In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.
For this final instalment, Margaret Litvin is moved by the living mind behind the words; Priyamvada Ramkumar renders a vivid polyphony of suffering and survival; and co-translators Noor Habib and Zara Khadeeja Majoka work together on poems that both gather and transcend meaning.
Margaret Litvin on Khalil Alrez:
At first it was the rhythm of his sentences: polished and wry, leisurely but not ornamented, like no Arabic prose style I had seen. Next it was the Russianisms: what were all these references to Chekhov, Turgenev, and Bondarchuk doing in contemporary Damascus, as if tailor-made for my research on the literary legacies of Arab-Soviet ties? Finally, it was the personality of Syrian novelist Khalil Alrez himself, glimpsed through every gleaming line. Who else could write such a lovable and quirky novel while escaping from bombed-out Damascus suburbs through Turkey and Greece, eventually completing it in a refugee shelter in Brussels? Who else, well aware of Russia’s role in the war, would set that novel in a fictional zoo run by a Russian former journalist named Victor Ivanitch, and furnish it with a wall newspaper, two wolves, three eagles, a hyena, an Afghan hound, and her friend the poodle Moustache? Khalil and I spoke over Zoom, and for a while I told myself I was just asking questions, not preparing to translate the book. But who was I kidding? The Russian Quarter had captivated me; I needed to share it.
Keeping the Syrian civil war in the background for most of the novel, The Russian Quarter reads nothing like a news dispatch. The action stays close to the unnamed narrator and his Russian-speaking girlfriend Nonna, who live in a rooftop room inside the zoo, next to rebel-held Ghouta. The book’s moral center is a giraffe. Time plays Proustian games, uncoiling spirals of memory. The virtuosic opening paragraph sets up the tension between the narrator’s mounting anxiety (his girlfriend is late in a war zone) and his cool descriptive eye:
On the roof of the zoo in the Russian Quarter, my 14-inch television, balanced on its table near the giraffe’s snout, was showing an archival soccer match between Spain and Uruguay. The rumble of nearby mortar fire had not stopped since early morning; my tea had gone cold waiting for the apple fritters baked by Denis Petrovitch, the clarinet teacher at the Higher Institute of Music, as I sprawled next to the giraffe watching tiny black-and-white goals filmed in Madrid fifty years ago. The artillery was shelling neighboring Ghouta from the orchards of the Russian Quarter. But my ears were trained on the long, still-empty staircase behind the couch on which I lay, expecting it to fill with the sound of Nonna’s elegant footsteps at any moment. She had gone to the cultural center in downtown Damascus to visit her dad. The full moon shone on me, and the screen’s silver light reflected brightly in the giraffe’s wide black eyes and flowed over her thick-fuzzed lips, which nearly touched the long-vanished players, the long-vanished spectators, and the long-vanished grass of the soccer pitch.
The deliberate prose knits a self-contained magical realist world, but Alrez also makes a point of exposing that imaginary ecosystem to the blunt force of real-world violence. When the war floods in, it is like a crashing wave swamping a tidepool—whose colorful, delicate creatures the reader has unwittingly grown to love.
The same qualities that make The Russian Quarter so charming—its otherworldliness and translingualism, its exacting rhythm—also make it fun and strangely natural for me to translate. Born in 1956 in Raqqa, Alrez studied in Aleppo and then moved to the Soviet Union, intending to study theatre. He studied and worked in Leningrad and Moscow from 1984 to 1993, then returned to Syria when Russia’s economy collapsed. He has published ten novels; the latest, set in 1990s Moscow around a production of Othello, is titled Spotted with Strawberries. He happens to write in Arabic, but he belongs to world literature; his closest literary kin are not Hanna Mina or Muhammad al-Maghut but people like Chekhov (whom he has translated into Arabic), Andrey Kurkov, Jose Saramago, and Italo Calvino. In a recent interview he rejected the premises of my questions about identity, stating instead that he is “a hybrid person. . . the child of what I have read and watched and heard and experienced.”
