The first time I corresponded with A.J. Naddaff was after I had read an early issue of his excellent newsletter Untranslatable, devoted to extensive conversations with Arabic-to-English literary translators about their craft. Startled by the sharpness, intimacy, and candour of each interview, I emailed him merely to convey my appreciation for the work he was doing and how fortuitous it seemed to me that he had begun this initiative at the time that I found myself falling in love with the limitless depths of classical Arabic literature. He wrote back, expressing genuine curiosity about my interests, saying: “Connecting with people who share this love makes the world feel a bit smaller and kinder.” That told me all I needed to know about how A.J. makes space for his interlocutors to arrive at such acute insights as “Every poem is a linguistic event which reimagines its entire tradition” (Huda Fakhreddine) and “That joy and pleasure of someone having it on with you is the very pleasure of literature. You know it and yet you still fall for it” (Maurice Pomerantz).
Besides being a gracious person and a master’s student in Arabic Literature at the American University of Beirut, A.J. wears many other hats: he is an award-winning multimedia journalist, translator, and social science researcher. He’s met and reported on people of diverse stripes, from Sufi intellectuals to ISIS extremists, co-translated Hassan Samy Youssef’s Threshold of Pain with Rebecca Joubin and Nick Lobo, and is currently working on a thesis regarding the translation of the pre-Islamic mu’allaqat into English. I was excited to encounter someone with his feelers in so many different worlds and to hear his meditations on the translatability of Arabic literature, the meanings of home, the in-betweenness of negotiating both the journalistic and the literary, and the state of contemporary Lebanese art in the aftermath of trauma.
Alex Tan (AT): In one of the first issues of your Untranslatable newsletter, you quote the brilliant Moroccan literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito, who wrote of how in the classical Arabic literary tradition, the ancients “endeavoured to make their works untranslatable.” What does untranslatability signify in classical Arabic literature? Why did you decide to name your newsletter after a quality that appears to defy the possibility of translation?
A.J. Naddaff (AJN): In my opinion, and this is up for debate, the idea of untranslatability is the wrong framing for understanding tensions that exist when translating Arabic. Alexander Key has proposed that the idea of untranslatability is a modern idea—that the ancients thought mental content (maʿnā) was always transferable between languages, from Persian to Arabic. So untranslatability was birthed out of early modern European notions, and we should push ourselves—as many translators are doing—to reimagine limits when translating Arabic into English.
Shawkat Toorawa takes it even further and believes that it’s possible to translate something sublime, like the Qur’an, into another language and to still convey the cadence, movement, and the beauty of the original, which I’m totally on board with.
AT: Most of the scholars you’ve chosen to interview so far are translators of pre-modern Arabic literature and contributors to the NYU Library of Arabic Literature series. I’d like to ask about your thoughts on the relationship between the pre-modern and the modern in Arabic writing. You work on the Mu’allaqat (hanging odes), but you’re also interested in contemporary Levantine literary production. How do you position yourself between these two worlds? Does your knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms haunt your approach to the modern?
AJN: Coming into my master’s at the American University of Beirut, I carried this notion that bifurcated “old” or classical Arabic literature from “modern.” I remember distinctly telling my teacher Bilal Orfali that I was excited to read old Arabic literature and he politely cut me off and encouraged me to think of literature more as a continuum. I think this is probably how we should think of literature in all traditions, but especially in Arabic.
So now, I position one foot in each world with no problem. I’m not haunted by my knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms besides by how little I know. Salim Barakat, one of the most celebrated modern Arabic authors, claims he only reads pre-modern works. Rachid el Daif’s novels are full of references to “pre-modern” literature: One Thousand and One Nights, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyei, the Kitab al-Aghani, al-Jahiz, Majnun and Layla, and Pre-Islamic (Jahili) poetry all make appearances. Mahmoud Darwish has a famous poem where he draws on elements from the sixth century poet-king Imru’ al-Qays’s final trip to Constantinople to allegorically critique the Oslo Accords. As T.S. Eliot said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, and they are that which we know.”
AT: I love what Huda Fakhreddine said in your interview with her: “When a young poet who doesn’t speak or read Arabic reads our translations, he should be left saying ‘there is something there that I can relate to as an artist, as a creative writer, as a poet.’” What has stayed with you from the conversations you’ve had? How has that shaped your own philosophy and aesthetics of translation?
AJN: Yes! Actually, she is borrowing this—and she says so—from one of her teachers, the late Jaroslav Stetkevych. In this incredibly bold critique he levels at a bunch of Orientalists in 1969, Stetkevych questions what scholars of Arabic literature have been doing—scholarly translations that adhere to a slavish translation of the text—and calls for translations that “stimulate a nascent poet in the English language, for example, to find some creative affinity with Imru’ al-Qays or al-Mutanabbī.”
