 Friends, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it's really lovely to have all of you here. My name is Adam Habib, and I am the vice chancellor of SOAS. I really do want to apologize, I want to start off with an apology, and really I'm going to apologize because as soon as I have welcomed you, in about two or three minutes I'm going to have to leave. And really I don't want you to think of this as a discursive, it's really not meant as a discursive. I do have to be across town to meet a few donors for SOAS, and I do want to say that is the nature of life of universities in the UK these days, where we are so dependent on having to raise resources from multiple quarters. So my apologies for that, I am really sorry that that hasn't been the case. It really is my pleasure to see all of you gathered here in celebration of Arabic literature, translation, and frankly more than a quarter of a century's partnership with the Bunny Pulse Trust for Arabic literature and SOAS. We take pride in SOAS. In the global role we meant to play in enabling conversation. Nanda Wenchen and others have heard me say this so much that they often try to fall asleep as I have to say it, but really our new strategic agenda is to build bridges. SOAS has got it in its mission, but our big agenda in the contemporary era is to recognize that all of our challenges in our world is transnational in character, whether it's pandemics, whether it's climate change, whether it's social and political polarization, and dare I say cultural polarization in our world. And if we're going to be able to address those challenges, we need the ability to get both global science and technology, global research, but also local understanding. How often we remember we had in the middle of COVID, we had this vaccine, same vaccine, but if you applied it to Tokyo or to New York, it had fundamentally different consequences because culture matters, history and architecture and politics and the social life for people matters. And so in a sense, at the very heart of our plan is to build these equitable partnerships between institutions in what I call the majoritarian world and institutions in the UK in part to enable this idea that we're going to train the world's people and by bringing them here is a long, long past agenda. We actually need to work with institutions around the world in intricate conversations so we bring the global and local in conversation with each other. We create a much better learning enterprise, a much better research enterprise. And how we do that in a world of such traumatic inequalities is the real art of our time. It's how do we begin to think and act equitably in an unequal world. And that's what we've taken at the very heart of our strategic agenda. And so when the Centre for Translation Studies and the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Post-colonial Studies enable these kind of dialogues about the immediate relevance of the humanities and the translation to intercultural understanding, they fundamentally speak to the heart of our strategic plan. They speak to not only our strategic plan, to the challenge of our times. This evening we celebrate two waters, Khalid Bhutawar and Najwa Parakat, both from war-torn countries, both Libya and Lebanon in many ways, and both our celebration of them today is a recognition of how much work we have to do. Both are located in the repart of the world. That is torn asunder, torn asunder, you know, at a moment when we as a human community have to cohere to address the challenges of our time, we are as a human community more divided than ever. Divided in the Middle East, hugely we've got thousands of people that have died, 12,000 children that have been killed, but the dawn of the 21st century is a tragedy of our times. But that's not a problem only of the Middle East, if you simply look at Europe and what's happened in the Netherlands and the rise of the far right in Germany and in Italy and potentially in France, what's playing out in North America, we are a world that is really in trouble. There is a moment of urgent need for intercultural understanding, and when we celebrate colleagues from a part of the world that is in crisis, we celebrate them because we use them as symbols for effectively the world we want to build, a world we want to enable into being and hopefully a high education system that recognizes we've got to bring the majoritarian world and what has come to be known as the West in conversation with each other so that we enrich each other in our understandings, in our research, in our scientific technologies. So I tend to talk too much at this point so I'm going to shut up at this point and forgive me for this, but it is particularly an important moment and again I hope that you have a wonderful celebration, I hope that you have a wonderful intellectual conversation and my apologies for having to leave you at this point. Thank you very, very much. Thank you very much. We're going to be playing musical chairs all evening. I'm Paul Starkey, the chair of the Bonnipot Trust for Arab Literature and I'd like to add my own welcome to that of Adam Habib that we've just heard, both the people that are in the hall and to those of you that are watching us on Zoom. It's very good to have this link with Zoas and let's hope it will continue and flourish. Just a few, a very few words about the Trust which I'll keep brief as most of you will already be familiar with the Trust's activities. The name Bonnipal will probably be most familiar to many of you in conjunction with the word magazine, Bonnipal magazine which sadly has now closed at least in its English version. After publishing a numberless selection of translations into English of Arabic and Arab writing, poetry, short stories, extracts from modern novels since 1998. The Trust, the Bonnipal Trust and members of the Trust worked closely with the magazine when the magazine was being published and the Trust itself has been organising an annual translation prize in conjunction with the Society of Authors for the translation of a work of modern Arabic literature into English since 2006. The prize, the safe Urbash Bonnipal prize for Arabic literary translation is funded through the generosity of the Urbash family to whom we remain most grateful. More recently an annual lecture has been added to the Trust's activities and tonight we're engaging in something of an experiment combining the two activities in a single evening for the first time. So not only do we have here to welcome this year's lecturer Khalid Mutawa but also the winner of this year's translation prize, Luke Liefgren and this year's Chair of Judges, Ros Schwartz, who will be in conversation during the second half of the proceedings which will also include some readings from the winning translation. We also have another judge this year's panel, Sarah Inani, is also in the audience so welcome to all of them. On one level one does of course feel slightly uncomfortable hosting an event like this at the present time as we're all conscious of the horrendous events unfolding in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel and particularly since we are meeting in the world's university so as likes to call it the effective destruction of the higher education sector in Gaza. In this connection I'd like to commend to you the excellent letter addressed to the Prime Minister and to relevant secretaries of state by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies which you can find on their website. However it is just these sort of situations perhaps that make translation arguably become of more rather than less importance. You can bomb mosques, hospitals and schools but you cannot arguably bomb words at least in not quite the same sort of way. And it's against that background that we start this evening's proceedings with the annual Bannipal lecture which this year as I've already mentioned is being combined for the first time with the celebration of the prize winner and it's a great pleasure to introduce the Libyan American poet and translator Khalid Motawa who is himself the author of six books of his own poetry and has translated 12 more volumes of modern Arabic poetry into English. He also has a more intimate connection with Bannipal, his translation of Adonis selected poems won the 2011 Saif al-Khubash Bannipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and in addition to a lot of other awards and so forth his translation of Saty Yusuf's selected poems without an alphabet without a face won the Pen Award for Poetry in translation in 2003. In addition to having won the Bannipal Prize he has been a founding contributing editor of Bannipal magazine now certainly closed. The title of Khalid's lecture today is Stations of Translation, Power, Eros and Betrayal or some people say Eros. I looked it up and one website suggested there were 21 ways you could pronounce this word. Take your pick. It promises at any rate to be a fascinating task which starts from the premise that translation is as old as human speech itself and Khalid's presentation will explore the dynamics of translation as Eros and I quote from his abstract. The lecture will examine the dynamics of translation Eros from a postcolonial perspective with a special focus on Arabic literature in the light of the transformative events taking place currently in Gaza. So over to you Khalid. Thank you Paul for the introduction and thank you all for being here. I would like to begin by thanking the Bannipal Trust for Arabic Literature for the honor of this invitation. I so deeply appreciate what they have accomplished and the inviting light of empathy and understanding they continue to offer us in the many dark days of the past few decades since their inception. I was invited into the Bannipal family in its very early stages and I'm delighted to see how we've grown together as a winner and finalist for the prize. I also want to express my heart for congratulations to Luke and to Najwa for the prize. Thank you also to Professor Habib for providing context and he's not with us but I wish him good luck with the donors. Also to the Center for Translation Studies, the Center for Cultural Languages and Postcolonial Studies as well for hosting us today. Thank you everyone for coming tonight. I appreciate this opportunity to meditate with you on a part of my practice that for 35 years has run parallel to my own writing and has fed my imagination and informed my work in unstated deeply penetrative ways. A practice that has supplemented my calling with purpose provided it immense joys along with eloquent and highly poetic company. So thank you again. For many reasons I always struggle with these presentations. I saw my dear friend Hisha Matar and I told him I have a 40-minute presentation and he said why don't you make it 30 and enjoy it and let others enjoy it as well. I'm sorry we're going to have to suffer through this together. So it is in the projected neighborhood of 40 minutes and I will just lean