For the month of September, our Book Club selection Diaa Jubaili’s No Windmills in Basra, a visionary collection of short fiction that works from Iraq’s expansive folktale tradition to create vivid, surprising portrayals of the country’s complex present. In precise, yet fantastic prose, Jubaili jumps rope with the tight limits of short story to range from humour to darkness, from imagination to reality, from violence to tenderness. In the following interview, Laurel Taylor speaks to the translator of No Windmills in Basra, Chip Rossetti, on formalism, intertextuality, and the use of symbolism in Jubaili’s work.
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Laurel Taylor (LT): You’ve mentioned that Jubaili’s work was the first flash fiction you had read in Arabic, and also that the genre is still very new in Arabic. To what extent are you thinking about formalism as you translate something that is a known genre in English but perhaps less so in Arabic?
Chip Rossetti (CR): It’s interesting, as the short story’s both a very old and a very new phenomenon in Arabic. The earliest form of prose narrative in Arabic is the khabar, which is a very short sort of text. One example of its earliest use is the hadith, accounts of things the Prophet Muhammad once said or did, and a khabar could be a paragraph long, or a few sentences. Khabar were always preceded by a citation of its oral sources, such as “I heard this account from someone, who heard it from somebody else who heard it from somebody else.” So there’s a chain of transmission, and that’s what scholars always point to as the very core, the oldest examples of prose texts in Arabic. Of course, that’s fourteen hundred years ago. That’s a far cry from modern short stories.
There are, as I think I mentioned in the introduction to No Windmills in Basra, some other practitioners of flash fiction in Arabic—notably the Syrian author Zakariya Tamer who is, I think, in his nineties now. He’s also done very short stories, but the contemporary boom in flash fiction started making its way into Arabic much more recently than in English. The challenge, as I understand it—and I’ve tried my hand at writing English-language flash fiction—is the intensity required of the writer. The challenge for a translator of flash fiction is to mirror that same intensity in the translation. Obviously, every word counted for Jubaili when he wrote it in the original, so I’ve tried to make sure I’m keeping that emotional punch in a way that inevitably brings you to each story’s end: an ending that comes sooner than you might expect, but is still somehow satisfying.
LT: Flash fiction can very easily feel trite when done poorly; I’m curious what devices you noticed Jubaili using to keep things fresh and how those devices affected your own translation work. You mention, for example, in your introduction the role puns play, and they are of course notoriously tricky.
CR: Puns are fun and in some cases, you get very lucky and the English works out in a way that compensates or tries to compensate for what the original was doing. But other times, it doesn’t. Broadly speaking, the way these stories play out is very dark and grim, but then other times they can be whimsical and amusing. Other stories present a strange blend of darkness and whimsy. When you’re reading through the collection for the first time you never know which kind of story you’re going to get.
LT: In translation, there’s a tendency to unify the voice of the author to make it feel like it all came from the same person. Did you find yourself having to fight that impulse as you were translating?
CR: On the level of style, Jubaili does keep a fairly even keel; for one thing, there’s not a lot of slang. But it’s the content of each text that keeps them from seeming repetitive. In terms of his style or approach, it does seem very straightforward and—I don’t want to say neutral, but throughout, it’s clear that Jubaili’s sense of himself as a writer is shaped by his deep immersion in other literary traditions—his references to Latin American authors, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Amado.
My dissertation was about another writer from Basra, Muhammad Khudayyir, who is now an elder statesman of Iraqi literature. He, too, is very “local,” and his fiction is very much focused on his home city of Basra. Famously he never left it during the Iran-Iraq War, during the Gulf War, or during the American Gulf War of 2003. During all the years of violence, he stayed rooted in his home, but at the same time his sense of himself as an author is very global. He freely draws on references to other literary traditions and languages–from Latin America and Europe, the Persian poet Rumi, and Indian texts and authors like Rabindranath Tagore. Khudayyir clearly sees himself as part of this worldwide republic of letters, all within the compass of a single city. I get something similar from Jubaili in that he’s facing the world but is still very rooted in this one particular city that’s been at the crossroads of trade and civilizations over the centuries.
