maia tabet and Yasmeen Hanoosh are Arabic-English literary translators who have spent decades living and translating from multiple diasporic locales. In this conversation, they retrace the trajectories of their experience as translators, uprooted Arab women, and bilingual diasporic subjects to identify intersections and divergences along their paths.
Yasmeen Hanoosh & maia tabet
YH: Why translation? How did your journey with translation begin?
MT: Other than a few “technical” documents here and there, which I’d be asked to translate because my English was “native,” translation as a calling/imperative/labor of love began when I was about 25 and discovered the writing of Elias Khoury. At the time, Khoury was writing a column in the Arabic-language newspaper, As-Safir, chronicling the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Every time I read one of those columns, I felt a compulsion to translate it into English because there were people I loved who didn’t speak Arabic with whom I wanted to share his writing. I felt the need to show them how heart-stoppingly beautiful Arabic could be. Khoury’s language was accessible but also elevated and expansive. And it made me dream.
YH: How has your diasporic experience as an immigrant or uprooted person shaped this journey? Do you think you would have pursued translation had you lived continuously in Lebanon?
MT: That’s a really good question and one that I’ve never asked myself. But I think I would have, yes. The need to bridge the cultures in which I am fluent made me experience language as a bifurcation. Translation was, in a sense, my bridge to wholeness.
YH: Translation as a bridge to wholeness because (multi)language is a bifurcation. That is a powerful image, which makes me wonder: do you think it is possible to create successful literary translations when fully bilingual but not adequately bi-cultural? You and I have been embedded in multicultural and multilingual communities since childhood (my mother’s first language is Aramaic, not Arabic, and I grew up with Aramaic and three different varieties of Arabic spoken in our household). I’m curious about the experience of those who arrive at the hobby or profession of translation in adulthood after a long stretch of monolingual/monocultural experience in youth. Do you think we have any understanding of that experience?
MT: I think I understand that experience intellectually, yes. But not on a visceral level because I also grew up with multiple languages. When I think about my friends who are monolingual, I feel that I know there are things they simply will not be able to understand, in the felt sense of the word. That they can appreciate or sympathize with turns of phrase or particular ways of expressing something in a language they don’t know, but not understand it at the felt level. What I can say for sure, what I know in my bones, is that linguistic proficiency is insufficient. There has to be cultural proficiency because language is a repository of lived experience and historical enduring. Knowing the mechanics of a language and its etymological ramifications is not sufficient to convey the plenitude of a word or phrase. As we all know, denotation is only one aspect of language: connotation is the larger, richer, and more complex aspect. The multiplicity of connotative layers, the ability of a word, phrase, or even a description to evoke emotion, to provoke ideation, and to ignite imagination are compromised if a translator is inadequately bicultural. Words stir the soul, and to me the aim of translation is to achieve that stirring of the soul.
YH: When not bilingual from childhood, the majority of translators work from their second language into their first language. I have assumed the opposite trajectory by working from my dominant language, Arabic, into a language I was learning, English. For me this started as a challenge I set myself up for, an act of defiance, one closely associated with my uprootedness from a country and a native tongue to which I knew it was impossible to return. I began translating into English not because I was already sufficiently proficient in it, but rather because I wanted to improve my “host” language, so to speak, the language of my new and permanent uprooted status. What was the trajectory for you? You mentioned being a native speaker of English, yet you grew up in Lebanon where Arabic is the main language and French is maybe the second. How did this come to be and what has been the impetus to translate from Arabic into English and not the reverse?
MT: I think your trajectory and mine are a bit different. Although Arabic was “officially” my native language, it was not my mother tongue as I grew up in a household that was mostly French speaking. Despite being born and raised in Lebanon, my mother did not read or write Arabic because she came from a generation and social background that disdained Arabic as “lesser.” She attended a school where the girls were punished if they were caught speaking Arabic at recess! So, there’s that. My father, on the other hand, was brought up in an anglicized family, was schooled in English, French, and Arabic, and certainly had no contempt for Arabic as a language: but he and his family did have “colonized” minds, and generally thought that things foreign, European, Western, were “better” and that modern Arabs were “backward.” My father read An-Nahar, the Lebanese “paper of record” everyday, but he also subscribed to Newsweek and, for the most part, drank the Kool-Aid reproduced by that veneer of Western liberalism. He spoke a mix of Arabic and English with his siblings, and also French because both his sister–in-law and brother-in-law had only the most rudimentary grasp of English. My mother, on the other hand, spoke English, French and Greek with members of her extended family. (Greek is another story which I won’t get into here.) So the lingua franca in my parental home was French, followed closely by English, with Arabic coming in third. Aged 11, I left Lebanon after my parents’ divorce and went full tilt into the British system for the rest of my secondary schooling, first in New Delhi, and later in Oxford. Living abroad, attending British schools, and experiencing what I can only describe as a deeply xenophobic people (I mean the British) for five years, in addition to living with a mother who didn’t express herself in Arabic other than to curse, my Arabic language skills froze at the fifth-grade level, which is the last year I was schooled in Lebanon. In time, I made my way back to Arabic as a young adult as a result of becoming politicized, but my technical mastery of the language, and especially the deep grammar, remain elusive. Whereas English is clearly my literary language: it is the one in which I read most easily and fastest, and since I have lived as a global nomad for most of my adult life (35+ years), speaking in English has also become the default.
