A highlight of the current Summer 2022 issue, Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” stages an erudite inquiry into the classical Arabic underpinnings of Jorge Luis Borges’s famous “Averroës’s Search,” traversing the proximities and distances that triangulate between writers, readers, and texts across disparate literary traditions. As a reflection on the innumerable angles from which one might approach—with varying degrees of blindness and insight—the mirror of the text, Kilito’s essay is nothing if not a testament to the fundamental questions of translation that mediate each of our relationships to language and culture. Ghazouane Arslane’s English translation interposes yet another layer in this mise en abyme, deftly capturing the labyrinthine turns of Kilito’s thought. I had the honor of corresponding with Ghazouane over email; our conversation ranged over vast swathes of terrain, from the difficulties of rendering the polysemy of Arabic literature, the ethics and politics of the “original copy,” the hospitality involved in any act of translation, to more specific (but no less essential) lingerings over the evocative scene of prayer in Borges’s story alongside Kilito’s singular talent for discerning “the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange.”
Alex Tan (AT): So much of Kilito’s piece revolves around the specific positionality of the reader. I thought we could start there, with how you exist in language. You speak, in a recent essay, of how English eludes the contested politics of language connected to Algeria’s postcolonial anxieties. While a Ph.D. student in Britain, you grasped English as “a way out of everything inherited.” In contrast, Arabic became something you had to “[translate] yourself back into,” a language that you inhabited as “both host and guest.” How do your differing relationships to these two languages inflect the way you approach translation and, more specifically, your decision to translate this essay of Kilito’s?
Ghazouane Arslane (GA): English, I must say, has furnished me with a space of expression and self-articulation that is deeply personal and, at the same time, inevitably political. If it somehow escapes the complex politics of language in postcolonial Algeria, it is nevertheless lurking in the background. I am referring here to the rivalry between English and French as imperial languages in the last two or three centuries, a rivalry that saw English triumph for reasons everyone is familiar with. But for me, English meant going beyond the linguistic world of Algeria—a window to another world, beyond Algeria, but also a window through which I can look back into the world that Algeria has always represented for me, into myself, and, above all, into the languages that formed me.
It was thanks to Kilito, in part, that I became even more conscious and fascinated by language, by languages, by what they do to you. To speak more than one language is to turn in multiple and often opposite directions, enabling one to be a translator in the manner of Musa ibn Sayyar al-Uswari—an interpreter of the Qur’an that al-Jahiz describes as “one of the wonders of the world,” being eloquent in both Arabic and Persian. Al-Uswari, al-Jahiz tells us, “would sit with Arabs to his right and Persians to his left. He would recite a verse from the Book of God, explain it in Arabic to the Arabs, then turn toward the Persians and explain it to them in Persian.” All of this I learnt in Kilito’s Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, my first encounter with his work. What matters here is that translation implies both bifurcation and multiplication. Bilingualism splits in two opposite directions, but enriches. To be both host and guest is better than being either—in the sense that it is more demanding, more exhausting, thus more rewarding (the pleasure, like the pain, is doubled). To wander and get lost in the labyrinth of languages—I can’t say labyrinth without thinking of Borges!—is to find oneself in the real world, whose frontiers you can only cross via translation. In this sense, therefore, I was led to translation as necessity, not choice. After reading Kilito’s essay, I told myself it must be translated. And, of course, from Arabic into English—the same crossing I had already made. Needless to say, there are considerations of visibility and readability, but the main drive is the quality of the essay—which means its translatability in Walter Benjamin’s sense. Perhaps even the multiple directions it takes you to. Kilito’s essay is a journey through Borges, Averroës, Kafka, al-Ma’arri, and others, into blindness and insight. Distances collapse. Time is insignificant. Here, indeed, is world literature. That, I must say, is what drove me to translate the essay.
AT: In your translator’s note, you explain that your discovery of “Borges and the Blind” comes after spending considerable time with Kilito’s oeuvre. How would you situate this essay in relation to Kilito’s major literary and thematic preoccupations? What significance does Kilito’s work hold for you?
