A book I would love to translate (are you listening, Alon?) into Arabic. A book that MUST be translated into Arabic, and translated well.
House of Rajani (Harvill Secker - Random House UK), takes place in 1895 Jaffa. It records the diaries of Salah Rajani, a 12-year old Moslem child cursed with prophetical powers who foresees the rising of the Jewish state; and of a 27 year old Jewish colonist, new to the city of Jaffa, who takes both Salah's mother and their house.
Arab Israelis – among them Radio Cairo correspondent Khamis Abulafia and politician Ahmed Tibi – have called the book "riveting" and claim to find an echo of the Palestinian narrative embedded within.
The House of Rajani was awarded the Sapir prize in 2009, but two weeks after the public announcement on Television, the award was withdrawn due to allegations of a conflict of interest.
Alon says that the main catalyst to write the book came from a deja vu feeling: "The initial catalyst for writing it came from a scene I envisioned one day as I sat in a Tel Aviv café: all at once I stripped the present reality of its clothes – the Bauhaus buildings, the uniquely Israeli window blinds, the ugly air-conditioning units, the ficus trees, the asphalt sidewalks, the low stone walls – and I could picture the orchards and groves and prickly pear cactuses of the Palestinians who had lived there in the past. I shuddered, and at that moment I decided to try to pass that feeling along to my readers in a historical novel about Tel Aviv's Palestinian past and about the first wave of Jewish immigration."
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/
L.D. Mitchell (book collector, professional librarian, author, photographer) did everyone a great favour by posting a ten part introduction about the literature in Arabic that any serious reader should have on their shelves.
Given the enormous debt that Western Europe owes to Arab scholarship, it is puzzling why the Arab world's own native literary traditions remain so poorly known and understood in the West.
I have written often about contemporary Arab writers whose works are being translated into English (Humphrey Does It Again, Darwish Celebrated in Film, Arab Literature Breaks Taboos - in Translation, On Translating Arabic Literature, Taha and Adina - Translating the Other, From "Religion Dispatches" - Translating Rumi], but Mitchell takes us on a journey from 1001 Nights to Naguib Mahfouz, touching on folklore, religious texts and science, then stopping long at poetry, moving on to compilations of Jahiz, Maqdisi and the globe-trotter Ibn Battuta, biographies of the Prophet and other greats, Ibn Khaldun's seminal work on sociology and the histories of Tabari.
Mitchell says that his mini-introduction would not improve the general ignorance of the subject much, partly because of the frustrating lack of English translations. rest assured, my dear librarian, that there is a similar frustration among the Arabic-speaking generation Y and Z who no longer use classical Arabic and cannot comfortably link to Tabari, Ibn Battuta or Jahiz. Modern translations from 7th-12th century Arabic to Modern Standard are either non-existent, or very few and far between. Add to that high levels of illiteracy, censorship, and rote-learning. I read my first 1001 Nights in Burton's translation, not in the original Arabic, although the whole set was adorning our bookshelves when I was growing up.
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/
Ghosts, by César Aira (Argentina) Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
The Twin, by Gerbrand Bakker (Netherlands) Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer
Anonymous Celebrity, by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (Brazil) Translated from the Portuguese by Nelson Vieira
Wonder, by Hugo Claus (Belgium) Translated from the Dutch by Michael Henry Heim
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago, by Wolf Haas (Austria) Translated from the German by Stephanie Gilardi and Thomas S. Hansen
The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail Hareven (Israel) Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu
The Discoverer, by Jan Kjærstad (Norway) Translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland
Memories of the Future, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (Russia) Translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull
Rex, by José Manuel Prieto (Cuba) Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen
The Tanners, by Robert Walser (Switzerland) Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
*******
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/
I remember a discussion a few years ago with one of my colleagues from Cairo, a high caliber Arabic<>English translator, about the English version of Naguib Mahfouz trilogy.
I happen to know the translator of that work. I also happen to have read Naguib in Arabic, and then in English.
My friend said one thing that I could not disagree with: although technically very good, there was no Cairo in the English translation. At least not the Cairo both her and me spent such a long time in.