YH: Have you translated or would consider translating in reverse, from English into Arabic?
MT: I would never consider translating English to Arabic. I can detect a poor translation but I could not for the life of me do justice to any literary text. Maybe in my next life!
YH: Talk about that contempt for Arabic as a “lesser” language that your French- educated mother expressed more so than your father. Where does it come from culturally or politically? Is it a concept that the French colonial apparatus enforced more so than the British colonial apparatus in the Arab world during the twentieth century? We see Francophone postcolonial discourse grappling more with this issue — especially discourse issuing from North African territories that were under French colonialism — than Anglophone or Arabophone postcolonial discourse issuing from Arab territories that were under British mandate. In what ways do you think these distinct colonial systems influenced the locals’ relationship to their native languages differently?
MT: Well, here, I’m just going to speculate because I’m no historian or a linguist. My sense of French colonialism in the so-called Middle East and North Africa was that it was far more violent culturally than Anglo-Saxon imperialism. My impression from my interactions with Anglophone Lebanese is that they did not have contempt for Arabic, the way Francophone Lebanese did and do. My impression is also that Francophone Lebanese know Arabic far less well than Anglophone ones. This is just my sense. Not a scientific or researched opinion. I sensed a respect for and admiration of Arabic (even if there was no mastery) among people that were Anglicized but not the corollary for those that were Francophiles. In the French-language private schools which I attended, there were four hours of instruction in French and only two, if that, in Arabic, right from first-grade. So, very very early, Arabic was relegated to second place. In my personal life, I wasn’t enjoined to read and understand or appreciate all the greats of Arabic literature and thought, whether modern or ancient, but Descartes, Molière, and Gide. The “great” creators of Arab thought, whether lexicographers, historians, or philosophers, were never mentioned in the conversations we had at home, besides maybe an occasional reference to al-Mutannabi. There were two Arabic music records in our house, one of Wadi’ al-Safi and the other of Sabah, if I remember correctly, but there were dozens and dozens of classical music records. We never went to the cinema to watch Arab or Egyptian movies, but were encouraged to go and see all the films of the French Nouvelle Vague and of the Italian greats (Fellini etc.); my brother was praised for being able to recite Shakespeare at 12 years old, and besides the Nahda, which was spoken of in laudatory terms but which I heard about in a rather casual way, no Arab authors were mentioned by name — whether Naguib Magfouz or Mikhail Naimeh, let alone Naziq al-Mala’ika or Ghassan Kanafani (all these came later, once I was grown and had left/fled the family cocoon). This was my personal experience, in my home, and my very cosmopolitan Levantine milieu, which included a godmother whose parents were of Polish and British-French origin, and who had been long-time inhabitants of Smyrna (at the time), and a grandmother, who although she was born in Homs, was educated in Athens, and spoke Greek with her two daughters, my mother, and my aunt. As for my maternal grandfather, he fancied himself an English “gentleman,” dressed like an Edwardian, and had spent (I think unhappy) years in Manchester, trying to be a businessman in the cotton industry. I only ever met my maternal grandmother and aunt once. They emigrated to Argentina in the 1950s with my grandfather whom I never met, but I have letters from him to my mother, written in perfect English interspersed with French expressions here and there.
What I know in my bones is that linguistic proficiency is insufficient. There has to be cultural proficiency because language is a repository of lived experience and of historical enduring. Knowing the mechanics of a language and its etymological ramifications is not sufficient to convey the plenitude of a word or phrase.
