Toward a Gender-Conscious Translation – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY
Between Marilyn Booth and Yasmeen Hanoosh
In our first “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Marilyn Booth discuss the outlines and possibilities of gender-conscious translation, how a translator can be transparent about their choices, and Marilyn’s translation of Alis al-Bustani’s صائبة, (Sa’iba 1891), and the “need to advocate for, and translate, these earlier works.”
YH: You’ve had a long and remarkably productive career with Arabic literature, along with your scholarly research as an historian—take us to the beginning of this journey. What were your earliest meaningful encounters with Arabic language and literature?
MB: It’s a long story! My encounter with Arabic began when I was eleven years old and my parents took the family to Beirut for nine months, via an Italian liner from New York and then a Volkswagen bus trip from Italy through the Balkans, Turkey, and Syria to Lebanon. I was raised in a family that valued languages, but I remember that when we were traveling through Bulgaria, my father couldn’t understand menus and we still laugh about a restaurant dinner where he said, “Quiet—you’re all having omelets for dinner!”
It was amazing to be in Beirut. And we met many Palestinians there and in the West Bank—this was 1966-67 and we spent time in the West Bank before Israel invaded it. We left Beirut during the war in June, it was terrifying. By then, I had come to feel that I wanted to learn Arabic. (I learned a lot of French at school that year, but no Arabic.) I thought I would be a journalist who knew the language (rare in those days). What was equally formative for me was returning to the US at a time when my political consciousness was just forming, and realizing through conversations I tried to have that ‘Palestinian’ was not a word in most Americans’ vocabularies.
I’ll zip through the rest—at university, studying Arabic and still thinking about journalism, I developed further a love I already had for research and writing, and I studied history as well as Arabic and French. I was fortunate to spend a summer in Cairo on CASA—the great, intensive, still existing Arabic program—where I developed a fascination with Egyptian colloquial Arabics and their creative uses. I was very lucky to obtain a Marshall Scholarship to start graduate work at Oxford with the amazing and inspiring Albert Hourani. Another year in Cairo on CASA determined me to write a dissertation on the poet, prose writer, and activist Mahmud Bayram al-Tunisi, which allowed me to indulge my love of reading literary texts within—and to elucidate—political history broadly conceived. I worked with Albert, with Mustafa Badawi, and (informally) with Robert Mabro who, as an Alexandrian, loved reading Bayram and gave me a lot of insights on Alexandrian language and society. These mentors and friends, I miss them—Allah yarhamuhum—though I think they would all be rather shocked that I am back at Oxford!
YH: What a journey! How and when did literary translation come into the picture?
MB: Translation… I guess that started with my undergraduate dissertation on Mayy Ziyadah. She was an incredible language sculptor (and feminist). The beauty and difficulty of translating her prose hooked me. And then, Bayram al-Tunisi—what a challenge to translate his poems. What register do you choose? And from where?
Because I was interested in human rights work, I did some translations, interviews, and short articles for the London-based magazine Index on Censorship—including interviews with Naguib Mahfouz and Shaykh Imam. And then I got into conversations with publishers about translating longer works—and it began to happen. It wasn’t something I had planned on in advance. But I think literary translation is an addiction—in the best sense. Hard to stop once you have started. Forty years and about twenty-five translated books on, I still feel that way. Sometimes it is difficult to read a novel (whether in Arabic, French, or English) without thinking to myself: How would I translate that sentence?
YH: Translation is undeniably addictive—it reveals the inner workings of language in ways that, once seen, cannot be unseen.
MB: Yes, indeed! How did you get into translation, Yasmeen?
YH: My journey into literary translation is, at its core, a story of desperation. It stems from my long-standing quest to become a literary writer at a time when I had lost my language. As a teenager in Iraq, I immersed myself in reading translated world classics, captivated by the vast possibilities modern Arabic offered as a medium—its tones, registers, diction, and syntax. Yet, as a monolingual reader, my ambition was not to become a translator but a fiction writer.
However, circumstances beyond my control led me on a one-way journey to the United States at the age of seventeen. At that formative stage of life, one of the most profound challenges of uprootedness was the sudden, urgent need to function in a second language I could barely use. Overnight, English—a language I had previously encountered mainly in the abstract classroom setting for an hour a day—became the medium through which I had to navigate every facet of life. My Arabic, by contrast, was frozen in time—stunted, attenuated.
I felt trapped. Robbed of my voice.
For someone already enamored with language—not just as a practical tool of communication but as a magical portal into other worlds and layers of meaning—this linguistic rupture felt like a profound disability. (Later, I would compare my predicament to that of an aspiring pianist who loses a hand or a dancer who loses a foot.) My response to this loss was to plunge myself into the study of English with obsessive intensity, using every tactic available to me.