forward a little bit. So stations in translation of course the reference to the stations of the cross in the sense that there are things that we're going to run into. My first idea was also called Mawaqif as a reference to that concept in Sufi literature. Stations in translation power, errors and betrayal. I should begin by amending the title of this talk slightly to stations of translation power, errors and betrayal after Gaza and so as I speak of translation I will likely vacillate between three forms of translation interlingual between languages intercultural between cultures and intersubjective the translation of self into another. While translation has always been about trying to communicate with or understand the other who speaks a different language, intersting translation has ebbed in flowed. In more recent times one of the great engines of translation is a philosophical change perhaps in mankind's view of itself mainly the claims of the enlightenment for the quality of mankind and the resultant obligatory rights that ought to be granted to each individual to assure this equality. In the modern era we've had two ages of enlightenment one beginning the 18th century and a second established at the end of the world war two both enlightenment were characterized by claims for the equality of mankind which led to greater interest in translation as a mechanism for intercultural knowledge exchange and created a space for interlinguistic erotic and cultural kinship but both currents and the states and institutions that represented these values have been unable to resist the power differential between the cultures and societies engaged in this exchange whereby Europe North America your America have constantly made exceptions to their stated values to justify injustice and violence. The fact that enlightenment values have been betrayed does not mean that translation is not a powerful source of connection and innovation. Translation is a facility we acquired so that we may be engaged in an eternal process of knowing each other as we exchange as we change and evolve. Life depends on newer versions of things immersion and newer versions of ourselves that bear our sameness and the traces of another life in it and hence the analogy of linguistic exchange and reproduction translation and eros. Eros we may recall and it's the 21 definitions like eros the word itself is a kind of kamasuta of pronunciations. Eros we may recall is a Greek god who is a child of Aphrodite goddess of sexual love and beauty who was fathered by Zeus or Aris or Hermes messenger of the gods while all traces of the various fathers can be attributed to Aros. Aros was assigned to be the god of fertility as well as passion. Aros we should note was given a brother and terrace the god of mutual love who we'll come back to later. Like Aros translation has the power to break away to break us away from the solitude of solipsism and the myopia of narcissism with empathy and affection and the expansion of the self. It's a process of community making of fecundity and fertility to ward off ignorance and isolation. The great translation theorist George Steiner tells us that the first stage of translation is initiative trust an investment in the meaningfulness and seriousness of an adverse text. This is a psychologically hazardous state that leaves the translator epistemologically exposed. The philosophical bedrock of this initiative trust is a belief in the coherence of the world in the presence of meaning in very different perhaps formally antithetical semantic systems as well as in the validity of analogy and parallel in human interaction. These are the same forces that give rise to the stated values of both epochs of enlightenment. Steiner affirms that Aros and language mesh at every point intercourse and discourse copula and copulation are subclasses of the dominant fact of communication. They arise from the life need of the ego to reach out and comprehend another human being, he explains. Aros and language translation construe the grammar of being. After the translator brings the translated text home at Steiner we proceed to incorporation where we accommodate the new text in the new home to widen one's grammar and vocabulary. Then finally we reach reciprocity where the translation is supposed to body forth its object. What we're talking about then is a manifold relationship where fidelity like identity is being created. To be true to another text is not to be an echo to narcissists but to be curious and initiate curiosity. As such there is no richer trail of inquiry than translation. A process that guides us towards the great longing for the completion of language. To use Walter Benjamin's words in translations various phases we experience longing and its fulfillment being undone by each other, mediary encounters with the ineffable that encapsulate what we live for and real evidence in the translated text that the broken languages of others can find a home within us, a process where longing becomes belonging. Like Aros translation is more than its function. In fact translation fails when it limits itself to the conveyance of information because information is the least essential aspect to the literary work states the late Dennis Potter. Walter Benjamin posits a kinship among all natural languages and a historical and pervasive expressive intentionality that exists in the world's languages a capacity that can never be realized in any one language by itself. As a result all languages embody a more or less hidden yet nonetheless urgent aspiration to achieve the conditions of what he calls pure language. In the same way that erotic union overcomes the physical and points of transcendence as mystical poets from Merabar to Saint John of the Cross to the Sufi poets have contended. The translator releases his own language into or toward pure language which is under the spell of another. The purity is not in the outcome but in the Barzach the in-betweenness or in the ecstatic state of Fanat of being neither in the original or the recipient which is the bonus or excess that neither of them neither language can garner on its own. Proof that eros or whether translation is the god of literary fecundity and invention can be found everywhere. In ancient China, ancient Greece and Rome interlingual intercultural exchanges exercised through the erotics of translation were the engines of literary and philosophical invention. When it comes to Arabia and the emergence of Islam we often think of Mecca as the locus of a pure Arabic language but Mecca must have been a multilingual space in its trade routes to the sham and Yemen bringing with them speakers or traces of Aramaic and Sebian. We also think of Arabic as a language of isolated nomads but why is the simile of foreigners babbling in Greek a common trope in jahili poetry. To me the genius of Arabic Islamic civilization when it was vigorous was its ability to hitch up its cultural tent toward new linguistic pastors and its atrophying for me is associated with its loss of linguistic diversity. Coming to Europe now can we think of Protestantism existing without the German translation of the Bible by Martin Luther nonetheless or the English Protestant movements without William Tyndale's and Miles Coverdale's English translations of the Bible 100 years or so before the official King James Bible. Closer to our time modern poetry is the child of cross-Atlantic bilingualism. Poe to Baudelaire via translation to Pound and Eliot adding the mix of the Provencal poets or perhaps it's the child of European and Asian poetry a child of many fathers like Erus for wood for wood for where would Pound be who was the sort of chief engineer of much of modern poetry without having met Tagore and Levi who gave him his Cathay. So the seeds of translation as a progenitor or as the father of invention in literature is all over. All these moments in adjustments in the culture or to the culture of the other caused by linguistic melding between peoples by the discovery and practice of intellectual and physical kinship and necessary to any renaissance of translation was always an arousal of the notion of wellness and a shared fate between the self and one's culture with that of the other. In Islam the Quran has no tower of Babel but tells us that God had meant for humanity to be made up of peoples and tribes so that they may engage in ongoing process of knowing. Another clearly stated notion is that there being no difference between the Arabi and Ajami except in the their degrees of Taqwa which is more than fear of God but all the ethics and discipline a virtual life requires such as balance between body and soul possession of an inner life and dedication for the truth. These principles allowed non-native speakers of Arabic to join and lead Islamic civilization's pursuit of knowledge making the lands of Arabic and Islam one of one of the great engines of translation and since the beginning of the European Enlightenment with its ideas of the equality of mankind, liberty, progress and fraternity that call for society to be based upon reason and its individuals judged by their character and deeds rather than race or origin or faith all the way to the United Nations and the push for multilingual and multi-athlete democracies. We have been sailing a great ship powered by engines of translation. The 18th century is widely known as a republic of letters led by erudite multilinguals who together shaped our ideas of democracy. Multilingualism remains integral to democracy now. In my very state of Michigan my fellow citizens can vote in Arabic, Bangla, Burmese, English, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog and Urdu. This excitement about the knowledge to be gained from translation was not missed on one of the great chroniclers of early 19th century England. I'm speaking of Middlemarsh George Eliot's great novel. In Middlemarsh we meet the scholar Edward Kazabon. I know people hit on him all the time. Really he's the cause of all evil. The middle-aged husband of the novel's young protagonist Dorothea. Kazabon as you remember is working on a book titled The Key to All Mythologies. He's making no headway and he cannot read German where the new ideas in his field are quickly developing. Kazabon's intellectual impotence is reflected in his complete disinterest in having a physical relationship with his young bride. His linguistic isolation from the vitality occurring in his field of research is represented by his inability to consummate his relationship with Dorothea. Kazabon's infertility is juxtaposed with the vitality of his Polish-named cousin Will Ladyslaw, who is fluent in German and resides in Rome. A person living in translation Will, while uncertain about his future, is forward-looking, engaged and passionate and is competing with Kazabon for Dorothea's affection. Eliot's message is clear if I may put it bluntly. Intellectual vitality arises from a world where ideas are exchanged in translation. Despite the uncertainties, monolingualism