novel I Live has been translated to French). Baalbaki’s works were out of print in Arabic after the 1960s until the Lebanon-based Dar al-Adab republished her only three works in 2010 with a single print run. (Last summer, I went on an extensive quest to find all three books in Lebanon.) I mention this because Balbaki was lost to Arabs as well.

Whenever I look back at my modern Arabic literature class at university, which was taught in English translation, I think about all the works we couldn’t read because of the lack of translations. Often, the stories that are chosen for translation and published by trade presses are, if not orientalist, “orientalizable.” They must be stories about oppressed women, veils, violence, and war—or stories that can be read to fit such narratives. The characters must be victims or “victimizable.” That said, there’s a growing set of publishers willing to take risks and publish translations that might not sell in the same way. Often, the translators of “good” literature are academics who have teaching jobs and cannot be prolific in the same way full-time translators are. There is also a growing group of full-time Arabic–English translators—they deserve all the love and appreciation in the world—but there just aren’t enough people to do all the work. Against this (grim) backdrop, every short story, every poem, counts.

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“The Cat” weaves together two stories: that of story of a teenage girl who dates an older man and that of a family of cats. It is a highly unconventional story—experimental, even. There is no mention of war, violence, or oppression; instead, it is a Bildung-story, a coming-of-age of sorts (as much as the length of a short story allows) about freedom, rebellion, and jealousy. Someone who knows the Lebanese or Arab context will detect the subtle references to a patriarchal society, to the tension between the “traditional” and the “modern.” Yet, it is unconventional in its approach, and it doesn’t cede so easily to the Arab(ic) stereotype.

More than anything, that’s why I translated “The Cat.” As I worked on the translation at home in Beirut this summer, I knew that what I was doing was “thankless,” but I also imagined “The Cat” possibly making it to syllabi around the (Anglophone) world. A pioneering woman in Arabic letters, Baalbaki ought to be taught not only in Arabic literature classes, but also in global feminism and history classes (taught in English). 

Undoing negative stereotypes is not an easy task, and the stereotypes are here to stay in the short term. Nonetheless, I hope that with a growing body of “non-orientalizable” Arabic literature in translation, readers and students from all around the world nuance their understanding of Middle Eastern society and culture.

I translated Baalbaki into English; it’s now up to others to translate her into other languages, minor and major.

Artwork by Myriam Louise Taleb

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