When I first read The Russian Quarter, many lines spontaneously jumped into English, and the translingualism is a particular joy. A small example: the Afghan hound’s name is Raisa Petrovna; not realizing it was a Russian name and patronymic, a previous translator who published an excerpt of the novel gave the dog’s name as “President Petrovna,” because “Raisa” is the feminine form of “president” in Arabic. But her name is just Raisa—as familiar as Raisa Gorbachev. Whereas my 2019 translation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice foreignized the Russian terms because they were new to the novel’s Arab characters, here my strategy is to render the Russian just as it feels to the Russian Quarter’s cosmopolitan and uniquely tolerant denizens.
Tolerance is fragile, and Russia’s role in the novel is double-edged. While incorporating Russian culture and some luminous Russian characters, The Russian Quarter also highlights Russia’s role as chief sponsor of Syria’s murderous Bashar al-Asad regime. The heartbreaking conclusion (which I won’t spoil) features a Turgenev reference but also a Russian-made T-90 tank—the same model used in Russia’s earlier wars in Chechnya and Donbass—rolling through downtown Damascus.
Vladimir Putin’s brutalization of Syria foreshadowed and enabled the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As I began translating the novel in spring 2022, history’s wheel ground through another macabre turn: now Syrian conscripts were being paid or forced to travel to Ukraine to fight on Russia’s behalf. Unexpectedly, working on the translation became a welcome break from the headlines. The Russian Quarter is an exercise in writing about a war’s effects while maintaining the artistic autonomy that war, like dictatorship, works so hard to take away. “I don’t want to write about the ambulances, the sirens, the bloody images on the news, the shelling that broke my windows more than once,” Alrez told me. “Some writers wait for such events and jump to write about them. My challenge is, how do I build a wall between myself and the war?” I believe this artistic problem, and Alrez’s glorious solution, will resonate with English-language readers too.
Priyamvada Ramkumar on Jeyamohan:
Set against the backdrop of the Great Famine of 1876-1878 in India, Jeyamohan’s White Elephant is a landmark novel that builds on what is conjectured to be the earliest labour uprising in the country—one that has seemingly fallen through the crevices of history.
Interestingly, White Elephant is told from the perspective of a foreigner (arguably the first Tamil novel to do so), a bold device the author has employed to subvert factious political views and create a balanced narrative, in keeping with the mould of a classicist. It is through the eyes of Capt. Aiden Byrne, an Irishman, who chances upon the flogging of two Dalit workers employed in an ice factory, that we piece together the opposing forces at play in a society amidst unprecedented crisis. From this perch, we see a polyphony of perspectives as the author threads together one new voice in every alternative chapter of the novel’s fourteen: a Dalit doctor and activist, a German missionary, a Scottish lieutenant, an Anglo Indian sex worker, and many more. The multivariance of this text is to the point that translating White Elephant feels like an exercise in unearthing the original from a translation, for Jeyamohan has rendered in Tamil a world that in part operated in English. (Consider for example, his naturalisation of the English phrase dropping like flies; only, he uses “eesal” in Tamil—a winged termite, not a fly, but a common sight in the region.)
The challenge of rendering these characters in distinct, authentic voices aside, I have to walk the tightrope of ensuring the language is neither anachronistic to its setting nor archaic to the contemporary ear. (Innocuous words like “factory” trip me up when I learn that back in the day a factory signified a mercantile office.) Still, what excites me about translating White Elephant is its surreal, imaginative prose. The scenes in the novel are composed like vivid paintings, and the chilling coldness of the circumstances jumps right off the page—key aspects that guide me as I aspire to strike the right timbre in translation. (“Aiden’s gaze was still frozen on the ice block. The edges had thawed and melted, making it appear like a bevelled square. A square elephant. A white elephant. It shone radiant, as though the look in its eyes had become its very form.”)
Above all, like all great literature, the novel ultimately leads us back to ourselves. The human body is not fragile. Gandhi undertook a 21-day fast and survived. The mental and physical fortitude that evolution has embedded in us necessitates weeks of unbroken starvation for life to be extinguished. Yet, millions died during the Great Famine. How could human hearts ossify to this degree? Why was our conscience numb to the suffering of others? This is the fundamental spiritual question the novel raises. In dissecting the anatomy of the grave injustice embodied in the treatment of the subaltern during the famine, White Elephant lays bare the anatomy of all injustices.
Noor Habib and Zara Khadeeja Majoka on Miraji:
Our first serendipitous encounters with Miraji (who is often excised from the canon of modern Urdu poetry on account of his unruly body, which became a cipher for his verse) left us confused but entranced. Noor knew Miraji had come to her life to stay when she first heard a recitation of his powerful, haunting poem “Samandar kā bulāva” (The Call of the Sea) over a decade ago; Khadeeja ran into him several years later through the doyen of Urdu translation, Fran Pritchett, while herself inhabiting an unruly body and wandering through New York City.
Miraji felt like a friend, and translation both a creative and therapeutic communion. As a prolific translator himself, Miraji rendered masterworks of world literature into Urdu. Yet today, his own neglected but brilliant work remains largely elusive to readers beyond South Asia. Taking cue from Miraji’s own peculiarly hamdardāna (empathetic) approach to translation, we were inspired to think more expansively and creatively about our translational practice.
We were friends before we became co–translators, and it helped to have each other when we experienced the joys and occasional pains of translation. Creating this three-way dialogue ensured that neither of us felt lonely or lost in Miraji’s world. The early years saw us attempting foolishly to “know” and translate the poem faithfully via what its words meant, with the precision of a scalpel. However, the more we delved into the oftentimes labyrinthine structures of the poems, we realized that the meaning lay someplace else—beyond, perhaps, language itself. We attempted instead to recreate the atmospheric qualities of the poem; ecstatic, haunting, playful, and so on.
Miraji’s poetry is often a meta-poetic rumination on a naqsh (which can be variously translated as image, print, plan, portrait). Whenever we confront an unsettling image, we try to preserve its dense, embedded ambiguity. For example, he writes:
Gathering thousands of images, the hem of the expansive sky
speaks in whispers to the black night“Nāmeḥram” [Outsider, 12-13]
that strange image of an edifice made of a sea of nerves
“Unchā makān” [Tall Building, 44]
Poetry in Urdu is a sonic and rhythmic event, set to meter and conventionally recited in a gathering of poets and listeners; in Miraji’s work, the arrangement of words produce novel textures, rhythms, and sounds. As we read the poems, we listen for the poem’s internal music emerging from its inconsistent meter, a cornerstone of āzād shāyarī.
Given the vastness of Miraji’s oeuvre and the maddening diversity found in it, it only strikes us as sane to let every poem guide us into how it needs to be translated, to rely not on formulaic logic but the magical leaping flame that brings to life static words on a page, that defamiliarizes, that conveys an essence that transcends meaning of words themselves.
Read the first part of the series with Mark Tardi, Caroline Froh, and Richard Prins.
Read the second part of the series with Stine An, Stoyan Tchaprazov, and Joaquín Gavilano.
Noor Habib is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research centers around key modernist poets and writers in Urdu and Persian, among them Miraji, whose poetry she is co-translating with Zara Khadeeja Majoka. Previously, she taught for the program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at LUMS, Pakistan.
Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University, where she also teaches in the MFA program in Literary Translation. Her translation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice was longlisted for the 2020 EBRD Literature Prize, and her translation of Mamduh Adwan’s play Hamlet Wakes Up Late was staged at Cornell University in 2017.
Zara Khadeeja Majoka is a translator, wanderer, wonderer, and a PhD Candidate at Columbia University where she works on antinomian Sufis struck by maddening divine love as living people as well as celebrated poetic ideals in Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi poetry. Her co-translations of Miraji’s poetry have appeared in The Paris Review, Waxwing, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and her work has has received support from PEN America, The Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Priyamvada Ramkumar is a literary translator working between Tamil and English. She was awarded the 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for White Elephant (a translation of B.Jeyamohan’s novel Vellai Yaanai), the first Tamil work to be chosen for the grant. Her debut book-length translation, Stories of the True, was selected into the inaugural 2021 South Asia Speaks mentorship programme, where she was mentored by Arunava Sinha. The book was published by Juggernaut Books in 2022. Priyamvada was also selected to be part of the 2022 American Literary Translation Association (ALTA) mentorship program, where she worked with award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid. Along with fellow translator Suchitra Ramachandram, she co-founded Mozhi, an initiative that aims to bring together literatures from various Indian languages and provide a platform for critical discourse.
Artwork by Wang Ning
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