is a path to frailty, bitterness and death, which was Kazabon's fate in the novel. Translation is joy, vitality and fecundity indeed. Now to betrayal. Like me, you've also heard the expression translation is betrayal. It's a clichéd notion that apprentice journalists have tossed at me. An accusation I've heard in my classes sometimes when certain lines or weaker passages of translated poems suggest that there is something lost in translation due to that translator's inability to be faithful somehow. Such statements nearly always incense me and invoke a sense of loyalty to other translators and to the necessary work they do for every language. I remind my interlocutors that translation is again not a loss because without it there is a great deal that we would not have known and that our general knowledge and our languages themselves are enriched by what is translated into them. But the notion that betrayal somehow shadows translation is not limited to the unenlightened monolingual journalists or underclassmen. According to Roman Jacobson, translators betray a text when they disarticulate the original and for Paul Domain when they reveal that the original was always disarticulated. Domain suggests that betrayal arises from the unavoidable resistance of linguistic forms to human meanings. He asserts that translation disrupts the original unintentionally making the reader aware of certain disjunctions, certain accommodations, certain weaknesses, certain cheatings, certain conventions, certain characteristics which don't correspond to the claim of the original so that the original loses its sacred character. There is no one to blame, if you will, in this but the destabilizations these actions cause when their translation impossible. But even when it's done well could translation still be a betrayal? This thought, assuming that I do it well, this thought occurred to me a few years ago while reading a passage that Benjamin quotes from Randolph Panwitz who states that the translator must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. The verbs expand and deepen and the duty of the translator to gift them to his language which used to be which used to make me so optimistic in the past gave me pause with realization until then I had translated solely from Arabic to English and devoted much of my time working ostensibly to expand English, my stepmother tongue. While doing nothing for my mother tongue Arabic this guiltful thought reminded me of an American critic who intending praise called me among other immigrant ports linguistic turncoats which somehow stings in retrospect. Was I betraying Arabic by not expanding and deepening it? And what am I helping English transcend by incorporating Arabic poetry in it? The original expression that translation is betrayal comes to us from the Italian tradutory, traditory. Someone may be correct my Italian but I'm going to mispronounce it continuously. It's corner unknown but it's almost certainly the result of wordplay, the homophonic proximity of tradutory to traditory is what made the saying stick but also because the expression has a ring of truth in it. Translation can betray when it offers knowledge that empowers someone else. As author C. Danto explains if I give away my knowledge I lose power if others can use that knowledge I possess for their own purposes and these thwart mine. He encounters why should I tell you the truth if you know what I know my power is dissipated. Columbus complained a lot about translators not telling him the truth. What should they? This immediate distrust comes from those who are powerless so or nearly so. Danto suggests a secret language gives power only so long as it is secret and I betray the secret when I translate putting the knowledge and the power in alien hands. Indeed while God may have cursed humanity by splintering our one language into many in the Tower of Babel it's possible that we actually needed to create new languages. We needed new languages or codes in order to tell secrets and to exclude those whom we fear. A breaker of codes translation can have the sapping effect on those who need to keep secrets to survive. This last point brings to mind the American withdrawal from Afghanistan and before that from Iraq and even Vietnam. As the Taliban seized Kabul and as Americans armed forces and other western organizations were leaving Afghanistan one began to hear on the radio and then use a great deal about the Afghani translators. Before Afghanistan the U.S. did the same in Iraq and you may still be doing the same Iraq and you may recall the Vietnamese who stood on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in 1975. Many of them were translators maybe not literary translators but translators. Reading and listening to those stories about rescuing translators I was intrigued by how persistently the translators are considered traitors in these enemy nations and how sympathetically they are promoted in western media as benign innocent figures. Is translating for an invading army an innocent activity? The late great Iraqi poet Saad Yusuf accused some of his fellow communist Iraqi literati who worked with American forces who being translators who graduated from torture chambers. Clearly among many in Iraq Afghanistan and Vietnam before them there is a sense that translators offered the invading armies certain knowledge that added to their power and weakened them. This could be by offering new information that the invader did not know but also confirming false information that the invader knows. Whatever the case may be translation is consequential. I know I've taken us far away from the peaceful world of literary translation but even in our practice what makes translation give up its life force of fertility that Steiner describes and its capacity for kinship that Benjamin foresees are differentiations of power and the gradations of power between the European and European and non-Europe American are immense. So now to power. Now that we are talking about power a quick historical contextualization is necessary and yes going back to the primary encounter between modern Europe and the near east that old horse of historical explanations the Napoleonic expedition. I'll make it short. When along with a conquering army Napoleon brought with him the two main principles of the enlightenment the equality of mankind and a commitment to scientific truth scholar Tazel Dean whom I'll be leaning on heavily here argues that unlike the generally acknowledged polarities of domination and resistance that we associate with colonialism and Orientalism translation in this case offered a space where Arab intellectuals came to love and to be seduced by Europe. On the face of it Europe seemed keen to be true to its enlightenment values however she states three areas condensing them. One colonial Europe via its Oriental discourse appeared to affirm Egypt's pharaonic and Arab Islamic past as unbroken still vital and uncolonized. European colonialism appeared to validate the Arab Islamic culture even as it denigrated it putting Egypt and Egyptians on an illusory footing of equal exchange. This equal footing of exchange is being offered to us now and remains illusory. Two the colonizers early use of Arabic language played its part in nativizing the dominator. In 1789 Napoleon will remember circulated a proclamation in Arabic mimicking Quranic style that assured the predominantly Muslim people of Egypt that the French were sincere Muslims like them. More than a century later the Italians in my native Libya took a similar approach culminating in Mussolini's pilgrimage to the 4th shore that's Libya and raising the sword of Islam. This nativizing of the dominator is still occurring in different guises. Three colonial powers also offered the allure of kinship. Tajal Dean cites how in India British Orientalism invented linguistic and ethnological family trees that trace Sanskrit and English to a common Indo-European source and constructed Aryan affinities between Indians and Englishmen. A kinship that was later denied once Britain held sway in India. Similar approaches were offered to Arabic and Islamic civilizations that were colonized. The allure of kinship is part of the exchange between Europe and America and is continuously illusive now. You might say that that was long ago Napoleon Mussolini not now not us. Let me propose then Saudi Yusuf's poem America America. Please note that Saudi is the translator of Walt Whitman the great American poet of democracy in which he outlines these dynamics. So Saudi writes God save America my home sweet home I too love jazz and jeans and treasure island and John Silver's parrot and the balconies of New Orleans I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steam boats and Abraham Lincoln's dogs I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco but I'm not American. Is that enough for the phantom pilot to turn me back to the stone age? As you will note for the first couplet that I read Saudi mistakenly but maybe appropriately conflates Britain's God save the queen with America's God bless America as most American presidents close their speeches. Saudi replaces bless with save as in the British God save the queen or king as the case may be. Then of course the American homily my home sweet home the passage is a list of what has been seductive about America mostly 19th century references or images that have traces of slavery in them but also allude to music beautiful architecture and emancipation. Loving these things about America however does not prevent the American pilot from wanting to turn the poet's home country to the stone age. The phrase to turn something to the stone age is something that American generals have used to threaten adversaries such as Vietnam and even allies such as Pakistan and of course that was the idea about Hiroshima. It does not pay to love America and the West cultural gifts because the threat of annihilation remains. Later in the poem Saudi using the ritual of gift exchange maybe a play on the you know the gift exchange between the civilized and the savage attempts to negotiate with America it's important to know that Saudi's poem was written in the mid 1990s when the Clinton administration was considering bombing Iraq again around the same time when the U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated that the death of nearly half a million Iraqis due to Western sanctions was worth it. Here is what Saudi offers America let's exchange gifts take your smuggled cigarettes and give us potatoes take James Bond's golden pistol and give us Marilyn Monroe's giggle take the heroine syringe under the tree and give us vaccines take your blueprints of model penitentiaries and give us village homes take the books of your missionaries and give us paper for poems to defame you like the beat poets take what you do not have and give us what we have take the stripes of your flag and give us the stars take the Afghani Mujahideen beard and give us Walt Whitman's beard filled