 Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us for today's event. My name is Samira Qawar, and I'm a trustee of the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature. Today, we're presenting the sixth annual Saif Ghubash Banipal Translation Prize lecture, hosted by the British Library. The award-winning literary translator Jonathan Wright will speak on change and continuity in contemporary Arabic fiction. A brief word about the Banipal Trust. It was established in September 2004 by Banipal magazine's publisher to support and celebrate publishing Arab authors in English translation to deepen and enrich cultural dialogue between the Arab world and the West by working to bring the works of contemporary Arab authors to English speakers worldwide. The Trust supports and promotes the translation of literary works by contemporary Arab authors into English and the publication of the Banipal magazine of modern Arab literature in English translation three times a year. Our annual translation prize, the Saif Ghubash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, was first awarded in 2006 and is made possible by a generous grant from Omar Saif Ghubash and his family in memory of his late father Saif Ghubash. The annual lecture, also supported by Omar Saif Ghubash and his family, was set up to celebrate the 10th yearly award of the prize and can focus on any aspect of Arabic literature and translation. Our lecturer, Jonathan Wright, studied Arabic at Oxford and worked as a journalist for Reuters for many years, mostly in the Arab world. He turned to literary translation in 2008 and has since translated more than 20 novels and other books, as well as dozens of short stories. His most recent translations are the Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Anton and God 99 by Hassan Blaseem. He won the 24 independent foreign fiction prize for his translation of Hassan Blaseem's The Iraqi Christ and the 2016 Saif Ghubash Banipal Prize for his translation of Saoud Al-Sanouci's The Bamboo Stock. In 2015, he was commended for his translation of Amjad Nasser's Land of No Rain, and he was joint winner of the 2013 prize for Yousef Zidane's Azazil. His translation of Ahmad Sadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize and his translation of Maaz and Marouf's Jokes for the Gunman was longlisted for the 2019 prize. His translations were also shortlisted for the 2018-19 and 2020 Saif Ghubash Banipal Prize. His translations also include works by Hamour Ziyada, Ibrahim Aisa, Khalid Al-Khamisi, Rasha Al-Ameer, Fahd Al-Atiq, Alaa Al-Aswani, Azziddin Fisheer, Jalal Ameen and Baha Abdul-Nagit. Just a little housekeeping before we get started. If you have any questions during the event, you can submit them throughout using the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. You can put selected questions to Jonathan after his lecture. At the end of the event, a survey will pop up. We'd be very grateful if you took some time to fill it out. This will help our partners, the British Library, to continue to plan their cultural events program. Now, without further ado, I invite our special guest, Jonathan Wright, to take the floor. Good evening and welcome. Ahlam As-Ahlam. Thank you for logging in. Thank you to the Banipal Trust for giving me this platform, a larger platform than I usually have. And thank you to the British Library for hosting. It's a pity we can't be physically present, but doing it this way does allow people to take part from all over the world. I'm conventionally at these events to start by saying how honoured and privileged you are to be speaking. In my case, it's more like surprised and perplexed, always prone to imposter syndrome. I feel it triply in this case. I'm not a specialist in Arabic literature, let alone in Arabic literature in all its historical vastness. I'm an academic in a niche occupation where academics long dominated the field. I've never studied translation theory, though when I hear theoretical discussions, they do make sense to someone who makes language choices every day. Even when I speak Arabic, it comes out as a mishmash of modern standard Arabic and Egyptian and Levantine colloquials. In my working life, I was a journalist, mostly in the Arabic speaking world, from Morocco to Iraq and Sudan and Oman in the south. Journalists like me translate every day in a rough and ready way. And I was always an enthusiastic reader of literature of every kind, but mostly either English or in English translation. I have literature Arabic in all its variety, and I never privileged one kind over another. While learning Egyptian colloquial in Cairo in the 1970s, I remember transcribing with great dedication, the lyrics of Abdul Halim Hafiz songs, and the text of Kilimitane Rabess, the radio soliloquies by Fouad and Mohandis. I was an Arabic at university on a whim. Although I didn't articulate it at the age of 18. Later I sometimes told people I made the decision because the Arabic speaking world looked like a different world, one that might be worth exploring. It was also diverse and readily accessible. One might say I othered it in a generally positive way. Much of that otherness faded away. I came to the conclusion that people are really are much the same everywhere. And that for most people, culture is a thin veneer fragile malleable and susceptible to rapid change. Because of Arabic are clearly not much different from anyone else. The culture of Arabic literature is very different from that of any other major language that I know. That's really what I want to talk about today, how attitudes towards language and literature vary from place to place, and over time. How easy it is to be lulled into a complacent sense that it's always been the way it is here and now. Obviously, I'm especially interested in how these questions relate to translation. I turned to literary translation only a dozen years ago. Since then I've translated about 15 novels, several collections of short stories, several large nonfiction works, and extracts from works by many dozens of writers from almost every Arab country. Translators spend most of their working lives pouring over a single text for months at a time. So I haven't been able to catch up on all the great Arabic writers of even the past century and a half. Though I studied some pre-modern literature at university, my exposure to it in recent times has been sporadic and haphazard. Translators have to read at least as much in their own language, the target language, as they do in their source language. For me translation is 20% about understanding the text, 80% about writing something in English that reflects the original as closely as possible. This is actually reminded of the importance of wide reading, after I couldn't think of an easy way to convey the idea in this little sentence. About a week after I submitted my inadequate attempt in the middle of a larger text, I came across the perfect solution in the Guardian newspaper. Marina Hyde, writing about David