In this series, we listen in as Drunken Boat’s renowned translators talk with one another about art, craft, and the role of translation in the world.
Shireen Hamza enjoys literary translation, and is honored that her work will be published in Drunken Boat alongside that of translators with much greater experience. She plans to continue translating the work of contemporary Arabic poets into English by collaborating with Wael Tahhan on a translation of his recent book, An Anthropology of Dust. She is currently a doctoral student in the History of Science, focused broadly on the medieval Islamicate world.
Kira Josefsson is a writer, translator, and editor, working between English and Swedish. She writes about the intersection of politics, literature, and identity for both Swedish and English-language publications, and has translated poetry by Anne Boyer, Caitie Moore, and Lina Ekdahl. Based in New York City, she’s part of the translation editorial team here at Drunken Boat, and on the editorial board for Swedish journal Glänta. Her in-progress translation of Pooneh Rohi’s Araben (The Arab) is a recipient of a 2017 PEN/Heim Translation Award. An excerpt is forthcoming in Granta.
Shireen Hazma: How did you come to literary translation? What were your past translation projects? Why did you choose Pooneh Rohi’s novel, Araben?
Kira Josefsson: I picked up Araben in a bookstore in Stockholm when I was visiting one winter, and it completely floored me. Like a lot of the most interesting Swedish literature right now, this book, which in a very generalized description is about two generations’ immigration experience, paints a picture of Sweden that’s different from the idealized image of a Social Democratic paradise that a lot of foreigners imagine when they think of the country. In a North American context, I think it does something very important in complicating that idea — our political programs and utopias can’t be based on a system that’s crumbling even in its most successful iteration. These thoughts came to me once I started thinking about translating it. But what struck me on a more immediate level, on the first read, was how it explores questions of identity through language. It plays a lot with multilingualism, where the instances of code-switching between Swedish and Farsi (as well as Mazanderani), as well as different kinds of Swedish, work to present both the fluidity and sometimes seemingly unbridgeable gaps between different categories of identity. It’s a deeply sad and lonely book, but it’s also really fun in its treatment of language.
I grew up in Sweden, but in a multilingual family environment, and always thought that Swedish, my mother tongue, was a small and at times even paltry language. This is probably a question of individual taste, and maybe to some extent an example of the desire a lot of people have to get away from their roots. Still, I do think it’s true that it’s not always a very expansive language, something that might have to do with what is sometimes a lack of serious attention to humanities scholarship in the country, and perhaps, ironically, also the fact that a lot of Swedish speakers read and write English quite well, and that it’s a language often used in the universities, for example. I think this means that a lot of the more specialized and unusual words are given less legwork, hence shrinking the boundaries of how one can express oneself without sounding strange or archaic. Because of this resistance of mine to the language, I for long avoided the notion of doing serious translation work (though I have always written in Swedish, and translation, I think, is an option that crosses the mind of any writer with more than one language) until I befriended some translators and realized that all the questions of literary translation are conundrums I puzzle over all the time. It felt like coming home. At the same time, I had started to work more seriously on a Swedish-language fiction project of my own, and through that, and through reading extensively in Swedish for it, I began to come around to many of the beautiful and striking things that are, malgré tout, written in that language. Araben is certainly one of them.
How about yourself? How did you come to Arabic? I’m also curious about the trilingual conversations you’ve mentioned having while translating Ali Abdeddine, and, more specifically, how they influenced your work.