with butterflies take Saddam Hussein and give us Abraham Lincoln or give us no one. America has brought smuggling guns spies with golden pistols that the British touch increased drug trafficking missionaries and Islamic radicalism. These were not what was promised in the seduction of the region with Marilyn Monroe's giggle a prominent feature of the American allure the soulful melodies of jazz music for the of the descendants of feared slaves and the fatherly beard of Walt Whitman brimming with butterflies as Federico Garcia Lorca had described it whom Saudi also translated with reference to Saddam Hussein and Abraham Lincoln with the reference to Saddam Hussein Abraham Lincoln again the poem was written before the second war of Iraq. Saudi suggested that the oncoming engagement with the region should bring either emancipation or should not take place at all. My question to us as translators as part of the economy of cultural gift exchange is in what way is our work playing a part in this this equilibrium is part of our is it is it part of an emancipatory effort or something not clearly defined lost in the shuffle of political priorities where are we where does our work stand. Indeed the Arab literati of the 19th through 20th century bought into this erotic validation that had been established now for two centuries and seemingly a mutual attraction with the euro america for while they decried the military economic and political violence this is Therese Dean speaking that european embryoism wreaked on their land they nonetheless imagined their relationship to western aesthetics and epistemologies in terms of love not subjection indeed the world as it was set up in the rules based or order after world war two starting from the UN itself a beehive of translation relations between the peoples of the world the books and ideas they offered were expected to receive validation to stand on equal footing in the process of exchange to engage us in reciprocity and kinship that binds all peoples for in both areas where all this intercultural interlinguistic errors was taking place europe america perpetually made wide exceptions for its enlightenment values and this is what we're witnessing in Gaza indeed things may have changed but the principles of granting the european american the right to commit violence on others remains the primary force impacting our region and the world and our cultural exchanges the list of these exceptions by the way is really very long and runs from thomas jefferson's notes on the state of virginia to bag dead being burned burning like a christmas tree this exceptionalism has translated itself into what fano has called compartmentalization where non-euro american cultural products are segregated in how they're received and perceived in the global market of ideas here are the common the accommodations that have been made for us we are of course emblems of the past when it comes to non-european cultural products translated or otherwise these products and their artists are seen as coming from the past for only the future belongs to europe and america these works of art have to compete for their place in the fundamentally unequal ground of western temporality this plays into the european celebration of the colonized peoples past glory and past contributions to civilization and that's exactly how tag war gibran and the ancient egyptian mummies were welcomed into the western world our literature is often presented as something already seen snippets from antiquated ways of living that had little bearing on the big world the industrial technological world this designation of the non-european as an obstacle for the past from the past impeding the much the march of progress is still with us today until recently here's how the new york times blow hard thomas freedman telling it like it is two weeks ago wrote on the one side is the resistance network dedicated to preserving closed autocratic systems where the past buries the future and that was important on the other side is the inclusion network trying to forge more open connected for pluralizing systems where the future buries the past as i speak to you of course the inclusion network is wholeheartedly supporting a war on nearly two million gossums who are being shelled and buried under the rubble starved deprived of medical care and living out in the open inclusion network we are victims of the past and need rescue despite the fact that the rules pace order spearheaded by the united states has led to the creation of a more war victims and refugees in the world the other recognizable platform for artistic or literary production offered to us is that of other artists are victims of that non-european past or what freedman called the resistance network the requirement here is that the victim must seek shelter in the west artists who engage their cultures on sensitive matters but do not seek western approval or rescue are either insufficiently victimized or are not liberated or future oriented enough whether we like it or not this crude formula has impacted what we translate and how and definitely what goal gets published and how it's framed and presented ghiatri spivak warns that against translated text from the colonized world whether translator is being attentive only to the anthropological information it can derive about the presumed plight of the non-western or non-white female subject in this already set context the translator is not asked to bring something new but to feed an established narrative with new raw material the other accommodations of course is to work from the inside our current positionality for us who are endeavoring to undermine the negative views uh entrenched in non on your about the non-european our effort has focused on trying to humanize them in the eyes of the west the word humanize is one of the worst one of the first sorry not worst worst first verbs that I use to describe my work to humanize humanize them in the eyes of the west indeed my first impulse to translate had emerged from the stynarian reproductive encounter with arabic poems that flashed with powerful rays of benjamin's pure language as i rendered them into english the aim was to render these non-european texts and their cultures into an empowered equivalents with those of their dominators and thereby repressed the inequalities between those dominators and themselves to use saeed's words saeed calls this process the voyage in a conscious effort to enter into the discourse of the west to mix with it transform it writing about the 19th century for the main part tajaldine tells us that this has happened before to our with our progenitor translators to arabic putting a predictable damper on their efforts and perhaps on ours sherry reminds us that cultural imperialism might be better understood as a politics that lures the colonize to seek power through empire rather than against it to translate their cultures into an empowered equivalents with those of their dominators and thereby repressed the inequalities between them she goes on to call this effort a process of transnational seduction a diverting of energies through the subtle manipulation of illusion so is that where we are are we engaged in an invigorating humanizing reciprocating eros of minds through translation or are we seduced by the illusion of reciprocity and recognition whether we agree with tajaldine's view or whether it applies to our translate situation or not it's clear to me at least among the diasparas who have also chosen to work on the inside that we've had conversations similar to those between the polish port vessel of miyosh and his friend the indian philosopher raja wow in 1969 addressing wow miyosh writes i learned at lee at last to say this is my home here in a great republic moderately corrupt and so many of us have accepted this corruption the oblivion filling our chests and the consenting silence presiding over our interaction with others even before the flames had died to quote miyosh this too will pass we thought and we'll go on doing god's work writing translating lecturing teaching explaining to whoever will listen i think what we can say about gaza is that something new has happened as our sister arandati roy recently stated the moral architecture of western liberalism is disappearing before our eyes it was always hypocritical but even that provided some sort of shelter a position half-heartedly claimed unevenly practiced by powerful nations but that and their institutions but that allowed those invested in enlightenment values to pursue them in earnest even with limited outcomes no more gone is any pretense of post-colonialism multiculturalism international law the geneva convention the universal declaration of human rights gone is any pretense of free speech or public morality states roy really can't go back to these conversations with powerful entities in your america and keep a straight face the hypocrisy and the imposition of silence to on those who are calling uh of those who are personally are calling are having a chilling effect how do we now go back to translating to the translations that we're working in as we've done in the past in the face of their neglect of the humanist values we share in their selectivity on which humans are worth saving and others whose death we tacitly accept is my question things are changing people have been utterly changed the squares and streets of the free world if you will are thronging with supporters of Gaza survival for preserving the cherished values of equity and justice they're calling on us to help make the change to uphold our institutions to their beliefs younger scholars poets and novelists are taking brave stances endangering their own careers as translators and as the necessary link between languages and cultures we need to practice the fidelity of our calling in its broadest sense we listen apprehend interpret and give voice that's our habitual mode our breathing evenly keeled on a horizon of justice this gives us a moral authority that we should exercise now more than ever before let me close then by invoking and terrace the son of aris the god of courage and Aphrodite who was given as a companion to his brother Aros who was lonely and the notion that love must be required if it is to prosper the myth goes that Aphrodite complained to Themis the goddess of justice in divine order that Aros has remained a perpetual child to this theme has suggested that Aphrodite give Aros a brother with Aunt Aros by his side Aros grew and matured but once Aunt Aros was away Aros shrank back to his childhood to prevent Aros from impossibly flinging arrows of affection and possibly arousing love seduction and betrayal and repression oppression and terrace is there to urge Aros to act prudently not only so and terrace is the consular of those spurned by love repairing the damage that his brother has caused so in closing I'll say may we grow together and thrive in the siblinghood of translation and may the force of and terrace be with us as we