In this series, we listen in as our renowned translators talk with one another about art, craft, and the role of translation in the world.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH is the author of two novels. 2011’s Niko won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for Canada Reads and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. 2005’s Blackbodying won the McAuslan First Book Prize. He is currently translating Éric Plamondon’s 1984 Trilogy from French to English, the first volume of which (Hungary-Hollywood Express) was published in 2016. He is the editor for Esplanade Books, the fiction imprint of Véhicule Press. His third novel, The Bleeds, will be published in 2018.
ROGER SEDARAT is the author of four poetry collections: Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, which won Ohio UP’s 2007 Hollis Summers’ Prize, Ghazal Games (Ohio UP), Foot Faults: Tennis Poems (David Roberts), and Haji as Puppet: an Orientalist Burlesque, which won the 2016 Word Works’ Tenth Gate Prize for a Mid-Career Poet. In addition to the just published Nature and Nostalgia in the Poetry of Nader Naderpour (Cambria), his verse translations from Persian have appeared in Poetry, Arroyo, and Drunken Boat. A recipient of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, he teaches poetry and literary translation in the MFA Program at Queens College, City University of New York.
ROGER SEDARAT: I wrote out some questions. We don’t have to stick with them but I just went with what I’m legitimately interested in about you. So you translate out of French into English. Do you also do Arabic into English?
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: I can speak Arabic but I’ve lost the reading and writing unfortunately. I was born in Lebanon in 1977, but my family left in ’82 because of the civil war. I ended up going to American international schools in Greece for a number of years, where I was able to keep studying it, so for most of my childhood I was able to read and write Arabic. But when I moved to Canada, it became very hard to stay connected to that community. My Arabic never really had a place here. I lost the reading and writing when I had to start learning French.
ROGER SEDARAT: No, no, French is enough and you’re doing well with it.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: I’ve been living in Montréal for 15 years now. It seemed to me to be a way to engage with what was central to Québecois and Canadian literature, this crossroads between the French and the English. I had a capacity to translate, from working in French organizations here, and I already had a literary career underway in English, so literary translation seemed like an opportunity to open up the box that others put you in a little bit. Perhaps you can speak to this as well, but when you write about Middle Eastern subjects and the politics associated with them, there’s a tendency to be viewed within a box. People kind of put you away and say you’re the guy who writes about those subjects and you only get invited to talk about those subjects.
ROGER SEDARAT: I can totally see that.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: What’s your relationship to your Persian background?
ROGER SEDARAT: So my father is from Iran and I grew up in America. He came even before the revolution. But I’ve been around Persian literature my whole life. I actually got more and more interested in it on my own while growing up; for political reasons my father really wanted to be “American-American” and repressed his Iranian heritage. That of course made me more interested in Iran and its poetry. Even as modern poet in America who went on to get a PhD. in American literature, studying Wallace Stevens and whatnot, all along I was going deeper into my own interest in the literature of Iran.
But I’ve so found the same thing in terms of being pigeonholed. I’m in every anthology ever about Iranian anything; you know, I do and am other things. A few years ago I started playing tennis, rabidly, and I wrote a book about it, both for the sports community but also for poetry readers. If I bring it up, though, so often the reply is, “yeah, yeah Roger, now let’s get back to Iran.” But I do have a similar thing to you, being cosmopolitan beyond my specific language focus; I was an exchange student in Cairo, Egypt, in high school. That was pretty formative, and since then I’ve had a sort of pan-Arabic interest, even though I barely speak Arabic. I went to Beirut a few years ago to present on a conference about Ameen Rihani — one of the first Arab-American novelists — and I became really intrigued with Lebanese literature. This is kind of what got me curious about you and your background.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: For me, I think I experienced something like that too. My parents really wanted to leave behind that culture and become something else, and as a result I grew curious. It felt like a secret to me, rediscovering all this. I went about it on my own. The first time I went back to Lebanon was in 2009, 27 years after I left with my parents. I had to do it behind their backs, so I connected with relatives on Facebook, my favorite uncle and aunt from when I was five years old, I planned the trip with them, and then told my parents. I was 32 at that point but was acting like a child again, hiding something in my room…
ROGER SEDARAT: Wow. So this is weird. In my 30s I married an Iranian-American woman. For the very first time through my father’s lineage I got an Iranian passport. And I went, behind my dad’s back. I planned a trip. When I called him at JFK and told him I was going, he almost had a nervous breakdown. I met and got to know so many more members of our family. He hadn’t been back, and he swore he wasn’t going to go back, but here I am starting to learn more about him in a few weeks in one summer than he would have ever told me. All the scandals, all the details of his background. So I guess it’s like we both have that kind of resistance or repression in our families and we’re proactively responding to it. But it actually got me closer to him in some ways.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: Same on this end. I found that I ended up learning a lot about my parents. We are raised to be so individualistic here that it was strange for me to go back and realize that I was an ambassador for my family whether I wanted to be or not. I had to answer for all their actions. But I also find that having moved away and not being exposed to that degree of community integration has allowed me opportunities that I wouldn’t have otherwise had, especially in terms of literature. I don’t know that I would have gone down this path that I pursued, and become so ingrained in North American culture if my parents hadn’t done what they did. So I appreciate the balance now after going back and discovering Lebanon for myself.