Cameron's testimony in a parliamentary committee, wrote quote, When they close their eyes, the words lining their eyelids are going to be giant fraud. What I should have written was, when I close my eyes, an image of my father lined my eyelids. Translators have to keep their eyes open to the wealth and versatility of their own language. Apart from my own relative ignorance, I was also a little wary of speaking in public about my work and Arabic fiction in general, because the subject is so fraught with sensitivities. I'm an outsider, and it's not my place to challenge the way writers write novels in Arabic. The most I can do is make some observations based on my own experience as a translator and admirer of many of the authors I have dealt with. As many of you know, Arabness is primarily maybe even solely a linguistic category. Arabs are people who speak Arabic, regardless of where they live, the color of their skin, their religion or their way of life. Bound together by language, they value their language and have strong views about it. Many of them are committed to or conditioned to accept prescriptivist views of language. The belief that one form, in this case the form known as Fusha or MSA as linguists call it, is more correct than others, more worthy, more expressive and more aesthetically pleasing. Many of them even fetishize their ideal version of this language in a way that few other modern language communities even approach outdoing the French several times over. It's an attitude that attaches high value to form. Sometimes I believe at the expense of substance. It goes hand in hand with a belief in the immutability of language, the belief that the rules are set in stone for eternity, almost like the rules enshrined in scripture. Not surprisingly, the Islamists in general take this approach, even if they never write novels. In the 20th century, the Arab nationalists shared this position in the belief that any recognition of language diversity would undermine the unity of the Arab nation. Of course, in practice, few people can meet the high standard required by the prescriptivists, creating a divide between a hieratic caste of scribes and the rest of the population. They cuddle along with their underappreciated and sometimes even despised colloquial ways of speaking. Fusha is in effect a lingua franca, a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a vernacular. Let's see ourselves here. Listening to Tamim Barhouti recite poems successfully in Fusha, Palestinian colloquial and Egyptian colloquial. It's quite obvious that these are three different languages, especially in rhythm and syllable structure. The language has had frequent exposure to the other varieties, as is always the case of course in these interconnected times. These ways of speaking would not be mutually intelligible. Most of the books I translate are written in this lingua franca, a language that has not been anyone's mother tongue for at least 1000 years, a language that no family speaks around the dinner table, and that no lovers speak to each other in bed. This poses a massive problem for us translators, and we must be honest about it. By all the principles of best practice, our versions of Arabic novels should reflect this gap between the everyday world and the way it's expressed in novels. In fact, I sometimes have the feeling that for this very reason, native speakers of Arabic find our translations into English disappointing in some way, as if what aspires to be sublime ends up being just too mundane. I suspect this is partly what Egyptian novelist Ibrahim Farah Ali meant when he said that the works so far translated from Arabic to English quote, have failed to give expression to the true nature of the Arab world's literary output. And they have proven unable to bring about any sort of audience for this literature. That's quite damning. Translators don't have much choice in the matter. If we try to reflect the strange nature of a Fusar text, how far back should we go? English didn't exist as a language when the Arab grammarians set the rules for Fusar in the first centuries of the Arab Islamic Empire. If we compromise on an Augustan style, for example, pastishing pulp, swift and deferral, it would be a monumental task and few of any publishers want to publish the results of our labor. Of course, folk to me, we settle for the kind of English used by contemporary English novelists. And in most cases, there isn't any alternative. But the use of Fusari literature complicates the task for writers in Arabic, too. Let's take a simple example. Our languages have many words for the way people laugh. In English, for example, we can chockle, chuckle, cackle, snicker, snigger, giggle, titter, and even go for. Some of these distinctions are very subtle. How do we learn those distinctions? Only by hearing how other people use these words in real life situations. For example, when someone laughs and someone else asks, what are you chuckling about? Fusar, no doubt, has many words for laughing, too. But how would a writer make the same kind of fine distinction when those words are rarely or never used in the writer's lived experience, when they don't correlate with a particular rhythm or tone of laughing that they have actually heard? Take the words we used to describe the states of mind of the people around us. This is a matter of prime importance for us as social beings. We have a vast nuanced range of words for moods, all of them finely tuned through day to day interactions. When we're confined to bookish words that no one ever utters at home, we lose the richness and the subtlety that these words offer. A lingua franca runs the risk of taking us to a cold, sanitized, homogenized world. When writers in normally spoken languages are wondering how to put an idea into words, they wonder how they would explain it to someone around them. But if you're writing in a lingua franca, the only valid test is how other writers have already expressed it. Since Fusar operates on a plane separate from real life, the usual reality check functions, the usual reality check mechanisms don't function well. The best writers have risen to the challenge, but the odds are stacked against them. Even with the best, I sometimes find myself translating their words back into ordinary language. I have this weird sensation that I'm having to read the author's mind when they first converted their thoughts into Fusar and then undo the conversion. I remember when the English translation of Ahmad Sardarys, Frankenstein and Baghdad was shortlisted for the man book at International Prize a few years ago. A newspaper contacted me to contribute to a pop quiz about amusing or quaint idioms in the various languages of the shortlisted books. The suit struck me that compared with living languages, Fusar has very few idioms in the sense of expressions not readily comprehensible from the component words. In fact, the concept of idiom runs counter to the ideology of a lingua franca, like the French of Detato