pursue our noble calling thank you thank you so much thank you very much Khalid for that immensely powerful and thought-provoking lecture we now move on to the second part of the proceedings and it's a great pleasure to introduce first of all Luke Liefgren the winner of this year's Saif Gurbaz Gurbaz Bani Pel prize for his translation of Mr N by Natua Barakat which is published by and other stories the prize itself was awarded yesterday evening at an event which some of you may have been at the British Library organised by the Society of Authors it's worth also mentioning that Luke is not a newcomer to this position he's won the Saif Gurbaz Bani Pel prize before in 2018 for his translation of Mohsin Aramli the President's Gardens like introduce also Ross Schwartz the chief judge of the panel for this year's prize who she chaired the panel and Ross is herself a distinguished and award-winning translator of distinction for her translations from French to English which I'm told includes some translations of Francophone writers from North Africa which is an area of course with which we are intimately concerned she has over incredibly over a hundred fiction and non-fiction titles to her name and in addition to her own translations she's been heavily involved in translator training and we also have Sarah and Annie another of the judges sitting there in the audience so welcome to all of them it's very nice to see you all here also on the stage is Samira Kaua who has performed similar function this sort of gathering many times before I think he's going to read some extracts in Arabic and at a certain stage a little later they'll be joined by Wenjing Uyang from Zaoast the institution that we're in at the moment and there'll be a question and answer session which Wenjing will moderate so with that I will hand you over to our panelists on the stage and in due course and Wenjing will join thank you thank you very much Paul good evening everybody and good evening to everybody watching online it's an enormous privilege to be here in conversation with Luke and first of all I'd like to just congratulate you on your amazing translation of this extremely complex and multi layered book now I know most of you might not have read it so I'm going to ask Luke first we'll just to talk about the book a little bit and then Samira is going to read an extract in Arabic and Luke's going to read an extract from the English thank you so much Ross and Paul and everyone with Danny Paul and so as and so safe gavash foundation it's immensely gratifying to be here it's a huge honor and I'm very happy to be here with you tonight so I was thinking this afternoon how would I describe this book and you would think I had done this plenty of times before but I don't think it's still not easy to say what this book is about it's quite complicated there's a frame story that's the easy part the frame story is that a novelist has stopped writing and then 15 years later runs into one of his characters on the streets of Beirut and not just any character but a violent murderous former militia person and that then is the mystery is how does this fictional character step foot into the streets of Beirut and what does that mean for the author who in fact kills off that character in the book 15 years ago the book is about many other things I think one of the themes is pain but with individual pain stemming from a variety of sources from families from broken relationships from other people and a violent society the book is about collective pain the trauma that societies endure and specifically it's set in Beirut so Beirut is an important part of this novel almost a character in itself and the history that you know has shaped modern Beirut all the different peoples that have been coming there some of the challenges the dysfunction the poverty and then the author experiences some of this and then there are various results as that come out of that one other thing I would say about the novel is how intricate the narrative structure is and so as you're reading as I was reading I often didn't know where I was you would jump back and forth through time back and forth through perspectives often without much signposting so after a section break you find yourself in a different world and it takes a little while to figure out what has happened and so there's all these parallels that are going back and forth and so that was one of the challenges and one of the rewards of translating the book as I read it and reread it and reread it gave me a really a chance to deepen my knowledge my understanding given that Beirut is almost a character in this novel and given that Nejwa does such an amazing job of capturing the city we'll start with an extract from one of the descriptions of Mr. N wandering through the city of Beirut and Samira will start with the first section in Arabic so thank you so much Samira thank you and I will read some of that in English and go on just a little bit for a little bit extra of the English by the time Mr. N reached the middle of the bridge he felt a burning in his throat as the tears came it was as though he'd crashed into some invisible wall felt but not seen bringing him to a halt nauseating him hemming him in Mr. N gagged he had to clench his teeth to keep his stomach from spilling out of his mouth the odor descended like the last judgment solid and forceful a mix of vomit burning rot excrement mold and rust all collected and concentrated and perfectly balanced rising and falling with every breeze advancing and retreating like a wave Mr. N tried to pinch his nose shut but he could still feel the loathsome smell as it breached his defenses and slithered inside pulling up his collar the collar of his shirt to cover his face he hurried forward to cross the border yes a border for the line he crossed with only two steps might as well have separated two alien countries mar Mikhail and environs on the one side Burj Hamoud on the other in the former were old houses of two or three stories some with gardens front gardens smelling of life in the latter Mr. N navigated high dilapidated buildings haphazardly placed pushing against one another tottering together like man-made cumulus clouds locked in combat as they floated along with sense of decay from the slaughterhouses and the mountains of trash these neighborhoods had begun begun as refugee camps for survivors of the Armenian massacres and the first quarantine of fire first came the tents then the tents were transformed into tin shacks then the tin became concrete there were buildings that became houses that became markets for various crafts Armenia Arachs Agabus Cecilia Camp Tara Camp Ammus and Camp Maras the jewelry market the clothes market the shoe and leather goods market the food market the vegetable market and still others could now be found in the narrow lanes that branched off until they wound their ways to the homes of the poor who'd left their mountain villages for the outskirts of the capital striving for their daily bread the little streets boiled like a beehive with workers of a thousand races and colors alongside refugees from all the wars of all the nations Nepalese Ethiopians Sri Lankans Filipinos Egyptians Sudanese Syrians Iraqis Kurds Armenians Syriaks Assyrians Kaldians Buddhists Christians Muslims and my god Mr. Anne hurt himself say unable to control his eyes which darted here and there like frenzy to dogs thank you um the descriptions in this book are just so powerful and so evocative and you really managed to to create that sense of place I mean the smells the sounds the sights everything do you know Beirut and do you think it's important for a translator to know the place they're describing I have visited Beirut take a taking a bus there from Damascus on two occasions I made friends with somebody named haughty mac to be his family sells carpets in Beirut I met him in Oxford and when I was studying in Damascus took the bus over to see him and you know went up across the mountain and down and then took a taxi through the city I have not explored on foot and not the neighborhoods that are described in this book but I have some knowledge some background some of the places at Beirut to the question of how valuable it can be for a translator to know a place it immensely valuable and without having gone there one film that I saw around the time shortly before I translated this was Capernaum a Lebanese film set in in in Lebanon and amid immense poverty and as I was reading this book that's the movie that I was seeing those are the images but yeah so that's it was it was very helpful great thank you I wanted to ask you how did this translation happen did you find the book or did the book find you this book found me and I'm I would say very lucky my one of my I learned Arabic primarily in graduate school and one of my teachers Khaled al-Masri who's now a professor at Swarthmore introduced me to the first author I translated Masanah Rumley and then also to the second author I translated Nejwa Barakat and after I translated one book by each of them they offered me the chance to translate further books by them and so Nejwa who took a long break from writing and wrote this novel and I think it was again Khaled they had met up at some point maybe the Sharjah Book Festival or something else they were traveling together and she was excited to tell him about the book and then he mentioned it to me and then I was in touch with Nejwa after that and and then she sent me a couple chapters and I said I'm very happy to translate and then she sent me the rest and and here we are but that's the author sending it to you how did you find a publisher I mean did you have to do all the legwork so the first chapters came I in the summer of 2018 and then the full manuscript it was maybe January of 2019 and about a year later I had I had a first draft that I sent to Nejwa and so this was early you know January of 2020 and I was very excited about it I thought I was looking back and I saw the email where I had written to her and I told her that I thought this was my best work as a translator yet so that was both fun to recapture that moment and also humbling to think how much further the book came subsequent to that moment with further editing and through the publication process there wasn't I didn't have a publisher lined up and I think that's rather unusual for literary translators it's a big risk to translate a full novel if you don't know that it's going to be published or to find that kind of audience or to be paid paid for but it was something I was doing on the weekends alongside my full-time position as a university administrator it was the following summer that I started sending it out to some publishers and maybe a dozen or so and one of them said it sounded interesting but he was currently leaving that position but then this is Jeremy Davies an editor who was at Ferrara, Strauss and Giraud a couple months later he got back in touch after joining up with and other stories here in England and he was