One of the milestones in this linguistic struggle came when I began reading literary works in English—a goal I did not reach until my early twenties. From there, I began experimenting with translation, first from English to Arabic, and eventually, what still feels like a great challenge—translating literature from Arabic to English. Literary translation became my form of “copying the masters.” I believed that by rendering great works from one language into another, I could unlock their secrets—the rhythm of a phrase, the architecture of a chapter, the sweep of a narrative arc—and, in doing so, inch closer to my dream of becoming a writer myself.
I do think that intuitive translation has helped the development of both of my languages tremendously, more so than working through grammar manuals or reading translation theories, which brings me to my next question—You’ve remarked elsewhere, “When I translate a work of literature, I don’t want to be thinking as a scholar.” What is it about scholarly thinking that can sometimes hinder the art of literary translation? Can you fully separate your academic work on Arabic literature from the creative process of translating it? Or do these two pursuits inevitably overlap? If so, how might their overlap enrich your translations—or potentially compromise them?
MB: Separating them? Yes and no. Literary translation is my art, and I don’t write about the works I translate, except in (usually historically focused) pre/postfaces. I like your term, “intuitive translation.” I do also think that translation is the closest critical reading one can do. My translations are my readings, on various levels, of the work—while hoping to encourage readers into their own readings, for instance by preserving ambiguity when I feel it is a part of the text I am translating. Translating is my art, my writing—I don’t make translation decisions for conscious scholarly reasons. (Sometimes, I might make them for political reasons—but that is a matter of “deep background”—of who I am.)
However, translation is very significant to my scholarship, in several ways. When I write scholarly books, I include a lot of text that I translate from the original. I want readers to get a sense of the material I am pondering, though of course they are reading it through my lens. I want them to hear the emotions, the rhetoric, and also the silences in the text. I try to translate elegantly but these are also more “academic” translations. I hope that in any kind of translation I do, I give readers an intimate sense of the voice of the original, but the way one does that in a novel translated for readers of literature does differ from a text presented within a scholarly discussion.
Second, as a feminist historian of feminism (and thus, inevitably, of anti-feminism, too), studying translation historically is a key focus for me. I learn so much about the gender debates of the time, and about those who participated in them, from the ways that nineteenth-century translators rendered French and English works into Arabic: how as well as why they did so. Sometimes it is uncanny, the extent to which a translated text can sound like a local product, and this reminds us of how “thick” the circulation of ideas, projects, and tropes was—how issues circulating in 1890s Paris were also paramount in 1890s Cairo, and many attitudes were similar.
YH: Do you think translation can be taught as a set of techniques and theories?
MB: I have taught translation, and I encourage students to read translation scholarship and especially translators’ commentaries or memoirs on what they do. But all of this reading is for the purpose of stretching one’s imagination—never, never to be prescriptive. I want students to regard this kind of reading as liberating rather than enabling—that is, you listen to other translators, and maybe to scholars of translation, but in the end, you are an artist and you listen to the work, to its voice, and to yourself. And to others—like most productive human activities, translation can benefit from respectful collaboration and exchange of ideas (especially so, perhaps, since translation is often such a lonely pursuit!)
My own work as a translator leads me to recognize that choices in translation are subject to layered artistic, intellectual, political and perhaps psychological factors, and cannot always be explained rationally or consciously. Yet, as an historian I analyze translations and their paratexts for what they tell us not so much about changing translation norms as about political desires, senses of patriotic commitment, maybe personal ambitions, in a very specific political conjunction, a particular time and place. Is it contradictory of me, to resist analysis of my own translations but to insist on that move as an historian? I don’t know. I do think that my work as a literary translator gives me a healthy skepticism about how much one can read into translators’ choices. But there are different kinds of texts, and different levels of intervention in a text. I am analyzing translations of polemical and instructional texts, not (usually) fiction.
I would like to ask you the same question. You are a translator, and a teacher and a scholar. (How) do these roles intersect for you, in your thinking, your work, your teaching?
YH: I give more attention to translation as an intuitive pursuit than an intellectual one. While I enjoy reading, and occasionally teaching, literary theory, I approach it primarily as a way to compare notes with other translators, engage in dialogue, and explore how others have navigated specific translation predicaments. It also helps me articulate aspects of the translation process that I have yet to be able to describe on my own. Yet, at its core, for me translation remains an intuitive act. Expanding my knowledge of the cultural and historical contexts I’m translating from is essential. This is where I focus most of my preparation before approaching a text, ensuring that my intervention as a translator is both informed and responsible.