LT: I’m glad you bring up that intertextuality, because this book is deeply intertextual. I’m curious how much research you found yourself having to do to complete the translation. Did you find yourself having to pull out your Virginia Woolf or your Majnun Layla or your Don Quixote?
CR: I was digging through Virginia Woolf and accounts of her suicide, and I have to admit, I had never read any Jorge Amado. I realized, “Jubaili is citing this Brazilian author quite a bit. I really should take a look and see what these novels are.” Of course the trick is, how do you let this research inform your translation without turning it into an academic text that nobody wants to read? That’s particularly true for things like Jubaili’s two stories that reference Majnun Layla, this mythical or semi-mythical poet and his who have both have become a trope in multiple literary traditions. It’s not as well known to English readers. But the point of the two stories really rests on the fact that you have to be familiar with Layla.
The other example that comes to mind is “Betrayal,” which references the prophet Joseph, known as Yusuf in the Qur’an. In the Qur’an, Joseph is described as being so handsome that his Egyptian master’s wife, Zulaykha (“Potiphar’s wife” in the Biblical account), wants him. He’s so handsome that Zulaykha’s female guests, who are cutting open fruits, accidentally cut their fingers because they’re so distracted by his beauty. That account wouldn’t really resonate, I suspect, for non-Muslim readers. In fact, I realized I was not picking up on Jubaili’s allusion to Yusuf in the Qur’an. Fortunately this is the beauty of working with living authors. When you’re stuck, it’s great to be able to email them! You can get this resolved. Translating makes you a better reader, and in my case, translating these stories certainly widened my horizons.
LT: Did you have a back and forth with Jubaili, or did you essentially do the translation and then reach out?
CR: Translation is somewhat different for stories, because they’re all self-contained. If it’s a novel, and there’s something really not making sense twenty pages in, it’s easier to get it sorted early on. In this case, though, I think I sent him about three or four longish emails as I translated. In some cases, he had a deliberate ambiguity in the Arabic, which I had to try to replicate in English.
Diaa Jubaili is a delight to work with. He’s written a piece for the Guardian on the pollution levels in Basra choking the Shatt al-Arab waterway, so he’s very much concerned with his part of the world, but with a global perspective. His most recent novel is on southern Iraq’s large Afro-Iraqi population. They are descendants of Africans who’d been enslaved some centuries ago, and they make up a distinct minority, particularly in Iraq’s south. In recent years, post-Saddam Hussein, there’s been a local civil rights movement to advocate for the rights of Afro-Iraqis. He’s also written about Iraq’s broad array of communities, both religious and ethnic, which has been quite interesting to read.
LT: Basra is a port city where people are coming and going frequently. It’s a center of trade and perhaps has a larger sense of connection than places that are landlocked or further down a river, and I had noticed that salt was a recurring motif. I was curious about what kind of symbology salt holds in the Arabic speaking world and what particular role it might be playing in the collection.
CR: Yes, it’s right on the tip of the Gulf, into which flows the Shatt al-Arab, the river formed at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. It is a very fertile region, famous for its greenery and its palm trees. There’s irrigated agriculture along the river. But there is, in Jubaili’s text, a reference to a salty, brackish area called the Saltworks, which was part of the al-Faw Peninsula. It’s referred to in the story “The Taste of Death,” when the dead soldiers come to life again, rising from underground, because the “Saltworks” was a site of terrible battles from the Iran-Iraq War in ’86 and ’87. It is a major cultural memory, a name that resonates with people in the region.
I don’t think there’s a particular importance to salt in Arabic culture and Iraq other than as something that makes your food taste good and is also as bad for growing things. But it certainly is something in it that Jubaili finds interesting as a symbol. There’s the story, “The Saltworks,” with the young man whose skin sheds salt, and who ends up dissolving on the battlefield. The war itself is a kind of salt works, just as in English we would say a meat grinder—one that ruins lives, ruins the environment, and ruins the soil itself.