excited that this might happen and so we started a conversation and and then it was that I guess that fall that we signed the deal so that is a huge commitment and investment on your part to translate an entire novel on spec I mean you must have been really passionate about it I was I to be honest I've done a number of novels on spec I think the first three and several since then and it's as I mentioned it's there are some risks in doing that but translating is for me an immense pleasure I learned Arabic in my 20s it was very very difficult and the satisfaction that comes when when I did something that hard just reading Arabic is very satisfying and then translating Arabic is a way that I continue learning and I you know it it brings a sort of just immediate gratification in the way that a Sudoku puzzle does or when I was younger playing video games would do and so it's something that I do for recreation in a way as well as feeling like there's a chance to build bridges or help authors reach an audience and I think I part of the challenge for me is that I'm not as good I'm I don't feel as confident at selling a work as I do at translating a work and so sometimes I translate the work and think it will find its own way at that point that said I did think that this I was very excited about this novel is that is that quite usual for translators from Arabic and I've heard some are too saying to say similar things because I'm for the sort of more common European languages publishers read French or Spanish or German that I don't think there are many publishers who read Arabic who can read the original so presumably translators from Arabic have to do a lot more legwork I think that's the case that there aren't as many editors who are publishers who have access to Arabic so they're not reading themselves and there aren't as many you know scouts who are out there doing the work of searching for the for the next great book and so it's translators who are often taking on the role of agents alongside the translation work and finding a way to to sell the to sell a book or to sell an idea and make a pitch for it I think in the translation community we're all immensely grateful for Arab Lit blog Marcia Lynx Qualey who's doing a lot to highlight current things that are coming out and of course we wouldn't be here tonight without the Bonnie Paul magazine and Bonnie Paul organization which for the 20 past 25 years has been doing that role so there are like these two organizations that have done much to highlight contemporary Arabic literature and so on behalf of Arabic translators everywhere thank you so much so it's really translator led I mean translators having agency in that whole process I would say so yes which is which is exciting it's also I think a burden and and it's um it's also a challenge I have in this past year had the pleasure of a publisher approaching me about a translated work and that's very rare because there are I think it's uncommon for publishers to know that here's a book they want to translate I hope it will start happening more often well I think thanks to books like this it's going to open publishers eyes to the fact that there's some very interesting books out there being published so let's hope um so I mean this is a very harrowing novel to read and you lived with this for some years translating it how did you deal with the sort of mental emotional just you know that that harrowing you know did you become inhabited by it how did you stay sane I love that question it makes me think actually of the first book by Nejwa that I translated called Yasalam in Arabic and I translated the title Osalam in English and it's the intertext for this book the the character that shows up on the streets in Beirut is the anti-hero of Osalam and when my friend Khalid invited me to read the book and consider translating it I read the book and thought my immediate reaction was no no way I don't want to spend another minute with these characters because they're terrible people doing terrible things and then he you know passed on a chapter from his dissertation about the exploration of violence and the gender dynamics and kind of the deeper levels of what Nejwa is doing and why it's so meaningful and so that persuaded me to do it with this book I think I was maybe better prepared one more thing I'll say about the other one was that as I started translating it there was a perverse pleasure perhaps in inhabiting some of those characters and trying to find their voice as they say things that I would never say and you know do things that that are not part of my life and so translation allows that much maybe like an actor where you get to embody another another character which can be difficult but there's also a certain freedom or discovery that comes with that in the case of translation though you can only do so much in a certain time you know I might work at an hour at a given point and part of that hour is maybe not fully understanding and it's like wrestling with it and so it can be very intellectual which is distancing from the the things that are happening and the things that are being described later in the process as you could actually start reading what you've translated as as a continuous draft that's when it starts to regain that power so you focus on the sort of the nuts and the bolts and the mechanics of translation of the task and you don't think about what you're actually translating that's right read yourself and the editing when you're editing that's sometimes I've been I don't think I've been moved by anything I've written while translating but sometimes while I'm editing after coming back to it when you have fresh eyes and you have a little distance you think oh wow that is did I do that right um can you talk about the the specific challenges of translating from the Arabic language and I'm interested in registers of language so do the registers the different registers and I mean the different voices colloquial literary high literary do they map easily onto English what what goes on linguistically there are um yeah a number quite a few challenges of translating Arabic um definitely register I can't think about this question without mentioning punctuation and syntax which are so you know diverse and there's not always a lot of standardization and punctuation so that can be misleading not always helpful in understanding a text and syntax as well can be it doesn't map directly onto English and so there's thinking a lot about how to convey the information effectively in English that is conveyed effectively in different orders and with different numbers of words and so on in Arabic and then how do you identify an author's voice or style and and try in some way to be echoing that that's a big part of the challenge but the things that you're that you're mentioning as well there's such diversity of you know such linguistic diversity in Arabic with all the different dialects which is part of why it's so hard and was so hard for me to learn it's also challenging to write um convincing dialogue in the standard literary language not hard I should say but um when translating that into English if you do a very straightforward translation it feels much more formal than than would be believable um in English literary translation um there are some authors that are using more of the dialect in in their writing um I translated one the project I did after this was uh Shellish the Iraqi which is a blog post written by an anonymous Iraqi in 2005 and six living in Baghdad and the narration was in modern standard Arabic all the dialogue was in Iraqi Arabic which you know brought a certain life a vibrancy is and which which really worked for that project he was you know the author was presenting himself as the eyewitness on the ground seeing what was happening and hearing these are the words that he was hearing in this I can say that Najwa within the realm of modern standard Arabic it is vigorous it's lively she does an amazing job of catching that there was also one point where you know I there's some slang that comes in that she brings in a funny story that I it was a word I could not find in any of the dictionaries I gave it my best guess and thank goodness I asked her what does this mean because I totally got it wrong um and the um the word was um I'm not going to try the Arabic right now because I'll I'll make a mistake but she had taken the word gigolo in Arabic version and then used the mustar of the form to verb so yeah so to act so how do you translate that into English and I I guess to act as a gigolo to live my gigolo life I think was how it turned out in in the in my English version but right so so you're really it's really a huge sort of endeavor to find the voice that's going to work in English but not sound as though the characters are English that's right yes um and I was hearing um you know Daisy Rockwell was talking about that's when I heard her speak recently and she was she translates from Hindi translates from Hindi and does a lot of um partition literature so like how do you create something that is doesn't sound like an American it needs to be understood but it also needs to be believable as um you know somebody in Pakistan in 1947 um and it's the same thing with with Arabic and so I think that's a challenge for translators from all languages yeah yeah um you mentioned that you consulted Nejwa at one point what how was the author involved and how much did you consult and did she want to see the translation does she know English what was the the relationship there yes so Nejwa um it's fluent in Arabic and French and she um you know we converse in English so I'm sure she reads English if I write to her in English she might write back in French or Arabic and that's always a fun thing um that interlingual um multilingual communication um when I'm working I tend to spend a lot of time um with the text on my own um to um I guess there are so many questions that I have um for so long when making a translation many of them eventually get figured out by spending more and more time with uh with with the text and so I don't I think in part not wanting um to reveal the the my current state of ignorance um and in part not wanting to take so much of the author's time I'll wait and be judicious about um you know as I'm translating I am highlighting in the original text things that I have questions about things that I need to come back to um and many of them will be resolved but others I'll make making lists and in those lists I'll prioritize the most important questions and and send those first and then several rounds of sending questions but I'm very grateful that um both that Nejwa trusted me to translate this text and uh trust that I know um what I'm doing as a translator even when I ask questions that uh that might be a little bit silly or maybe if I had looked up used my dictionary more effectively could have found the answer to yeah well I think that trust was well placed seeing the results um so are there