This line definitely resonates with me and motivates me as a translator. Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound were so influential to Arabic modernist free verse poets, but why was the exchange one-way? Stetkevych’s critique gets at that, suggesting the onus be placed on the translator.
I also think about how Huda said a great translation should provoke readers back to the original. Frankly, I am juggling always between the instrumentalization of Arabic literature as a proxy for raising awareness of a culture misunderstood and just studying and translating Arabic literature for literature’s sake.
AT: Are there misconceptions or stereotypes that persist about Arabic literature in translation?
AJN: Anything that has to do with Arabic will invariably be accompanied by misconceptions amongst the public. We are still living in a world where Arabic is stereotyped as a language of ugly incomprehensible violence. This has to do with old Hollywood depictions of villains in turbans who snarl at their victims but also the continuous vilification of Arabs in the U.S. media.
In a beautiful 2016 article titled “Is Arabic Untranslatable?” Robyn Creswell argues that mainstream news outlets, notably The New York Times, have propagated the historic reality of Arabic as untranslatable by rendering the actually poetic eloquence of Bin Laden as an orator into “gobbledygook.” This seems peculiar to Arabic since we have already seen how books of Japanese poetry—haiku, for example—or even Persian (Rumi, albeit the watered-down versions) rendered into English exude a sort of attraction, whereas Arabic provokes a backlash, a real hesitation or reluctance, that it is too foreign, not worth the effort, daunting. I think this is strongly linked to politics.
So if translation is both art and politics, the central task of a translator becomes affirming the bare translatability of the language into English. What Creswell means by translatability is al-bayan, or the Arabic word for eloquence, which can serve as a model for English translators, whose versions might seek to elucidate rather than provide “accurate, literal” subtitles.
AT: You’ve long been situated at an intersection of several linguistic crossroads. You speak and read English, French, and Arabic. How would you describe your relationships to these languages? Are there moments in which your experience of one language is mediated by echoes of another?
AJN: If by mother tongue we mean the language that my mother spoke to me growing up, then French is my mother tongue. It’s the language I used growing up to cajole my mom into letting me sleep over at my best friend’s house after she’d already said no three times in English. I wonder if she was aware that French touched her more than English?
We tend to think that children of immigrants from non-European countries receive the lion’s share of bullying—I think it’s largely true of my Indian friends growing up. French, it’s assumed, carries colonial power and prestige. But in the Bostonian suburb where I grew up, anyone who was too tall, dark, short, fat, nerdy, poor, near-sighted, who did not conform to a certain type stripped of all originality, was crucified in a testosterone-filled landscape of bullies and the bullied. Desperately wanting to be cloaked in the cape of belonging, I vacillated between both roles, hushing my mom for speaking to me in French publicly and shamefully mocking others who were also different.
As I started to seriously wrestle with my upbringing and relationship to language, I noticed that my mother and I reversed roles. She stopped speaking to me in French, much to my grandmother’s (mamy’s) dismay, and I started wanting her to speak to me more in that language.
Arabic, on the other hand, is the language of my ancestors on my father’s side that was lost during the U.S. assimilation process. I started learning it in college. I must be honest and say that “fascination” with the Middle East shown through the news—the wars and car bombs and drone strikes—was part of my initial connection to Arabic. But was there nothing about the bits of dust from the sport coat lint dancing in the air that I inhaled growing up, that made me feel deep down in my lungs that I was Lebanese? Maybe it was the several times I walked into my grandmother’s kitchen and melted in the ambrosial waft of olive oil, toasted pine nuts, vermicelli pasta, and other spices that comprised her hushwi dish? Actually, I think it was precisely the lack of Lebanese culture in my environment that served as my main impetus for learning Arabic six years ago.
Today my American-accented Arabic sprinkled with Egyptian and Jordanian colloquialisms has evolved more into a Lebanese dialect as a result of being in Beirut over the past year and a half. On top of that, I fell in love with a strong-willed Lebanese artist from a village tucked between the sea and the mountain. We read a lot of Nizar Qabbani and speak a lot of Arabic together, but especially when parking the car, cooking, and cursing. Does falling in love with certain people or things arise from a psychological absence?
AT: How do your different relationships to languages affect your sense of belonging to a place? Where is home for you?
