Sarah Enany on Living — And Making a Living — As a Translator in Egypt – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

SE: Egyptian Arabic is really… English achieves this effortlessly, switching between “To be or not to be” and “she’s a bit of all right” with nary the blink of an eye. Drs. Shawqi Deif and M. Enani, my late father, both held that Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic were different levels of the same language, and while that view is debatable, what is incontrovertible is that Egyptian Arabic shares a great deal of vocabulary, particularly for abstract and sophisticated concepts, with MSA. The grammar and syntax may differ between MSA and Egyptian, but I’ve found the vocabulary assertion to be largely true.

What was interesting about doing Les Mis was that the translation was intended to be sung. This entailed producing an Arabic version with the stresses, strong and weak syllables, long and short vowels, etc., almost identical to the English original to enable them to be sung to the original music and sound natural in performance. This is hardly a new endeavor: virtually every major opera has been translated to be sung in most European languages, and we have Arabic-language pioneers who have translated operas, notably Ali Sadek, who has translated and recorded some infelicitously stressed but incontrovertibly groundbreaking Mozart operas into classical Arabic; Abdul-Rahman al-Khamisi, whose Egyptian Arabic translation of The Merry Widow has been going strong for some 80 years now and is still regularly performed today; and our brilliant poet Sayed Higab, whose Egyptian Arabic translation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera to be sung to Kurt Weill’s music is a quite extraordinary triumph that I am still frantically trying to get published before it is lost to history. Les Mis marked my second time working with Neveen Allouba of the independent Egyptian music theater organization Fabrica; since she speaks German, I collaborated with her to produce a sung version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, also in Egyptian Arabic. It was performed at the Alexandria Library in January 2011 (just three weeks before the Egyptian Revolution) and was a big hit with audiences.

I may have digressed, but I feel it is important not to look at opera/operetta translation into Arabic in isolation, since it is still a groundbreaking endeavor every time we do it. Les Mis, not to be falsely modest, was performed to cheers from audiences every time I attended it. I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to see your work performed to literal shouts of delight. Admittedly, such lines as “Everybody raise a glass/Raise it up the master’s a**e” are guaranteed to engender a wicked glee in the audience!

In addition to these feats, you also translate novels and short stories. How do you discover new reads, both in English and in Arabic? What reviews or reviewers do you trust? Or do you follow the literary scene in some other way — through prizes, word of mouth, particular publishing houses?

SE: For English, I rely perhaps more heavily than I should on The Guardian – they have helped me discover everything from a new translation of The Odyssey to their latest recommendation, the harrowing I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust. I’m just getting into the world of literary awards, although I do fear sins of omission when drawing one’s recommendations exclusively through lists curated by others. Some of my best reads I have found on the sidewalk in battered, dog-eared editions sold by street vendors – or, indeed, in Internet fanfiction, where I have found some of the best writers out there who have never dared to approach a publisher. To give one example of the fiction you can find on the Archive of our Own online, this is by an author who goes by “notbecauseofvictories”:

He does try to play the thing once or twice.

But a fiddle of gold is heavy as shit, and the sound’s all wrong—loveless, and cold as Hell, with vicious strings that split Johnny’s fingers when he plays. (There’s never any blood when he looks, and Johnny wonders if it’s drinking him up, dry; leaving scars at his fingertips and an ache in his hand that won’t quite ease. Then again, it’s the Devil’s instrument; it can probably do any evil thing it likes.)

In the end, he loosens the bow-hair and puts the thing away in a battered, borrowed case, goes back to playing his box maple. Wood is living, it breathes and breaks; swells like your best girl’s clit under your tongue, shivers like a warm wind through leaves. Wood remembers the sun, wants to sing about it.

There’s nothing gold wants to sing about, except being dead.

In Arabic, it’s a little trickier: word of mouth is always a good indicator, and scattered reviews here and there help get a handle on what’s available. This year, I’m heading up the jury for the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature, so I’ve been fortunate enough to have a great deal of fiction dropped in my lap. Still weeding through that. That said, the issue with Arabic publishing is that it’s still largely opaque, although social media and the Internet in general have made things much more accessible than they used to be. But there is still the issue of obscurity. There’s no real literary journal movement, and one may hear by pure chance of someone who has garnered some major award here or there.

I believe you’ve published all of your book-length translations in Egypt. What are the challenges of accessibility for translators who work from Arabic–>English and who don’t live in a country with many different English-language publishers, such as the US or UK?

SE: Primarily that there aren’t publishers. There’s no market. I was lucky enough to be referred to the AUC Press by the late translator Humphrey Davies, and that’s the only really well-established publisher who does work into English, has high publication values and good editing, and pays decently. The series Contemporary Arabic Literature, which I mentioned above, issued by the State Publishing House, was an attempt to introduce more works in Arabic to the English-language reader, but other than their abysmal pay rate (in the 1990s it was six milliemes, a millieme being a defunct unit of payment that amounts to one-tenth of one piaster, also a defunct unit of payment equivalent to 1/100th of one pound, which of this writing is equivalent to 5 US cents. You get the idea), any channels of communication between the publisher and prospective clients (such as departments of Arabic literature in US and UK universities, to say nothing of African universities) were – and remain – completely absent. There is still this opacity in international networking where there’s very little communication and/or openness to the outside world. I don’t have any idea how to solve it, but perhaps someone more versed in arts management or publishing might.

In addition, there is an endemic lack of respect for translators in this country – I don’t have enough information to generalize about the Arab world or the international market. If one isn’t employed by the United Nations or some well-established organization, one is out in the cold. For instance, a number of distinguished English Department professors, and myself, were recruited to translate several textbooks from English into Arabic for a major government ministry. I won’t disclose too many details, but we were due to receive payment in September 2023, at which time our payment would have been equivalent to $10,000; as of today, we still have not been paid, and the value of our prospective payment has depreciated to $6,750. Clients negotiate aggressively, offer laughable rates, and expect free labor – and this is my experience as someone with an established reputation in the field! Young translators just starting out are in a terrible position, with clients offering as low as 4 EGP (70 cents) per English Standard Page. The National Center for Translation, with its English-to-Arabic mandate, is appreciably better, offering comparatively good rates, if still below international standards, and a solid variety of non-fiction and academic publications. They have been talking about branching out into Arabic-English, but nothing definite has materialized as yet.

One last question! If you suddenly found yourself on the board of a well-funded literary organization, based in Cairo, that existed exclusively to support translation in and out of Arabic, what would you want it to do first? What sort of programs would you look to support? (Note you don’t actually have to run day-to-day operations, you’re just on the advisory board.)

SE: Great question, and one that I struggle to come up with on-the-spot answers to; I’ll probably think of better responses the longer I sit on this.

2. For translation into Arabic: For the love of God, make copyrights more accessible. We need more copyleft. So much good work is never translated because of prohibitive copyright costs charged in hard currency, in a country whose currency hasn’t been that strong in years and has recently been devalued. The bureaucracy can be labyrinthine and responses slow. Publishers abroad, especially of bestselling foreign-language work that needs to be translated, need to be aware that the book market in Egypt, at least, is not a multimillion-dollar industry and adjust their expectations accordingly.

3. Pay translators more. I know of an amazing independent publisher who pays sixty piasters per word, which is one of the most generous EGP rates out there. That is equivalent to 1.2 cents (US). The National Center for Translation pays from 35-40 piasters, so about 0.6 to 0.8 of a cent. At the risk of seeming like a harpy harping on money and financial gain, pay these kids a living wage!

4. As someone on the outside of the publishing world in English, I can testify that it sometimes feels like an opaque monolith where a newcomer would have a hard time finding a foothold or getting a publisher to give them the time of day. I would love there to be such a thing as a literary agent for translators in this country – a job entirely absent at the moment – so that someone can do the essential job of making those links and contacts while we get on with what we do best. A similar crisis exists with arts management in the field of theatre, by the way, in which I have acquaintances, and the arts scene more generally in Egypt.

Thank you so much for your time!