ROGER SEDARAT: Same. Did you find that with your experience with North American literature, you’re seeing it somewhat through the perspective of your immigrant parents? That they’ve kind of informed it in some ways?
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: To a degree, in that I lived in a number of places before I arrived in Canada. I lived in Kuwait, in Dubai, I spent seven years in Greece. So what I do have is this constant awareness that there are other perspectives out there in the world and that, even from very early on, I never accepted wholeheartedly what the culture here was offering because I’d lived in four or five other cultures up to that point, and it had become pretty instinctive to see lines that defined them. So whereas I didn’t have this comparison between a Point A and Point B that typical immigration provides, I had this sense that things are done differently elsewhere, and I should see North America through that lens.
ROGER SEDARAT: Speaking to what you had published in Drunken Boat, I was wondering what intrigued you enough to take on the task of translating Éric Plamondon’s novel.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: I was reading up on what got you into translation, and you brought up something that struck a chord: as a writer, you saw it as a challenge. You already have this literary involvement, and it becomes a connection to something you can’t access in your own writing. I see myself as a novelist who translates. I’m not someone who’s opening up a window to culture like a full-time translator.
ROGER SEDARAT: I always identify as a poet who translates for some reason. What you just said — I have to draw that distinction. I don’t want to be named as the gatekeeper into this whole tradition; I really translate almost as an avocation.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: Yeah, I would say there are other people who can speak to the macro view of bringing one culture into another. I see it as doing my little part with a writer whose work is very different from mine. A writer whose aesthetic I would have liked to pursue at a point early on, but then my writing ended up going in a different direction. So translation affords me the ability to pursue an aspect of literature that I love but didn’t end up taking on as my own. Does that speak to how you went about it?
ROGER SEDARAT: I seem to channel or supplement my own envy as a writer through translation, so sometimes it’s like, “God, I wish I did this.” It’s not my writing, of course, but it gets really cool to touch it and somehow play with it. Maybe I can’t or won’t write in that certain way, but it’s pretty cool to have the opportunity to engage the writer closer than just reading it.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: Maybe it’s a function of age. When I was younger, I would have had more of the envy or more of a knee-jerk reaction to try that myself, but now that I’m approaching 40, I feel there’s room enough for everyone out there. I’m not as competitive as I used to be. Translation feels like the right balance of appreciation and delving into these other aspects.
ROGER SEDARAT: I teach creative writing and I also do translation workshops, and it’s so different. In fact I wrote something for Words Without Borders because I was so struck by the difference. There is not the same kind of anxiety in a regular creative writing workshop. When we do translation we want to get it right but we risk a lot more, we get interventionist with our own choices and it’s more of a communal thing as opposed to this romantic egocentric notion of “this is my work and you how dare you touch it” [in creative writing workshops].
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: I like the fact that I don’t have to worry about the highs and lows of creating the work. It’s really about the surface aesthetic, and I can just focus on the mechanics. It’s shifting into a different gear.
ROGER SEDARAT: What really interested me with mechanics — I stumbled onto your music background; you’re also a music critic.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: I probably was more of one before. A few years ago, I decided it should probably be a younger person’s game. I was getting a little bit too cynical, but I still have a deep appreciation for music and I’m still involved in it and I still do the odd music writing here and there, but for a long time that was a main feature.
ROGER SEDARAT: Being closer to music than your average writer/translator, is there any connection to your rendering of prose into English?
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: What I took from music writing is the ability to write and deliver on deadline. Beyond that, I listen to the sound of sentences in a particular way, though I would ascribe that to more of a poetic ear than a musical ear. What about you? You mentioned tennis earlier as a great love outside literature. Is it only tennis or do you have things like music as well?
