Featured in the Summer 2022 issue, “The Ayah of the Throne,” by Habib Tengour, is a lyrical story that explores the French colonial power in Algeria toward the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence. The story centers around how colonial forces shaped the narrator’s experience of education, language, religion, and even how and when one can tell stories. With this vibrant and original account of his childhood, Tengour reclaims the power of storytelling and relays a life-altering moment with humor and compassion.
In his English translation, Bryan Flavin deftly captures Tengour’s voice and introduces Anglophone speakers to an important piece of writing from one of the foremost voices in contemporary Francophone Maghrebi literature. I had the opportunity to speak with Flavin over email about his experience translating “The Ayah of the Throne.” In the following interview, we discuss the intricacies of working with multilingualism, the importance of not explicating in translation, and the complex and interwoven histories of French and Arabic.
Rose Bialer (RB): I always like asking translators how they first began translating. I am even more curious in your case since you work in both French and Arabic.
Bryan Flavin (BF): I’ve always loved the precision and structure in linguistics and language studies, as well as the exploration and plurality of language in literature and creating writing. During my undergraduate education, I studied linguistics and French literature with a specialization in Arabic language and culture and ended up discovering literary translation as a sort of intersection for all my interests. I was lucky enough to take classes on French translation and global literacy toward the end of my studies and started with translating student writing with an undergraduate translation magazine I helped co-found. It was something I continued practicing on my own until deciding to pursue it in my graduate studies.
RB: You mention in your Translator’s Note that you had the chance to work with Habib Tengour during his Fall 2021 residency with the International Writing Program. This program sounds fascinating, and I would love to hear more about your experience, especially collaborating with Tengour in person.
BF: My translation program had the opportunity to pair with one of the residents to produce a translation of their work during workshop sessions devoted to each piece. Both the original writer and translator were present and active contributors during each workshop, and the balance (and sometimes friction, but in a generative way) between the author’s original intention and the translator’s means to produce something independent in the English was uniquely pronounced due to the workshop’s collaborative nature, which made for a great learning experience.
Working with Tengour in particular was an absolute joy. I was paired with him due to my background in French/Arabic translation and my interest in postcolonial literature. We met a couple times to go over my drafts before the workshop, and he’d always make me a cup of tea or coffee and was incredibly patient with my questions. The thing I enjoyed the most was how my questions and his answers often evolved into more stories about Tengour’s childhood—personal narratives, tangents on historical or cultural context that were implied or left unsaid in his writing. In the end, those conversations—along with just hearing him read certain sections of the story out loud—informed my translation just as much (if not more so) than my more technical questions on word choice and such.
RB: Instrumental in your experience of translating “The Ayah of the Throne ” was the work of Pierre Joris who first brought Tengour’s poetry into English with his collection Exile is My Trade. Did you find inspiration in Joris’s renderings? More generally, how do you approach translating an author who has been translated by others before?
BF: I ordered Exile is My Trade the moment I knew I’d be working with Tengour. Joris’s introductory note was really helpful for contextualizing the literary and cultural significance of Tengour’s work, and I also happily found that Joris had already translated two of the stories in Tengour’s Gens de Mosta: “Ulysses Among the Fundamentalists” and “Necrology.” I definitely found inspiration in those translations; while reading them, my approach was to see how Joris worked with Tengour’s voice and stylistics in prose and then analyze how that may influence my own translation. Because they’re a part of the same collection, it was helpful reading those translations simply to understand how the stories in Gens de Mosta progressed into and spoke to one another. For example, in “Necrology,” there’s a long section of dialogue from a single character riddled with narrative and cultural, historical, and geographic references. Joris rendered this part with such strong attention to the pacing we often find in oral storytelling—the pauses, tangents, and shifts in tone that bring a character’s voice to life. I referred to this particular section often in my translation of the grandfather’s story in “The Ayah of the Throne” as something to strive toward.
RB: In your translator’s note, you write that one of your translation strategies was inspired by Tengour and Joris’s belief that “translation cannot and must not explicate.” What do you think translation loses when it is explicated for the reader?
BF: I think two things become lost in this case, the most obvious being the author’s intention. Joris refers to this toward the end of his own translator’s note in Exile is My Trade: that a translation should follow the original’s “absence/presence structure,” that it cannot spell out what the original had “purposefully hidden.” Joris then goes on to explain the importance of audience in defining the absence/presence structure—the cultural and historical knowledge a reader brings when experiencing a text. I describe this in my translator’s note as providing stealth glosses for references that were not “purposefully” hidden in the original French but may become so in translation, and then foregoing stealth glosses when the reference embodies an “absence” for readers without an in-depth knowledge of the story’s context. I discussed these decisions with Tengour at length, and this leads to the second and equally important thing that I believe becomes lost: the reader’s ability to critically engage with the text. In reading literary translation, I think we should consider an absence not as something that inhibits access but rather as an opportunity to actively discover cultural, linguistic, or historical knowledge in context.
RB: “The Ayah of the Throne” is a story with shifting temporalities. As an adult, the narrator looks back on a moment in his life that shaped who he became—though he didn’t quite understand it fully at the time:
. . . That long penitent wait, that sensation where the being is slowly emptied of that which forms its substance—I sometimes still feel it, my body resisting, reliving that moment of total abandon where the motionless soul hangs by a thread, detached from its gravity. Far from driving a transformation or sense of uplifting ecstasy, the emptying returns, again and again, exhausting me more each time. Is it possible for a childhood memory, apparently trivial, to assume a more painful importance with age, to overwhelm and leave you completely disoriented? . . .