different editorial practices in Arabic publishing and English language publishing and how do those impact on the translation and do you sometimes have to intervene in some way that's a very large question so the difference between editorial practices in English and Arabic I could say there are different editorial practices even within English as well um and working with different publishers and different editors um knowing or you know they will have different degrees of intervention or suggestions or um changes that they're that they're proposing and I need to acknowledge and recognize and express my gratitude to uh Jeremy Davies who was the editor at and other stories that worked with me on this on this translation um Jeremy um really pushed me to to think about how you know is this language you know how is this effective how effective you know how are you capturing the descriptions of Beirut for instance um I think Jeremy probably improved every page of the translation so um I'm grateful very grateful um one other aspect of this question is that um many uh Arabic novels come to press without having been um gotten much editing support um I think in in the English language publishing world um books are read multiple times uh by multiple different editors and there's developmental editing there's copy editing there's proof reading um and I don't know of I don't know of any publishers in the Arab world that that provide that support and and so it's up to an author to um you know do their work on it um and then I think sometimes they'll circulate it with friends who have comments and suggestions um but things go to press um that still have um possibly some typos possibly you know non-standardized punctuation possibly some redundancies that maybe aren't meant you know literary sense but don't help the book that's that that that could could have benefited from engaged readers before publishing and so I think um you know Nedra I should say is um I don't think you know Nedra is incredibly careful and precise and um I was very lucky with the the shape of this manuscript that came to me but there have been others where um I've worked um to do some of the editing process and either being pushed by the publisher to do that and then editing a text and bringing it to author to see if they're comfortable with the decisions that we made um I'm working now in a new book by Musa Na Rumli and I think there's a level of trust there where um I will point out a few of the things that I've done you know a sentence that I've taken out here or there or a paragraph that I moved from one chapter to another um but that's there's such a trust in that relationship that's um that I'm very grateful for thank you um do we have time for another reading or do we need to move on to the okay okay so we'll finish with it with a reading and then there's going to be a Q&A if you have any questions for Luke uh there are um yeah so many that I could choose from I had a few selected to pick out but let me um do one at the end of the first part the book is in three parts um and I mentioned that that it's a book about pain and sadness and part of that comes from uh in Mr. N's case original wounds in the family and it's captured in a beautiful way here we all have a spot on our backs that is vulnerable to loss where love and security can leak out they're square these areas the size of a hand cut into the middle of that smooth flat surface on our body where all our nerves all our feelings all our longings are exposed a secret panel that grants entrance to the heart for reassurance or its absence to spread within when we are born and our first sob makes us realize that we have entered this veil of tears the doctor lays us on our mother's breast for her to press the palm of her hand onto that spot that's how the heart is unsealed how the lungs begin working oxygen comes in our organs throb with life but when a mother doesn't put her hand on that secret spot on her child's back to rub and massage and caress the baby isn't let off the hook no life itself steps in to keep its pulse moving like those machines we plug our hopeless cases into so as to prevent them from leaving this world too soon and the child becomes just another digit in life's tally without an identity or a family of its own me you've probably guessed that no mother pressed her hand onto that special spot on my back she neither kissed nor nursed me she suffered me to live in her vicinity that's all perhaps my father took an interest in me in so much as fatherhood allows but a father's hand is not the lifeline that can save the little creature who's been floating inside his mother's belly for nine months thank you hi everyone so we have our speaker our trans walk prize winning translator and our we have the chair of the judging panel with us and they will be happy to take questions from you so if you have any questions please please ask them so Jonathan thank you um a question for Khalid the Matawa um in your a fascinating um uh lecture you mentioned you invoked the enlightenment several times and you also mentioned Eros now one of the european thinkers who spoke about Eros in its um uh Dionysus uh manifestation was Frigid Nietzsche indeed one of his last letters before he went mad he sighed himself as Dionysus but Nietzsche of course was um upholding aristocratic uh anti-gallitarian values whereas you in several times mentioned equality and uh similar enlightened values do you have um any comments to me on that um well i mean i also mentioned that there has been exceptions um and uh you know the enlightenment project if i'm not a historian but and i'm doing things in a wide uh brass talks but the enlightenment project if you keep going with it it ended in the holocaust if you keep the ideas of scientific research and so on and so on uh eugenics was supposed to be science uh phrenology was some kind of science so um one of the quick questions and i mentioned Thomas Jefferson i mean he you know he was very much an enlightenment figure and in the description of the state of virginia he's trying to figure out ways in which he can make justify slavery based on the bodies of black people so uh maybe i should stress the uh the sort of uh intrinsic uh disequilibrium and enlightenment but the values of equality as such maybe even have emerged from the notion of the noble savages that that was the discovery that people are equal and even people who live in in very so-called primitive society are even better or equal or the equal of everyone else and so yeah so i i can stress that point more but uh i you know but but i recognize that of course and i i hope that it's clear in the assay maybe when it's read rather than what she's heard but no it's it's exactly um there that uh the promise of equalism uh was maybe highly Eurocentric and not inclusive of other people but um it's what the world uh world after world war two sort of picked up on the same values but enhanced and uh basically uh sort of that was enlightenment 2.0 if you will does that answer your question um no really that doesn't matter okay Jonathan yes um my question is addressed to Achael it i very much enjoyed your lecture i noticed that um on a couple of occasions you referred to the concept of pure language which kind of alarmed me to some extent because it sounded a bit platonic and i wondered if you could expand for us on what exactly you were thinking of when you talked about pure language i'm using the uh Walter Benjamin expression your pure language is uh is something that can never come to into being uh it is the expression it's when two languages sort of collide and between their discrepancies and their differences something more beautiful and unrealizable occurs uh so it's not i mean Benjamin doesn't say we should all purify our translations to become pure or that literature is necessarily pure but there is something that's hoped for almost like in the state before the Tower of Babel that one can encounter in having two things sort of rub against each other let's say something that's so beautiful the arabic that you cannot render in english as beautiful or translation into english that maybe excels exceeds or excels on the original is a suggestion that language has a higher standard that we just cannot get to uh and that's where pure language exists so it's in the task so it is so it is platonic in effect yeah i would say almost hegelian perhaps yes yes okay anybody questions thank you very much my question is to luke um if you can let us into the black box of the translator here and the process of translation when did you feel the need to domesticate and to foreignize the text in which areas have you encountered this the dilemma of dichotomy in your work question for luke exactly yes yeah so on this um dichotomy of domesticization and foreignization um i i think that i'm largely writing for um you know aiming as though this book were written in english so that's that's um you know producing something that engages um and doesn't um you know set people or catch them or make them stumble on on language or elements coming from the arabic i think instead of um linguistic um doing that linguistically it's i think with using the the power of the story and the characters and the voices that bring um that allow us to see inside um other people other cultures um so i think that's my my general general approach this is a question for ross um i wanted to know how you judge a translation when you don't know the original language and how it works what goes on in your head tell us more about the judging process it's a good question um so there were four judges two who who know arabic and two who don't and we all so the judges who know arabic read the books in arabic and in english and the ones who didn't know arabic read them just in english and we all made our own short lists and then we came together and compared our short lists and there was the most extraordinary convergence um so we there were the arabic speakers were able to enlighten the non-arabic speakers on a couple of the titles where they were able to say well no there was there was a big problem with this one because there was a mistake in the title or something like that but on the whole um we were very much in agreement which was which was a revelation really and it's it's a testimony to the quality of the translation and you know you're you're looking at a good translation of a good book there could be a very good translation of a not so good book there could be a bad translation of a good book um but somehow it sort of bubbles to the surface and we were all absolutely unanimous about this title would you agree sarah great can i can i follow up with okay sorry sorry i think you can hear me for the recording all right sorry okay no um as ross said we were all in agreement about the the short list and then uh it was more or less so we looked at each other and it's mr n isn't it yes um i think so too don't you yeah yeah mr n yeah there isn't anything better than that really