The Cuban-American writer, Gustavo Perez Firmat, says in one of his poems:
The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don’t belong to English
though I belong nowhere else.
Translating culture is a very hard task, and the more the source and target cultures differ, the harder it becomes to bridge the gap. Naguib in Turkish, or Farsi, would probably be more Cairene than Naguib in English or Swedish.
The way around it would be to limit literary and cultural translations to bilingual people who either spent their childhood in the source country, or come from bi-cultural families. Then again, being bilingual, or even bi-cultural, does not make you a brilliant translator. So maybe we could employ them as some sort of consultants to the translator?
Just dreaming aloud..
(Thanks to Patty Ball and The Quad)
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au.
The typical translator's status can be likened to a ghost writer's — an appendage obscure and underpaid. Like ghost writers, they often receive flat fees and no royalties. Reviewers often overlook them or faintly praise them — and this drives Grossman crazy — for "ably" translating the original text.
"`Ably translated,' compared to what?" asks Grossman, whose "Why Translation Matters," a brief, forceful defense of her profession, is being released by Yale University Press. "The reviewer clearly doesn't read Spanish. How would they know if it is ably translated? They quote long passages to indicate the style of the writer and never credit the translator."
BRAVO, BRAVO!
Grossman would know: she has translated such works as Miguel de Cervantes' 'Don Quixote' and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 'Love in the Time of Cholera'.
In "Why Translation Matters," Grossman writes of taking on the opening phrase of the first chapter of "Don Quixote," among the most famous words in Spanish literature: "En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme," which in an earlier English-language edition was translated into, "In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind."
Grossman worked on the phrase by reciting the Spanish to herself, "mantralike." She reached for the right mood and rhythm, to recapture how it struck those who read "Quixote" centuries ago. She pondered the word "lugar," which can mean either village or place. The words came to her, like lyrics to a song: "Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember."
Grossman, who turns 74 in March, is curly haired and plainspoken, her voice still flavored by her childhood in a Yiddish-speaking neighborhood in Philadelphia. She had an early interest in languages — although she hardly remembers a word of Yiddish — and by high school was thinking about becoming an interpreter, "which suggested travel, exotic places, important events, world-shaking conferences at the United Nations," she writes in "Why Translation Matters."
Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator’s role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, “My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented.”
For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: “Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable.”
Throughout the four chapters of this bracing volume, Grossman’s belief in the crucial significance of the translator’s work, as well as her rare ability to explain the intellectual sphere that she inhabits as interpreter of the original text, inspires and provokes the reader to engage with translation in an entirely new way.
The full interview with Grossman can be read online. The book can be purchased directly from the publisher's website.
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/
Prince Charles is visiting an Edinburgh hospital. He enters a ward full of patients with no obvious sign of injury or illness and greets one.
The patient replies:
"Fair fa your honest sonsie face, Great chieftain o the puddin race, Aboon them a ye take yer place, Painch, tripe or thairm, As langs my airm."
Charles is confused, so he just grins and moves on to the next patient. The patient responds:
"Some hae meat an canna eat, And some wad eat that want it, But we hae meat an we can eat, So let the Lord be thankit."
Even more confused, and his grin now rictus-like, the Prince moves on to the next patient, who immediately begins to chant:
"Wee sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie, Wha' sich a panic in thy breastie, Thou needna start awa sae hastie, Wi bickering brattle."
Now seriously troubled, Charles turns to the accompanying doctor and asks "Is this a psychiatric ward?"
"No," replies the doctor, "this is the serious Burns unit."
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.
Now Marsot speaks of her experiences as a bilingual writer writing about the differences between her two languages..
"As I was writing it, I noticed there weren’t any novels that addressed my particular pet idea. There are lots of books about people moving to France, but they tend to be written by outsiders looking in: people entranced or repelled, caught up in the humor or frustration, privilege or disadvantage of being a foreigner in France. The French, they are so: puzzling, frustrating, intriguing, annoying, rude, smelly, precise, chic, and/or (insert your adjective here). But a bilingual woman is both an insider and an outsider.
Funny, then, that it turns out my novel seems to be untranslatable, at least into the other language it is about, French.