What was your experience of capturing the same narrator at different ages and outlooks on life?
BF: The paragraph you draw from here was by far the most difficult for me to translate! Absolutely, shifting temporalities is a major part of this piece, as well as shifting perspectives where the narrator momentarily embodies a different rhetoric for whatever purpose; an example of this that comes to mind is “fixing our warped speech,” which assumes the perspective of the French colonial worldview and their linguistic superiority. Translating these shifts involved pinpointing where and why they were happening, as well as how the text’s form, register, syntax, and tone informed one another and indicated these shifts. In the paragraph above, the ellipses before and after the paragraph indicated a tangent from the original narrative; the register and syntax became abruptly more elevated and indicated a shift away from the child narrator’s sentence structure; and this elevation led to a much more introspective tone, indicative of a shift toward reflection as opposed to narration.
RB: The legacy of colonialism is present in the story. We see the young narrator being pulled in different directions by religion (Islam vs. secularism), belief systems (superstition vs. reason), and language (Arabic vs. French). The last of these plays an important role throughout the story as the young boy grapples with when and how he should use each language. What is your relationship to translating both Arabic and French, and has that been informed by their intertwined and complex histories?
BF: The first French literature class I took was a seminar on postcolonial Algerian literature. I remember reading Assia Djebar’s La disparition de la langue française in particular, which was not only my introduction into the complex history between French and Arabic language but also one of the main reasons I decided to study Arabic in the first place. So my relationship between the two is definitely informed by their complex histories, especially because I often work with texts by Arab authors writing in French, where that colonial legacy is either directly addressed or intrinsically present.
In either case, it’s also important to understand and represent the original author’s relationship with their languages—how their languages interact with one another through multilingualism, through rejecting or reclaiming one over the other, through personal motive or within a larger literary movement. To give a specific example: I’ve been translating one French author with Lebanese-Palestinian roots who uses transliterated Levantine Arabic for certain words or phrases. However, for certain Levantine words he offers translation or contextual footnotes while leaving others to stand on their own. I had difficulty rationalizing these decisions—why footnotes were included for some words but not others—with my more academic relationship between French and Arabic. However, when I asked the author about these footnotes and the process behind them, I discovered it was a personal initiative inspired by his lived experience: to bridge the gap between his languages by offering explanation to certain words that had been decontextualized or “distorted” in popular French representations of Arabic.
RB: Tengour is very concerned with preserving orality in his writing. In “The Ayah of the Throne,” this is clear in the oral style in which it is written. Moreover, the story emphasizes the power of having a story (or prayer) within you, actively resisting the import given to those in the French literary canon, such as Molière and Anatole, who the narrator learns about in school.
BF: You’re absolutely right! I found that to particularly be the case in the grandfather’s story about the cavalryman. In “The Ayah of the Throne,” oral storytelling is a means of preserving cultural memory. In general, I think Tengour’s story really illustrates the importance of literature in all its forms and the effect it has on individuals and communities; it can be utilized to colonize language and thought, as well as to resist that import through preservation or even reclamation. Another really good example of this is a short story by French-Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga. In it, a group of Rwandan schoolchildren become enthralled with a story entitled “Titicarabi” that they read in a French textbook. Eventually, they make it their own by retelling the story with their families and community. The story spreads and evolves drastically over time as the storytellers add to it, to the point where it hardly resembles its original written form and the story’s title eventually becomes a nickname that schoolchildren use to tease one other on the playground. It’s a fantastic story that really speaks to “The Ayah of the Throne” in terms of the power of story.
RB: What do you gravitate towards when selecting a piece of literature to translate?
BF: More than anything, I always consider a text’s themes and my knowledge of them going into it. With my interests and backgrounds, I’m always drawn by work that addresses issues of language, identity, and migration, which often leads me toward first and second-generation immigrant authors in France. The linguist in me gravitates toward prose simply because I love working with sentence structure and pacing between languages, and I also enjoy the challenge of working with character voice and rhetoric, especially in dialogue. I wouldn’t consider this a dealbreaker, but I’ve actually found myself translating a lot of pieces with either young narrators or narrators reflecting on their younger selves, which definitely explains why I chose “The Ayah of the Throne” from Tengour’s collection!
RB: Lastly, are you working on anything you are excited about now?
BF: I’m currently wrapping up my translation of A Bathtub in the Desert by French author Jadd Hilal, whom I referenced above as the author working with Levantine Arabic and footnotes. It’s a short novel that follows the story of a young boy named Adel and his two imaginary friends Darwin and Tardigrade—who both happen to be giant suit-wearing insects—as they escape their town after war breaks out. It was massively fun to read and translate, with a lot of thematic and stylistic similarities to Saint-Éxupery’s The Little Prince. I hope to continue working with Hilal in the future, as well as other new or emerging writers working with similar themes in unique ways.
Bryan Flavin is a writer and literary translator from French and Arabic. He is a recent graduate of the M.F.A. in literary translation at the University of Iowa, and his writing and translations have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Waxwing, Empty Mirror, and others.
Rose Bialer is assistant interview editor for Asymptote. She holds a BA in Sociology and Spanish from Kenyon College and is currently earning a MPhil. in Comparative Literature from Trinity College Dublin. Bialer’s book reviews have appeared in publications such as Full Stop, The Kenyon Review Online, Action Books Blog, The Florida Review Online, and Rain Taxi. Follow her on Twitter here.
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