I would like to hear your thoughts on the translator’s intervention. When it comes to a translator’s choices, how have the boundaries of what is considered acceptable intervention in a text evolved over time and across cultures? Have you observed these shifts through your work as a historian? And how do they compare to your perspective as a modern translator?
MB: In the period I work on, translators often felt free to radically redirect the texts they chose to work on—adding whole sections, deleting others, maybe inserting a poem—so this intervention goes way beyond lexical choice. And translators sometimes articulated their agendas, their reasons for radical adaptation—but not always. Their choices require contextual interpretation and openness—a recognition that as scholars, we can’t explain everything. Yet, when they make decisions to delete a whole chapter of an original, or to completely change modes of address, for instance, we can and should at least speculate (from a position of careful research and historical knowledge) about what their goals and sense of audience might have been. Studying translation ought to be central to intellectual history. That belief has been at the heart of a collective project, a somewhat shifting group of scholars I’ve convened intermittently; we have thought of ourselves as the Ottoman Translation Studies Group. We’ve produced two scholarly volumes bringing together many Ottoman languages. In the second one, we worked collaboratively, across languages. It was a lot of fun and I hope it produced some insights on translators as creative knowledge producers in a period of acute change and in a multilingual society.
More work has been done on Nahda translation-adaptation with regards to fiction than on the genres of texts I study. (In addition to tracing the rhetorics of feminist and anti-feminist discourse partly through translation, I am working on what I hope will be a major study of behavioral manuals and their translational origins.) We don’t usually know much about the translators—elusive, half-visible, as translators so often are. But these translations were an important part of public discourse. And the study of translation into Arabic in the nineteenth century and before is certainly a growing field of interest, in tandem with the intensified interest via Translation Studies in translators’ work. This has the salutary effect of emphasizing translators’ agency as producers of theory-knowledge, though I remain aware of the danger of over-reading, of over-analyzing translators’ writerly decisions.
Finally, I’m interested in translating the early fiction by women in particular, hopefully for a wide audience. My translation of one of the earliest novels that we know was authored by a woman, Alis al-Bustani’s 1891 صائبة is coming out with Oxford World’s Classics. I have experimented with giving it a slightly Victorian-era voice in English, since I think it is a Victorian (and Gothic!) novel. I would like to do more translation of works from that era—such as Zaynab Fawwaz’s حسن العواقب, which I’ve begun to work on. In this way, my work as a literary translator and my scholarship really do converge. We’ll see how well that works!
And by the way, I do not at all reject (or “resist”) others’ analyses or critiques of my translations (whether “literary” or “scholarly”). I welcome them. I just can’t always explain the choices I have made.
YH: I wonder if this is in part because they were choices made intuitively rather than analytically.
MB: Absolutely, it is. Choices made as a writer, not as a scholar.
YH: I’m glad to hear about these translations of nineteenth-century works in progress. Hopefully we will see both works in print soon.
As a scholar who studied the history of Arab feminist writing, publishing, and translation in nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—would you say there are general aesthetic, political, or social lessons from these earlier sites of cultural production and transmission that we might benefit from as contemporary translators?
MB: We need to advocate for, and translate, these earlier works. We need to constantly remind people everywhere that feminist writing in the Arabophone region as elsewhere has a long history and that these works are both enjoyable and historically significant. I am not sure that they benefit us as contemporary translators of contemporary works in any specific way, but perhaps the works themselves remind us to be humble about our own times, both the good and the less good. Perhaps they also oblige us to be sensitive to language change. They show us a writerly context where writers were trying to figure out how to write novels, with the inevitable fissures, which we might laugh about now but we need to respect and can learn from. Concerning women’s writings specifically, they remind us of how much social as well as aesthetic labor women have exerted on behalf of their own aspirations, for a very long time and often in extremely adverse social-intellectual climates—where, for instance, if a woman’s writing was deemed “good,” then people questioned whether it was really written by her.
YH: To think about it, how tragic! I wish it weren’t such a common phenomenon.
MB: Although I understand readers’ and publishers’ wishes to partake of what Arabophone authors are writing now, I have long wished that we could train more attention on earlier works of Arabic literature—not just these very early fictional works, but through the twentieth century—just as readers appreciate going back to Anglophone authors of earlier decades. (These omissions were a focus of a brief interview I did for Wasafiri in 2019).
Do you think there is an appetite for earlier works? How do we create and foster it? What works from earlier in time would you like to see translated—or to translate? I do wonder sometimes if I am crazy to want this, given how difficult it is even to find publishers for very contemporary works. I’d like to know your thoughts.