There’s a lot of French in my book. I think and hope it’s written so that even if you never studied the language, you can still understand what’s going on in the French passages, which are commented upon in English by my narrator. But here’s the crux of the matter: the French phrases and expressions in the book are dissected in English; that is, understood and parsed through English. So, though the novel is in English (the protagonist), there’s a necessary tension with French, the antagonist. If you translate everything into French, the tension is gone. You’d have to convey that the French-language voice is that of a bilingual American, who is commenting on the French language; so, you’d read a French voice puzzling over odd French phrases — in French! Perhaps a really good literary translator could do this, but I’m not sure how."
Here is an interview with the writer...
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.
An article from Temple University talks about Lawrence Venuti's translation from Catalan of Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper , a work that has won Venuti the second annual Robert Fagles Translation Prize, sponsored by the National Poetry Series.
A leading theorist in his field, Venuti is at the forefront of what might be called a translation renaissance. Once invisible in their behind-the-scenes roles, translators are increasingly recognized in academic and publishing arenas for their contributions to the literary process.
The most prevalent translation strategy has been to adhere to the current standard dialect of the translating language, which is the most familiar and least noticeable to the reader. This kind of translation, according to Venuti, effaces the translator’s presence and erases cultural distinctions.
“Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures,” he said.
Ah! The white man's guilt complex...
Today, Venuti’s impressive collection of translations includes everything from Gothic tales to scandalous contemporary best-sellers. The stylistic innovations he undertakes in his translations are called “elegant” and “brilliant” by reviewers.
I assume his reviewers are bilingual translators.. Otherwise, they would have no clue what they are talking about anyway..
“When I devise a translation project, my aim is to write a translation that will make a linguistic and cultural difference in English,” he said.
You can't. You would have to destroy English as a language of power first. English sucks in differences, linguistic and cultural, like a sponge, making them its own without necessary having to acknowledge the debt.
The best part is the explanation of "swell" used by Venuti in this translated poem:
Face stern, hair more or less blonde, eyes with an inward-looking glint, skin in the pink, wearing a stare-till-you’re-bored attitude in a black dress that hugged her breasts and a pair of long legs, in good working order, she looked real swell, sure enough, and “independent,” as the saying goes.
The explanation of this AMAZING term states that..
Venuti’s translations purposely use non-standard English colloquialisms, slang and dialect, requiring the reader to read the translation as a translation. In the above poem, swell—not Standard English, not even contemporary slang—was commonly spoken by American painter Edward Hopper, so Venuti selected it when bringing this poem, which describes Hopper’s 1938 painting, from Catalan into English.
DUH? I am only half a century old, and "swell" was used this way in my teenage years, and is still used by some of my friends today.. Maybe the person who wrote the review should mingle a little with different classes of people in different places before she writes such stuff?
The late-Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was one of the towering figures of late-20th century Arab cultural production. Among Palestinians, Darwish’s stature was unrivaled.
Recognized as one of the great Arabic-language poets in living memory, he was also an unreconstructed nationalist with a long record of critically minded activism within Yasser Arafat’s PLO.
To follow his decades of output is to find poetic expression of the urgency of Palestinian militancy and the accumulation of Palestinians’ despair and anger at the ineffectual political classes that have claimed to represent and support their right to retain possession of their ancestral lands.
Straddling the worlds of art and politics, it’s no surprise that Darwish has cut such a heroic figure in the cultural life of his countrymen – whether they reside in ’48 Palestine, the Occupied Territories or among the Palestinian exile community.
His poems are memorized and recited by elementary school children, set to music and performed by Arab artists throughout the MENA region and have been translated into 30-odd languages, including Hebrew. From time to time, Darwish’s work is adapted to film.
“As the Poet Said,” the latest feature-length film by Lebanon-based Palestinian documentarian Nasri Hajjaj, is one of the more ambitious efforts to bring Darwish’s poetry to the rest of the world through film.
The premise of the film is simple, setting out to take the audience on a tour through the poet’s life. Accompanied by Darwish’s work, Hajjaj takes the camera to some of the places the poet lived in the Middle East and Europe. The journey is linear but in execution the project is multi-layered. The filmmaker has assembled a distinguished group of colleagues, friends and admirers to participate in the tribute.
