At that time, Ramadan’s published translations included two works by Oulipo member Anne Garréta: Sphinx and Not One Day, which had just won her and Garréta the Albertine Prize. Earlier, she’d received a Fulbright Fellowship to study the work of poet, novelist, and filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani in Morocco. The Shutters, her translation of two of Bouanani’s most notable poetry collections, was released in 2018. To cap off a very busy year, she opened a bookstore with her then-partner Tom Roberge, in Providence, Rhode Island, an experience she also writes about extensively.
Most of all, the yearlong diary gave her an opportunity to explore various facets of the translation process from a personal angle. Ramadan writes of how, for her, translation is intrinsically linked to the body, and emotion: “We use our bodies to write, to type, to think, to read aloud, to listen, to gauge by our gut whether or not a sentence is right . . . When a sentence isn’t right, I feel it immediately in my back . . . what I bring to the table as a translator is precisely that I come at books from a place of emotion. That urge to translate a book comes from seeing what it can do for a reader emotionally, what it does to me emotionally, how it can impact the way people feel in the world.” Like Kate Briggs in This Little Art, Ramadan approaches translation as a project “undertaken by real people.”
No longer “solidly in between,” Ramadan has landed firmly on the side of “established” (she took the 2021 PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying). In July 2022, I approached Ramadan after a reading at Molasses Books in New York City, and she agreed to an interview. Between starting a full-time teaching job, moving to New York, and preparing for two of her translations to be released this fall—Panics by Barbara Molinard, and The Easy Life by Marguerite Duras—Ramadan’s day-to-day life has been incredibly busy. We found time to talk on the phone between two of her partner’s tennis matches, where she spoke courtside with buoyant excitement of these life changes and how they intersect with a move toward being more purposeful in her translation practice.
In the ensuing conversation, we discussed the multiple overlaps between archival studies and literary translation, and of translation as a project undertaken by real people—with all of the errors, coincidences, and decisions that it entails.
—Claire Mullen
To begin, I wanted to ask you about one of your most recent translations to be published, Panics. Specifically, how you found it. I read in an interview of yours with the Columbia Journal that it was a dream project for you. How did you come across the book? What drew you to it? And specifically, in terms of archives, what about Panics made you think of translation as archival research?
In terms of how I found it, I was doing research for another translation project, which ended up being Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras, which was published by Dorothy [Project], and that I co-translated with Olivia Baes. We had originally pitched just this one novella that was somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. They had asked us to find more nonfiction pieces that we could combine with it to make it into a collection. So, we were reading through these books of Duras’s called Outside and Outside II, her collected nonfiction pieces for newspapers, prefaces for other books, art writing, all these random pieces she had done that were nonfiction. Among those texts, we found her preface to a book by Barbara Molinard. It was just this absolutely wild preface to a book that was simultaneously Duras herself, and also Duras adopting the style of Barbara Molinard—she was using the small caps that Molinard uses, she was describing Molinard’s process of writing and the tortured nature of this woman, her fraught relationship to writing, and her relationship to the world.
It seemed very sad, but also very urgent. And the fact that Duras had found this woman’s work so interesting, so engaging, so worthwhile, so valuable that she had taken these fourteen stories from this woman, who usually ripped her writing to shreds, and brought them to a publisher and said, “I’m going to use my influence as Marguerite Duras to get this woman’s writing published.” That’s a good hook, right? Like, oh, my God, Duras loves this woman’s writing and thinks that this woman’s writing is so important that she physically stole these stories from her and took them to a publisher . . . I have to read these stories. So, that was the first time I found out about this book, which in English translation is Panics.
It set off this little tingle in my mind, “Okay, there’s something really special going on here.” I’m focusing on this Duras project, but then I need to get my hands on this other book and see what this is about, see what my favorite writer saw in it. So as soon as that project was done I went looking for Panics. I couldn’t find it anywhere.
I knew that it existed, but I couldn’t buy it online—it was out of print. I emailed the original publisher to ask for a PDF, but they replied that not only did they not have a PDF, they didn’t control the rights anymore. They gave me her daughter’s email address. I emailed her, but she didn’t have a PDF. I could not get this book!
Then, I went to the Providence Public Library and got it through an interlibrary loan from Princeton. It was kind of miraculous, I still can’t believe that of all the places that I was able to get it from, it was the Providence Public Library. It’s really amazing. When I got it, it was a weird, surreal moment. I describe it in my translator’s note—I can remember walking down the hill from my apartment to the public library, thinking, “I’m actually going to be holding this book. I’m actually going to read this book!”