Esperanto as envisaged by its creator. Such a language should be crystal clear, almost mathematical. Yet the various colloquials of Arabic are of course as rich in idioms as any other language. Frankly, I'm amazed that anyone ever manages to write a novel in any language. The stamina, the commitment, the inspiration make it seem almost miraculous. For a novelist in Arabic, the obstacles are even greater. Because of the constraints imposed by the literary establishment, I sometimes feel that writers in Arabic are voluntarily working with one hand tied behind their backs. With or without their consent, they are like composers who write music on the basis that there are only 12 possible notes in an octave or that the piano is the only instrument worth playing. Because in a way that was the purpose of Fusar, it made sense in the days before radio, television, film and large scale movement from country to country, but the barriers have been breaking down for a while. Arabs are constantly exposed to other ways of speaking and even writing through video clips and social media comments in their various colloquials. But in the world of literature, the conservatives still hold sway. They dominate the establishment, the media, the academic and political worlds, casting a pool of conformity and a heavy dose of antiquarianism over public discourse. I came across this very early in my translating experience. The first full-length book I translated was Taxi by the Egyptian writer Khalid al-Khamisi. I'm usually for Arabic fiction fiction. This book is written almost entirely in Egyptian colloquial. It's a rich text, a series of vignettes into Cairo life in all its diversity, full of vitality, pathos and humor. I loved working on it and I was excited when it was well received. I should point out here that when I mention the text, I'm not saying it's a work of genius and superior to every other possible text I might have mentioned. In the end, we translators are not critics. We translate things that take our fancy, things English language readers might find interesting. Things publishers ask us to translate and in the case of many translators, I'm sorry to say, horrible things that help them pay the rent. But after Taxi came out, I noticed subtle jibes by the guardians of language. Although the Arabic texts are very well and perhaps because of that, many critics couldn't conceive of the possibility that Arabic literature could exist outside the very narrow parameters set by the ancient grammarians. A book like Taxi just could not count. They said it wasn't worthy of consideration simply because of the language in which it was written, and it certainly didn't deserve to be translated. In recent years, the English literary translators thankfully taken a more generous attitude towards works in non-standard English. Irving Welch of Trainspotting, who writes in Scott's Direct, which is daunting to outsiders at first sight, is seen as a serious writer. He writes with style, imagination, wit and force in a voice that which those alienated by much current fiction clearly want to hear, says the Times' literary supplement. One of the many books I read on the lockdown, Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings, many chapters of which are written in Jamaican patois, one the man Booker Prize and two other literary prizes. The Wall Street Journal said of it, a total divorce, an audacious, demanding, inventive literary work. These scenarios are hard to imagine in the Arabic context. It goes beyond literature too. Although most Arabic speakers can understand the language of the media through extensive, extensive exposure, only a small minority can speak it competently. In effect, hundreds of millions of people are pushed to the sidelines of public discourse or excluded entirely. The effect is especially pernicious on children in their formative years. Surveys show that the practice of parents reading to children is much less common in Arabic speaking countries than elsewhere. Those things are gradually changing. Most of the books for children are written in a language that children hardly understand and that some parents struggle with themselves. One of my next major translation ventures was Yomi Dean, Judgment Day by the Reveni's writer, Rashal Amir. A work of a completely different kind from Hamisiz. The novel, a love story between an educated urban woman and repressed Muslim cleric from the countryside, is written in an almost pre-modern style, meaning the style that prevailed before changes in Arabic that came about in the mid-19th century. The couple fall in love while parsing and unraveling the poems of the Mutanabi, the brash 10th century poet, who may or wanted to declare himself a prophet but decided to settle for fame as a poet. In the introduction that I wrote at the time, I celebrated the classicism of her style. I noted that although Fusha was no one's mother tongue, it was quote, the common heritage of all those diligent and studious enough to adopt it as a vehicle for their thoughts. On reflection a decade later, my views have changed somewhat. I can now see that the strength of Russia's work lies in her ability to dissect human motivation in detail like Proust or Jane Austen. In other words, in the content and not in the form. I believe it's possible to do that effectively in any language spoken by any community. Reading Sally Rooney's massively popular normal people in preparation for this talk, strangely my thing. I realized this was Rooney's strength to noting the subtle signals people sent each other in words and gestures and how these relate to their inner lives. Rooney does this in simple spoken English of the kind you and I use daily. Another early venture of mine was a collection of short stories by the Iraqi writer Hassan Bessam, the madman of freedom square. Hassan is an interesting case, a filmmaker by training. He left Baghdad when Saddam Hussein was in power and took several years working his way across Eurasia, crossing borders by transvestite means if necessary, until he finally settled in Finland where he lives today. Hassan stories read rather like the short list for a film in dispersed with dialogue sometimes with elements of Iraqi colloquial, not a language I knew well at the time. And Hassan doesn't hold Fusar sacred. He might write he began as bear, Dale, Aleph without Hamza, as in Iraqi colloquial bidder. Readers expecting a Fusar text would read the word as bad it seemed. Looking back on this now, I remember it was a little irritating, mainly because it made my task more difficult. But first I had to check with him each time just in case. When you wrote about did you mean bad he began, for example, when you replied yes of course I thought to myself, then why did you write it that way. I've gone past that now. I'm better attuned to style. But the guardians of language jump on things like that. In fact, one of the first questions a reviewer asks of a new literary work in Arabic is, is it properly written. In other