Several Palestinian poets – Ahmed Dahbour, for instance, and Dalia Taha – are augmented by cast that include Nigerian writer, poet and playwright Wole Soyinka, dissident Israeli poet Yitzak Laor, Iraqi Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas, American Michael Palmer, Lebanon’s Joumana Haddad, former French Prime Minister (and, it seems, poet) Dominique de Villepin and a troupe of school students from Sidon’s Ain al-Hilweh camp.
The camera (wielded by Jocelyne Abi Gebrayel) captures this cast of characters in a dozen or so different locations, within Palestine, around the Middle East, in Africa and Europe, places loyal to the memory of the poet and to which the poet was loyal – his favourite room in Paris’ Madison Hotel, for instance. Whether by design or happenstance, many of these locations are in a state of repair, or disrepair – an abandoned railway station, a university auditorium filled with scaffolding, an abandoned theatre.
For the most part each setting affords these figures an opportunity to read lines of Darwish’s poetry. They do so in several languages – Arabic, of course, but also English, French and Kurdish.
The poetry can be interpreted in other terms as well, of course. A weighty piano piece, composed and performed for Hajjaj by Lebanese composer Hiba al-Kawas, opens the film and is revisited throughout. This pounding score is augmented by the work of harpist and composer Tara Jaff, and dancer Lorca Sbeiti can be seen navigating various derelict spaces at certain points in the work.
The effect is to testify to the wide range of people that have been moved by, or at least exposed to, Darwish’s words. This approach gives the film an oddly selfless aspect, since Hajjaj’s cast is given so much latitude to interpret Darwish’s work in his or her own terms.
Moving literature between genres is challenging work. No few lines of film criticism have complained about how some hack scriptwriter or director has tried to adapt a much-loved novel or short story to the screen and made a hash of it. If adaptations of prose works to film are hard to pull off, translating poetry to film is inestimably more difficult. It has been amply demonstrated that the shooting and editing of moving images, whether proper film or digital video, can be “poetic.” It is difficult, though, to approximate the impact of written poetry – the resonance of words and their breadth of meaning within individual readers – even within other languages, let alone in visual media.
Filmmakers are still compelled to try. One compulsion, presumably, is the desire to secure increased exposure for the poetry, liberating work that, if left between the covers of a book, might languish in obscurity. There is less danger of that being the case with the work of Darwish, which is probably better known in the non-Arab world than that of any other Arab poet. The desire to free Darwish’s work from its genre, and its appeal to both filmmakers and audiences, was nicely illustrated at last December’s Dubai film festival, where “As the Poet Said” enjoyed its world premier. It wasn’t the only Darwish poem in competition.
Lebanese filmmaker Talal Khoury’s “9 August,” his second effort to render a Darwish poem on film, screened in DIFF’s short film competition. Furthermore the trailer that DIFF’s production team worked up (to project before the festival’s gala screenings) was drawn almost exclusively from a particularly effective passage of Hajjaj’s film. That sequence sees a deaf actor sign a passage of Darwish’s poetry – an avalanche of verbs the poet deployed as if grappling to depict the complex range of feeling his lover, and country, evoked in him. Audiences invariably applauded generously. It wasn’t odd to hear the word “beautiful,” in various languages.
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.
Sami Michael is an Iraqi-born, Israeli author. His interview on MedArabNews by Claudia De Martino tells the story of a writer with multiple identities and languages, as well as some strong political opinions..
"I was born in Iraq and immigrated to Israel at 21. Back in Iraq, I was writing in Arabic and it took me 15 years to switch from Arabic to Hebrew writing. In those 15 years, I never published novels in Arabic, but many short and long stories. I also wrote for a newspaper for 5 years; I was on the editorial board of Arabic language newspapers. But the reason why I never published a single novel in Arabic is that authors in exile have to write in the language of the country in which they live, otherwise they do not find readers and most of them became frustrated."
