We were driving along the Sheikh Zayed Road from Abu Dhabi to Dubai, a hundred and fifty kilometres of desert back then unmarked by a single building or feature from one city limit to the next. It was the mid-1990s, and my father, an architect, had just relocated the family to the United Arab Emirates, where we joined the tribe of impermanent aliens that constitute over eighty-five percent of the country’s population and workforce. At the top of this pyramid: the Emaratis themselves, former Bedouins who shuffled back and forth between town houses and their farms in distant oases in their 4x4s, safely ensconced behind blackened glass. The couple of decades since the oil crisis in 1973 had seen the establishment of one of the world’s most lavish welfare states, whereby Emaratis were being gradually etherized with “sit-down money”—an expensive version of what has also befallen Australia’s Aborigines, among others—meaning that if your grandfather had once lived in a tent and dined on dates, bread, and salted fish, attuning his life to the rhythm of the sea and the sands, you would instead have gone to Yale on a scholarship and found a managerial post at some state-owned corporation waiting for you on your return; you might never go to the office, but that wouldn’t get in the way of your salary, your house, your satellite television. It all happened in the space of a single generation.
It was either our second or third weekend excursion to Dubai, but this one was special. My father had promised me a rare sight: a Swedish camel. They were blonde and had blue eyes, but you couldn’t inspect their irises up close, as they were even grumpier than your average camel and would probably tear away a finger or two. My father’s warning left a vivid impression. I spent the two-hour trip with my nose glued to the window as my father pointed out three or four of the beasts, barely visible in the blurry distance. “Are they really blonde?”—“Yes!”—“And blue-eyed?”—“Yes!”—“Why did they leave Sweden?”—“Because it was cold!”
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It felt utterly liberating to believe in my father’s fiction. I enjoyed how the two pictures overlapped and interfaced: that a camel was Swedish made it no less of a camel, and it even enriched the imaginary bestiary by amplifying the notion of what a camel could be if unmoored from its habitual context. I had just started school and my classmates were even more startling hybrids than I was: there was a half-Filipino, half-Pakistani girl in front of me in class, and a half-Zambian, half-English boy behind me. Regardless of how gullible I was, in that light, a Swedish camel made perfect sense. There was no dominant pattern: only layers, each as valid as the next.
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Italian was my mother tongue. I subsequently acquired French, English, and a modest smattering of Arabic, which has since fallen into rusty disuse. I suspect aptitude had little to do with it; I simply absorbed them at the age Cicero referred to as optimal, from six to nine.
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Perhaps all too fittingly, considering I grew up in a former British colony, I developed an early fascination—nay, obsession—with novels and stories about diplomats, like Lawrence Durrell’s Esprit de Corps. I suppose it was a desire for adventure. I had never really enjoyed stories about European travellers in spotless whites and Cawnpore helmets standing with their hands on their hips while the natives paddled them down the river in a pirogue. Diplomats, at least on a surface reading, were different creatures: erudite, linen-suited, world-weary alcoholics embedded in a predictable game of musical chairs. These fictional diplomats always had a cutting observation to make and were masters of the ironical understatement. They had an air of sophistication I couldn’t see anywhere else, unsurprising considering the United Arab Emirates is a giant shopping mall. Life for those diplomats seemed slow and elegant, like an Antonioni film.
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I spent three years at university in a state of torpidity. Everything was upside down: honours instead of honour, regurgitation instead of rumination, exegesis instead of appreciation. At the time, Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal provided much needed assistance and forthrightness; MacNeice, an indefatigable translator who produced versions of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Goethe’s Faust, made an eloquent case for not allowing oneself to be trammelled:
To competition and graft,
Exploited in subservience but not allegianceTo an utterly lost and daft
System that gives a few at fancy pricesTheir fancy lives
While ninety-nine in the hundred who never attend the banquetMust wash the grease of ages off the knives.
As for lecturers, adrift in a sea of supine students, they are slowly desiccating into lazy gerund-grinders—I take that back. If they really were gerund-grinders, perhaps academic papers wouldn’t be so badly written.
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After I moved to London, I took up translating for two reasons: the first was the realization that academia no longer offered any opportunities for real scholarship; the second was that I would need an activity to keep me close to literature in the long, drawn-out gaps between one poem and the next, which the older poets I knew impressed on me would get longer and longer. Translation happily presented itself as a wonderfully uncomplicated proposition: I could be a diplomat without overly dirtying my hands with politics; I could also make a meagre, but liveable wage. Breyten Breytenbach once said that civic poets owe it to the community to be thorns in the flesh; by the same coin, a translator should prick the bubble of geographically-induced complacency.