YH: I, for one, certainly have appetite for earlier works! I’m currently working on Elias Khoury’s first novel On the Relations of the Circle (1975), which seems to have been left out by translators because it’s too abstract, experimental, or thematically distinct from his later works. I’m also working on Gha’ib Tu‘mah Farman’s first novel, The Palm Tree and the Neighbors (1966). Farman is widely regarded as the father of the Iraqi social realist novel, and yet none of his groundbreaking works are available in English. I initially thought publishers would jump at these translation proposals, but I was wrong. In the process, I learned how difficult it is to publish, let alone fund and market, older works of fiction.
I could be wrong or overly generalizing about it, but my impression is that many serious translators navigate like historians of literature—searching for deep intertextual connections, literary genealogies, archaeologies of language and meaning—while the publishing industry navigates more like journalists of literature—propelled by novelty, splashy headlines, controversial authors, scandalous content, and fleeting current themes that capture readers’ buying power. Perhaps the translations that make it to the market are shaped by the tension between these two impulses? Whatever the case, I feel incredibly fortunate that Archipelago Books and AUC Press have, respectively, agreed to publish both of these translations.
MB: I am so glad to hear this—that you are doing it, and that you have found publishers. I think we translators need to work together more on these issues—for one, of how we bring the older works we love to publishers. I agree with you on the different agendas, or outlooks, that at least some translators have, as opposed to publishers. I wish we could find a publisher who would take on the responsibility of publishing a Modern Arabic Classics series—sort of a parallel to the fabulous productivity of the Library of Arabic Literature supported by New York University/Abu Dhabi and New York University Press.
YH: That would be wonderful. I think key to fostering interest in older world literature is to cultivate interest in other people as living concomitant societies, not just the substance of dramatic news headlines. We need English language readers to be interested in Palestinian literature, for instance, not just during a genocide, but primarily before a genocide takes place, so that they may have emotive reasons to object to it and prevent it. How do we get there when we’re operating within colonial systems of inequality and selective education? No idea beyond keeping the effort to publish what we deem worth reading.
MB: I agree—and this is what literary works can so beautifully foster—if only we can get them to readers.
YH: You too have turned your attention to the demographics of the less commonly translated. From the outset of your career, you’ve been keenly aware that far fewer women get translated than men. Does the problem emanate from the Arab publishing world, the choices of western translators/publishers, or both at the same time? How did you set out to remedy the discrepancy through your work and advocacy?
MB: At a certain point, male authors and critics were howling that they had been subsumed by publishers’ interest in female authors—when in fact, translations of women’s writing were still hugely in the minority of what was getting published! But as is the case with most good questions, the answer to this one is complicated, because it isn’t just that fewer women are translated, but the issue of which women are translated—and how are “they” “packaged”? It has been the case (improved now, though still an issue) that publishers were mostly interested in women from the region as victims—whether they were authors of fiction (or memoir) or characters in fiction.
I want to be fair to publishers: they have to sell books, and most of them have narrow profit margins. But what is upsetting is the vicious circle: publishers wanted works that confirmed western readers’ stereotypes of “Arab” or “Muslim” women, and of course if those kind of works were predominant then that would further sediment the stereotypes. But as more works get published, and more translators are advocating for them, this is—as I said—becoming less of a problem, I think. Optimistically, therefore, I use the past tense in remarking on this. But, do you agree?
YH: Yes, I see this disturbing vicious cycle now that you point it out so clearly. I am also all too painfully familiar with how Arab women are packaged—how most cultural aspects get tokenized under the subgenre of “ethnic literature” really. But I also share your optimism that the trends could shift because, historically, we see appetites and aesthetic preferences constantly shifting.
MB: For me, a huge incentive early on to translate authors identifying as women, and as feminists, was that Nawal el-Saadawi was literally the only female author of Arabic fiction known to Anglophone audiences. I’m a bit complicit in that I translated her prison memoirs (and, reluctantly, one novel). I respect her memory as an activist (though she was a complicated and not entirely congenial one, for me). But I wanted readers to hear other voices. That was the impulse behind one of my earliest translations, an anthology of eight Egyptian writers that I selected and translated, after reading hundreds of stories. I am very proud of that work and I wish it could be re-issued.
YH: Do you think that not only women authors but also women translators face unequal access to representation, recognition, compensation, awards, etc. on the basis of their gender?
MB: Translators in general face unequal access to recognition and compensation. Translator rights are a huge issue, though this is receiving more attention now. Some major prizes that highlight translation, as well as the meteoric rise of academic Translation Studies and the embrace of “translation” as a working metaphor for our times (sometimes too loosely, I feel) have helped to make translators’ work more visible. But we still have a long way to go; visibility doesn’t always mean rights. This is a feminist issue—whoever the translator is and whatever their own gender trajectory and sense of self.