I can identify with that, as well as with his sentiments that "in many Arab countries in the Middle East there is hardly any freedom of speech. If an author writes something “critical” of the regimes in place, he/she may be taking an extreme risk, be jailed or persecuted for it" while in Israel the "persecution" is more subtle - no promotion, no financial assistance. It is the same in any democratic country. Democracy only works if you have access to the media, and main-stream media are seldom democractic anywhere. Thank God for the Internet.
I do write in Arabic, although much less than in English. I have another blog, under a pseudonym, where the Internet has allowed me to talk to people in the language they understand without being jailed or shot for it.
I also liked his comment that "my mother tongue is Arabic and my nationality Israeli, and my identity Jewish. I have always thought of myself as an “Arab Jew” without distinguishing at all which one of my identities was the dominant one. don’t feel I need to define myself for anyone, as an Englishman doesn’t get up in the morning and ask himself: who am I?" Many decades ago I opted for a line from Bernard Shaw's Man and Arms - I am a citizen of the world.
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.
Julie Schwietert tells of how Leigh Shulman translated a novella written by one of her friends, an Iranian writer in exile, from Farsi into English - without knowing Farsi. Well, ok, the Iranian writer knew a fair bit of English..
Leigh Shulman is a traveler, writer, and translator currently living in Salta, Argentina, where she is developing an educational project to teach English through photography and technology. She is also editor of Matador Life. You can read more about Leigh and her travels on her blog, The Future Is Red.
An excerpt of their joint effort can be found here.
"First rule of translation, though, is the translator does not need the same level of fluency in the original language as the target language. We take the language, culture, ideology and thought process and pour it into the mold of the language we know best (...) The first step was to create a very raw and literal word-for-word translation of the piece. I sat in front of the computer typing out exactly what Ali told me. The product of that first step was completely incomprehensible, impossible to read.
Then step two. We smoothed the rough English into a real working English. Again, Ali and I sat side by side in his apartment in New York City. As we went through the sentences, I used my western United States view of the world to ask for specifics and clarification.
Language takes its culture along with it, so where ever possible we remain faithful to the original. Punctuation and sentence structure – which you’ll notice are often incorrect and misleading — follow the exact pattern of the Farsi. Alimorad designed the text this way intentionally to confuse and distract you as a reader, mimicking the way an exile feels while navigating a new land. (oh, postmodern deconstruction of our mental comfort zones).
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.
Why is it so hard for foreign authors to get published in the US? It’s clear to anyone working in international rights that the sophisticated marketplace involving scouts, rights sellers and foreign publishers that exists to get American books out into the world does not exist to the same degree in the other direction.
There are a number of explanations for this phenomenon, very few of which have to do with stereotypes of American readers as being culturally insulated or lacking curiosity about the outside world.
(a) First, there are the unforgiving economic calculations that publishers face in taking a translation to market.
(b) Apart from economics, the often cited reason for the difficult of placing translations with American publishers is the limited number of US editors who speak a foreign language. It costs a lot to have something translated and get it gussied up and ready for the American market. They have to decide, is it really a book that’s likely to find a US publisher anyway?
(c) There is no mature translation market for any one language in the English speaking world, and the fact that books coming into the American market come from many different countries and languages makes it harder for editors here to develop the expertise in what any market has to offer, and which books from that country have the best shot of appealing to American readers. The books that are sold for translation here are more likely to come through the handful of US agents with close ties to one region or another, who are themselves usually working through professional relationships with particular agents or publishers abroad. What books by foreign authors that end up crossing an American editor’s desk, then, depends in no small part on chance and good connections.
(d) The "commercial mindset" versus "cultural mission mindset" that is progressively seeing the later outbeat the first. This difficulty restricts the number of translations Weil is able to take on, while he struggles with the fact that this leaves American readers without access to some excellent writers.
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.
By Rayyan Al-Shawaf From the Canadian The Globe and Mail - 02/-1/2010
A few weeks ago, Canada saw the English-language publication of Egyptian novelist Bahaa Taher's Sunset Oasis, which won the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008. This year's winner was Azazeel, by Egyptian scholar and novelist Youssef Ziedan. Both books deal with Egyptian history. Taher sets his story at the very end of the 19th century, shortly after his country was occupied by the British, while Ziedan turns to the 5th century AD for his tale of internecine Christian conflict in Roman Egypt.