no no it's all magnificent yeah great and you think so too wonderful let's all do that right i mean that was more or less how how it uh with with some very small you know variations because the the the short list really was brilliant but as as you said bubbles to the surface so we were deprived of the sort of great arguments that didn't have any controversy no not at all can i follow up with the question and we'll come to you in a second um what about the nomination process you know who nominated the entries or um the publishers submit there's a publisher submit yes yes and and i think vanipal called in a couple is that right margaret that you identified a couple that hadn't yeah yeah yeah but it's the publishers who submit okay all right so here we are i have a question to hailed and a quick question to hailed and a quick question to look as well so i i seem to the together and then kind of play uh for for the question for hailed uh do you think that fidelity uh in translation demands or or uh should be defined differently from any other fidelity like uh as a space of uh of as a space that needs a scale is not only fidelity that i'm preserving things or or or or keeping uh keeping things and in uh as it showed but also it needs much skill and uh an effort like what's the difference between the fidelity in translation or and the and the definition of fidelity uh itself and for luke uh it's similar to the question of the visiting the places that you are describing uh what do you do uh with the traditions the different culture and fictional of imaginations that that that you can if you translate things from arabic or the opposite uh you will find things actually that are imagined differently and and there are uh expressions that uh that are not culturally the same and you have to to put much work and actually to assimilate the differences uh it it needs like a big effort and how do you deal with this in the translation thank you i was trying to think uh i think in the 19th century we've been earlier the idea was that the best way to translate poetry was in couplets rhymed couplets uh that was thought to be maybe maybe the the best you know truthful way of fidelity in a sense is to render you know Alexander Pope to render things in rhyme couplets of course you know that that's not going to be uh you know render things in a more uh literal way but the idea that uh to be true to poetry you need to make it more of of what current poetry or the best kind of poetry being produced in the language sounds like so the answer is um fidelity has meant many things and it is a cultural element as well as an aesthetic one i would say that um um with uh prose translations emerging later on of oriental texts of poetry uh their immersion i mean that's maybe some people say that that's like the beginning of free verse in in english and elsewhere uh because one could get and everyone talks about that one can get a substance of poetry without it necessarily being poetry and in a sense that is has more fidelity in it than not and so uh so which is you know prose is not poetry in that so fidelity has um many things it's it is uh it is as vague and noble as maybe pure language but it also is a something that we can decide upon as we practice you could there are two maybe sort of layers of it sometimes there were lots of translations of arabic in journals of arabic literature the referee journals and so on and those were you know supposed to be more approximate to the so-called literal translation as you try to make your way into the poetry of a given language as it is practiced in that language the literal translations tend to not be as um uh as welcomed first nobody wants to read poetry with footnotes footnotes in a poem can add a lot of truth and fidelity to it but nobody wants to do that in english or in any other language so it's it is open and it is almost like a register of translation at which level do you translate and sort of have everything in the poem as it is or to what way are you providing something that's more like um what have been called a trot where it is more literal with uh footnotes and so on where there's a and and sometimes those translations are for people who know arabic to some degree so so it is open i would say one of the most successful translators who've managed to do both in terms of arabic poetry and jahili poetry is michael sales who has produced in a book called desert tracings excellent renditions of jahili poetry with minimal uh um uh footnotes but also with some inventions to english in order to accommodate the jahili arabic of the time so it is open uh but maybe letting your readers know your approach and how your what your methodology is is the is the best way to be to be truthful in every aspect of the process is fidelity and it's not the same as as within the relationship a few months ago my wife bought me a great poster of a film that she thought i liked until now and i couldn't say why did you buy me this uh i but i in the end she could see in my face that i didn't want this poster really but i had to say thank you so which fidelity is better to your feelings or to uh to uh you know to the uh expression of appreciation of love i was caught in the middle red-handed luke thank you for that question um so the the question of all of the the differences of cultural differences and challenges of interpretation um things that are being expressed in arabic that might not have equivalences in english things in arabic that that i might not understand how do you bridge those gaps um i'll start by saying that um recognizing my imperfections uh is an important part of the process if i waited until i were perfect to translate and knew everything i would never translate and the same with any other endeavor in life so finding a way to trust that you've gone enough that you understand enough and then adding your contribution to the conversation and and and and continually learning together is something that i try to pursue in life um but there are amazing tools um you know such as you know the the internet is a godsend being able to uh when i'm seeing something that i'm not understanding um that's the best part when i know i don't understand it the the real danger is when i think i understand it and and i haven't so i don't go back to dig deeper um but you know searching a phrase um in google will bring up things and often google images is very helpful another great source is a native speaker somebody who knows more um the the project after this one that i mentioned shellish the iraqi with all of the iraqi dialect um i believe i read the entire thing uh with my friend yusuf henna um in iraqi um who's studying to be a doctor and you know i was reading my english and he was following along in the arabic and um or explaining some things that i just had no idea about um but again the one of the wonderful things about translation is it is is such a wonderful way to continue learning um about a culture that that i've invested so much in in a language that means so much do you want to add something just quick times when there are words that are that are not like would you there are there words that are in arabic that you kept the same so keeping keeping arabic words um uh that's that is like imam yeah well um things things that would be in an english dictionary that's that's not a problem and um i think if something is in uh so if it's in an english dictionary or if it's in google if it's easy to find i don't often feel the need to translate it if it has a wikipedia article i'll try to use that spelling but in terms of um other you know i just i mentioned daisy rockwell a minute ago and i recently read tomb of sand and that has a lot of the you know hindi ordu and sanskrit preserved in in the english and uh she does it in an amazing way that um both speaks to people from those cultures who speak those languages and then also uh train the english reader or the reader of the english version and and educate us on the on the book and i don't i'm not thinking of examples where i've done that in my own books but um it's it's it's amazing when it's something in slang i mean do you preserve the slang in language or do you replace the slang from one language to another that's probably it doesn't usually doesn't work it usually doesn't work you know because the slang in english has such specific cultural references that would distract the reader or bring their mind to the wrong place and so so it's i think in every context it depends and and it's always a struggle okay right yeah coming in on this um one of the things i find interesting is that as a translator into english there are lots of different englishes people write books in different englishes there's american english there's australian english there's an indian english which are as foreign to us as arabic or something else there are whole cultures foods etc books that are written in english nobody worries about the fact that this is an australian flower or of the american american dish you know we don't worry about other englishes but we get very worried about translations from other cultures and i think you know we shouldn't underestimate readers yeah yeah uh i think sort of a probably this is all the time we have right so sort of like there is a lot to talk about and i actually had questions for both of you but i'm going to hold them back until later so thank you very much for coming i think we can stop here because the books are waiting and the reception is waiting and we can chat there and catch up there so can i invite nana nana to come forward so we can very quickly here just say our thank you sorry i'm used to only karaoke so but i don't sing today don't worry um so thank you very much for coming to this event and we are so glad to see this passionate audience and thank you very much for wonderful lecture you're reading and i'm looking forward to reading your translation and i hope that you are going to accept our invitation to talk in front of our students in the near future and so thank you very much everybody and i will yes so i sort of dr kea and jaria who chairs the center for cultural literary and postcolonial studies is unwell she cannot be here so i say a word of thank you but also for myself i'm very honored that bonnie paul trust is here at so as today and throughout the proceedings today we're reminded of the victims of violence in the Middle East in the Arab world even as we celebrate translations of Arab authors so thank you again for reminding us of the Palestinians of the Libyans of the Lebanese of the Iraqis of the Syrians and Yemenis and Arabs all around the world so thank you very much and please enjoy the reception and particularly enjoy the books that are on display before your eyes thank you again well i'm down to say thank you as well but really it's already been said but simply on behalf of the trust thank you very much for everybody for coming thank you for watching on zoom and we'll look forward to seeing you next year thank you