It is very important to educate readers about translation as a process: the many hands that go into it, for instance. And the fact that, for translators, it is a process involving deep knowledge, research, sensitive reading, art, negotiation—there is nothing “automatic” about the process, from advocating for a work all the way through to its emergence and public presence, all of the “invisible” (and often unpaid) work that we do. The love that goes into it.
It is true that the labor conditions for translators tend to be those associated historically (and still) with women’s labor (and most intensively with the labor of disprivileged women): inadequate and unequal pay, instability, invisibility, denial of creativity. It would be interesting to see some research on whether gender assignment makes a difference in this regard. It probably does. There are power differentials in the business of translation as there are in virtually all work sectors, in most contexts.
YH: You have also been interested in disrupting what you call “the gender stereotypes” that plague perceptions of Arab and Muslim societies. In what ways can literary translation, and your translation in particular, offer effective interventions? Inversely, can western translators, when lacking this awareness and cultural knowledge that clearly mark your work, contribute instead to enhancing these entrenched gender stereotypes by bringing them into the text?
MB: Again, it is a complicated issue, involving many players beyond translators, let alone “western translators.” First, can we ponder what that term means? So many people have roots and life experiences in a range of cultures and societies… is a translator who grew up in an Arabic-speaking, Muslim-majority country but moved to Europe or North America and developed a career there a “western” translator? Is someone of European origins who partly grew up elsewhere a “western” translator? Is it about origins, appearances, outlook, family name, resources… ? And who are the gatekeepers? This returns us to questions of power and labor conditions. Many translators have justly complained that their origins or color or name has led publishers to overlook them as translators into English—this leads us (back) into a set of labor-condition issues of great importance. A thoughtful recent intervention on discrimination and inequalities in translation is Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation.
To come back to your question: the first layer of intervention is that of what gets translated. Translators play a hugely important role as advocates, even as quasi-(and unpaid) literary agents. We can urge translation of works that we feel disrupt gender stereotypes. For me, this is not specifically about works by women authors—although, as I said, when I started out it seemed important to get women’s authorial names out there. Since, I have also translated men authors who probe gender stereotypes about femininity and masculinity (for example, Lebanese author Hasan Daoud).
In choosing what we translate and how we present it, sometimes we may face texts that make us uncomfortable and yet they deserve to be translated. What do I mean? Stereotypes generally have some basis in lived realities, in a society’s histories, in power differentials (such as colonizer/colonized) that shape how people are categorized. Literary characters can reflect and articulate these social processes. Patriarchal gender relations are persistent across the world. (We are being reminded at present of how deeply patriarchal the United States is.) Human lives as portrayed in fiction often reflect that. There’s a difference between portrayal and espousal—between a literary character whose outlook in the text is patriarchal or sexist, and a text that, as a reader, I find uncomfortable in its gender politics. A literary character who holds patriarchal views can be portrayed sympathetically, for the origin story that lies behind the character; but for me to feel comfortable, I need to sense a critical edge to that portrayal. That might be a critical edge that I supply to my own reading of the text, or it might be explicit or implicit in the voice of the text. Furthermore, as a reader, I may bring to my reading a belief that patriarchally inclined literary characters generally demean or undercut themselves in the end, but not all readers will see things that way.
The literary characters that hail me most strongly are the complex, messy, often self-contradictory ones; such portrayals attest to an author’s deep attunement to the complexities of human existence. I am currently reading Emile Zola’s magnificent Rougon series, which is both panoramic and profoundly focused on individuals. I am gripped by his vividly nasty characters, whom he shows as shaped by extremely difficult environments. Even if Zola’s ideas on character formation were a bit rigid, the fictional results are multifarious and fascinating! I may not “like” most of these characters, but I certainly engage with them, and they stay in my mind. Engagement doesn’t always mean comfort. In her powerful study of some historical women’s lives and politics, Jacqueline Rose calls on us “to bring to the surface of history, both private and public, what the heart cannot, or believes it cannot, withstand.” (Women in Dark Times, 2d edn, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025, p. 51). This is a task that fiction helps us face. Whether I am willing and capable as a translator to take on the most troubling texts is another question. I might well not feel that I’m the best woman for the job.
Naturally, these issues of character presentation and voice are important as one translates, in the language one uses. I am struggling right now with whether, in a novel set in the early 1960s, I can use a non-gendered “their” for “his” when I think “his” is (unconsciously) exclusivist. But will “their” sound anachronistic? I want to always use inclusive, non-hierarchical language, but some characters (including “omniscient” narrators) can’t be made to speak that way—and shouldn’t be made to. One hopes they expose themselves through the language that the first author, and myself as second author, binds to them.
These are difficult issues. As a translator, a reader, and a scholar of literature, how do you manage these issues? Which are not abstract, because as translators, we may face them in every line we translate.