words, does the writer observe all the complicated rules of grammar and orthography. When Hassan Blesin recently announced on Facebook that he was writing a novella holy in Iraqi colloquial, possibly the first such work in history. He recorded a wide range of responses from his audience colloquial Iraqi wouldn't be able to reflect the real world, one reader said. This was Hassan's reply and I brought the endorser. So it's first time that can reflect the real world. A sentence in first time sounds like one of those histrionic actors in those TV series. When you read a sentence in first time you can read, you can feel a certain voice and tone. Imagine someone opening a story in first time like this, the vehicular explosive contraption fulminated while I was partaking of my matitudinal repost. The sentence reflect the real world better and more truthfully than if I were to say, as I was having breakfast the car bomb blew up colloquial language is sensual warm and honest you feel it from your heart, and it is remarkably extinct. End of quote. A leachism over the correct register for Arabic literature goes hand in hand with a leachism over the choice of words for translation works for translation into English, which is a highly contested domain. So few English language publishers read Arabic, and because the public and critical reception of books in Arabic is difficult to gauge from outside. We translators often end up as gatekeepers between authors and publishers, a reluctant one in my case. Naturally enough, it's impossible to please everyone. There's a widespread belief that some mysterious force chooses the books to be translated. Listen to critic gave the last four briefly Egyptian Minister of Culture, for example, quote a globally prevalent neo Orientalist tendencies adopts a set of literary and artistic works from the third world in general, and the Middle East in particular, and bounding with exposes of a ubiquitous mobile backwardness and rampant corruption at every level. This has given rise to the phenomenon of the modest scandalizing novel of limited creative valid value that lets no corruption oppression perversional deviants pass on mentioned. One of the aims is to perpetuate in the minds of Westerners, an image of an East in decline, alien, fantastical, backward and oppressed to justify the need for colonialist domination of the region, end quote. No one denies that there was a spurt of interest in Arabic literature in your American circles after the attacks of September 2001, and the political rest that started in 2011. Some of this interest was indeed ethnographic, or even prorient, rather than purely literary, but I find it hard to see any correlation between us for conspiracy theory and the books I have worked on over the years. Some of the works favored by the traditional exhibit many of the features that are for cadems with such venom. Take the sleepwalkers is set a rune Neama by Saad and I carry for example which I often see cited as one of the great Arabic novels that has never been translated into English. I know the book well, because I have in fact translated it, though the publisher has been sitting on my translation for some years. It's an interesting work written in the 1960s, a panoramic historical novel set in Egypt in the last 50 years of the Mamluk State, that is in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. It took me a while to warm to the book. But in the end I found many virtues in it. But the book does contain barbaric cruelty of all kinds, decadent indulgence in drugs, sexual predation, a dysfunctional family dispute that ends in brutal murder, religious superstition in the form of Sufi holy man, and a stereotypical Jewish apothecary who sells poisons to the aristocracy. I wrote a long introduction to the book in 2010, and I quote my own comments on my impressions of the time. Marcaery wrote the sleepwalkers in highly stylized, sometimes artificial literary Arabic, which is increasingly out of favor. An unusual feature of his writing, if it is his anthropomorphization of inanimate objects or natural phenomenon. In a similar vein he often identifies people by one of their accessories or physical features he writes that the red turban sat down, or the bushy moustache lost its temper, for example. Marcaery also delights in displaying his knowledge of exotic Arabic vocabulary, sometimes overloading sentences with quasi synonyms, in a way that might appear contrived to a modern reader in English. Browsing through the recently translated essays of the Egyptian writer El Mawilehe, who wrote about 1900. I came across synonym chains of this kind on almost every page, exalted and revered, robbed and dispoiled, collecting and amassing, squander and waste. It continues into recent times. The works I'm asked to translate are peppered with locutions such as fear, dread and terror or worry, anguish and concern. When I come to think about Mcaery's book now, with the benefits of hindsight, maybe these were the elements that Arabic readers value, maybe they would want to see them retained in an English translation. Would English readers, I mean English language readers go along with that. How many of them would say, well that's an original interesting way to write a novel. Who do we translate to serve anyway, the culture of the source text, or the readers who buy the books we translate. That's a question that keeps coming up and I should return to it later. As far as accusation of near Orientalism, always lurks around the corner, whatever we translate is good, especially those of us who are white men. Should we dare adjust the text to make it more accessible? Should we assume that the probable readers already have advanced degrees in area studies. Only the accusation of near Orientalism can be directed at unexpected targets. We outsiders with an interest in Arabic have to steer a narrow course across rocky shoals. In the face of a well-known American professor of Islamic studies, a convert to Islam. When Hossam I was up, one of the founders of the living Arabic project recently argued in favor of using colloquial Arabic more widely, the professor replied, not as full of people who actually care about speaking, higher register Arabic, so that they can have serious conversations about higher registered topics. People who complain about this don't care about speaking Arabic like an educated Arab. Some hours later, after complaints from social media participants, including many people with Arabic names, he retreated. After reflecting on how my words have embodied or advanced colonialism and white saviorism, I decided to retract my statement that recourse to Fussar is required for discussing high registered topics. I doubt that Fussar needs white saviorism to survive, but the idea that ordinary people can't discuss higher registered topics because they don't speak the right language is both insulting and preposterous. Of course, the usual explanation for the survival and prevalence of Fussar in literature is culture