Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home is a poetic rumination that shifts through the land of the dead and of the living, between thinking and intuiting, and from the vast destructions of war to its intimate, embodied experience. In taking us to the “other” side—that of the military—in Syria’s unsparing civil war, Yazbek offers a method of understanding pain’s blind immensity, as well as the metaphysical phenomenon of life at the precipice of death. With the incredible work of translator Leri Price, whom Yazbek calls here her “voice in English”, Where the Wind Calls Home arrives to us with all the weight of contemporary tragedy, and all the light of a spiritual encounter. Here, Yazbek and Price speak to us on the recurring motifs of the text, the fluidity of the prose, and how writing can reveal to us our own secrets.
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Alex Tan (AT): Samar, in your previous novel, Planet of Clay, we follow the perspective of a mute girl from Damascus, caught in the middle of the Syrian Civil War. For Where the Wind Calls Home, why did you select a dying soldier as your protagonist?
Samar Yazbek (SY): First of all, we’re not sure if he will die—what will happen to him, and with his life. Actually, it was a challenge in my own life, because I was in exile from myself, and I had stopped writing literature. I came back with Planet of Clay, to literature, but when I decided to write this novel, I started writing it as poetry. I tried something different. It’s a very personal thing.
Ten or twelve years ago, I decided for the first time to speak about the victims who are living on the other side of the Assad regime. It was a very difficult choice for me. There’s a perception that the soldiers on the side of the regime are not victims, but the problem is that this has been a long war, and everyone is a victim. And what we’ve got to remember is that there’s a class element; we have to remember the poor. A fundamental part of literature, in my opinion, is that we learn to look at things from an alternate point of view, and to have empathy with others. Without that, it’s absolutely certain that things won’t change.
AT: The figure of the tree plays such a central role in the novel—it becomes this recurring motif, with Ali crawling towards it in the narrative present, and thinking back to all the trees that have shielded him, including the one next to the maqam. Did you have any specific personal, religious, cultural, or literary motivations in opting for the tree as the essential anchor of the text?
SY: There are lots of reasons. First, every maqam in the mountains has trees. They’re all surrounded by trees, and these trees are huge and ancient, hundreds of years old. Second, the tree acts as refuge for Ali. It represents a shelter from daily violence—from the sort of physical violence that he encounters in the village.
The most important thing is that trees are silent. Trees die standing, silently, without speaking the language of humans—and in this death they have dignity. Ali is able to communicate with the tree, together in their silences. Silence is Ali’s language, his way of resisting against the violence in his society, so he invents a new language with the trees, with the sky, with the wind. It’s like he builds a bridge between himself and all the elements of nature. Trees are part of his world.
I’m also talking about myself and my vision; I believe we need to be like a tree sometimes.
AT: I want to pick up on what you said about the language of the trees being Ali’s language in the novel. I’m also thinking of what you said earlier, that the novel began as poetry. Could you tell us how it evolved from poetry into the novel, and whether you think the novel becomes a good channel for this silence?
SY: When I started to write the poetry, I did it for me. Because I’m fully in love with my language, and I decided that, after lots of horrible books about the war and the revolution, I wanted to lean into my beautiful language. I love the world in Arabic, so I started to write it as my personal space. It was for me; I started to play with the war, to create metaphors about what it might mean to be part of nature, what it might mean to be part of the army under Bashar al-Assad.
When I wrote twenty pages, I was surprised. I said to myself, it’s not just a game, it’s about coming back to my home—my home being the Arabic language. And then I decided I had to change it, because I didn’t originally decide to write it as a novel. Really, this novel was like a scream of freedom. Like play. I wrote it in my soul, my spirit. When I finished, I called it a novel. I didn’t decide anything. I wrote in a crazy moment, in a very painful moment. I don’t have any explanation for that moment, but I can say it was one of the most beautiful moments in all my life. And after that moment, I felt like I had come back to my home, like I was in Syria—because I had come back to myself as a novelist.
AT: Leri, when I was reading Where the Wind Calls Home, I thought about the aesthetic continuities it shared with Planet of Clay, which you also translated; both adopt a childlike perspective and tone to render the abstractions of politics unfamiliar. How do you conceptualise and relate to Samar’s writerly style? What were some conscious measures you took to convey this in English?
Leri Price (LP): That’s a great question. I’ve always connected with Samar’s work on a deep personal level. I find her compassion and her dedication to beauty and humanity in the face of horror absolutely remarkable. And I find her characterisations of these protagonists very truthful and simple. For instance, Rima in Planet of Clay—when I read the book, it wasn’t a voice that was coy. A lot of grown-ups find it quite difficult to write in a child’s voice. I mean, Rima isn’t a child, that’s part of the point. She’s on the cusp.
Actually, that was one of the big differences between Rima and Ali. Ali hasn’t been sheltered in the same way that Rima was, and I feel like his withdrawal from the world was a much more conscious act. In terms of how to convey that with Rima, I was conscious about trying to be more childlike, whereas with Ali, it was more a question of being very uncomplicated. I was very aware that he interacted with the world around him in a straightforward manner. A lot of the beauty of Samar’s language, her playing with language, all these things, they came from Ali’s reflections rather than how Ali thought. One of my favourite passages is when he wakes up in the morning and sees the dew frozen on the fruits; they become those beautiful spheres. I think the word “celestial” might be in there, and I don’t think Ali would necessarily think the word “celestial”. But he has these very profound, embodied reactions; that’s where the beauty of the language comes in. I was conscious of trying to separate Ali’s thoughts when he was consciously thinking: Where is my boot? Am I whole? And then these silences, this beauty, these reactions—how do you convey these reactions? That was quite challenging, but it was something I really enjoyed.
AT: You did it wonderfully; any reader of the novel would be struck by its sensory vividness. What was one scene you found especially challenging to render in English, and one scene that was fulfilling for you to translate?
LP: On a very practical basis, one of the things that I found quite challenging was the geographical terms, like cliff and slope and bluff and gully and ravine. I remember we had a very long conversation, Samar. We were on the phone for about three hours. And Samar sent me lots of pictures which I saved in the folder with the translation. Whenever I needed to translate something very specific and vivid, I had those images to hand. Maybe geographers reading this would be like, That’s not a cliff! But hopefully it conveys a sense of the scene to lay readers.
In terms of things that were fulfilling, I think of those beautiful poetic passages when Ali is responding to the world. The image of the sun and moon alternating, the colours in the sky, those pictures on the dew. Those were the passages that flowed out from my fingers. I read them and let them sit in my mind, and anyone who’s read them in Arabic will know they’re poetry. Those were the most fun and rewarding.
AT: Along the lines of those beautiful poetic passages, something else that stood out to me was the length of those moments; they often run on for several pages uninterrupted. Between Arabic and the English translation, how did you work with the rhythms of the prose?
LP: This is probably one of the books with the least changes between the English and the Arabic, in terms of structuring and paragraphs. Arabic literature, you know, is structured slightly differently, but I think the only changes were that we added a few paragraph breaks. I did want those moments to stay long. There was that lovely parallel between these moments, when you respond to and think about moments of beauty, and it feels like it lasts forever. And you have all these complex feelings going on at the same time. And yet it is all in a very short moment. I felt like you needed to have that density of experience as a reader.
AT: I noticed the presence of many untranslated Arabic words in your translation, like “maqam” and “arzal”. When did you decide to leave words untranslated and what were your motivations?
LP: I have so many thoughts about this. I’m a big believer in leaving in words from other languages—and not just in translated literature. When I read literature written in English, from the perspective of other countries and other cultures, I come across words and phrases, food that isn’t translated. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth is my go-to. There’s loads of stuff in there that I did not understand. But if I want to know exactly what the salwar kameez looks like, I could go look it up. If there was a food that denotes a certain social class, I might not understand it on the first or second reading, but I might get it from context, and I could Google it. This is part of reading adventurously; it’s part of broadening our horizons as humans. It’s something I feel quite strongly about in Arabic as well, particularly because there’s this perception that Arabic is a scary language from a troubled part of the world. And I feel like the sounds and the textures and the rhythms… You need to convey them in English, because they’re beautiful. I like to trust my readers. Obviously, you need to strike a balance between lazy translation where you don’t reflect and you just leave an Arabic word in because you can’t be bothered thinking about an English equivalent. But at the same time, the words like “maqam” and “arzal”, how can you convey that in English? You can’t say “shrine”, that’s not really correct. And the same with “arzal”, I could say “treehouse”. It sounds like a toy in English, a child’s game. If you say “hut in a tree” that doesn’t really convey very much more. I think you get a better sense of what they are just from reading the book.
AT: Samar, I was moved by how you constructed the secondary characters in Where the Wind Calls Home, especially Humayrouna, the red-haired woman who claims to be a hundred years old, and who has memories of Syria’s revolutionary and anticolonial history. I was wondering if you could share your inspirations when you crafted her as a character.
SY: She’s from my mind. It’s difficult to say, but in all my books, I have someone like her. Rima in Planet of Clay is like Humayrouna. We think she is an old woman, but she isn’t one. I think she comes from my soul, from what I want to say about the area, about women in the war, about the religion of this human community. Always, I repeat the same thing: she comes from our imagination, our crazy moment. In the Alawite religion, the women are not allowed to bear its secrets, but in my novel, I did the total opposite. I give the woman everything, because in reality, women are not allowed to know all these secrets about religion and history. Through her, I’m talking about an entire history of humanity who were here before Hafez and Bashar al-Assad’s system, across all the demographic and social changes in the Alawite community. Humayrouna is part of me. When I finished the novel, I said: Oh, it’s you. Something in you.
LP: I agree with that. I can see the parallels, Samar. Humayrouna’s refusal to bow, I think, is very much a part of you.
AT: You talked about giving women access to secrets and history in the novel. That reminded me of Ali’s mother Nahla, whose relationship to Ali shifts over the text. You give her so much dimension as a character. One line devastated me, at the end of Chapter 12: “He realised that the curse of mothers was not merely their love, but the ropes with which their love binds its object.” I’m intrigued by the framing of maternal love as a “curse”, here. Is there something about motherhood that especially fascinates you when you write literary fiction?
SY: I need to say that after the revolution and the war in Syria, because I was a journalist, I met lots of women and mothers in the world, women with and against Bashar, with and against the revolution. I changed a lot after I finished my last book, Nineteen Women, about the experiences of women in the revolution, the women who survived jail, rape, massacres, lots of horrible things. I think I started to build something new in my writing. I’ve been feminist all my life, but after the war, I started to prioritise the women and the mothers—especially the mothers. I try to stay away from my other identity as an activist, but really, deeply, my identities mix. In all my books, there is one mother, one girl, one woman; it comes from my life as a mother also. It comes from the history of mothers in this mountain, and what happened to them.
AT: To what extent did you both collaborate on the English translation? How did that shape the creative process of translation for you, Leri?
LP: We did collaborate! Samar was so patient with me on so many phone calls. What I normally do is try and get a fairly complete draft together, and it’ll be the third or fourth draft when I consult with the writers, because I need to be clear in my mind what I’m asking. Sometimes we have a general talk about a character or a scene, and often it will be specific phrases or vocabulary. Interestingly, we normally talk in French, don’t we, Samar? Samar’s French is considerably better than mine, but because it’s a second language for both of us, we have to be very direct. When you’re discussing complex ideas or dynamics, it can be helpful. I think just this morning, Samar, I texted you in a mixture of English and Arabic and French. It’s really fun, we have all these resources to draw on.
SY: When I speak Arabic with you, I feel like I’m adopting a strange persona; I speak word by word. But it’s so interesting to work with Leri because I think she doesn’t have an English head. My books have been translated into twenty-three languages, and I work a lot with many translators. All the time, I have to explain the meaning of our culture and the Arab world, but I don’t have any problem with Leri. I feel comfortable with her all the time; there is something very special about her. She has lots of questions about small details; she tries to understand, she repeats and repeats, she writes and she writes. So I feel safe with her. She’s my voice in English.
AT: If you’re at liberty to share, what projects are next for you?
SY: I am writing a new novel, yes.
LP: Exciting! I’ve been taking a break from translation, working on a PhD at the moment. In a month’s time there’s another book coming out with World Editions, Selamlik by Khaled Alesmael; we’ve been working on that right up to the wire. There are a few irons in the fire, but nothing concrete at the moment.
Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer, novelist, and journalist. She was born in Jableh in 1970 and studied literature before beginning her career as a journalist and a scriptwriter for Syrian television and film. Her novel Planet of Clay, also published by World Editions, was a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Warwick Women in Translation Prize. Her accounts of the Syrian conflict include A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution and The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria. Yazbek’s work has been translated into multiple languages and has been recognized with numerous awards—notably, the French Best Foreign Book Award and the PEN-Oxfam Novib, PEN Tucholsky, and PEN Pinter awards. She was recently selected to be part of the International Writers Program with the Royal Society of Literature.
Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. She has twice been a Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, in 2021 for her translations of Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, and in 2019 for Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work. Her translation of Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work also won the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
Alex Tan is Assistant Managing Editor at Asymptote.
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