YH: As a scholar and teacher of Arabic literature, I think these instances offer wonderful opportunities for unpacking concepts, examining presuppositions, and tracking trajectories and disjunctions of cultural histories. As a translator, I find it more challenging. There’s always the risk of exposing my own unexamined prejudice or uninformed choice by making the wrong intervention without knowing. This is why, like I mentioned earlier, it’s so important for me to do the preparatory work on understanding a work’s cultural context before embarking on a translation. This is also why I mostly focus on translating works by Iraqi authors. I imagine that I understand how their characters operate better than I understand characters from farther removed Arab cultural milieus, but there, too, lies the serious risk of bringing my own unexamined suppositions about Iraqi society and its gender roles into the translated text.
I wonder how you handle these uncertainties. When you translate a novel, is there ever a fear that an Arab author’s unconscious choices (because we’re all embedded in patriarchal societies as you say) might perpetuate gender stereotypes that are already at work against Arab societies, as we discussed earlier? What do you do in those situations—when you decide that the work as a whole is worth translating but there are individual instances within the text that don’t live up to the work’s overall caliber?
MB: Great question. Some practitioners within Feminist Translation Studies, as an academic discipline, have advocated an activist translation practice that might intervene to alter the gender dynamics of a text. It is an ongoing debate (and I am privileged to be part of a thoughtful group that is thinking through such issues and staging public events on them, the Feminist Translation Network based at University of Birmingham and co-led by Dr Hilary Brown and Dr Olga Castro). Does one practice gender-conscious, feminist translation by identifying moments of sexism or structures of inequality in the text and thinking about how to change them, or does one highlight mechanisms of inequality by translating them? It will depend on the type of text it is, as well as one’s sense of the presumed audience. In general, I will not alter or suppress facets of a text—if I am that uncomfortable with it, I will choose not to translate it as a free-standing work. (Translating within one’s scholarship raises somewhat different issues for me.) But I might make linguistic choices that do highlight or mute certain features—hard to avoid that, I think. And sometimes, these are negotiations between first author, second author, and editor(s), and they may come back to the question of stereotypes—but about representing stereotypes held by characters in a novel. For example, in Jokha Alharthi’s Bitter Orange Tree, there is a ghajariyya, a Traveler or gypsy woman. I had used “gypsy woman” because that’s the way the villagers thought of her—and they meant it as a demeaning term. The editor wanted Traveler or traveler throughout, but I argued that this would inaccurately portray the character through the other characters’ eyes. I modified my language to use traveler or just “the woman” only when it was not a question of the villagers’ focalization, but I insisted on using “gypsy woman” or ghajariyya when it was (and the children were learning this demeaning vision of others from their mothers).
Most important is to be as transparent as possible about the choices I make, usually trying to signal this within the text. Producing a gender-conscious translation may mean intervening via a translator’s note/afterword.
How do you feel about levels of intervention? Isn’t it difficult sometimes to be transparent about choices? I feel this, as a translator and as a feminist.
YH: Some situations seem intractably difficult, like the one surrounding our use of the now-outmoded and frowned upon “gypsy” label and its derivatives. Substituting with “traveler” is an evident instance of what we call “translation loss.” It’s interesting that you should mention this example now because I was recently thinking of all the great literature in which the word occurs, not just in Arabic and English but also, significantly, in Spanish. What are we supposed to do, for example, with García Lorca’s Romancero Gitano (Commonly rendered in English as Gypsy Ballads)? Imagine retranslating it as A Traveler’s Ballads! In most cases, I’m of the opinion that historical specificity should come before political correctness, and that the latter belongs in paratextual materials like footnotes and Translator’s Notes rather than as a surreptitious intervention within the translated text itself. I’m sorry you had to do away with the historical and cultural specificity of your ‘ghajariyya’. Words shift meaning and there’s always the risk that an acceptable usage will be rendered obsolete or problematic at a later time period when a linguistic community contends with its prejudices (and hopefully we can continue to do so despite the global resurgence of fascism). It’s a risk we take when we write anything, which leads me to ask you: what is your take on modern translators’ interventions in ancient texts?
MB: If I were (re)translating, say, a Greek classic, or the Bible, I might well want to intervene. After all, in that case, one is working against a long history of patriarchal translations which have become classics in themselves—working against translations that espouse masculine and heterosexual privilege in their language and emphases. Also, these are texts suspended in space, as it were—they don’t usually have single, identifiable, human authors but rather they arise from collective and spiritual experience—even if they are attributed to a single author, such as “Homer.” Some recent translators have been explicit about taking this path. At the same time, masculinist translation, unfortunately, is alive and well. Vivid examples of it are offered in the wonderful volume edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal, The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender. Why shouldn’t we counter such practices by producing critical translations that question the gender politics of a work that has become a classic—as long as it is done with transparency about one’s choices and methods.
