“I hold no objections against adaptation as a form of translation, nor am I interested in guarding definitions of translation but am rather interested in examining how such co-opting of literary translation speaks of a larger attitude toward non-Western literatures,” she writes. Kareem sees translation as a nexus point, particularly between western and non-Western literature, and the moral dynamics of that nexus govern its aesthetics. She condemns translations that forsake the aesthetic contours or intentions of the source text and impose a style that is more comfortable to a western sensibility or pleasing to western ears: “Smith’s renditions were decorated by an aesthetic contrary to [Yi] Lei’s work, a musicality specific to Smith, a drastic difference in style and tone,” Kareem writes of My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree, a selection of Lei’s poems translated by Smith. “What poets who are not translators fail to understand is that it is exactly ‘style, tone, and content’ that makes or breaks a translator.” Domestication is not just an aesthetic problem for Kareem, it is also “a form of textual violence” and an extension of colonial violence, an idea shared by theorists such as Lawrence Venuti.
Through her criticism, we get a sense of the kinds of virtues she believes translations from non-Western languages should embody. They should carry the voice of the source text rather than “make us lyrical, oblique, politically-correct, or appealing.” They should be in service to the author and the source culture rather than “the tenure dossier,” and they should be contextual rather than depict “a singular voice against the savage masses.” Most of all, they shouldn’t make mistakes, especially the kind of basic errors the monolingual adapterati are susceptible to. The translator’s fluency in the source language is necessary but not sufficient. After all, she wonders, “why is a native speaker assumed to be a translator?”
*
I am exactly the kind of western reader that Kareem is leery of. Though I have a bachelor’s degree in “Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies” (a proper noun whose all-encompassing Orientalism would, I’m sure, make her head spin), I’m not at all well read in contemporary Arab literature. Having read only in translation and without deep contextual knowledge of Arab culture, I read—present and past tense—at the mercy of the gate-keeping translators.
But when Kareem publishes translations, such as her 2021 selection of Ra’ad Abdulqadir’s poetry, titled in English Except for This Unseen Thread, I am also, in a sense, exactly her target audience: ignorant enough to be reading in English, but interested enough to seek out a $20 Ugly Duckling Presse paperback of a poet whose English-language footprint is small enough to lack a Wikipedia page.
In her translator’s note, Kareem is careful to position the poet in an Iraqi and Arab literary and political context. She writes about the kind of escapist poetry that came out of the censorship and sheer anguish that Iraqi writers faced in the late twentieth century. “Some even took to writing classic verse, perfect for recitals at the presidential palace,” Kareem explains in the note. Abdulqadir, she specifies, resists this, giving new life to the Iraqi prose poem. In a piece for Literary Hub, Kareem describes Abdulqadir as writing to extricate himself from “a poetry scene that had lost its soul to the battlefield, to the chaos of abstraction, and to the abyss of escapism.”
She places Abdulqadir as a crucial figure in the development of writing about sanctions in particular, a central reality of Iraq in the 1990s. Of one collection titled Let the Songbird Wander, she writes, “[it] has a special place in the hearts of Iraqis who lived through the sanctions.” As Russia’s war in Ukraine has resurfaced the discourse in the West on the ethics of collective punishment, it might be tempting to seek a global literature of sanctions. But this translator’s note, published before the most recent invasion of Ukraine, resists exactly that kind of reading. Consistent with her essay, Kareem would not let Except for This Unseen Thread be reduced to a mere example of poetry of the Global South, nor be diluted to accommodate a universalist reading neatly packaged for western consumption.
At times, Kareem’s choices, presumably with the editors at Ugly Duckling, create a deliberately untidy, even disorienting reading experience. The bilingual edition has an English front cover and an Arabic front cover, and can be read both ways. The Arabic text is separated from the English by only a single blank page. But there is no way for a non-Arabic reader to identify any correspondence between the source and target languages. Arabic-language pages are numbered in Eastern Arabic numerals illegible to western readers. There are no footnotes or translated titles that might encourage comparisons between the original and translation, nor is there a table of contents or index. One wonders whether the text is most truly meant for bilingual readers.
While these decisions seem intentional and in line with Kareem’s stated literary convictions, other choices seem less deliberate. In the translator’s note, she writes: “Ra’ad explained: ‘I realized that I am not a poem-poet, I am more a book-poet, with each book, I have a set of practices, forms, and visionary intentions.’” It seems odd, then, that Kareem chose to sample poems from many collections without clearly noting which poems came from which collections (the number of section breaks in the translation does not equal the number of books Abdulqadir has published). Likewise, she repeatedly refers to Abdulqadir’s skill and innovation as a prose poet, only to pick a sampling of poems that are lineated, both in the Arabic and the English. Is free verse considered prose poetry in the Iraqi context? If so, Kareem doesn’t alert us to that idea.
I enjoyed the wry, lyrical poems and the striking images in this collection, in turn paradoxical (“the butterflies flutter alone / in their thousands”), haunting (“the pigs screamed in the marshes of our soul”), and darkly funny (“their poor are rich with pride / like extinct birds”). Still, I sometimes felt like I was missing much of what Kareem describes in her note, for example, that “Ra’ad, obsessed with the Arabic canon, especially Sufi literature, with a PhD in Islamic philosophy, embraced the anti-genre nature of his collections, placing them in the tradition of Farid ud-Din Attar, Avicenna, Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, Leo Africanus, and Usama ibn Munqidh.” With only a casual familiarity with Arabic poetry, almost all of these affinities, if they appear in the text, are lost on me.
What I do notice are numerous references to western writers and artists. The translator’s note mentions that critics compare Abdulqadir to Yanis Ritsos and Alejandro Amenábar. The opening poem, “Window”—which indicts both the “windows on the world” theory of translation (advocated for by scholars like David Damrosch) and the western gaze more generally (“They can do anything / . . . / indifferent to what’s happening, / silent, staring, content”)—also brings to mind the permissive, sexually liberated “high windows” of the eponymous Phillip Larkin poem in its last lines: “they enjoy this loneliness / of high windows,”. Meanwhile, “Godot’s Head” borrows the titular character from Beckett’s play, and Abdulqadir’s “Falcon with Sun Overhead” invokes Yeats’s “The Second Coming.”
Presumably there are rich allusions to Arab sources throughout, but like Abdulqadir’s sun, they are over my head. In her essay, Kareem asks, “Where is the intertextuality of the text? Why is a text reduced to the singular, instead of becoming a tunnel, a little river to lead into the ocean that is Arabic poetry?” When I read her translation, I hoped to be led to the ocean of Arabic poetry, but the sparseness of the paratextual handrails made that difficult.
Perhaps that’s the point. Rather than satiate, Kareem inspires readers to go forth and explore for themselves. She lives her philosophy defiantly, framing her translation in a way that denies western readers a feeling of mastery over the text. In doing so she resists the worst kinds of misreading or tokenization at the hands of western audiences. But this moral vision comes at the cost of intelligibility. Unglossed references to local place-names and Mesopotamian gods ground us in the setting, but readers who don’t have a background in the Arabic canon won’t understand it without additional, extratextual work. Kareem’s essay and her translation are worth reading, especially as a pair, because together they ask the most pressing questions in translation: who is translation ultimately for? And is a transparent translation—one with every contextual clue conveniently explained—possible, desirable, or ethical?