While both books were published in Arabic to wide acclaim, such is not the case with many novels and short stories written in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish and other languages of the Middle East, which end up being censored or banned outright (the Coptic Orthodox church lobbied the Egyptian government unsuccessfully to have Ziedan's book banned).
As a result, the ability to write in a Western language, or the availability of translation services, becomes imperative for many authors. With the freedom so afforded, writers from across the region are incorporating all manner of taboo subjects into their fiction, and often simultaneously revealing the rich and varied cross-cultural influences that have shaped them. An overview of six recent novels exploring Middle Eastern topics highlights this phenomenon.
"I'm trying to come to terms with the Holocaust, something that would try the patience of God himself, and behind it all is the figure of my father." So wrote "Rachel" (Rachid Helmut Schiller) in his diary a few months after discovering that his late father, a German who settled in Algeria following the Second World War, helped produce the Zyklon B gas used by the Nazis to murder millions of Jews and others. Rachel has since committed suicide - having apparently subjected himself to the sentence he feels his father deserved - and alongside his diary we have that of his brother "Malrich" (Malek Ulrich Schiller), a former Islamic extremist who now sees Islamism and Nazism as two sides of the same coin. Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal's novel The German Mujahid, translated from the French by Frank Wynne, consists of both diaries.
(...)
Unlike Sansal, who lives in Algiers and writes in French, Salwa Al Neimi lives in Paris and writes in Arabic. The Syrian Al Neimi has penned a short but sizzling novel about a liberated Syrian woman's steamy sex life in France. The narrator of The Proof of the Honey unabashedly proclaims: "I have a physical need for water, semen, and words. The three things I need in life. I cannot exist without them." Throughout, she details her torrid sexual encounters with vigour, though her apparent lack of faith in love resurrects a tired and simplistic dichotomy.
The narrator's frustration with contemporary Arab culture's suppression of desire and her ambitious mission to re-sexualize the Arabic language can be traced to her sexual awakening, which began with the discovery of surprisingly explicit commentaries on the joys of sex composed by Arab writers centuries ago.
This aspect of the book proves fascinating, though sometimes in an unintended manner; that so many Arab intellectuals and artists feel compelled to justify their controversial works by depicting them as continuing an illustrious Arab tradition - as Al Neimi has done - points up the burdensome weight of history and heritage in Arab societies.
*****
Ironically, the punishments for lovers in Saudi Arabia, a country in good international standing, are just as severe, if not more so, than those in increasingly isolated Iran. The Consequences of Love, Eritrean Sulaiman Addonia's debut novel, is set in Jeddah. "I had been in this country for ten years," muses narrator Naser, a 20-year-old Eritrean refugee, "yet I had never talked to a girl or held a woman's hand."
All of that changes when a woman, her face and body concealed by the mandatory black abaya, begins passing notes to Naser, in which she writes forthrightly of her attraction to him. Naser dubs the girl "Fiore," Italian for flower (Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa having left a lingering linguistic mark), and the two eventually progress beyond epistolary professions of love to an actual physical relationship.
The dangers are tremendous and ubiquitous; even when merely exchanging notes, Naser realizes that "just one careless moment could have me arrested by the religious police and that could lead to Punishment Square where lovers are lashed and sometimes even killed."
The fact that Fiore turns out to be beautiful reveals a lack of courage on Addonia's part, a quality that otherwise can be found in abundance throughout his novel. Indeed, not only does Addonia write frankly and movingly about forbidden love all the way through to the story's heart-wrenching and unflinchingly realistic ending, but he does so within the context of a scathing exposé of Saudi Arabia's myriad social ills: religious extremism, oppression of women, circumstantial homosexuality and exploitation of foreign labourers. The Consequences of Love is the real deal - passionate and potent.
*****
Kuwait isn't nearly as repressive as neighbouring Saudi Arabia - which is a good thing for headstrong Palestinian-Egyptian Nidali, the protagonist of A Map of Home, as she spends her childhood in Kuwait City. Randa Jarrar has crafted a warm, ribald and insightful evocation of life in Kuwait, Egypt and the US.