I read the first story, and I knew instantly that it was exactly what I thought it was going to be—the tone of it, the style of it, the topics, what’s happening in the stories. It’s all of the things I love in writing. I had this intuitive sense of what the book was going to be, and knowing that it was going to be something I wanted to translate, and it was exactly that. So, it was all very exciting for me, and very strange, too.
I photocopied it, scanned it. What’s funny is that Éditions Cambourakis, the publisher behind the new edition of the book that had just came out in France, emailed me to ask, “Hey, can you send the scan you have? We don’t have the French text.” That scan was the only version that existed, so they needed it because it didn’t exist digitally otherwise.
I met Molinard’s daughter in person in Paris a few summers back. It’s a very delicate situation—it’s her mother’s book, and it’s a very intense book. It’s very revealing of the struggles her mother had in the world, with her mental health, with feelings of alienation, even with her own family. It’s sensitive. And so I think she wanted to see what I was about, and why this book was interesting to me, and make sure that it was in good hands.
In terms of how I felt translating Panics related to archival work, there is something special about finding this book—which was originally published in 1969, and went out of print shortly thereafter—and making it available again all these years later.
For me, as a translator, for that to be an element of the work, finding these texts that are no longer in the conversation or available at all, and giving them this new life, a new audience, and new opportunities to reach people in different languages, is amazing. This book is a really particular example, because not only is it available now in English, but it’s available in French again, which is the ultimate honor. That’s what you want, right? That’s the best thing you can hope for.
The day that we found out it was going to be published again in French, I could feel how happy it made the daughters. That their mother’s work would be available again, and people would be talking about it, meant something. It really meant something to them.
As translators, we can have these different roles. We can be asked by publishers to translate the new thing that just came out, and that someone is going to translate and it’s just a matter of who. Sometimes we’re asked to try out for a book, and multiple people do a sample and then one of us is chosen. The book is going to be published, and it’s just a matter of who’s going to translate it. That’s one kind of translation work. Then there’s the other kind of translation work, which is that you go out and you are actively finding projects and pitching them. These are things that may otherwise never have been translated, or not have been translated for a very long time, or not have been translated in the same way. I think that is where translators are also, in a sense, doing archival work.
According to your translator’s note in Sphinx by Anne Garréta, it seems that there was a similar archival practice behind that publication process as well. What was that like, and are there any other books you’ve translated that you feel expanded on archival work?
I would say Sphinx was very much in the same vein, where that book, it wasn’t out of print, but it had come out in 1986, and people weren’t talking about it as much anymore. It had never been translated—then it was suddenly translated into English, and Anne started publishing again in French. There was this revival, in a sense, and it made me remember why I started translating—that revival is an element or facet of the job of translation that I think is very special, and that I want to return to more going forward.
I’m looking at my shelf now and I feel that my answer is, actually, that there’s more than I would have thought. One book that I translated, A Friend of the Family by Yves Ravey, that Sublunary Editions published in June, is a funny story.
Ravey is an incredibly prolific author in France. He’s written so many books, I don’t know exactly how many, but a lot. He writes mostly noir, crime, mystery, genre. I had never heard of him, but if you go into a bookstore in Paris his books are always on the tables. He always has a new book out. It’s just, that’s not really my genre, per se, and so he wasn’t really on my radar. Then my former professor from Brown, Forrest Gander, went to a conference where he met Ravey. Forrest doesn’t really speak French, and Ravey doesn’t really speak English, but Forrest told me that he just had a really good feeling from talking to Ravey, he was interested in reading his work. Forrest had been given this one novel, which in French is Un notaire peu ordinaire. Forrest asked me, “Will you translate this? And, if you like it, will you pitch it and we’ll see what happens?” I really liked the book, it’s short, really interesting, and weird. He’s prolific and he’s contemporary, but as far as I know, this was the first of his books to be translated into English. He just hadn’t been translated, for whatever reason. I would love to do more of his work; I think he straddles the line really well between these noir crime plots that are also deeply psychologically interesting. I’d like to translate more of his work.