ROGER SEDARAT: I wouldn’t call myself a great musician but I do play guitar and I played in bands in the past, and I’ve always connected to the singing-songwriting aspect. That’s helped me more than maybe one would realize, going to classical Persian poetry like Hafez, which remains so invested in rhyme. It’s predicated in a musicality that can never be the same in English. It’s sung a lot. When I went to the tomb of Hafez, they had his poetry on the loudspeaker, with singers rendering his great ghazals. That was a place where it came together for me. And I started writing poetry as a formalist, so I really didn’t want to cop out and do the kind of free verse approximation that some translators do. I really did want to go for some kind of musicality.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: Part of the reason that I decided to start participating in translation was a dissatisfaction with a certain way of doing things which to my ear didn’t read well. Maybe that’s the musical side. I thought I could try my hand at it and end up with something a little different. And the reviews that I’ve seen of my translations have noted that I tend to approach it more like a novelist. Instead of being in the backseat, I’m maybe in the passenger seat, pointing out the direction.
ROGER SEDARAT: There’s definitely a case to be made for that too.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: It’s just a different approach, and I think it’s healthy to have different perspectives. In every approach you gain something and you lose something. Do you find that with your work? Persian is so far from English that there must be a great gap to overcome there.
ROGER SEDARAT: I can get so obsessed with what I’m not rendering, what’s left behind, but I do like the challenge. I start playing with it. You lose puns which are so amazing in the original Persian. Puns don’t work in English, they’re very stupid, like kids’ jokes, or they’re Alexander Pope or something, so square and old. I do talks on the Persian form; I wrote in English on the ghazal and one of the things that helped me more than any English rhetorical model was going to the seminal hip hop/rap guys like Notorious B.I.G. who can do like three to five rhymes on top of another and never sound forced. They’re fresh, every time he does it. And that is maybe closer to Hafez than something else in English poetry like Alexander Pope. So that helped me in some ways. There’s always going to be the loss, but I did like the challenge and it pushed me to these new places.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: When you’re working with someone like Hafez, do you feel that the Persian poetry at least at that time may have been closer to its public than poetry is now in North America?
ROGER SEDARAT: So much. That’s another thing that’s always going to be lost, the integrity of of a source poet to his or her culture. I mean I wonder what a comparable Western analogue would be. We can appreciate Emily Dickinson and position ourselves in relation to her because we’re not that far away from the 19th century, but the 14th century is so long ago, it’s so foundational. It’s really not going to be the same.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: It’s interesting that you go to a reference like the Notorious B.I.G.; that’s what triggered that question, that we really have to go into that application of poetics to find something in our culture that’s as close to the people it’s addressing.
ROGER SEDARAT: In oral cultures too, the idea that you can walk around with those rap lyrics in your head, whereas I don’t think the youth are walking around memorizing poetry like they maybe used to.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: Especially with Hafez or Khalil Gibran — that was an oratorial style, it was meant to be recounted, the person had to be there, people memorized it as advice. There was a practical purpose to the wisdom. You were meant to take things from the message.
ROGER SEDARAT: And even today, in Iran I would meet people who are functionally illiterate in the Persian language and yet they have Hafez poetry memorized, because that’s been passed on to them from their parents. It’s really a different model compared to any kind of Western tradition I could pin down. It’s such a cliché question to ask, but what’s been your greatest challenge in translating? What’s something you’re up against that’s tough to render?
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: I think the toughest aspect is that Québecois French can be quite regional in places, especially once it starts to get more colloquial and slangy. It’s its own thing, it’s not anywhere near France’s French. The further away it gets from “regular” French, the deeper I have to dig to render that. Oftentimes there’s no English equivalent, I have to invent a parallel. Perhaps I should ask you about Haji Khavari, the poet you translate on Drunken Boat. Have you worked with him beyond these poems?
ROGER SEDARAT: Yeah, I’m working on an emerging collection. Curiously, he doesn’t have his own collection out in Iran. I wouldn’t say I’m envious because like you said I’m getting older and… you know more…more self-actualized. But there’s something kind of cool about it to me, that it’s not this careerist thing; he’s this cool musician type who also does these, I think, postmodern violations of poetry, almost in the realm of the simulacrum. It really resonated.