SH: I am the child of immigrants from the West of India (Gujaratis whose parents had migrated to cities in Maharashtra), and I grew up in a very white suburb of Chicago. After my first visit to India at age ten, I started fixating on language as the way to stay connected to family, culture and faith, and in some ways to recover parts of the life I would have lived and the person I would have been if my parents had never left. Growing up Muslim, I was taught the Arabic script at Sunday school, and eventually started learning Classical Arabic as a language through textual study of traditional Islamic sciences. Although Gujarati, my mother tongue, has a rich scholarly tradition of its own, and I would see my paternal grandmother (who did not read a word of English) reading Gujarati-language periodicals, I never tried to develop it as a literary language. I think I would have to start by learning the Gujarati script, which I have heard is not so different from Devanagari script. So, like many Muslims throughout the history of the Islamic world, I put more effort into learning Arabic than I did into my mother tongue. There is an endless amount of effort one can pour into learning Arabic, and I have hardly contributed a drop to that ocean. As the lingua franca that can connect me to centuries of literature and scholarly production by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, as well as one that is continuously updated and adapted by modernizers to include the theoretical vocabulary of the academy — East and West — it is a scholarly language. Or at least, that’s the Arabic I encounter.
I heard about Araben from the announcement on the website of PEN America that you won the PEN/HEIM Translation Fund Grant, for translating this novel. I asked my Farsi instructor about it, and she was enthusiastic; I’m not sure where she heard about it from. I just began studying Farsi last year, so I don’t translate from this language (although I had the humbling experience of being assigned a translation of some ghazals of Hafez as part of the first course I took in Farsi, in Lucknow, last summer. Though I was familiar with some of the tropes from Urdu poetry, suffice it to say, I won’t be trying that again for a long time).
Are there other novels recently published or currently being written in Swedish that are accomplishing some of the political work that you see Araben doing? Is this novel part of a broader literary exploration by people on the margins of Swedish society? I’d love to hear more about the parts of the novel that explore identity through language and translation. Does Araben explore the author’s relationship to the Swedish language at all?
KJ: Much of the book centers on an immigrant’s relationship to the Swedish language — this is not a work of autobiography, so I don’t want to say it’s about Pooneh Rohi’s relationship to the language, but one of the two main characters, Yasaman, certainly is preoccupied with her language.
One of my favorite scenes from the novel captures a conversation between her and her mother in the mother’s kitchen. They are preparing food for a dinner party with Yasaman’s Swedish-born boyfriend and his parents. Yasaman’s mother has been cooking all day, too much food for Swedes, who are “not used to cooking more than you can eat,” in Yasaman’s opinion. The food words in their conversation are all in Persian, and the mother slides in and out of Farsi and Swedish. Her Swedish is “broken,” with pronunciations that diverge from the accepted norm, and with unusual grammatical constructions. (This was another interesting — and a bit scary — translation challenge — how to convey an accent in a different language?)
Throughout the book, Rohi italicizes the Farsi and Mazanderani words, and does not include translations to aid a reader with no understanding of Persian dialects. This strategy turns code-switching into a language in its own right, as it often is in immigrant communities. When the mother switches to Farsi altogether, her words are conveyed in Swedish, but we are made to understand that she’s speaking in her mother tongue because her sentence constructions are suddenly free and unhindered. Yasaman, in contrast, came to Sweden as a toddler and is fluent and unaccented in Swedish, but her Farsi is not effortless. Nor is she a fluent chef of khoreshte bademjan or ghormeh sabzi, foods made with recipes that have been passed down through generations of women in her family. These foods and this language become symbols of a different life, one she can’t access. In other words, the situation links up with what you are saying about language as a way of recovering a different kind of life, though for Yasaman, language seems to be a source of grief rather than an opening. I am also interested in the way this passage, in its focus on food words, makes language into something quite physical. There is no “Swedish” (or “English”) word for khoreshte bademjan, this turmeric- and saffron scented stew which, like all foods, is incontestably present in the world, no matter which language is spoken as it is eaten.
I am immensely interested in the way language is linked to identity in this way. One of my closest friends came to Sweden as a child. She has told me about spending many evenings alone in her room practicing Swedish pronunciation because she knew that she would never be fully accepted in the new country if she had an accent. Her mother speaks fluent Swedish but prefers to use English in public because she receives better treatment when people hear her international English than her accented Swedish. What you say about the time one can afford to pour into learning and perfecting one language, in particular under conditions where “perfection” is the only ticket to acceptance, is so real. What languages must we give up to attain others? What are the costs of belonging, and not?