and tradition. But this raises some interesting questions about community continuity and change in culture, not just in literature but in wider society. People commonly assume that communities retain their culture by default. They think it takes convulsive events to divert culture from its natural trajectory. Cultural continuity and change are rather like continuity and change in food styles. People assume medieval Italians ate pizzas with tomato paste and Shakespeare dined on turkey for Christmas. The Egyptians in Macaulay's novels are portrayed as drinking coffee more than a century before coffee arrived in Egypt. Similarly, conservatives can talk confidently about the Arab literary tradition for something ancient and permanent, and people take them seriously. But the world is not like that. Children are born free of culture. There are no markers of culture in DNA. Sociologists bound to more says as well, quote, culture is not something that exists outside of or independently of individual human beings living together in society. Cultural values do not descend from heaven to influence the course of history. They are abstractions by an observer based on the observation of certain similarities in the way groups of people behave to explain behavior in terms of cultural values is to engage in circular reasoning. The assumption of inertia, the cultural and social continuity do not require explanation obliterates the fact that both have to be created anew in each generation, often with great pain and suffering. To maintain and transmit a value system, human beings are punched, bullied, sent to jail, thrown into concentration camps, cajoled, bribed, made into heroes, encouraged to read newspapers, stood up against the wall and shot, and sometimes even taught sociology. Not only that, even within a single generation, cultural change can be dramatic. When I grew up, homosexual acts were illegal in this country, and many schools taught large doses of Latin and Greek to their pupils. At one school I personally attended at the age of 12, Latin and Greek took up 40% of our class time. Same-sex marriages are now routine and Latin has no part in mainstream education. When I was born, the minority ethnic community in this country amounted to about 100,000 people. It's now about 8 million, 80 times as many in that presence has transformed the cultural landscape, largely for the better. So when politicians speak of British values or critics speak of the Arab literary tradition, we should immediately be on our guard, probably what they want to define those values or that tradition in a tendentious way that suits their various interests. In the case of Arabic literature, change has been dramatic anyway, novels in their present form are largely an innovation of the early 20th century. In its early stages, the genre was heavily influenced by translations from the widely read European novelists of the 19th century. Ask Arab novelists who has influenced their work, they are more likely to say Kafka or Marques, than they are to say Rajah or Therese Shadiak. Off the top of my head, I would estimate that the volume of narrative fiction written in Arabic in the last 40 or 50 years greatly exceeds the amount written in the previous 1400 years. Righteous narrative fiction are breaking new ground every year. I would go even further. Some of the best literature ever written in Arabic has been written today. Some of this new literature is taking Arabic into areas of human life and aspects of the human mind that it's never explored before. Righteous today are inventing the tradition of the future. But when it comes to language, they are putting new wine in old skins, new wine in new skins might taste even better. For centuries, poetry dominated the Arab literary landscape is shared beware nil Arab or on when the latter. Poetry is the Arab archive in the epitome of literature as Abu Farid said Hamdani said in the 10th century. But Arabic literature underwent a total transformation in the mid 20th century. Another poetry which followed rigid pre-Islamic patterns of rhyme and meter was suddenly replaced by free verse or prose verse with few rhymes, loose meter, sometimes no obvious meter at all. Changes in the texture of written fossa predate those changes in poetry by about 100 years. The changes are overlooked by those who prefer to emphasize continuity for reasons of supposed cultural authenticity. European domination in the 19th century, a byproduct of the industrial revolution into a massive translation process, which inevitably brought calcs and European modes of expression into Arabic. There are questions such as you judge there is no longer news of it there to introduce indirect questions, imitating the English air for the French sea. The innovations will not appear. Yeah, it's not stuck a bit. This dozens of examples of stylistic borrowings that now fully incorporated into written Arabic. As the Arabic has adapted to new circumstances, the conservatives cling to the myth that the language cannot change. Until recently, most of the dictionaries were hopelessly out of date, filled with recycled 19th century definitions and heedless of the subtle changes that all core words have undergone in the meantime. This iconography is improving, but it's not the conservatives who are leading the way, because they don't want to recognize change. Others have taken over people like Hossein Abouza, whom I mentioned earlier, whose website now contains masses of material on spoken language from Egypt, the Levant and North Africa. There are sites that specialize in Gulf Arabic and Iraqi Arabic to my Twitter feed is full of professional and amateur linguists announcing their latest discoveries. The strange thing is, in the real world, there doesn't need to be a dichotomy between Hossein and Halokri. There's a spectrum of registers that spans the gap between the two, and Hossein expressions are deeply embodied in daily speech, they can coexist and interact. On the quiet, many writers in Arabic are slowly bypassing the conservatives, some deliberately and some unwittingly. I don't remember how by it's novel couple and to name America before the Queen forces sleep last year, I can plenty of Levantine colloquial words, I wasn't familiar with. And I don't mean words for objects specific to a Palestinian context. I mean colorful expressions that come for concepts common to us all such as say yeah, now yeah, wandering around freely. In the Algerian book I've been working on the author rights. Partially Berber expression for telling it straight. In a text just the other day I came across the colloquial expression, not a register for something like jerky or recoil. I will write an Arabic novel that breaks all the conventions mixing language, every possible register. And yet a book so brilliant and original and so indisputably a work of genius, the guardians of language will find it hard to dismiss it. Then writers in Arabic can break their chains and give free rein to their linguistic