GA: A major preoccupation in Kilito’s work is translation and untranslatability, bilingualism and its conditions, manifestations, and implications—particularly with regard to literature both modern and classical. What really stands out in Kilito’s work is how, in a curious and insightful manner, it engages the classical adab tradition in debates that concern us today; he reads “the ancients” by remaining faithful to them and to us at one and the same time. That is to say, without projecting the present onto the past or vice versa. And he does so in a playful, multi-directional manner that reveals what is taken for granted, that draws our attention to often unquestioned assumptions. For instance—and this is particularly pertinent to me as someone who found himself studying comparative literature—he makes us aware of the gains and perils of comparison, of the power relations that underlie comparative acts of reading. What does it mean, for instance, to study al-Ma’arri in light of Dante, Ibn Tufail’s Hay Ibn Yaqdhan (curiously translated as The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hayy Ebn Yokhdan) in light of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe? What if we did the opposite—study Dante in light of al-Ma’arri, Robinson Crusoe in light of Hay Ibn Yadhan? Is it possible to say that Dante is the al-Ma’arri of Italy? Unthinkable, one must admit. But what is admirable about Kilito is the confessional or autobiographical note that initiates these insights. Behind every habit lies an unspoken, subconscious rule, but he discerns the presence of this rule, this unacknowledged law, in himself first. There is, thus, an inviting element of wonder or perplexity—in the Socratic sense—to his work. And that has to do, I must add, with his obsessive fascination—like al-Jahiz, Cervantes, Borges, and many others—with the book as material object (the protagonist, really, of his latest novel This Story Is My Story, I Swear), with storytelling (The Arabian Nights is frequently mentioned in his work), and above all with writing and its labyrinthine causes and effects. And writing, of course, is indissociable from reading as a habit, as an attitude, as a way of seeing. All of this is explicitly or implicitly present in “Borges and the Blind.”
Besides what I’ve said so far, Kilito is an inspiration for me precisely because he calls my attention to a way of reading and of seeing that relies on, rather than dismisses, first encounters—with the book, with the other, with languages. But he doesn’t stop there. He turns those seemingly innocent impressions, those childhood encounters, into a story that discerns the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange, the human in the divine and the divine in the human. A story that connects. In “A Season in the Hammam,” for instance, published in The Clash of Images, Kilito recounts his experience of the hammam in Rabat’s old city. The hammam’s heart, its magnetic pull, is the hot basin, where nude bodies, equal in their indistinguishability and purpose, direct themselves. An underworld atmosphere, the hammam is analogous to hell. It’s a place between life and death, between the human and the divine: a ritual of resurrection. Apart from illuminating, for me, the universal in the particular and the sacred in the mundane, the story reminds me of my grandfather’s hammam in Tebessa, built in the late fifties, in which I used to do my ritual cleaning almost every week. Now the hammam, sadly, is no longer in operation.
Although my experience is less interesting than Kilito’s, reading his story made me realize that everything we have experienced is a resource—what matters is how we see it. This is, among other things, what gave me the impetus to write about my own experience of bilingualism. Let me add that Kilito is from a neighbouring country with which we share many things—after all, it’s the Maghreb—and that makes my reading of his work something special, albeit marked differences separate my generation from his.
AT: Your memories of the hammam make me think of the vignette in “Averroës’s Search” where the eponymous philosopher observes, from his window, some children “mimicking the act of praying.” In “Borges and the Blind,” Kilito parses Borges’s depiction as revealing Averroës’s imperviousness “to drama as a literary genre, as an embodied text which could also be written and read,” while drawing our attention to Borges’s parallel attempt to “distance himself” from Islamic rituals. I’m curious about how you originally read that scene and the associations it has evoked for you over time, perhaps in terms of the sacred and the mundane, or the inseparability of faith, literature, embodiment, and textuality in the Arabic adab tradition.
GA: As far as I can remember, it was difficult to imagine what was going on in Averroës’s mind when I first read Borges’s “Averroës’s Search”. But before I reflect on the scene, let’s not forget that Borges, who narrates what he calls the “process of a defeat,” expresses his doubts over the possibility of fathoming Averroës’s mental landscape towards the end of the story—something that Kilito draws attention to in his essay “Illusion” (in Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language). One cannot escape, but must confront and grapple with, the realization that without access to a foreign language, an inner aspect of its culture is likely to remain inaccessible—this was something of which Borges was acutely aware. Translation therefore is not simply a bridge from one language to another; it is an act of interpretation. And some interpretations are revealing, perhaps revelatory, by virtue of blindness. What is peculiar about Borges is that he knew, at least to some extent, that he was blind—hence the deliberate and careful distancing from Islamic rituals—but that condition was precisely what enabled him to write “Averroës’s Search” in the way he did, to approach “Islam” in the way he did. By obscuring the details, distance allows for a comprehensive view. As I say these words, I am suddenly thinking of the well-known theological argument, advocated by Averroës and other Muslim philosophers and refuted by al-Ghazali, that God, by knowing the universals, does not have to know the particulars (a detail, of course, mentioned in “Averroës’s Search”).