I also think of another book that I translated a long time ago, The Shutters by Ahmed Bouanani, which is poetry. My whole Fulbright project was based around Bouanani. I went to Morocco to study his work, to translate his work, and to help catalog his archives. He was also a very prolific writer and filmmaker who had left behind trunks and trunks, as in literal trunks of unpublished writing and drafts. There were screenplays, there were short stories, there were novels, there was a trilogy, there was poetry, his translations of other poets. So much writing, and his daughter was working on getting everything cataloged. And the other people from the Dar al-Ma’mûn Artist Residency where I was doing my Fulbright, they had been working on his archives for years, getting his name back out there, celebrating his work again, and creating this revival for him. Lara Vergnaud translated one of his novels, The Hospital, and that came out at the same time as my translation of The Shutters, both from New Directions. This author had also sort of been “forgotten,” and these books were part of his “revival” in English.
There’s also that book Desiderata by Lizzy Mercier Descloux, a chapbook that just came out, that is another example. Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press, who again scanned the original chapbook in French, found a copy of this long lost chapbook that there were rumors about on the internet, but which no one had access to. He photocopied every page, and now it exists in English. It’s another example of bringing a book out of an archive, and then giving more people access to this thing that no one had access to before.
The last one that I would say falls into this category is the Duras translations I have done. There is one coming out in December called The Easy Life, which was her second novel, and is also a co-translation by me and Olivia Baes. There is just a very small number of remaining works by Duras that no one has translated, and you would have thought that if someone was going to translate these books they would have been translated by now. Even so, maybe not. Other translators have translated a couple of her other works that have come out in the last few years. The Impudent Ones, which was one of her really early works, also came out not that long ago, translated by Kelsey Haskett, from The New Press. So there are more works that are coming out.
It begs the question: why haven’t these books been translated before? Are they not as good as her other works? I would say that they are just as good, but they’re very different and not what we think of when we think of Duras. They are asking us to think of her writing as also being other things. In The Easy Life, she’s doing a lot with shifting pronouns. There’s a girl who, after a series of family tragedies, goes to a town on the seashore to recover. When she gets there, she just sort of unravels mentally and emotionally. A lot of the unraveling happens in her hotel room at night, while she’s looking in the mirror. She’s looking at herself, and then she begins to feel alienated from herself, and she speaks from the “I” and then it switches to “You” and then it switches to “She.” She’s talking about herself in the third person. Then, she sees multiples of herself.
This is not the kind of writing we think of when we think of Duras. Really experimental, with the shifting of pronouns and perspective—that’s just not what she does in her later work. This is very different; I was drawn to it.
Then, with Me & Other Writing, there was “Summer 80” and her other nonfiction work, and “Summer 80” had never been translated. My theory is that it is due to it being this very uncategorizable hybrid—it was meant to be, and started out as, newspaper columns about current events in the summer of 1980. Then—because she’s Duras—it sort of devolves into her own stories, and her fiction. She makes up these stories based on the people she’s seeing, in the seaside town of Trouville, and she’s all over the place. One sentence might be about the Olympic Games in Moscow, then the next is maybe about a little boy on the beach. Where does this boy come from? Again, it’s this very weird, messy, but beautiful work.
Her other nonfiction pieces were supposed to be under the framework of her personal journalism. There is some of her nonfiction work that she allowed to become so personal that it bordered on fictional. There’s true crime writing in there—she writes about a court case, and she speculates about the psyche of the woman who is on trial. What is she doing? What is this form of journalism that is so subjective?
All of this to say, even though she’s Duras, and maybe those works would have been translated by someone eventually, to me, it was interesting to translate these previously untranslated works. I think it’s just as important to translate them, because they sort of conflict with what we typically think of when we think of Duras and her work.
Yes, completely different. I also want to ask you about this other way in which translation could be considered an archival practice, in that through bringing works from one language into another, translation also creates an archive of a writer’s work in that destination language. Have you thought about translating all of the works of a given author in this way, to create this sort of “archive”?
Yes. For a while I wanted to be the person who translated all of Anne Garréta’s works into English, to help make her work complete in English in that sense. She lives in the United States, she teaches English at Duke, and I think it’s important for her that her works be available here as well. I’ve done three of her books at this point, but I think now I am also interested in, sort of like Clarice Lispector, seeing other translators signing on to do Garréta’s other books.
With Ahmed Bouanani, there’s been so much effort in Morocco to get his work archived. I was really invested in helping with the archiving of his work there, and then when I left, obviously it wasn’t possible to keep working on that because all the things need to be scanned; they exist on paper in a place where I cannot be. For something of that scale to make its way into English in its entirety would be a huge feat.