Because of this, I would be curious to hear about your thoughts of the emotional aspects of going deeper with your mother tongue, about broadening and enriching that relationship rather than negating it, as many are forced to do.
I will respond to your question about other Swedish writing that has a similar political and cultural valence to that of Araben in another email — this has already been so delayed that I figure short-ish and sweet-ish is better! Also looking very much forward to hearing more about Ali Abdeddine.
SH: Thank you for your message, and for describing these kitchen scenes. I enjoyed your explanation of how Rohi is capturing the naturally layered languages of immigrant homes. The persistence, even if sometimes difficult, of Persian/Mazanderani names for food in Yasaman’s Swedish resonates with me. I think of things like jeera (cumin) and haldi (turmeric) in Gujarati first, instinctively, and sometimes it takes me a moment to remember what they are called in English! On the other hand, the only Gujarati I know is the language of the home and of everyday life. I think to formally study Gujarati, I would need to commit to years of rigorous study, and I hope to do so one day — but I doubt whether it would feel like broadening my ability in my mother tongue. I suspect it might make the dialect of Gujarati that I grew up speaking seem provincial and inaccurate, in relation to the official, written language. This is how some of my friends in Morocco have explained the relationship between their mother tongue, Moroccan Darija, and Modern Standard Arabic.
Ali Abdeddine’s mother tongue was not Darija or any other form of Arabic — it was actually Tamazight. He is from the South of Morocco, not too far from Essaouira, and is very proud of his Amazigh identity. His first deep encounter with Arabic was through memorizing the Quran — something he and I have in common — which he did as a child, at his local masjid. He went on to eventually get a master’s degree in Arabic literature, but decided to do his doctoral research on Tamazight poetry, written by an older Amazigh poet. (He simultaneously teaches Arabic full-time!) Ali’s ability to work with both Tamazight and Arabic literature is marvelous to me, as is his decision to further the state of research on the literature of his people.
Ali’s writing, and even speech, is peppered with Quranic syntax and vocabulary, but this language can be startling to encounter, because it is surrounded by stark, spare language. This latter kind of prose is reminiscent of Ali’s major influences: Modernist writers, from Arthur Rimbaud to Samuel Beckett, whose work he read in Arabic translation. I think readers of Modernist writing may easily find something familiar in the tone of Ali’s work, but for me, it took reading the Arabic translation of Waiting for Godot to get a sense of how Beckett and others influenced Ali’s style.
Ali’s constant interplay between registers of Arabic is a pleasure to read, and a challenge to translate, though an enjoyable one. His poem, “A Return to Rain,” ends “As we started the first failure, so we will retrieve it.” This is a reference to verse 21:104 of the Quran, which includes the phrase “As we began the first creation, we will repeat it/bring it back again.” I found myself trying to imitate the tone of the King James Bible to convey that this line is scripture (something like “so we shall bring it forth”), but I felt like it didn’t fit with the rest of the poem. I did, in one place, translate an Islamic concept into a Christian one — ṣalawāt as psalm; perhaps I will find a better alternative in the future. But these were the challenges I faced in translating a poem which starts with a poet mourning Troy! As the poem ends, it is the poem’s speaker reciting the Quranic line about failure, but it could as well have been the Trojan poet. In another poem, “Room of the Forgotten,” the speaker breaks from third person description to briefly address the reader with a proverb in Darija: “you rush, you die.”
KJ: I love what you’re saying about needing to go to the translation of Godot to fully grasp Beckett’s influence on Abdeddine’s work. It says something about how translated works are artworks in their own right — how they morph and subtly take on new connotations and valences in new cultural contexts. What happens to the traces of Beckett in Abdeddine, dressed in Arabic, when they are translated into English? Thoughts also worth pondering when considering what you write about translating Islamic concepts into Christian ones.
