Leri Price commands language, and—similar to the narrator in Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay—does so with a prowess for invention. Furthering Price’s accomplishments as an award-winning translator of contemporary Arabic fiction, her translation of Planet of Clay was recently named as a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. The novel is a haunting exploration of the Syrian civil war, as seen through the eyes of fourteen-year-old girl named Rima. At a checkpoint one afternoon in Damascus, Rima’s mother is killed, leaving her and her older brother alone to survive. To escape from the surrounding horrors, she turns to reading, drawing, and daydreaming—creating her own magical universe à la her favorite book, The Little Prince. Though an unflinching account of war, Planet of Clay is, in many ways, a hopeful novel: a testament to the power of our own imaginations in the alleviation of suffering. In the following interview, Price graciously shares her thoughts on the importance of translator visibility, the nuances of translating from Arabic, and the books that have changed her life.
Rose Bialer (RB): Last month, Planet of Clay was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature—just two years after your translation of Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work was a finalist for the same prize. How has your journey as a translator been up to this point? Have you noticed any changes or shifts in the literary translation field?
Leri Price (LP): It’s genuinely an honour to be counted among such amazing colleagues on the longlist and shortlist. Like most people in this industry, literary translation is not my only field of work, so it has been hard at times to maintain—especially when holding down full-time work in a completely different area. I’ve been so lucky that I have been able to translate authors like Khaled Khalifa and Samar Yazbek; a translator is a reader first of all, and having the chance to engage so deeply and intimately with a text is a privilege when it comes to writing like theirs.
My first translation was ten years ago, and I would say there has certainly been a shift in the field since then, in no small part thanks to translator/activists like Anton Hur and Deborah Smith. Among translators from Arabic, you have people like Sawad Hussain, Yasmine Seale, Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, and Lissie Jacquette (among many others) who all advocate for the incredible richness and variety of texts written in Arabic. Prizes like the National Book Award in the U.S. and the International Booker in the U.K. acknowledge that a translated work of literature requires recognition of the translator (without whom the work would not be accessible to English-speaking readers). There are more presses devoted to translation and more acceptance among others that translated literature is something that people are interested in reading. Maybe it’s part of the broader social movement to seek out and amplify voices that have been overlooked in the past—I certainly like to think so.
I also think that current conversations about the visibility of translators is long overdue— not (just) because translators deserve more credit for their craft, but because readers deserve to know how the text came to be in their hands. For instance, given how influential editors can be in the final version of a text, I actually think they should also be noted prominently. The final book is the result of so many people’s work, so much discussion and negotiation, and I wish that was recognised and celebrated more often. Jennifer Croft recently made excellent points about this issue.
RB: What was your relationship like with Samar Yazbek? Was there a collaborative element to the translation?
LP: I always consult with authors where possible; I think it’s vital to get author input, but personally speaking, I need to have a strong sense of how I see the text first. It’s much easier to go back and revisit things after a conversation with the author than having two or three versions of scenes or characters in your head while drafting the English version. (Of course, that can happen anyway, especially in a text like Planet of Clay!) I tend to consult authors after I have a draft in fairly good shape, and then again during the editing process, as many times as needed. So I don’t know that I would call it a collaboration as such, but I would never feel comfortable producing a translation without consulting the author as long as I have a chance of doing so. Samar and I had two or three long phone calls, as well as email exchanges, and they all took place in a sort of mishmash of Arabic, English and French, which was fun.
RB: Though the Syrian revolution is at the forefront of the novel, Planet of Clay is not just a book about war. In fact, Rima turns to her rich imagination to escape the violence and suffering of the outside world. The end result is a surprisingly optimistic—even joyful—account of finding art and beauty in a society which can feel bereft of such. With the oversimplification (by the media) of many contemporary novels that are set in countries at war, how do you hope that readers encounter the book?
LP: My hope is that readers will engage with this book as a creative work, not as a peek “behind the scenes of war” or as a political tract.
This book is so beautiful and strange. It uses innovative narrative techniques and questions the relationship between language, meaning, and the senses. To reduce it to a voyeuristic peek into a war is not just a disservice to Samar and her craft, it also misses the opportunity to just revel in the sheer joy that the narrator takes in art of all kinds. I agree—I think it is joyful, and on the whole. I am still torn about how to regard the final pages.
In terms of how it depicts war, the scenes I found most effective were the descriptions of the war’s indirect impact on people—the extra traffic because of the checkpoints, the bombardment that just becomes a background noise, having to cook something for a fussy eater even when you’re under siege. Of course it’s mostly women who have to deal with the mundane, everyday business of keeping everyone safe and fed.
I also really hope that it inspires people to seek out other Syrian voices (or translations from Arabic in general). There is a vibrant community of Syrian artists and writers producing a huge body of work that can offer so much to the world, not as some anthropological case study, but as a contribution to how we understand ourselves as humans and creators.
RB: The novel is narrated in first person and told from a child’s perspective—letting a very innocent and wondrous quality seep into the prose, such as in this passage:
All of this talking just so I can tell you about the happiness that came suddenly when I was looking at the shabby hospital ceiling that rained flakes on us. I wasn’t looking at the ceiling, I was seeing the sky. Everything that was over me, that shaded me, was sky. I was imagining its burning sun, and my gaze travelled far away . . .
RB: What was your experience of translating a child’s voice? Was this stream of consciousness style different from other projects you have worked on?
LP: Yes, it was tough to get the balance right between childlike and childish (as Samar’s agent Yasmina Jraissati put it). Rima is fourteen, so she is in that awkward in-between stage; she isn’t quite an adult, but she also has this incredibly diverse vocabulary due to her eclectic reading, and her thoughts and feelings are beyond those of a child. At the same time, she has been incredibly sheltered and lacks experience of the world outside her home. For instance, her flirtation with a delivery boy and her crush on Hassan demonstrate that she has the usual teenage hormones, but also that her feelings are very much filtered through the language of stories and romance, and she doesn’t really know how to manage them. Rima is very matter-of-fact about the things she sees, and actually that really helped get a handle on her voice. She just accepts what she sees and doesn’t attach meaning to it; she hasn’t acquired the layers of signification that we accumulate as we grow up (for her, a uniform is just a differently coloured set of clothes, for example).
I don’t think I’ve worked on anything with quite the same rhythms. Arabic is constructed in a very different way to English; it has much longer sentences which often loop and swirl freely, and part of the challenge of translating this language is guiding your reader through that intricate style without losing them. But this meandering through someone’s brain is quite unique among the things I’ve translated. In terms of that stream-of-consciousness, I also have a daughter who was learning to speak while I was drafting the translation, and although their ages are very different, it definitely affected how I heard Rima’s voice. I was hearing stream-of-consciousness self-narration every day, so the cadences of those long sentences were fairly familiar to me.
Interestingly, I think the quotation you used that paraphrases an excerpt from a thousand-year-old dictionary by al-Tha’alibi (“Everything that was over me, that shaded me, was sky”). It is an example of Rima creatively re-tooling something in her own way. The Arabic word used is “sama,” which could mean “sky” or “heaven.” I think the original quotation was intended to mean “heaven,” but when I consulted with Samar she had used it in the sense of “sky.” That was one thing I loved about this text—Rima had no qualms about grabbing hold of these works and interpreting them in her own way, such as when she suggested an improvement to Alice in Wonderland. It shows that loving and respecting art does not mean having a slavish reverence for it.
RB: As someone who did not have any direct connection to the Middle East or Arabic-speaking world before your study of the language, how has working as a translator (especially for a book such as Planet of Clay) shaped your political consciousness?
LP: Well, simply studying Arabic was a wake-up call for me. The more I learned, the more I was forced to realise that my worldview to that point had been very narrow and very Eurocentric. It was pretty humiliating, if I’m honest. As I think many people are coming to realise, confronting biases you didn’t realise you had is a lifelong exercise, and it’s painful but necessary, especially in work like this. The mere process of translating an Arabic text into English comes loaded with all sorts of assumptions and power dynamics, even before we get into the nuts and bolts of choices and references and everything else. Recognising that is a first step, although there are many that come after.
Translation has made me more humble, I hope, and helped me fully appreciate that difference doesn’t have to come with a hierarchy. We often assign hierarchy to difference, but it is not inherent. Different traditions, different styles, different norms—they are all equally valid, and communicating that is part of the translator’s role, as I see it. It’s simple enough to say, but surprisingly complicated to articulate in practice. Translators make choices all the time, but at what point does a choice become an imposition? Can you ever disentangle background from the inescapable subjectivity of both reading and recreating? How do you respect the original work while also creating something that stands on its own in English? It’s easy to both overthink and under-reflect on this, which admittedly is not a very helpful observation. I would never say that I always get the balance right, but that’s what I strive for with each translation.
More broadly, translation has confirmed for me that the arts are vital for empathy, compassion, and creativity. In many countries where Arabic literature is produced, writing genuinely is a radical act in itself. The stakes are higher, the risk is real, and conversely the joy is more fierce. What a miserable point of view it is, to say that arts and humanities aren’t worth pursuing and have no impact on the world—if that were true, Samar wouldn’t be in exile today.
RB: Rima has a very special relationship with de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and uses its language to understand the world around her. I was wondering if there was a book from your childhood (or adulthood) that has changed your life?
LP: I have to mention the first book I read in Arabic, which was Love in Exile by Bahaa Taher—it really opened my eyes to the joy of reading in Arabic, to different kinds of storytelling, and it was the springboard to exploring Arabic literature further. It’s available in translation by Farouk Abdel Wahab, and is a beautiful read, delicate and melancholy.
As an adult, the books that have had the biggest effect on me were Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino in William Weaver’s translation, because of the sheer joy it takes in words and storytelling. Each chapter is a jewel. Then there are the diaries of Anaïs Nin, which I read first in the drafts that she prepared for publication, and then in the unabridged versions written in unfinished sentences and containing excised “storylines.” I was fascinated to see the different layers of creative process that took place at each point. But I never understood why she was so obsessed with Henry Miller, even less so after I attempted to read Tropic of Cancer.
I can’t pick out a single book that I read as a child that changed me, to be honest. I think their collective impact was more important than any individual one, and of course I had my favourites that I went back to again and again.
RB: Would you be able to share anything about new projects you may be working on?
LP: I will shortly be working on the edits of Khaled Khalifa’s latest novel, a sweeping historical epic called No One Prayed Over Their Graves, set in late Ottoman and early to mid-twentieth-century Aleppo. It will be out next autumn, I believe. It grapples with all the big questions like destiny, and love, and identity, and it’s told through the intertwined histories of a Christian man and a Muslim man and their friends and families. It’s as dense and rich and perfumed as you would expect from Khaled, and I can’t wait for it to be out!
Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. Price’s translation of Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and winner of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Her translation of Khaled Khalifa’s No Knives in the Kitchens of This City was shortlisted for the American Literary Translator Association’s National Translation Award. Price’s other recent translations include Sarab by award-winning writer Raja Alem.
Rose Bialer lives in Madrid, Spain. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as The Kenyon Review Online, Full Stop and Rain Taxi.
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