YH: That is a fascinating multicultural family history! I hope you will write a memoir or a novel about it one day. I wanted to touch upon another related issue with you. At a most basic level, the act of translating stipulates bilingual competence in the source and host languages, yet the proficiency levels in these languages are rarely equal for translators. To me, translating from Arabic into English, a language I did not practically use until leaving Iraq at age 17, was at first an act of supreme challenge. It was akin to working chaotically and without hope amidst what Moroccan novelist and critic Abdelkebir Khatibi has termed “bilingual illiteracy.” To me, translating from Arabic to English meant translating from a mother tongue whose fundamentals I knew on an intuitive level –– because I learned Arabic from birth and during the formative years of elementary and secondary education, but which was at the same time unfinished and rusty on the productive level because I hardly used it as an adult living in an anglophone diaspora –– into a second language in which I only became proficient in adulthood and therefore cannot use its idioms and deep grammatical structures like native speakers, even though it came to be my main language of critical thinking, communication, and textual expression in adulthood. Talk about your relationship with Arabic and English. Where are your strengths and weaknesses in each in relation to the act –– and art –– of translation?
MT: Oufff… that’s a big fat question. Well, I alluded earlier to the fact that I felt bifurcated between English and Arabic. It’s interesting to me that I didn’t experience the same bifurcation in French: inside my head, French and Arabic coexist happily without any need for one to assert itself vis-à-vis the other. But that’s not true of English. Maybe because my native acquisition of English coincided with the wound of estrangement and its attendant experience of xenophobia…Onto that original wound were grafted all the forms of dislocation entailed by a divorce, a move to another country, a switch to an entirely different culture, and an encounter with white superiority… all that at the threshold of adolescence and in the immediate aftermath of the June 1967 war. I still remember the thick, waxy deep-blue paper that we taped across our windows on the advice of the Lebanese “authorities” trying to protect civilians.
Regarding the more “technical” and less existential aspects of the question, I see my strengths as having complete mastery of English grammar (helped by my grounding in French grammar, in addition to five years of Latin at the middle-high school levels, and two years of German in high school) and a deep love of the literary language, in which I do most of my reading. Regarding Arabic, my grammar is somewhat shaky and intuitive, in that I can recognize grammatical or other errors of language in a text but couldn’t for the life of me explain to you what rule has been breached: Whereas in English I could tell you that the subjunctive voice requires a verb to be conjugated a certain way, I have no equivalent skill in Arabic. What I do have, however, in addition to a deep love of the language, which I find both lush and wonderfully succinct (notwithstanding a lot of “bad” writing which is full of padding), is an in-my-bones experience of living in Arabic, what in French we would call un vécu, which is not quite the same as “living” in an Arab-speaking country for a long period of time. I was impregnated with Arabic at family gatherings, and, as a young adult, in the everyday social intercourse of speaking with people who did not have a second or third language beside Arabic, and also in the beautifully poetic language of the Arabic Bible (I was raised Christian in Lebanon’s Protestant church.)
YH: Do you remember which Arabic Bible that was? The 1865 Bustani-Van Dyck Arabic Bible has had an enduring legacy and profound influence on the development of literary Arabic in the following decades. I wonder if it was the Bible you were reading. I was also blown away by the poetic yet accessible language of that Bible when I first read it as an adolescent Catholic in Iraq (Of course I didn’t know which translation I was reading, or the fact that I was reading a translation, until decades later.)
MT: I don’t know which translation it was, but I imagine it was the Bustani-Van Dyck version because my great-grandfather was one of the founders of the Protestant church in Lebanon alongside Mu’allem Boutros al-Bustani, as my father referred to him.
YH: How interesting! This topic deserves a full interview in and of itself. In your interview with Dima Ayoub you described translation as both pleasure and pain combined. One of the greatest challenges of translating Arabic fiction for me is the phenomenon of diglossia, or the stark difference between the written and spoken varieties of one language. It is a feature unique to a few languages, Arabic prominent among them. You have translated several novels that weave the spoken varieties into their dialogues to create an atmosphere of realism and naturalism, especially Elias Khoury’s novels whose language is particularly tuned to the subtleties of the old art of Levantine oral narration. As someone who is proficient in the Lebanese dialect of your upbringing and the Modern Standard Arabic of your formal education, how do you reconcile the differences between the two language varieties within the Arabic text when you translate into English, a language that does not present the same range of registers and colloquial textures? Would you describe diglossia as a source of pleasure or pain in your translation process?