As an historian, I work with and sometimes translate feminist texts but also anti-feminist ones. We ignore the latter at our peril: I want to highlight rather than suppress the gender politics therein. And in my research on translation historically, I emphasize the fact that much of the gender-focused discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries happened through translation into Arabic of patriarchal and misogynistic English- and French-language texts. The often-heard assumption that somehow “feminism” was imported wholesale into Arabophone societies is not only erroneous but suppresses the ironic fact that anti-feminist discourses were often imported, though often with creative modulations. When I translate a misogynist historically rooted text—such as some of the essays in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Arabic newspapers—I am contextualizing it within a local and trans-societal circulation of debate on what “gender” should mean, a debate in that particular time and place.
YH: Do you think the gendered dimension of an Arabic literary text needs to be explicitly unpacked for the western reader? I’m thinking of Gérard Genette’s work on paratexts here—keywords, [changed] titles, forwards, introductions, afterwords, reviews, scholarly articles, etc. A few of your translations enjoy a preface, introduction, or afterword that you thoughtfully wrote yourself. What is the significance of framing the translated text for you as a feminist translator? Do you think translators have a responsibility to provide an interpretation of the work they translate (to rescue it from misinterpretation, stereotyping, etc.), or is it sufficient sometimes for this elucidation and disambiguation to happen through the process of translation itself (through word choice, inline definitions, or even the choice of which work to translate to begin with as you mentioned)?
MB: As the examples above might suggest, there are different layers of the text, and they may need to be handled differently. Translation is already an interpretation—we could say that the text is “framed” internally through a translator’s choices. The reader is getting my reading of a text, although I hope that when a text is ambiguous (as I read it, anyway), I preserve that ambiguity. To the extent possible, I want the reader to be able to access multiple ways into the text, to form her own interpretation. As to framing a text, sometimes that is very important (though I prefer afterwords to forewords, because the former seem a bit less imposing or directive; they are positioned more clearly as subordinate to the translated text). We can offer afterwords or introductions that contextualize gender relations and images in a novel, as I did for my translation of the great Latifa al-Zayyat’s classic The Open Door. Published in 1960, the original was a feminist novel of its time and was controversial then—but for an Anglophone audience forty years later, I felt it was important to offer readers an historically focused study that considered the interplay of national and gender politics in the era of its writing and first reception.
In general, though, I prefer not to provide that explicit framing. I don’t think that translators necessarily have a responsibility to inform readers in this way. (But again, sometimes brief translator notes are important to point out certain usages or features of the text, perhaps in lieu of glossaries or footnotes.) Our responsibility is to render the text in such a way as to provide readerly openings, and to be transparent about what we do, in the case of major interventions. I can give a “bad” example of the latter. Years ago, and somewhat reluctantly (to be honest), I translated Saadawi’s Circling Song, at her insistence. And then, her husband at the time, who had also translated much of her work, intervened and demanded that we (Zed Books and me) remove the fictional framing text that is so characteristic of Saadawi’s fiction. I refused; but we were at loggerheads and so then I said, all right, as long as I can have a translator’s note stating that this was done at the author’s request. He refused (Saadawi, ironically, didn’t get involved!). I withdrew my name from the translation, because to me, this silent tampering with a major structural feature of the text was dishonest. This doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with feminism or feminist texts. However, the cases I know of, when original texts have been altered in a major way, concern women’s texts. I can’t help wondering whether such tampering most often has to do with pressures to “present Arab [or Muslim] women” in a particular way. Do you agree?
YH: I’m less familiar with this book but I wouldn’t be surprised. I would’ve withdrawn my name from the translation too, and I have in the past for similar reasons. Such a vivid example of what seems to be a quintessential gender power dynamic. Do you think the paratextual practices could influence or guide the reader too much, beyond what the original text does for its Arabic readers?
MB: Yes, definitely, which is why we must be vigilant about book covers, titles, blurbs, and our own practices, whether in writing afterwords or being transparent about divergences between the Arabic text and the English text. The impacts of such paratexts on readers are justifiably receiving quite a lot of attention in Translation Studies.
YH: In exploring his concept of “caring classes” anthropologist David Graeber wrote, “Feminists have long since pointed out that those on the bottom of any unequal social arrangement tend to think about, and therefore care about, those on top more than those on top think about, or care about, them. Women everywhere tend to think and know more about men’s lives than men do about women, just as black people know more about white people’s, employees about employers’, and the poor about the rich.”