With Duras, I feel I’m helping to complete an archive of her work in English. Because she is this world-renowned figure who is frequently written about, I think she deserves for her archive to be complete so that it represents all of her. I see myself as helping to complete that full picture, for her work to be complete, to represent all of her. I see myself as helping to complete that work.
Obviously, English carries with it a certain power, in terms of research, and who can use these texts in their classroom, or in their dissertation. Maybe it’s creating an entry point to a bigger archive. I may not be able to help complete each author’s archive in English, but I want to be a part of that opening here.
Thinking of an extension of this idea of creating an archive in a destination language, it seems that through your work you are often considering Francophone writers writing from outside of France, in countries such as Morocco, which has not had as much of its literature translated to English.
What do you think about the archival practice of translating from the literature of a country? Maybe it’s not exactly an archive, but through translating a work, do you consider how it contributes to an understanding by readers of English of what, for example, “Moroccan literature” is?
When it comes to something like literature from Morocco, it’s almost like you want to translate as widely as possible, and not focus on translating everything by one author, because you want there to be enough translated that you can have a more representative picture of what “Moroccan literature” is. You can break this idea that “Moroccan literature” as a term even makes sense. Can these writers even be grouped together? Yes, maybe they are all Moroccan, or writing from Morocco, or after having left Morocco, you know, whatever we want to use to tie them together. Do they share similar themes in their writing, though? Do they share similar writing styles?
The more writing you have published from these regions where there is not a lot coming out, the clearer a picture we get of just how varied it is. Rather than striving for a complete archive by one Moroccan author, I am more drawn to the idea of translating one book by this person, one book by that person . . . I’m drawn to them all for different reasons. Then, you start to get this beautiful conglomeration of different kinds of writing, and you have a better, less pigeonholed, less singular view.
I’m teaching the essay “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to my ninth graders, and that’s what it’s making me think of. You don’t want to have a single story of what Morocco is, you want to translate widely, and translate writers who are doing very different things.
There are a lot of questions I ask myself when choosing a project: Do I want to be intentional about choosing a project that is doing something really different from all the other literature that’s out there right now from a particular place? To combat the idea of a single story? Or, do I want to translate the books that really speak to me, and put everything else aside? (Thankfully, the two goals often coincide.) Or, do I want to translate more books by the authors I’ve already translated, to help continue bolstering their presence in English?
Extrapolating on this idea of the archive and translation, do you consider the paratextual artifacts of your translation practice, such as interviews, emails you’ve written about translation projects, or perhaps your translator’s diary, which is available online, to be a kind of “archive” of your own work and interests?
I began thinking about this aspect of translation and archives after reading an article in the journal Palimpsestes by Professor Maria Constanza Guzmán, titled “(re)Visiting the Translator’s Archive: Toward a Genealogy of Translation in the Americas.” She is considering English translations of books from Latin America, and the ways that thinking about Latin American writers and literary movements have been shaped by translations and translators. I’ll read her definition of a translator’s archive:
You’ve spoken before about your personal background, being one of the first of your family to grow up in the United States, and your father, whose native language is Arabic but who did not teach you to speak it, and what I’m getting at here is—do you think there is a strong connection between a translator’s personal interests and background, and the works, writers, and regions that they choose to focus on, and perhaps how this shapes their understanding of literary movements? Could this be considered another kind of translation “archive”?
the translator’s archive as a concept is a more complex composition that is not limited to the archive’s materiality, to translator’s written statements, but which includes translators’ biographies, their practices, the agents involved in the translating event, and the relations among them. The translator’s archive is a discursive formation and a dynamic and organic composition (Guzmán, 2013: 179)
I like this idea, that if you zoom out and we have this information about why certain translators were translating certain things, or how they were translating them, then you start to get a sense of the bigger picture.
From that perspective, we might see what kinds of works were getting translated and published at a certain time, and maybe when there were shifts in styles or what kinds of works were being translated, you could trace why . . .
That makes me think of a note I read by a translator when I was writing my master’s thesis on Clarice Lispector. It was the original translation that had come out in the eighties, and the translator was talking, in very explicit terms, about how he had smoothed out her “quirks.” In very black-and-white terms he was saying, “I made her sound really normal in English.” As if it were a good thing!