He uses a pseudonym, and that’s something I didn’t talk about: the political challenges of translating work from Iran. I’m not in relative danger because I live here and I don’t go back so much. But for him, he’s gotten in trouble for some of his writing, so we came up with this pseudonym that I can his poetry under. We have placed a fair amount of his poetry in different places. My translation of one of his poems won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize.
I wouldn’t say the degree of difficulty of his poetry is that hard — it’s pretty straightforward, conceptually. He writes punk songs in addition to poems, after all. But there’s something conceptually very rich about his verse, at least to me. So even though it has a veneer of simplicity it really takes off. When I was first introduced to his work I just couldn’t leave it alone. I don’t know if it’s ever going to emerge in a collection published in English. I should maybe be more careerist and push him harder, but he’s kind of under the radar and seems to like it that way. He does his own zine that he circulates among a few friends in Shiraz, Iran. I was just very intrigued with his work and thought, I’m going to go for it anyway. And I’ve enjoyed translating his stuff more than anything. And we do it over the internet.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: How do we situate poetry in relation to the rest of what’s going on in Iran these days? Is he an anomaly or is there a whole community of people writing this way?
ROGER SEDARAT: I’d say there’s a pretty good underground community. They don’t have MFA programs, but there’s this underground artistic community, the same for fine artists or musicians. The musicians will go into somebody’s house with a lot of padded mattresses and jam in a kind of make-shift performance space, and I think that his poetry speaks to that too. Meeting at a coffee shop away from your parents, exchanging poems or reading them to each other. I don’t know what’s a comparable model in America, maybe back in the 60s when people would be passing around a jug of wine in somebody’s basement… It’s so much less established. There’s not really a poetry establishment except for older big names of those who passed away, like Simin Behbahani.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: It sounds like it has to be underground. How did he get into trouble?
ROGER SEDARAT: A nonfiction piece he posted online. He’s young, in his later twenties, now, and back before I met him he wrote something that offended the powers that be. As a lot of people have. It was just the wrong post at the wrong time politically. So when my translations of him started going up on the internet we thought it would maybe be a better idea to [use a pseudonym]. He actually let me come up with the first name, while he invented the last name. As an ancillary note, because I’ve gone to Iran and my wife’s Iranian-American, perhaps I should have used a pseudonym for my earlier books. Thankfully I’m under the radar because I’m not famous. There’s a gift to being a nobody. But there is a danger.
And there’s another thing — a lawyer found his way to me to start translating diaries of people in prison in Iran. They’re not literary; they’re normal people, mostly women without much education, but they’re still good writers. One actually killed her husband because he was abusing her. I took it on because, again, I’m pretty safe in America. But there is still the political component, and then there was the right situation where it was very hard to get the permission of somebody in prison by proxy. So it was a lot to take on, and those are things that are a little different I face as a translator.
Hafez is safe because he’s in the public domain. But that’s that is something to think about. And ethically I have worried about putting somebody’s work out there and putting them in danger.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: It’s so easy to feel that a lot of this is off in its own corner in America. And one can’t imagine writing anything so offensive that you would end up in this situation, and yet here we are discussing other cultures where even underground poetry is scrutinized by the government. In Canada you would have to fill out reams of grant applications to get the government to read your work.
For me, it would feel like there would be a necessity in helping these writers overcome their political situations. But then again, do they want that work out there?
ROGER SEDARAT: The women in prison — Guernica did a big one that I translated — they were pretty adamant about wanting their stories told at all costs. Their families felt that they had been in enough trouble but they were really insistent. And this lawyer, who was helping them pro bono, he got a call seven or eight years ago in the middle of the night telling him to get out of Iran because they were coming for him. He relocated to Canada and took these manuscripts with him, and then found his way to me through my relatives and asked me to do this. I also got self-conscious about what you said earlier, about being typified as someone who does sensationalist stuff — it’s not like I had a linear plan about this. And Khavari is not super-political all the time, by the way; he’s usually just irreverent, but so are a lot of people. I struggled with that, the reception of it, but then started saying it’s maybe not about me, just about rendering something in English for other people to look at.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: And sometimes things come to you for a reason. I’m an atheist, but over the years I have learned to appreciate a certain amount of faith in what happens in art, and that things will come to you because they’re meant to. I no longer sweat it when inspiration doesn’t come to me at the expected moment when I’m writing a novel. I just accept that it will happen in its own time.