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Hans Magnus Enzensberger once referred to translators as “noble coolies” and while I appreciate his humour and admit this statement comes closest to summing up the public’s perception of translators as anonymous valets (always seen, never heard), I would much rather be an ignoble coolie. After all, it’s hard to forget those lines from Basil Bunting’s “What the Chairman Told Tom”:
What do you do?
Nasty little words, nasty long words, it’s unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.They’re Reds, addicts, all delinquents.
What you write is rot.
A good translator, like a good writer, should be ready to endure just about any hardship and give short shrift to anything too “noble”—or in other words, anything too grand or stately, overly rooted in hereditary political systems and conventional moral schemes.
On the other hand, being “ignoble” implies wading in what is disparagingly referred to as “common,” “humble,” “vile,” “villainous.” In short, human. The first two writers I translated were the Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi and the Algerian novelist Rashid Boudjedra. The former spent eight years in prison for “crimes of opinion,” the latter was forced into exile several times for criticizing both the FLN government and its Islamist enemies. The less “noble,” the better.
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So much begins and ends with sound. I recently read Achmat Dangor’s Strange Pilgrimages, his new collection of short stories, which opens with “The Poppie of 42nd Street,” where Josh, the son of an anti-Apartheid activist who died “years before freedom was attained” reminisces about the time “his sense of being South African was renewed”:
After 1994, he included the street where the consulate was located in his daily wanderings, often stopping to watch people leave the building and listen to them talking. He absorbed the familiar, flattened vowels, listened intently whenever Afrikaans was spoken, trying to locate his ouma in it, her voice, her warmth. After 1994, he increasingly heard discussions in isiZulu or isiSotho, which he listened to with uncomprehending appreciation, just as passionate opera fans would listen to a beautiful Italian aria without knowing the meaning of the words.
It reminded me how much sound—or rather, the “authenticity” of an accent—often plays in our appreciation of someone’s linguistic skills. Throughout my time in the Emirates, it never failed to surprise me how headteachers and recruiters would pay top dollar for a badly educated Englishman almost unable to string a sentence together, while other English-language instructors—say Indian or Nigerian—would find their “non-native”—read “different,” therefore unsaleable—accents a hindrance to their advancement, despite their flawless grasp of the language.
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It has become commonplace to talk about the bad rep translators get. History is strewn with famous names being unkind to translation and its practitioners: Cervantes thought reading a novel in translation was like trying to appreciate a tapestry by examining it from the back; William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English, exemplified how much of an activist a translator can be and was burned at the stake for his efforts; more recently, Eugenio Montale called translators traitors. When Ian Hamilton asked Philip Larkin if he read much foreign poetry, the supercilious librarian answered with an undignified, “Foreign poetry? No!” Damned if you mirror the original: E. M. Forster once complained that Scott Moncrieff’s translation “faithfully reproduced” all of the difficulties in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu; and damned if you don’t: A little over a decade ago, J. M. Coetzee famously admonished Michael Hofmann for improving Joseph Roth and simultaneously accused him of being too British. Although Coetzee’s indictment didn’t really hold water, it sufficiently annoyed Hofmann for him to reply:
Translation is a subject that empties rooms probably faster than poetry, which is supposed to have that effect. I am sorry to raise it, but the imputation that I go around ‘making Roth better’ I regard as a slur, and reject. Mr. Coetzee is wonderfully mistaken if he thinks a novel can be compared to an enormous number, and he can stand there and say, “There’s an 8—what have you done with it?” […] Words are not like numbers, they are unstable and porous. […] Last and least, I’m not British, I’m German.
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Does nationality, or so-called “native mastery” in the language a translator works in, matter? I very much enjoyed what David Bellos, Georges Perec’s English translator and biographer, had to say about it in his discourse on translation, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?:
It doesn’t really help to call it “native” and it helps even less to insist that you can translate only into a “mother” tongue. The paths by which speakers come to feel at home in a language are far too varied for the range of their abilities to be forced into merely two slots (“native” and “nonnative”), however broad or flexible the definitions of those slots may be.
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André Naffis-Sahely’s poetry was most recently featured in New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015) and The Best British Poetry 2014. His translations from the French and the Italian include Balzac’s The Physiology of the Employee and Émile Zola’s Money. He has also translated several works by North African authors, among whom Rashid Boudjedra, Abdellatif Laâbi, Mohamed Nedali and Tahar Ben Jelloun. His translation of Abdellatif Laâbi’s Selected Poems was selected for a Writers in Translation award by English PEN in April 2015. The first volume of his translation of Alessandro Spina’s Libyan multi-generational saga, The Confines of the Shadow, will be published in June 2015.
Featured image of Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai