Shakir Mustafa on the Obstacles to Translating Iraqi Literature into English – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY
Shakir Mustafa was a scholar focused on Irish literature and drama in 2003 and 2004 when the invasion and occupation of Iraq “swatted away my other interests in English, American, and Irish literatures.” Here, he talks about the joys of Iraqi literature and the challenges of translating it into English.
Note: Publishers who are interested in Iraqi literatures will find more in our May Publishers Newsletter, out today.
First, we would like to acknowledge that you are the reason ArabLit started. The site opened in 2009 in order to comment on the excellent short stories that you chose for the 2008 anthology Contemporary Iraqi Fiction. Can you take us back in time to that anthology? When did you decide you wanted to curate an anthology for Iraqi short fiction? And how did you make it happen?
Shakir Mustafa: The anthology came as part of a cultural response to the racist and condescending attitudes towards Iraq, Arab, and Muslim cultures concomitant with the build up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Several stories appeared in that year in Banipal—the leading Arab culture journal in Britain, and some reappeared in American publications as the need to know more about Iraq specifically became apparent. Literary works do reveal features and trends characteristic of groups and cultures producing them, but that revelation is largely an imaginative act that requires comparable imaginative effort. It remains to be seen if the stories had spurred more interest in Iraqi culture, or if they provided counter images to the overwhelming negative ones about Iraqi and Arab cultures.
And then — can we go back further than that? When did you first start translating, or found you had an interest in literary translation? When did you decide it was something you wanted to spend time, love, and energy on? What sorts of works did you first translate, and for what sort of audience?
SM: It’s intriguing how we interact with our cultural interests, and how deeply fashioning some of these interactions are. I remember reading one of the stories—Muhammad Khudayyir’s “Yusif’s Tales”—when it first came out in an Iraqi newspaper in the 1980s, especially the urge I felt then to translate such works into English. I feel grateful to Banipal for the space its editors allowed me to publish several translations in 2003-4. The invasion of Iraq swatted away my other interests in English, American, and Irish literatures, but I thought of translation as one way of providing counter cultural images. Publishing more translations of Iraqi literature was crucial enough to rearrange my professional and research interests.
What authors did you read growing up, who had a particular impact on you? Books, magazines, newspapers? Did you grow up in a literary family? Who did you discuss books with, as a teen and young adult? What was the literary climate like in Baghdad in the 70s, and was it different from Mosul in the ’80s?
SM: I was fortunate to start reading Arabic literature in my high school years, and for that I’m grateful for the public libraries in Baghdad that had the kind of books I wanted to read. I could buy some books—working menial jobs during the summers and saving money for books and music records. Newspapers and magazines were decent in Iraq as well, and major writers—like Saadi Yusuf and Ali Jafaar Al-Allaq—usually edited their literary sections. The somehow open climate of the 1970s that I witnessed in Baghdad had all but disappeared in Iraq in the 1980s with a grueling and long war with Iran on one hand, and the consolidation of an oppressive totalitarian regime under Saddam Hussien.
How did your engagement with literature shift when you went to do your doctorate at Indiana University in the ’90s?
SM: The academic and intellectual environment at an elite American university like Indiana, Bloomington, was challenging, but I have prepared myself for that. I started teaching there a year after my arrival in1990. My stay there till 2000 has completely reshaped how I receive and interact with cultural products. Training in translation and critical theory was part of the sea change I underwent during work for my doctorate. One critical change has been becoming more receptive to other traditions, more willing to understand, and more circumspect in assessing impulses and consequences.
Have your thoughts about translation, and what makes a good translation, changed over the years? How do you think about the role of literary translation in the wider literary landscapes: in English, in Arabic, and in other languages?
SM: I took one translation course as part of my minor in literary theory, and I believe my notions about translation changed dramatically. I had more opportunities to see how translation has been a major component of human history, and how interactions between various traditions due to translation created major new works. For example: Translations of the One Thousand and One Nights into many world languages contributed to reshaping approaches to narrating and structuring of imaginative literature. The same would be equally true about translating Aristotle into Arabic, or translating Persian poetry into European languages.
What particular challenges, do you think, have faced the reception of Iraqi literature in English translation? Vs the challenges of the reception of Iraqi literature in French or Turkish or elsewhere?
SM: It took me a couple of years to find a publisher for the anthology and my guess is that market concerns — about public interest in Arabic culture in general — limited publishers’ serious engagement with Iraqi literature. Also, the invasion of Iraq and the negative publicity it generated, I believe, didn’t help the flow of translations beyond the initial curiosity about a third-world country like Iraq that could not provide enough electricity for its citizen suddenly emerging as a lethal threat to the Western world. That bogus narrative affected translations into English. Conversely, more French and Turkish translations of Arabic works appeared in the past two decades when one considers markets in comparative perspectives due to the much larger English-speaking populations.
Your scholarly work also focuses on Irish drama. What intersections have you found, between Iraqi and Irish literatures? What first brought you to Irish literature, and to drama in particular?
SM: My academic work on Irish literature deepened my understanding of the impact of colonization and decolonization in traditions across the world. Ireland suffered the longest British colonization—over 700 hundred years—and although British presence in Iraq was less than 50 years, one could still see common features between the two cultures’ responses to foreign domination. Revolutionary literary works in both Ireland and Iraq had similar features of pride in indigenous traditions, mobilization of public resistance to foreign influences, and singing the praises of a long line of mostly futile rebellions and sacrifices. Colonial presence in Irish drama is certainly one of the strongest in the world, and several Irish writers have solid world reputations. I read Synge and Shaw in Arabic in college before rereading them in English. The works of W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Sean O’Casey, among others were natural subjects of interest for me culturally and academically.
You have translated widely from among Iraqi short-story writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Are there characteristics that mark the contemporary Iraqi short story? Authors who have really left their mark on those who came after — as I imagine Muhammad Khudayyir has, for instance?
SM: My translations were mostly of works I knew and liked, but I also had limited knowledge of the Iraqi literary and Arabic scene. My academic obligations left very little time to have a more solid sense of writing at home, and my translations have been selective and perhaps uneven. Several women writers have been translated—Duna Ghali, Hadiya Hussein, Inaam Kachachi, among others, and a few others—Muhsin al-Ramli, Sinan Anton, and Ahmad Saadawi, among others—have generated considerable interest in new Iraqi fiction.
Among your awards is the 2020 ArabLit Story Prize, which you won for your translation of Hadiya Hussein’s short fiction. Part of being a good literary translator — I think — is knowing a good literary text when you see it. How do you discover new short works that you might want to translate? Has your process of discovery changed over the last 20, 30 years?
SM: I usually go back to favorite works and writers, and some Iraqi writers send me their works. Iraqi writers are among the most generous in the world, and one side of the pleasure of translation has been knowing several writers personally. Sadly, no new discoveries, as I continue to teach here in Boston and have little time to devote to finding and translating new works. It was a delight to see a work by Hadiya in my translation get recognition. A humble, superb, and dedicated writer like her deserved that recognition.
There are many books, of course, that one would love to have in English translation. Are there one or two you feel particularly passionate about? I often mistakenly believe that there is a collection of Muhammad Khudayyir’s short stories in translation and then waste time on Google. I make the same mistake about as-Sayyab’s أنشودة المطر. Is there a book you can’t believe isn’t in English translation?
SM: Saadi Yusuf wrote some touching short stories about Iraqis in North Africa. They were published in Al-Adab—the major literary journal of the second half of the twentieth century. I would love to translate those. And I have been working on translating some Iraqi poets. I’ll probably send you some of those translations soon!
If you had a fund to support the translation of Iraqi literature, how would you spend it? What sort of support do you think could foster not just more excellent translation, but better and more thoughtful reception of the books that are translated?
SM: Having writing workshops would be one such venture. If I win the lottery here, I’ll have a bunch of these across the Arab world to provide young writers with opportunities to know and appreciate other traditions. To get out of their skins and think and write like others across the world. I feel frustrated sometimes at the level of closure in Arabic writing, and I hope more work is done for more inclusive and diverse interactions with the world.
Can you tell us what you’re working on now, or do you prefer not to?
SM: I’m working on a book on reading narratives and art in some world traditions—Pamuk’s My Name is Red, Dia Al-Azzawi’s poetry Dafatirs, among others. Narratives and poetry that have art as a major component of their structure and message have fascinated critics for centuries, and my contribution to this tradition would be writing my own narrative interpretations of art works. Still working on developing ideas, but I have sent out the book proposal to some publishers.
