As thousands of Palestinians protest against Israel’s newly announced annexation plans for significant parts of the West Bank and Jordan Valley, Adania Shibli’s haunting, persistent novel, Minor Detail, seems especially potent as our May Book Club Selection. The text is written in two parts: the first is set in 1949 and details a horrifying act of violence committed by Israeli soldiers, while the second takes place during present day, in which another young woman discovers the crime and makes a place for it within her own life. As Palestinians continue to struggle in turmoil, Shibli’s masterful language transposes the past into now, in a profound recognition of violence and its intricate legacies. In the following interview, Daniel Persia speaks to the translator of Minor Detail, Elisabeth Jaquette, about how she has rendered this powerful narrative for English-language readers.
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Daniel Persia (DP): Time seems crucial to our understanding of Minor Detail, both in terms of its historical context and the passing of events. Can you talk a little bit about time in translation—how it’s expressed in the Arabic language, and whether this presents any challenges when thinking about English tenses or ways to recreate stillness and movement?
Elisabeth Jaquette (EJ): Time often poses challenges for me as a translator working from Arabic to English, but oddly enough this book didn’t pose particular conundrums in that regard. With other books, I’ve found that English publishing has a greater expectation that readers be able to place events on a precise timeline in relation to one another, whereas that’s somehow less crucial in the Arabic book. In Minor Detail, I felt that the reader’s sense of time was constructed less through events or tense, and more through repetition, pacing, and tone. In Part I in particular, there’s a somewhat paradoxical contrast between dates being directly stated: “9 August 1949 . . .Before noon, 10 August 1949,” and so on, and the way that the officer’s repetitive, enumerated actions make one day bleed into the next, creating stillness even though the passing dates are marked. In Part 2, I also felt that tone and voice, and especially narrative digression, were central to the reader’s sense of movement.
DP: The scene in which Israeli soldiers capture and hose down the young Arab woman is, I think, one of the novel’s most haunting. What was it like to translate this kind of trauma? Does a scene like this demand more of you as a translator—not only technical skill, perhaps, but something like emotional resilience?
EJ: In the face of such traumatic scenes, should we understand readers as bearing witness, or as implicated onlookers? Translators, like writers of course, are more intricately involved: a translator recreates the scene word-by-word in English, actively crafting it. The scene where the soldiers hose down the girl, and her subsequent rape, were certainly the most raw for me. There is tension between the emotional trauma of the actions and the matter-of-fact way in which they is narrated, and I consciously worked to maintain that impassivity at the level of language, following the Arabic’s choice of neutral words, even though the emotional impact of these scenes is high. In some ways I felt that the distanced style of narration amplifies the horror, because the girl is all the more isolated in what she endures.
DP: There’s an underlying layer of social and political commentary in the novel. Do you find that this commentary operates any differently in English than it might in Arabic? Do you believe that translation can serve as a site of resistance?
EJ: In the novel, social and political commentary operate at the level of events, as well as at the level of language: the polished language of the first part, in contrast with the scattered language of the second. What does that tell us about each protagonist’s place in the world, and what power each does or does not have? I do not think this commentary acts differently in English versus Arabic, but I imagine that it is received quite differently. This is more a question of readership: Arabic readers and English readers inevitably bring different sets of background knowledge, preconceptions, and context to the work. Translation can serve as a site of resistance, certainly. But it can also serve as a site of colonization. I don’t believe resistance is intrinsic to translation.
DP: Can you give us an inside look at collaborating with Adania Shibli? What kind of contact did you have before, during, and after the translation process?
EJ: Working on the translation with Adania was a very intensive process. Before I began the project we discussed the novel and her priorities over Skype, and as I completed the translation she sent thorough comments on several drafts, working quite closely with the English version up through final edits. If there is one person who should be commended for their work on the collaboration, it’s Tamara Sampey-Jawad, Associate Publisher at Fitzcarraldo Editions and the primary English editor, who did an extraordinary job of navigating us through multiple drafts and iterations.
DP: Is there something you love about Minor Detail in particular, or something you’ve learned in the process of translating it?
EJ: Somewhat fittingly, translating Minor Detail has honed my attention to detail in prose. Through the process I’ve become a more careful observer of how a book does what it does. With Minor Detail in particular, the echoes between the two parts of the text—a dog barking, a spider, the smell of petrol, a shiver—details with a kind of architecture linking the two parts, will stay with me.
Elisabeth Jaquette‘s translations from the Arabic include Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous, and The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz, among others. Her work has been nominated for the TA First Translation Prize and Best Translated Book Award, and supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, and several English PEN Translates Awards. She is also Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), and was a judge for the 2019 National Book Award in Translated Literature.
Daniel Persia has divided his time between Boston and Brazil, serving as Regional Leader for the US-Brazil Fulbright Commission and Editor-at-Large for Asymptote. His most recent translation, Writings, by Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, was published in April 2019 for the re-opening of the Chillida-Leku museum in Hernani, Gipuzkoa, Spain. Working primarily from Spanish and Portuguese, his research explores collaborative and inclusive frameworks for translating Afro-Brazilian/Black Brazilian literature. He will begin his PhD in Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University in Fall 2020.
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