inventiveness. I seem to have a reputation in some circles as a populist. I don't really have a stake in how Arab writers write their novels. That's a choice they'll make for themselves in that particular social professional context. I'll take them as they come and judge them on their content, rather than their form. But whatever form they come in, I will continue to make them sound like in this. The approach has always been to imagine how the writer might have written that book, if by chance, they suddenly woke up bilingual in English. Isn't that the obvious approach. The translation theorists call it domestication. I was especially pleased to find myself recently in agreement on this with Michael Cooperson, one of the finest and most ingenious Arabic English translators around. He asked in a recent interview what makes a good translation. He said, I'm going to be blunt and say domestication. I don't deny that aggressive exotification of the Nabahobian kind has its place for certain purposes. But once it makes its point, which it does pretty quickly, the charm wears off. The translation is a claimed version of the Hariri's map, which is domestication to the limits. Translating each of the 50 macamas into a different version of English, including cockney rhyming slang, Chaucerian English, Nigerian English, and Gilbert and Sullivan opera style. And of course, is that Hariri's original wasn't written in 50 different versions of Arabic, but almost entirely in a single stylized form of rhyming prose. I can't say where literature informs of Arabic is heading. There's a chance that Fusar or modern or modified version of it will become a true mother tongue spoken by millions of educated Arabs at home from childhood. The evidence from history suggests that this is unlikely. The more likely outcome is that over centuries, dialect clusters will gradually coalesce into relatively stable standard languages in much the same way as Latin evolved into Italian, French, Spanish, and so on. That would open up new possibilities for diverse literatures grounded in the daily lives of the people who spoke those languages. One way or another, change is inevitable. Language conservatives, like political conservatives, pretend that change can be postponed, even stopped in its tracks. They imagine a golden age, and they see decline all around them. I prefer to see change as an opportunity for improvement and enrichment. Writers in Arabic, as in all languages, do their best work when they feel free to innovate and explore when they embrace change. Judging by the signs I see around me, many of them are doing so already, and I hope they will continue. And I thank you for listening. Thank you very much, Jonathan. That was absolutely fascinating. We're now going to the question and answer section of this event. We have around 20 minutes or a little over, and I'm going to go to the first question that we have from Becky Maddock. And she says, do you think that my writing in modern standard Arabic authors are making their books available to a wider audience across the Arab world. If authors wrote in dialects, would they find it more difficult to market their work outside their home country? Yes, of course they would. And I think that that is actually probably one of the major motivations for writers in Arabic. I have an interesting insight into that. Back in the summer in July, I think it was, I did a translation workshop with the Bristol University, and we did a variety of texts. One of them was an Iraqi colloquial text. And none of the participants were Iraqis, and they managed to work to understand it with great ease. I was really surprised at how receptive they were to it and how easily they found it to negotiate their way through it. And as I mentioned in my lecture, I'm not familiar with Jamaican Padua. When I read Marlon James' book, I learned it as I went, but I actually found it a kind of really interesting voyage to go on. And I think actually people are exposed to other ways of speaking. I don't think it's a massive obstacle. I think they would very soon learn. Okay, my next question is from Mai Zaki. And she says, you talked about the differences between Fuscha and the dialects. How do you reflect that in your translation, especially in a novel that mixes the two, narration versus dialect? I don't know, there's no way we can do it. I mean, what it, the, we don't have, as I mentioned, we don't have a realistic alternative. There's no way we can reflect that split, that gap between the two in English. I mean, I think the novelist actually, I think it raises another question, which I would like to ask the other way around. When Arab readers read a book translated from a European language, do they kind of assume that this is some kind of, the original is some kind of literary language? Or do they understand it that it's just the way ordinary people speak every day? I don't know. It's a problem, but there's no obvious solution. We just do what we can. We just, we just translate it in a way that our readers are going to understand readily. We have no choice. Right. So the next question is from Mirvath Halloum. And she says, how do the novels that you select for translation come to your attention in the first place? Do you select them based on their popularity and significance in the Arab world? Well, you know, it's a kind of complicated process, but I can assure you it's very ad hoc and very random, and there's no kind of, there's no kind of system involved in this at all. It's many people acting in a marketplace with many different factors weighing in. Sometimes people come to me with a book and I look at it and say, oh, I like it, but then we have to find a publisher who's willing to pay for it. Or sometimes publishers come to me and they, and they, they offer a book to me, and I get many offers. I get several, at least, I get many offers and some I turn down, some I accept, but it's a very random process. And I don't think I don't pretend I'm not, you know, I don't see it as my mission to, you know, choose the very best and then presented to the world. I choose things that I like. They may not be maybe they're good, maybe they're bad, but you know who knows. I do it on a personal matter of personal choice. So, I have a related question here, which is, who is it that decides which Arabic novels get translated into English, how do the books get chosen. Is it new or the translator thinking, oh, I like this book or I, I think this would really add to the body of translated literature that's out there. So publishers who think, oh, this book would sell very well, or an agent who sends it to them. Let's contact the translator and get it. It's a bit, it's a bit of everything. It's a very haphazard, random process. There are a few agents now, which is fairly new, who do samples and they promote samples around publishers. And often actually translators going to publishers and saying, I have a sample of this book and here's what the books about would you like to pay me to translate it. And that is probably the thing. And then a book, books that win prizes of course have a big advantage because, you know, they, you can, that gives them a certain credibility to the publisher because the publishers. They have no idea what these books are about. They can't read them and they have a very limited access to material about them. So it's a bit of everything, but it's often translators going to publishers and saying, we like this book. Right. So the next question is who are the most innovative writers writing in Arabic today, obviously in your view. That's the most difficult one because I don't read enough. I don't, I don't have time to read as widely as I would like. There are other people you might ask about that. I mean, I hesitate to name names, because I just, you know, there may be people out there that are really innovative and I should know about them. I don't, I don't know. And perhaps you should ask Marcia, she's, she's good on that kind of, she has a much wider vision of what's going on or the people at Bani Pal too. They have a much wider picture of the whole scene. So I'm hesitant to answer that question that way. Okay. I've got a question here from Fabio Chiani and I hope I'm not mispronouncing the name. And he says for a monumental novel in which different Baghdadi dialects and poshah adventurously exists. We could turn to the late Jewish Iraqi writers Tamir Naqash's Nozala al-Khatt al-Shaytan. And on Blaseem, he says, isn't it correct that the great majority of his works are actually in poshah? Can you comment on this? Yes, yes, definitely. Hassan writes in poshah, yeah, pretty much, yeah. Though he has written, he recently wrote a novella in Colloquial, which I have translated and it might come out soon. And I very much enjoyed the earlier because I didn't actually, I had to do quite a lot of research and ask lots of questions. But you also write about Samir Naqash, Samir Naqash, if I remember rightly, and I have seen some of his works, he used a lot of Iraqi colloquial. And that's a very precious resource for our knowledge of Iraqi colloquial in the 1940s or whatever. And it's a very special, in fact, all those Iraqi Jewish writers are very unusual and wrote in very innovative ways for that time. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think the latest issue of Bani Pal is doing something on Iraqi Jewish writers. Next question is from Jamal or Jamil Talib. And he says, do you think that some translations into English make some novels poorly written in Arabic look good? Yeah, that's a difficult one now. I think it's possible that sometimes there's a problem in their literary world with editing. There aren't many professional well paid dedicated editors who are willing to sit down with a book and work really hard on it deeply in, you know, say, let's remove this chapter rewrite this, put this first change the structure here and do that. That just doesn't happen very much. And it's many a matter of money. It's not because I'm willing to do it. It's just that the financial asset and financial environment doesn't allow for that kind of expense. So yes, it's possible that a book that should have been edited, substantially in Arabic might turn up in English translation and be edited and actually turn out to be superior. That might happen. Yes, I would accept that. But mainly because the it hasn't been properly edited in the original version. Right. And there's a question here from Christina or Cpova. And she says, how do you evaluate the literary qualities of a new novel in Arabic? What is crucial for you, the plot or the language? Well, obviously plot, yes. Plot matters. A character's matter, the delineation of character, the development of character through the novel as a whole. The language, yes, but I mean, not in the sense of whether it's properly written or not, but whether the description resonates with me, whether it creates an image in my mind that makes sense. Yeah, so it's a mixture of all kinds of things. There's a question here from Saib Eigner. I hope I haven't mispronounced the surname. And he says, why aren't there translated volumes of the early known and great Arab poets of the 99th to 12th century available for public retail and consumption. That's a good question. Well, the library of Arabic literature is actually doing a lot of good work on this. This is, I think it's a New York University venture. They are working on quite a few early poets. You'll be surprised how much there is around, but the Mutanabi, for example, has not been much translated, because it is extremely difficult. It's really, really hard to translate this literature effectively. You have to make some really important choices at an early stage, whether you're going to do a kind of academic, you know, study course type translation, which basically explains to the reader what it means. You do a kind of loose imaginative, you know, a translation that conveys the general impression without sticking to plastic. It's very difficult to make it really very readable to English language readers. So that's why, but people are working on it. I know that there's somebody's doing the complete works of Mutanabi, I believe, which has never been done before. And people have done, for example, he's, I think the library of literature done quite a lot of his poetry, I think so. So it's coming along. And you will find some Victorian translations of these poets. All the model, the model of Carter being done again. They've all been done many times, but they are being done again. And I think the new versions are even better than the old, they're getting better and better all the time. So it's, it's, it takes time, but it's coming along. Right. I have an interesting question here from Sophia was a little. And she says returning to the laughter example I wonder whether the contrast with English is perfectly fair. Don't we learn the distinctions between some of the words for laughter. Etcetera to written text. How often do we use them or hear them use in ordinary conversation. Every day conversation has an impoverished vocabulary compared with written text. The limited range of vocabulary is what strikes one about the dialect, which there is a result of the having been sealed off from written expression. I guess her and Amiya are defective in this sense. But it seems that Amiya would have to go through a process of enrichment and growth to be usable for literary composition. I think I just agree quite strongly of this software. I pretty much think that the distinction between shortling and chuckling is something one learns from lived experience and not from books. I don't see how one could learn it from a book, because the distinction depends very much on the sound of the laughter. And I'm not sure I accept that Amiya's need enrichment. Because they can, when necessary, they can tap into the first high resources at any time that it's all available to them. Just like English can tap into Latin and Greek at will, I mean you can make up