ROGER SEDARAT: Yeah, I’m always interested in why out of all the things in the world, people write what they write. Wallace Stevens said that we have to write the poems we write. You can’t be another writer.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: There’s a deep well inside each of us. You really don’t know what you’ll draw out of it once you start sending down buckets.
ROGER SEDARAT: So out of all the things there are to translate, you have picked up this novel by Éric Plamondon. It’s a trilogy. Are you going to do the whole thing?
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: I am doing the whole trilogy. Hungary-Hollywood Express, the first one, which was excerpted in Drunken Boat, came out last September. And now I’m working on the second one, Mayonnaise, which is about, ostensibly, Richard Brautigan, the 1960s counterculture poet. And the third one is called Apple S. That one’s about Steve Jobs. So these three figures, Johnny Weissmueller, Brautigan, and Jobs, offer a representation of American culture in the 20th century.
ROGER SEDARAT: It’s a really interesting trajectory.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: It is. It seems so random at first, but then you recognize that Plamondon ended up selecting a central figure of the 20s and 30s, a central figure of the 60s and 70s , and then one who spoke to the end of the 20th century in a very major way, and if you go back from the beginning of their lives to near the end of their lives, then you’ve covered the whole century through that.
The Drunken Boat excerpt gives a sense of the narrative’s non-linear style, which bounces back and forth over time and through different places and situations. All three books evolve that way, through these vignette chapters, and when you take them all as a whole — there’s more 300 of them, they end up making up a version of the 20th century and its popular culture and how we’ve gone from certain preoccupations with a moving picture towards the digital realm at the end with Steve Jobs, via this counterculture in the middle that was largely a tangent.
ROGER SEDARAT: When I talk to translators it’s usually self-chosen, so it’s usually a delight in the work.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: You really have to be an admirer to diligently dive under someone else’s work. When you’re sitting there with a few sentences, you’re paying closer attention to that work than maybe even the editor, because you’re going over it word for word, really slowing things down.
ROGER SEDARAT: Absolutely. Do you have a last question?
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: Where do you see your translation work going? You’re primarily a poet, and you have a collection coming out next month — congratulations.
ROGER SEDARAT: Thanks! I won this mid-career poets prize, for my own work, which is a nice thing but it’s also humbling because I don’t think of myself as mid-career. I think of myself as young! I guess it’s relative. For the sake of the Khavari project I really would like to put a collection out with some edgy postmodern press. There’s a lot of those — we have a great 50 pages or so. I think we’ll shop those around. And then for the last seven years or so I’ve collaborated with a scholar in Iran, something I’ve never done before; we’ve worked forever on translating this seminal 20th century poet, Nader Naderpour, and it’s coming out in a few months. And more poetry. I also have just finished an academic book on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early appropriation of American poetry. How about you?
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: I’ve been pretty focused on finishing my own novel, The Bleeds, which is coming out in 2018. Now that I’m done with that I’m going to finish up the next two volumes of the Plamondon. From what I understand, he has a fourth book ready, so I suppose I’m going to be reading that soon and seeing if there’s something to do there. Because of my role primarily as a novelist, I would be fine if I simply took one novelist under my wing, that this is going to be my little contribution to the translation of this culture. I’ve always appreciated when you see some novelists just translating one or two writers. Others should take on the responsibility of translating many aspects of a culture, but I’m content to take it slow, spend a lot of time with one author and then move on from there when the time is right.
ROGER SEDARAT: I like that. It makes me think of my students in the translation workshop — all of our workshops are polyglot, and they keep introducing me to writers I’ve never heard of from new languages. But over time I see the students get to know that person’s work, and then I see the translator at the end of the semester really starting to plug in to the quirky kind of mannerisms that a writer might have. There’s a case to be made for really getting to know a writer over time.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: Not only do you get to know that writer, but you get to see them change, especially in a somewhat linear fashion, even if you’re going back in time you’ll notice the stylistic tendencies and priorities shifting. The writer might not be 100 percent conscious of this. It becomes a really interesting interrogation of how someone else works.
ROGER SEDARAT: I love that metaphor. This has been great, and I’m so glad to have been introduced to your work and your source author.
DIMITRI NASRALLAH: Same here. When I first started publishing in the mid-2000s it was very hard to find other Middle Eastern voices working in North America. Over the past ten years, maybe thanks to the internet or just people becoming more connected, it’s been fascinating for me to make these connections with people who are working in a similar voice.
Between Us: Roger Sedarat and Dimitri Nasrallah was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.