Much of the first half of the novel, however, is exasperatingly quaint, as precocious Nidali endures her parents' quarrels, hangs out with her diverse group of friends, and stuffs herself with za'tar burgers.
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 infuses the heretofore languid tale with some much-needed drama, and the family's subsequent move to Egypt and later Texas allows Jarrar to explore cultural and linguistic acclimatization with a great deal of poignancy. Made aware in the US that she speaks a formal and somewhat stilted English, Nidali ruefully recalls "how in Egyptian my language was full of songs and lilts and catchy turns of phrase. I wished, then and for many months later, that I could translate the way I was, my old way of being, speaking, and gesturing, to English: to translate myself."
*******
Though one cannot speak of a unifying theme binding these very different novels together, all underscore the importance of Western languages, especially English, for authors writing from or about the Middle East. Written in French, The German Mujahid was banned in Boualem Sansal's native Algeria, but won the RTL-Lire prize in France. Though available in Lebanon - where it was published - Al Neimi's The Proof of the Honey was banned in several Arab countries (...) If Eritrean Addonia had not written his debut novel in English - his third language - from the safety of London, he might have met the same fate as several of the unfortunates in his novel, who suffer whippings and worse. And although it straddles cultures and, in a sense, languages, Jarrar's A Map of Home, with its frequently colloquial English and many Americanisms, to say nothing of its graphic descriptions of masturbation, would have had a hard time finding a home in the Arab world. In all instances, the publication of these books in English signifies the importance of this language for writers delving into controversial Middle Eastern subjects, and English-language readers are that much richer for it.
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.
The capital’s cultural agency has published a new edition of one of the rarest known works of Arabic literature, Soul of the Soul, an encyclopedia of poetry from the fifth Hijri, or Islamic, century, dating back approximately 1,000 years.
The AbuDhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (Adach) has published the first volume of the book, of which there are only two known surviving copies. One is in the National Library in Paris and the other in the Assad National Library in Damascus. The 2,790 poems contained in the book are considered to be among the most important in the Arabic language.
Ibrahim Saleh, a Syria-based scholar who researched and edited the new edition, said it was impossible to know who compiled the original Soul of the Soul, but it is believed it may have been one of the disciples of Al Thaalibi (961-1038), a prominent literary figure in the eastern part of the Islamic world during the fourth Islamic and 10th Gregorian century.
Mr Saleh said this theory was based on the fact that Al Thaalibi’s name is evoked with the utmost regard in the book, and the ancient text lists a compilation of his poetry, Yatimat Al Dahr (One of its Kind), as its primary source.
The full edition will be divided into 360 sections and the poems will be divided by theme, including one section for prose, which makes up about two per cent of the predominately verse content.
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.
Ofri, D. (2010) Medicine in Translation: Journeys with my patients. Beacon Press. For two decades, Dr. Danielle Ofri has cared for patients at Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in the country and a crossroads for the world's cultures. In Medicine in Translation, she introduces us, in vivid, moving portraits, to the patients she has known. They have braved language barriers, religious and racial divides, and the emotional and practical difficulties of exile in order to access quality health care. Sharing their journeys with them over the years, Danielle has witnessed some of their best and worst moments, and come to admire their resilience and courageous spirit.
Danielle introduces us to her patients: Samuel Nwanko, who was brutally attacked by a Nigerian cult in his homeland and is attempting to create a new life in America; Jade Collier, an Aussie who refuses to let a small thing like a wheelchair keep her from being a homegrown ambassador to New York City; Julia Barquero, a Guatemalan woman who migrated to the States to save her disabled son but cannot obtain the lifesaving heart transplant she needs because she is undocumented. We meet a young Muslim woman threatened at knifepoint for wearing her veil, and the spitfire Señora Estrella, one of Danielle's many Spanish-speaking patients, whose torrent of words helps seal Danielle's resolve to improve her own Spanish, an essential skill in today's urban hospitals. And so she, her husband, and their two young children and seventy-five-pound dog relocate to Costa Rica, where they discover potholes the size of their New York City apartment, a casual absence of street signs or even street names, tangy green-skinned limon dulce dangling in the playground, and sudden rains surging over the craggy edges of roadside ditches. Ultimately, Danielle experiences being a patient in a foreign country when she gives birth to their third child, a "Costarricense" girl.