Re-reading that scene made me realize that what is at stake in it is not the inseparability of faith and literature, but the separation of “high” and “low”. From his balcony, Averroës “looks down.” He catches sight of children who play by mimicking the Islamic scene—not just the act—of praying (the muezzin, the minaret, the congregation). Acting is a playful thing that children, not adults, do; adults pray, children play. And these children, furthermore, speak the “vulgar” dialect of Muslim Spain. Acting is therefore something playful, vulgar, “low,” beneath wisdom, philosophy, and knowledge, beneath poetry—all of which require talent and learning. Poetry is heard, savoured, and appreciated by the learned ear, whereas acting is primarily seen as a childish activity—two divergent modes of representation. Was it possible, in this particular cultural and conceptual environment, to domesticate “tragedy” and “comedy” into something other than “panegyric” (مدح) and “satire” (هجاء) respectively, two sub-genres of Arabic poetry? Let me add that in “Averroës’s Search,” after Abul-al-Hasan al-Ash’ari recounts the anecdote of the people in Sin Kalan (Canton) who were “representing a story” in “a painted wood house,” the Qur’anic scholar Faraj was unable to see why twenty people are needed to tell a story, asserting that one speaker can easily relate any story, however complex. At this, the discussion immediately drifts towards the virtues of Arabic language and poetry, a discussion that ends by Averroës’s impressive vindication of tradition after arguing for the timelessness of the metaphor, “destiny is a blind camel,” found in the pre-Islamic poetry of Zuhair bni Abi Sulma. Is it by coincidence that the discussion here moves from “low” to “high,” from what the Arabs deemed mundane to what they deemed sacred?
AT: Kilito meditates, in “Borges and the Blind,” on the object of Borges’s address in “Averroës’s Search”: “the Western reader [. . .] with an implied or rather explicit interest in Arabists.” No less than Averroës or Borges himself, this reader is caught up in all the overlapping circuits of blindness and ignorance that Borges’s fiction implicates. In your translation practice, what assumptions generally underlie your image of the reader? Where do you stand on the foreignization vs. domestication spectrum?
GA: I don’t think I’m experienced enough, in the field of translation, to do justice to your questions here. I would say that what matters, first, is not so much the reader as the text. Of course, the nexus of writer-text-reader is inseparable, but it is the text that calls attention to itself, to its translatability, even if it somehow declares that “Thou Shalt Not Translate Me.” And to do justice to the quality of a text has nothing to do, at least on some fundamental level, with the author or the reader. To carry across a text from one language to another is not to create a copy of the original, but an original copy in the target language, such that language becomes at once the host of the copy and the guest of its originality. Abbas Kiarostami’s film Certified Copy (2010) comes to mind here; particularly interesting is the slippery space between “original” and “copy” that it teasingly renders—the possibility that “a good copy is better than the original.” One should not forget, furthermore, the genre of the text. Poetry is untranslatable—that’s almost a truism by now. And that’s certainly the case with regard to the huge and incredibly rich corpus of classical Arabic poetry, which was for centuries at the centre of Arabic literature and is still very much alive today. As a bilingual person, I often read it with a huge amount of pleasure and an inescapable touch of pain, with the pleasure that its creative and evocative power creates (to such an extent that Arabic becomes, at least for the duration of our reading, the language) and with the pain that it is “untranslatable” (the cost that Arabic pays, perhaps, for being the language). But what does its untranslatability really mean? Doesn’t it signify that translators must do their utmost to enter that zone that exists across and between languages—that ‘impossible’ zone to put it somewhat pretentiously—so as to create an original copy of the poem? That’s why I believe that the language and practice of hospitality—not of domestication or foreignization—is key to translation. Originality in any language designates a terrifying novelty, contrary to what is usually associated with the term—which is why “literature is news that stays news,” as Ezra Pound memorably said. Any creative deviation from the familiar is initially disturbing, perhaps even shocking, but that is precisely why it is also exciting. An original copy, therefore, is original in a double sense, since translation gives another creative birth to the original, a different birth by necessity, and thus invites the reader to taste that terrifying, exciting novelty in her own language. But this is, alas, more easily said than done.
AT: Since untranslatability, as you mention, is one of Kilito’s obsessions, could you share with us an example of a linguistic or stylistic challenge you had to confront while bringing “Borges and the Blind” into English? Are there aspects of the essay apparent to the Arab reader that are inevitably effaced in English? I’m thinking, just as a small instance, of the multivalent ayn (when Kilito cites Kitab al-Ayn), which is of course at one and the same time a letter of the Arabic alphabet and the word for “eye” or “source.”
GA: The polysemy of al-ayn is indeed lost on non-Arabic readers, and it has, in addition to “eye” and “source,” other meanings such as “guard,” “asset,” “explorer,” “spy,” “the same thing,” “a notable person,” “evil eye.” Besides, I think Kilito has already alluded to what the non-Arab reader will miss, namely the associations and evocations that those Arabic classics and their titles suggest. These allusions, in a way, belong to the inner life of Arabic culture. What remains untranslatable therefore is the immediacy with which the Arab reader accesses that inner life. Note that I said immediacy, meaning that that inner life is not inaccessible. At any rate, that’s always the case, in varying degrees of course, with translation.