You can get a sense from translators’ notes, most of the time, of how people thought about translation, and what made a work a “good” translation. Thinking about translation has changed over time, which is why the Lispector translations had to be redone. In this day and age, you can get a sense from all of the translators’ notes that are being published that we have a different view of how things should be translated, what the goals are, and what should be preserved in an author’s voice. The things that we value in translation are being recorded now, and in another few decades from now, somebody could look at these notes—and maybe they’ll cast judgment on how we’re doing things now. Having these translators’ notes does give us a sense of what is being valued in translation right now, which does serve as a sort of archive or time capsule.
But this idea of being a part of an archive of translators who are intentionally writing about why they’re doing what they’re doing, and about how their background is shaping their translation work—I think that’s really only possible recently because of the new emphasis on the visibility of translators. The role of the translator has become more valued, more respected, and more visible. I think the idea of having a book of translators’ notes, even a few decades ago, would not have been possible because we just probably didn’t have enough, and they weren’t varied enough. Although, who knows, maybe I’m wrong about that.
Looking at your shelf, what would you say your interests are as a translator? How would you define the interests of your personal translation archive?
I like to translate books that are doing something special with language, whether that be on the level of experimentation, or rhythm, or just using language in ways that I have not been pushed to use language before.
I’m also very drawn to a particular kind of story. I like stories of love, and especially of love gone wrong, and personal alienation. I like books that are about finding your way to yourself, whether that be through love or through language or through something else.
A lot of the North African books that I’ve translated feel really akin to Duras to me. I’m thinking of Abdellah Taïa, and even this book Zabor, or the Psalms by Kamel Daoud, one of my favorite books that I’ve ever translated. They both write about how we reconcile ourselves with ourselves, how we find our ways to ourselves.
I’ve been having this feeling lately of wanting to get back to doing the kind of translation work that I see as related to archival work, like Panics, and this idea of finding and working on books that otherwise may not find their way into English. But then, as I was describing this to you and looking at my shelf, I realized I’ve done more books like that than I even realized. Now, I’d say probably about half the books I’ve translated would fall into that category—books that I stumbled upon in some way, and now they exist in English. So, that’s really nice for me to see on my shelf, just how many of those actually are up there.
I love that, in part because it often appears to be that there is heavy competition in the field of translation, such as being the translator of a specific writer, or the first to translate a particular writer. There is so much work out there that hasn’t been translated though, and this approach to finding what exists in archives seems to counteract that scarcity mindset.
I mean, it’s definitely a lot more work than just showing up at the library—it takes being invested and involved, knowing a certain amount, and reading enough to recognize when something you come across is interesting. It requires a sense of curiosity too, when you come across a mention of a person whom you’ve never heard of before, and then going and finding it. It makes it feel like there are plenty of opportunities out there.
I have been asked before to “audition” for books. Sometimes I get them and sometimes I don’t. But in that case, I’m literally in competition with other translators. At a certain point, it’s like, why? There’s so much out there that is really good, and worthwhile, that no one is touching. Why are we all fighting over the same authors and the same books? A part of that is how publishing works. Publishers want a particular thing, so everyone’s fighting over that thing. Whereas if you’re digging into the archives and finding a book that no one’s talking about that’s been lost, you invest years translating a sample, writing the pitch, getting a publisher to pay attention. Sometimes it can feel like there aren’t that many publishers that want to publish a book by an author that no one is talking about, right?
It’s hard. I spent two years pitching Panics, and that’s two years in which I wasn’t paid for that work. It’s still worth it for me—it’s part of the nature of it. I do think, if you as a translator are interested in your personal archive being cohesive and really representing you, then it requires finding things that you’re really passionate about. While you also do the other stuff too, if you need to, to pay the bills. You have to balance it out, and it’s easier said than done.
So on a practical level, there’s an obvious reason why we’re fighting over the same projects. But there are enough publishers out there who are willing to judge a book based on its own merit, and not on how many prizes the author has won.
I am so much more fulfilled by and interested in trying to find more books like Panics, and can do that now because I have a full-time job. I am excited by the idea of translating a lot less, but translating in this archival way. Only now, I’m also asking myself, can I even translate one book a year? I don’t know. But, I’m more excited about translation now than I have been in a really long time. I’m feeling energized about translation again, and that’s thanks to this book in particular. So we’ll see what happens from here.