With controversy over immigrants in our society escalating, and debate surrounding health-care reform becoming increasingly urgent, Ofri's riveting stories about her patients could not be more timely. Living and dying in the foreign country we call home, they have much to teach us about the American way, in sickness and in health.
To read more about Dr. Danielle Orfi, see her blog. You can also read a review of the book in New York Times.
******* Another beautiful piece by a doctor in a multicultural setting, Dr. Nell Burger Kirst from the University of Michigan, was posted on the New York Times today. I quote a part that particularly touched me:
"Words are paramount in the business of medicine. Diagnoses are illuminated by the patients’ own accounts of their illnesses. Treatment options are discussed using conditional verbs, plans described in the future tense. And in the end everything is documented. We have become so dependent on our words — so reliant on the phrases and spiels we know by rote — that it is almost impossible to imagine what we would do without them.
But there is communication without words, too — an honest-to-goodness human presence that transcends language. Sometimes it is just as essential to healing as our precise and formulaic words.
In medical school I worked with a young infectious-disease physician from India. She was consulting on the case of a middle-aged Indian man who had cancer and a hospital-acquired infection. His infection had improved, but his cancer had become quite aggressive, and I accompanied her to his room to discuss what had become a very poor prognosis.
To learn how to carry on this kind of end-of-life discussion, medical students practice on actors trained to simulate dying patients. It’s a valuable exercise, but a difficult one. I always found myself hung up on the details of what I was supposed to say — important details, like the patient’s life expectancy, remaining treatment options and the logistics of palliative care and hospice services.
When it came to real patients, I found myself similarly fixated on the particulars, doing my best to learn the drill: What lab or exam findings let the physician know it was time for this discussion? Would insurance pay for hospice care? Could she wait for her daughter to fly in from Phoenix before making the decision?
The Indian patient lay quietly in his hospital bed, his wife beside him, elegant in an embroidered dress and a sheer blue headscarf. The doctor began speaking to them in English as the husband and wife took turns translating unfamiliar words into Hindi. I listened closely as always, concentrating on the facts of the case.
I suspect the English was on my account, for when it became clear that the couple was having too much difficulty understanding, the doctor gave up and began speaking in fluent Hindi. I kept listening, but now the music of the language was all I could follow.
English words were peppered in only occasionally — a sentence punctuated by the word “suffering,” then a paragraph weaving “comfortable” and “hospice” into a string of Hindi. I was behind a veil, seeing the dialogue only in silhouettes.
Yet somehow, being outside the language finally allowed me into the heart of it. The conversation was beautiful, hypnotic, meditative. With words out of the way, I could focus on the elements I had always been too distracted to notice — the doctor’s slow and lilting tone, her attentiveness to the patient’s body language, the white-knuckled hands of the husband and wife locked together, a lifetime of love, fear, resignation and hope flickering back and forth in the glances they exchanged.
After several minutes, the patient looked my way and asked, “Should we speak in English, so she can understand?” I was humbled by his generosity, but there was no need; I understood better than I ever had before."
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.
Barbara Jane Reyes is a US poet born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. My third book, entitled Diwata, is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2010.
Barbara writes both in Tagalog and English. Here is what she has to say about writing in other than English language:
"Now as for languages other than English, I can only say that so many of us exist between languages. Let’s not perpetuate the erroneous assumption that monolingual English speakers should be privileged over the rest of us. Let me add to this the fact that “proper” English is only one sliver of the Englishes we speak and hear every day. Think about what folks speak in East Oakland, or the Fruitvale, or in the Mission District, or in Chinatown, or on Powell Street, or in any major American city, cosmopolitan spaces, inner cities, suburban and rural communities. People are not speaking in proper academic English but in really interesting figurative language. One positive result of my English Tagalog Spanish mash-ups is that subtracted bilinguals like me relate to it; take away the negative connotation that this is “broken” language, and it reaffirms our wholeness. We were never broken to begin with, and it’s unfortunate we were ever led to believe this in the first place."
For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.