LT: Both you and Jubaili have talked about how tight these texts have to be, almost like poetry. To get to the essence of the thing, you are trimming away, or trying to approach them in a way you might not approach a long narrative; I’m curious about how the editorial process continues that endeavor and how that may or may not affect your work.
CR: Time is any translator’s friend. When you translate and put the work aside, and then come back to it fresh, you instantly see things that you missed the first time. Something that once seemed perfectly normal now seems terribly clunky, so taking time to revisit the translation was helpful.
You compared it to poetry, but I wonder if a better analogy for flash fiction might be jokes. A joke has to set itself up and has a very specific one-two-three rhythm to it, even if it’s a long joke. You’re bringing the reader or the listener along to a certain point that you want to hit, the punch line. It felt to me that I always had to keep sight of the fact that each translation needed to be leading readers directly to that line.
LT: I wonder then if it’s a question of musicality or orality. If flash fiction is like a joke, then perhaps thinking about it in terms of storytelling is the means by which you keep someone’s attention.
CR: Right. Stories can be long and winding yet captivate the listener’s attention, as with Shehrezade’s tales. You won’t even notice where the time has gone, because you’ve been so rapt by the storyteller’s powers. But flash fiction is more like someone grabbing you by the lapels and then sending you on your way. I think for me that was one of the appeals of these stories—they hit that jarring but also somehow completely appropriate note. As in ”The Ribbon,” where four mothers go to the ribbon store, and it turns out one of them is looking to buy a black ribbon for her dead daughter. There’s an undercurrent of shock that stays with you after you finish reading it.
LT: While we’re thinking about specific stories, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about “Traduttore, Traditore.” I was curious about how you might have felt about that particular fiction.
CR: The Arabic title is literally “The betraying translator,” and it just seemed too obvious to me not to go with the Italian expression for the title. The story is about someone who has written thirty terrible novels. A reviewer tells him, “You’re such a bad writer, you should submit your novel to a worst novel award in Europe.” So he goes ahead and has a professional translator—this ink-stained wretch in the basement of a translation company—translate it, presumably to English. Then he sends it off, and he receives a note back from the contest saying, “Sorry, we don’t accept masterpieces,” and he falls dead. So there is a sick, dark humor to it. To be honest, I thought it was funny. I probably should have paid a bit more attention to what the author was saying about translators! I guess it offers a very flattering image of a translator who takes something terrible and turns it into a masterpiece, and perhaps I should be flattered—we should all be so lucky that our authors think of us that way.
What resonates with me from many of the stories is the idea of the past returning, a past that doesn’t go away and which shows up unexpectedly, like the frog man who’s been underwater since the Iran-Iraq War and who thinks the war is still on. Jubaili’s themes echo those of Muhammad Khudayyir, who is also very interested in the idea of Basra as a kind of palimpsest. The city is made up of layers of the past that are buried, but which can come to the surface again. Even when the past has been deliberately erased by the powers that be—by Saddam Hussein, let’s say—nevertheless, there is a past that is unquenchable, that still returns. In Jubaili’s stories, it’s a way to say, “Look, we’re still here. You can’t entirely erase Basra or what we Iraqis have been through. We’re still here.”
Chip Rossetti has a Ph.D. in modern Arabic literature from the University of Pennsylvania, and wrote his dissertation on the contemporary Iraqi writer Muhammad Khudayyir. His published translations include the novel Beirut, Beirut by Sonallah Ibrahim; the graphic novel Metro: A Story of Cairo by Magdy El Shafee; and Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik. His translations have also appeared in Asymptote, The White Review, Banipal, and Words Without Borders. He has worked in book publishing for over twenty years, and is currently the Editorial Director for the Library of Arabic Literature at New York University Press.
Laurel Taylor is a translator, writer, and scholar currently working on her Ph.D. in Japanese and comparative literature through a Fulbright at Waseda University. Her writing and translations have appeared in Mentor & Muse, The Offing, The Asia Literary Review, and elsewhere.
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