I must also mention that verse of al-Ma’arri—how could I not?—which, as I was translating the essay, forced itself as the most arduous challenge. To know that you must translate it means that you are already on the threshold of betrayal, the fear that you might be guilty of betraying your own language. Thank God it was only one verse! The main question was how to combine semantics and syntax poetically in English. The second hemistich of the Arabic verse was particularly difficult—يخفى على البصراء و هو نهار. It ends with the word ‘daylight’ نهار (nahārū), with the rhyme being the long rū. After many considerations, I decided to go with “hidden, albeit a daylight, to the sighted,” which I thought captures the meaning while creating some kind of rhythm, the effect that the insertion of the phrase “albeit a daylight” in the middle of the hemistich produces: the momentary pauses between “hidden” and “to the sighed” combined with the realization that this is an oxymoron, the puzzlement that compels you to read the verse again. Whether I succeeded or not is not for me to tell. This is just an indication of how laboriously difficult it is to translate classical Arabic poetry into English, or any other language for that matter. I believe the obstacle of rhyme and syntax, of wordplay, of the pace and music can be addressed by making sure that a distinctive voice is produced in translation, that is, a new poem, an original copy—which I think explains the claim that only poets can translate poetry. This has to do, at the end of the day, with the major challenge of any literary translation: how to create, in the target language, that curious unity of form and content that characterizes all great works of literature. In the case of Kilito’s essay, the challenge was to render in English its stylistic composure, that critical voice which effortlessly mixes erudition with irony in a manner that is neither too serious nor too comic. Experiencing that sense of wonder in the familiar in his work, you cannot help but smile. I hope that wasn’t lost in translation.
AT: Do you have plans to translate anything else from the Maghreb or the wider Arab world? Which works of Arabic literary criticism (if any) do you think should be made more accessible to readers in the Anglophone republic of letters?
GA: Well, translating another work by Kilito is definitely part of my plans in the foreseeable future, and my ambition is to translate an entire book. Unfortunately, this is something that I am not free to do at the moment. I should point out that his book Je parle toutes les langues, mais en Arabe (2013), a brilliant work of literary criticism that touches on issues of translation and bilingualism in relation to classical and modern literature, must be made available in English. I should also mention the work of Tahar Wattar, one of Algeria’s foremost novelists in Arabic after independence. Only his novel al-Zilzāl (The Earthquake) is available in English. To translate another of his novels is therefore one of my ambitious projects. The rich and complex novels of Rachid Boudjedra, yet another key figure of Algerian and North African literature who publishes in French and Arabic, await translation too; of his oeuvre, only two titles are available in English. I’m still surprised that his Les 1001 nuits de la nostalgie (1979), a novel comparable in its imaginative magnitude and narrative complexity to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, has escaped the attention of translators—or has it perhaps frightened them? Also significant, in my view, is the literary work of the Moroccan intellectual and historian Abdallah Laroui, especially his autobiography Awrāq (published in French as Les Carnets d’Idriss) and his novels in Arabic, not to mention his ground-breaking study L’idéologie Arabe contemporaine (1967), whose unavailability in English has robbed Arabists and intellectual historians of many analytical and critical insights that are still relevant today. It goes without saying that there are many other important writers whose work must be made available to Anglophone readers, but this is what I have in mind right now.
AT: Where would be a good starting point for someone wanting to acquaint themselves with classical Arabic literature?
GA: I think that Classical Arabic Literature: A Library of Arabic Literature Anthology (New York University Press, 2013), which includes poems and prose texts carefully selected and translated by Geert Jan van Gelder, is a great starting point for those who wish to familiarize themselves with the massive world of classical Arabic literature. The NYU Press’s “Library of Arabic Literature” series is indeed the perfect place for one to begin discovering Arabic classics. The latest exciting publication in that series is the ground-breaking translation of Hariri’s Maqāmāt by Michael Cooperson, Impostures: Fifty Rogue’s Tales Translated Fifty Ways (2021).
AT: If your house were on fire, and you could only save three books, which would they be?
GA: Well, if I am to answer that question by looking at the actual collection of books I have right now, which means excluding the electronic books I read, I would say: Rasā’il Ibn Arabi (The Letters of Ibn Arabi)—a Sufi-philosopher and poet known as the Great Master, Ibn Arabi is one of the most brilliant minds of the classical period; Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet; and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
Ghazouane Arslane is an assistant professor of English at Larbi Tebessi University in Tebessa, Algeria. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Queen Mary University of London. His recent publications include an essay, “(Re)-collecting Myself in Arabic and English: Personal Reflections on Literature, Place, and Identity” (Life Writing, 2021).
Alex Tan is assistant editor for fiction at Asymptote Journal.
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