a new Latin, a new word in English based on some Latin or Greek word at any moment and get away with it. Similarly, any Amiya used in literature could tap into Fussar at will and borrow it if necessary. But I suspect you'll find that in fact colloquial forms of Arabic have quite a few words for forms of laughter, which probably don't appear in Fussar at all. All right, and this question is from Yassin Hayat-Selfe. And he says, I wondered if you could talk about domestication. It doesn't an approach which seeks to entirely domesticate a text, presumed that the target language is completely stable and free from foreignness, translating into English makes Arabic literature potentially accessible to people all over the world. Is it okay if a reader finds something exotic, quote unquote, why should art make you feel completely at home? Yeah, yeah. Perhaps I should elaborate slightly on that particular point. When I say domestication, I certainly don't mean complete domestication. But if I come across a simile in an Arabic text, that may be a cliche in Arabic, but it may make sense to translate it by the equivalent cliche in English. I think it's, I'm quite happy sometimes if the simile makes sense in English, just to borrow it as it is and not to domesticate it. So there is a certain exoticization. I mean, if you say, for example, he's as thin as a palm tree or something, instead of saying thin as a rake and fine, no problem. So, but I'm really talking about the kind of, you know, the nuts and bolts of the language, you know, so you can, so it can be read and read smoothly. That's what I, that's the domestication I'm talking about. And there are extreme forms of domestication where you kind of change the names and you move the, you move the action to, you know, a London suburb rather than Cairo. I'm not talking about that kind of domestication. No, not at all. A question from Ibrahim Badshah. I read your statement on the website saying you changed something in Saudi Al-Sanusi's text, because the editor suggested it. Does that take away the agency of the author entirely from the translation. And indeed, there is a big gap between the source and target text in terms of performance stylistic. Do you think the editing culture in English is affecting the translation practice? Well, I go back to this case because I've discussed it in detail on a number of occasions. And I've kind of apologized to it. It wasn't something I thought very deeply about at the time. And it was very minor, to be honest. I mean, it didn't affect the substance of the book at all. It was a time fraction. Maybe I regret it actually. Well, there were two separate issues here. But one of them was in the original book. Saud needed an explanation, a kind of cover story to explain how this book appeared in Arabic when it was written. It was narrated by a young Filipino boy or young man who didn't write Arabic. Right? So he needed to have a kind of cover an explanation for this. So he invented a translator who translated it. But in the English version, this didn't seem to matter very much because no English reader would be asking the same question about how this text that appeared in English because we were just saying it was a translation survey. So the only issue really was the question about the football match at the end of the book. And I just got it in my head that publishers don't like footnotes, so the footnote didn't care. That's all it was. It was a very minor thing. And I don't think anyone should make a big deal out of it. Okay. This question is from Nashwa Nasser al-Din. How closely do you work with the authors of the books you translate? I think I've heard you say in the past that you tend to ask a lot of questions. Is that still the case? I ask you a lot of questions. I usually do it by email, but not always. Sometimes I do it in voice conversation. I do it by email because I think it's actually more, it's often better to give them time to think about the answer. And sometimes get a better response than if you do it on the phone instantly. But yeah, I think I don't know what my record is, but my record was about like 300 questions or something on a book. I mean, there's a lot of big, big document, possibly too many, but I'm nervous. I mean, I don't like to make guesses. I check things. I actually try to draw out the author on what, how they imagine the scene, something a bit extra too. Because sometimes when you're translating, you need to know a few extra things which aren't in the text, but which are in the head of the author. And sometimes I, but that often authors are a bit reluctant to give a lot of time to that kind of question for obvious reasons. Right. And Mark Allen has a very interesting question. What's your assessment of the effective state censorship on literary production and importantly the market for books? Surprisingly, it's very ineffective. I'm not sure it has a great deal of effect really. It's a hard one that because it's quite hard to quantify, but probably less than you imagine from outside. I wouldn't hear stories of books being banned here and banned there, but the truth is they all slipped through one way or another. Because a lot of literature in the Arab world is read by PDS, which are downloaded from the internet, unfortunately, because it undermines the author's income, but it's very, very common. And all these books are available in that form if you look around for them. In fact, sometimes because in London it's quite hard to find Arabic, but sometimes I do it myself, which I apologize for doing it, but it's so much easier. Right. This is my question. Could the fact that some of the literature that gets translated is actually produced by Arab writers in exile, could that be playing a role in circumventing censorship? Yeah, certainly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, with the case of the Iraqis, it's extraordinary. Very few of them are now of the big Iraqi contemporary writers are living in Iraq today. There's Mohsin Ramri in Ali Bader in Brussels, Mohsin in Madrid. There's Hassan in Finland. There's others. There's Gurgis in Oslo and I mean there's a whole bunch of them all over the place. There are very few. I'm sorry, there are a few others as well in Baghdad, but yeah, and those people of course, because they're in Europe, they don't feel censorship at all. They're free to do what they want. Right. Well, thank you very, very much Jonathan for a very interesting lecture and for answering all those provoking questions. Welcome to the end of our event. Thanks very much for attending it. Thanks to the British Library for hosting it. And thanks to Omar Saith Wabash and his family for sponsoring it. Please take a bit of time to fill out the survey that will appear once I finish talking. For more events from the British Library, please visit the What's On pages on their website. You can keep in touch with Bani Pal by visiting the website of both the Bani Pal Trust and Bani Pal magazine. Good night. Good night. Thank you.