MT: Yes, diglossia is an ever-present challenge. When I was translating my first book-length text by Elias Khoury, this question was particularly arduous. What helped me was the fact that I hear language rather than see it, and every line of dialogue, of “spoken” Arabic immediately had a “tone” in my head. And it was the tone I tried to reproduce and not the words. For example, in Lebanese Arabic, if you say “la, wallah?” on an interrogatory note, you don’t render it as “no, by god?” but as “No, really?” So it is the tone that I hear or perceive in an utterance that I seek to reproduce and not the words themselves. I hope this example is not too reductive.
YH: Established translators are often invited to share advice with new translators –– something you provide effectively in “12 Rules and 3 Translations.” Do you think it is possible to become a good translator strictly based on following rules and advice from other successful translators, or is there something more — something inherent or acquired intuitively — that needs to be there too?
MT: The latter. Rules are simply not enough, although they are enormously helpful. The best analogy for this is the kitchen for me. No matter how closely you follow a recipe or how well-written it is, at some point your “kitchen instincts” have to kick in, and those are forged by repetition, practice, and observation. They are also informed by general knowledge, that if something is frozen, its volume will expand, that if you steam spinach, it will wilt, that if you want to maintain the crunchiness of your croutons, you have to make sure to place them in a hermetically sealed container. To go back to translation, I don’t know if it’s something inherent as you call it; it is conditioned in the same way as other aesthetic experiences. I find myself particularly drawn to and enthralled by Mediterranean landscapes and the kind of light that exists in Eastern Mediterranean countries. That feeling of plenitude that I get from being steeped in such light and landscapes is, I’m sure, attributable to having been born and grown up bathed in them. This passage from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss encapsulates what I’m trying to say: “These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerow — such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them [my emphasis]. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep bladed grass today might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years, which still live in us and transform our perception into love.” And to me, this carries over to translation: despite my shaky beginning in formal Arabic, that language was all around me in my childhood and the impressions it left on me are part of this fabric of beauty from “the far-off years, which still live in us and transform our perception into love.”
YH: Any thoughts on gender or racial distinctions when it comes to the act of translation or access to renowned authors and publishers?
MT: The only anecdotal thing I can report is that I’ve generally found women authors to have smaller egos. I’ve worked very closely with the authors of all the books I have translated (except the one currently in progress whose author is no longer alive), and only in one case was the author completely uninterested in engaging with the translation process…but I don’t think it had anything to do with gender or ethnic background.
YH: How do you generally communicate with the authors you are translating? Do you communicate with them directly?
MT: Yes, I meet them in person, if I can, and work on a text with them, asking questions, seeking clarification, and discussing what might be the best way to render something I’m finding arduous. In instances where I haven’t been able to do that, I’ve maintained a detailed and intricate correspondence with them, and have had several virtual sessions with them on platforms like Skype or Zoom. Because I’m very relational, I love working “in tandem” with authors … which doesn’t mean that there aren’t occasional frictions because I, like the author, might have strong opinions about some particular thing. Generally speaking, however, I have found that collaboration helped me in my process when I found myself hitting a wall with a particular passage, or even a linguistic register. Generally speaking, authors have told me that they trust me in instances where there just is no really good or perfect rendering of the word or phrase involved. I explain the ramifications of choosing one word over the other, trying to illuminate the subtext of a particular choice for them, and occasionally have to accept that it won’t be a perfect rendering. The translation will be satisfactory but not capture (at least for me) all the nuances, complexity, and resonances of the original term/word/phrase/passage.
YH: In closing, are you willing to share more about the translation you are currently working on? What is it about and why/how did you select it?
MT: I’m currently working on a short and very beautiful text by the late poet, essayist, and journalist Mohammad al-As’ad entitled Atfal al-Nada. While the book bills itself as a riwaya, which immediately suggests the word “novel” in English, the word that comes to mind for me is what we call in French “un récit,” literally a “telling” or “recounting” and not a roman, the French word for novel. It is a genre-bending text, part poetry, part prose, part historical fiction, and part magical realism. It doesn’t have the sort of arc that a novel might, with a beginning, middle, and end, main characters who develop, and a denouement at the end. Of course, I’m describing a classic novel structure here and understand that there is a lot of modern novel-writing that is experimental which in no way follows such a structure. The text is a poetic meditation on the Nakba as experienced by a four- or five-year old child, who tries to reconstruct what happened from the vantage-point of his adulthood, coming-of age-as a refugee in Baghdad. The segues from Umm al-Zenat (the child’s village of origin) to Baghdad, and from there to locales in Arab folk tales and The Thousand and One Nights, and from there to UN resolutions and conventional histories, are masterful and Al-As’ad’s language is gorgeous. I’m nearing the end of the project and can only hope that I have done justice to the beauty of this poetry-prose text.