With regards to Swedish contemporary literature, I tend to be a little hesitant to define broader trends of tendencies since any cultural field thankfully has room for many different forms of expression at once. Defining or categorizing can sometimes work to simplify and commodify in a way that flattens. That being said, questions of identity and identity politics, often inspired by a U.S. discourse, definitely have been in the spotlight in a big way since the far-right neo-fascist Sweden Democrats were elected to parliament in 2010, a political turn that shocked many. Debates over these questions and tensions get a lot of attention in newspapers and magazines, and I think it’s definitely fair to talk about a tendency there. Literature is of course shaped by the social climate in which it comes into being. I am personally drawn to literature that discusses these kinds of questions because it has the possibility to do things that are much more nuanced and complex than an op-ed article, and frequently also plays with language in a way I find thrilling. Athena Farrokhzad’s White Blight, beautifully translated into English by Jennifer Hayashida, is a book-long poem about language and shattered histories, about revolution and pain inherited in the family. Johannes Anyuru is another of my favorite Swedish writer, a poet whose second novel A Storm Blew in From Paradise, about his father’s flight from Uganda and his struggles settling in Sweden, has been translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles. Rachel is also the translator of Jonas Hassen Khemiri, who was hailed as a completely new voice when Ett öga rött came out in 2003. The novel is a portrait of a young man who’s trying to find a way to exist between two cultures, partly through the invention of a kind of pidgin language of his own, in which the novel is written. It has not been translated into English, but Rachel has worked on several of his other titles, including the play I Call My Brothers.
A few others, who to my knowledge have not been translated: Lidija Praizovic, Iman Mohammed, Sami Said, Mara Lee, Daniel Boyaciouglu…. These are all writers whose work does something quite different from the crime fiction that perhaps many tend to think of when they hear “Scandinavian literature.” (But I also want to emphasize that they are far from homogenous as a group, and they don’t necessarily always write about the racialized experience.)
I just looked through our conversation and it’s getting so long that I wonder if we should think about wrapping up? But I would first like to ask what you are focusing on right now. You have translated several poems by Abdeddine. Do you have a larger project of his in mind? Are there other authors you are currently working with? And lastly (if this question is not much too big), do you find that your doctoral studies in the history of medicine in the Islamic world at all influence your work as a translator?
SH: In truth, I don’t have a concrete idea of what my next project as a literary translator will be, outside of potentially collaborating with Wael Tahhan, a Syrian poet, on a translation of his first book of poetry, An Anthropology of Dust, recently published by Dār al-Fārābī. I have translated a number of Ali Abdeddine’s poems, besides those that will appear in Drunken Boat, and continuing that project could take a while yet — he is a prolific writer. Ali has not published much of his work in the Arab world, so it’s possible that he will publish a collection of original work before I try to publish more translations. Lately, I have been sharing some translations locally, in some of the vibrant venues of Cambridge/Boston, like the open mics hosted at Haley House, the Cantab Lounge and at EMW bookstore. Maybe I will try to share some of that work in written form, but maybe not.
As a PhD student, the medical texts that I translate from Arabic and Persian are all written in prose, and many of them are technical, though some treatises straddle the line with literary genres, or adab. I hope that the process of translation for my academic work is sharpening my skills, but it feels like a different process, sometimes. Perhaps this is because I have to strike a different balance for these translations than I do when translating poetry, to approximate a much closer or more “literal” translation. To that end, I have to be satisfied with some awkward sentences here and there as long as I can maintain a one-to-one relationship with the key terminology in the original language (included in parentheses) and the translation I have chosen for it. I guess this is a translation that would allow for a specialist to back-translate, to some extent, but that I hope would still be coherent to the non-specialist. But there is plenty of time for my thoughts on this to change, going forward!
BETWEEN US: Shireen Hamza and Kira Josefsson was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.