Lately I have been thinking a lot about this concept and how it applies to us as woman readers and translators. Be it in the Arab world or Europe or the Americas, we are embedded in patriarchal social arrangements that prioritize masculine perspectives, needs, desires, etc. Tying this in with the concepts of feminist translation and gender-conscious translation, do you think the gender placement of the translator also influences the text? Do you think that when you read or translate an Arabic novel, you might be more readily tuned to the gender dynamics and the patriarchal undertones in the work as a woman and a feminist? Could a feminine or a feminist translation also be a more caring or empathic translation? (Graeber’s argument somewhat blurs the line between feminine and feminist).
MB: Becoming aware of these dynamics made me a feminist. That elemental part of me affects how I read. Someone raised as a male whose life experiences has made him a feminist would also be alert to those dynamics, though not necessarily in exactly the same way. How privilege or disprivilege of various sorts affects our political, intellectual and moral outlooks, as diverse individuals, not to mention our opportunities to thrive as productive and artistic beings, is important to ponder, but I am wary of generalizations.
YH: More or less, western societies tend to view themselves as progressing when it comes to achieving gender equality for their members. This progress is often projected on a linear time trajectory. Is this sense of progress actually linear and is it reflected in the publishing, editing, or reception of the works that you translate? That is, is there more enthusiasm for Arabic literature that disrupts narratives of gender normativity today compared to when you first started publishing your translations?
MB: That progress in itself is uneven!! But greater receptivity to different ways of thinking about and of living gender identities and sexualities, everywhere, is reflected in (and happens through) literature, and therefore in translation, too. Rather than seeing it as specifically an enthusiasm for disruptive narratives, I would say that there is (happily) more receptivity to contemporary Arabic literature in general, as a major world literature, and texts that disrupt gender normativity are part of that, so they partake in that greater receptivity. So many more works of Arabic fiction are appearing in translation now than when I started, and many more presses are taking this on (especially indie presses). But it is still not easy (whatever the text). I have had a very difficult time finding publishers for my most recent translations. And it was a long and difficult process getting a publisher for Celestial Bodies. Important to keep that in mind. We need more funding, for one thing. We need energetic agents knowledgeable about the field of Arabic literary production (this is happening). We need more of a literary editing culture in the Arabophone publishing sphere.
YH: Let us turn briefly to the politics of the literary prize, which is said to have created new criteria of success for Arabic literature. You are an award-winning translator (The noteworthy Man Booker International Prize for Jokha Alharthi’s Sayyidāt al-qamar. English, Celestial Bodies). You and other award-winning translators have spoken cynically about the after-effects of these prizes, which often place the winning work on the top of an author’s or translator’s oeuvre while submerging their other, often equally or more praiseworthy, works as lesser achievements.
In addition to these after-effects, I would like to ask you about the pre-effects of these prizes—are there any dynamics of note that tend to influence the decision-making and evaluation of submitted works along gender lines? Is there a formal or informal gender quota?
MB: I have not been involved in judging many translation prizes and so I cannot speak to the internal dynamics of the process in general. When I have been involved, there has been no gender quota, and “gender” has not been a specific dynamic of the selection process.
Yes, I have been cynical about the after-effects of prizes, but I also believe they have positive effects, both in drawing larger audiences for Arabic literature and in encouraging young people to write as well as to read.
YH: I can attest to the positive effects! Being the winner of the 2001 Arkansas Arabic Translation competition for my first book-length translation (Muhsin al-Ramli’s Scattered Crumbs) had a significant impact on my self-esteem and development as a young translator working into my second language. (I’m not sure you remember since it’s been such a long time, but you were one of the judges who made that first win possible).
MB: Oh, yes, I remember! And I am so glad to hear this. As translators, in a rather solitary profession, we need to support each other. An important part of that is recognizing really good work.
YH: A belated thank you for setting me on the wondrous path of literary translation with your generous endorsement! On that note, I’d like to close by asking: if you were to interview one translator you have read, living or dead, who would that be and why? What would you want to know about their process?
MB: I would love to interview some of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century translators I study, Arabophone translators working from French and English and often making radical changes to the texts they chose to render. Alas, they are not only dead but were often anonymously published when they were alive—an extreme case of an issue we still face as translators, being invisibilized as creative writers.
I have found translators’ memoirs, and reflections on their practice, to be fascinating and useful—that’s not an interview but it is a glimpse inside the head of a translator. I always recommend these texts to students.
I always love talking with other translators about what we do! A translators’ retreat—walking in the woods and talking about translation, for hours—is my idea of paradise. Let’s go walking in the woods, Yasmeen.
YH: Let’s! And let’s cultivate our translation gardens in spite and defiance of the forest fires and other tragedies that surround us, à la Candide. Thank you for this conversation, Marilyn.
For other conversations in this series, see:
