風箏

Spanning the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, political unrest in Lebanon and the civil war that began in 1975, Kite is a novel about love against a backdrop of war. Contrary to the literary style of the Lebanese novel in vogue in the 1980s, Eddé does not dwell on descriptions of violence and atrocities, preferring to devote herself to a lucid, often ironic examination of the historical issues of a complex Middle East rife with conflict. Through the novel's fragmented structure, the author strives to express in fiction the collapse that calls into question an entire way of living and thinking.

In translating Eddé, I was keenly aware of an oriental sensibility underlying the French prose. The novel's structure―stories within stories, like a set of Russian dolls―contrasts sharply with the western linear narrative tradition, and has a very different feel from a work by a writer from mainland France. Eddé's writing is multilayered and multitextured, and rich in metaphor. She writes with exquisite elegance, and the translator's challenge is to preserve her very distinctive voice.

In general, translating from French requires us to concretize a great deal, since we Anglo Saxons are less comfortable with the abstract, and that is further challenged when confronting a whole other cultural tradition. I approach Eddé's writing with the expectation that I'll be thrown out of my comfort zone and need to be open to ambiguity, abstraction, impressionistic descriptions that operate on a poetic rather than prosaic level.

The act of translation could be described as negotiating the tension between meaning and music. For each text, the translator must decide which takes precedence. In the more lyrical, descriptive passages, music often has to predominate. I am also intensely conscious of the need to avoid domesticating the text, which is another form of colonisation, while aiming for a translation that is highly readable in English.

—Ros Schwartz