AJN: I don’t know where home is. Maybe it is Boston, but it might be Lebanon, or Belgium, and God knows where it will be in a few years from now. I no longer have my life measured out with coffee spoons. Like Naguib Mahfouz said, “Home is where all your attempts to escape cease.” I’m still trying to run away from something, although I don’t really know what.
AT: You started off as a freelance journalist, covering humanitarian aspects of the Syrian war and later the October 2019 Uprising in Lebanon. How did you move from your journalistic work to doing a master’s in Arabic language and literature at the American University of Beirut? To what extent does your experience in journalism nourish your current interests in literature and translation?
AJN: My goal has always been to use literature to nourish my reporting, although I think the exchange goes both ways.
The first act of serious journalism I performed was when I shadowed renowned Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa my freshman year at Davidson College when he was on a tour in the United States thanks to my professor Rebecca Joubin. In public, Khaled maintained his typical jovial character. Behind closed doors, I saw the sadness in his eyes as he explained to me his longing for a Syria before the war ripped it apart. When Khaled left, his choice to return to Syria catalysed a research question: Who is the large group of Syrian artists who cannot return because of the state’s crackdown of dissidents? The following summer, in 2018, I received a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant to cover the return of ISIS fighters in Kosovo. Literature has always been very important for contextualizing and informing my stories.
Upon graduating in the spring of 2019, I was lucky enough to travel to Egypt as part of a year-long Arabic fellowship (CASA). Two days before taking off, I attended a musical called We Live in Cairo with my mom in a small Cambridge theatre that helped me recall the horror of Regeni, the young Italian researcher murdered by the state’s thugs, and of what can happen if one dives too deeply. These fears were coupled with accounts from Egyptian journalist friends, so I stayed as far away from politics and news as possible. That didn’t last for long and I ended up traveling to Lebanon over the winter break and reporting on the country’s massive anti-government protest movement for the Associated Press.
But back in Egypt, being in a situation where I couldn’t actively report, I spent afternoons and weekends café-hopping, reading books for class, surrounded by old men gurgling hookahs amidst the backdrop of Qur’an recordings. That was when I first internalized the intimate connection between literature and culture that motivates me today: in other words, I believe literature is the conduit to the deepest understanding of society. But of course, you have to engage people, too.
I was reading Qandil Um Hasehm—problematic as it may be in setting up a modern West opposed to an ignorant East narrative—by Yahya Hakki. In the novel, there is a lot of talk about the intercessory power of Saint Zainab, about going to a shrine and praying on her behalf to perform miracles, which I thought was forbidden in Islam. The novel allowed me to ask questions to Egyptian friends about religion, intercession, mysticism, and a whole range of topics that I would never have thought of had I not read the novel. This informed my experience and understanding of the plurality of Arab thought and led me to pursue a master’s in Arabic literature at the American University of Beirut in my forefather’s homeland, seeking to connect even more deeply with language, culture, and my own roots.
At the end of the day, the goal is to become a writer. Both George Orwell and Gabriel García Márquez were journalists, so the boundaries are more blurred than we think. I use reality to inform my writing, and I am waiting for the day when I will publish my own book, when the world will validate my parking ticket, and I can say that I’ve finally arrived.
AT: Between the journalistic and the literary, where would you situate your heart right now?
AJN: You really know how to ask the questions that torment my soul and keep me up at night! But I thank you for giving me the space to elaborate. Is it possible to say both? What do you mean by the journalistic and what do you mean by the literary? Are these boundaries not in constant renegotiation? Is a medieval Arabic khutba, a sermon, part of the literary? Is Arabian Nabati oral poetry part of the literary? Does a profile on Qaddafi’s son in the New York Times Magazine by Robert F. Worth count strictly as journalism or can we consider this literary? What happens when Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature or when Egyptian writer Ahmad Nagi is put on trial for breaching public morality after publishing the colloquial vulgar word for vagina (kuss) in a story that appears in a famous Arabic literary journal? Are these people literati (udabāʾ)? When Ursula Lindsey and Marcia Lynx Qualey host Arab authors as part of their Bulaq Podcast, is that literary?
What I am trying to raise is that as much as we think we must be pigeonholed into one of these two fields, I wholeheartedly believe one can do both and that the definitions around the literary and the journalistic are constantly evolving. If anything, literary training will only make me a better journalist, and vice versa. The biggest different perhaps lies in the framing: to write a novel, you have to go way slower and be more alert to experience and how it unfolds.
AT: Lebanon has been through so much tumult and pain in the past few decades, to say the least. And yet there continues to be an absence of official memorialization of the Lebanese Civil War, whether in the form of monuments or history textbooks. Living in Beirut now and witnessing first-hand the aftermath of the port explosion in 2020, do you see contemporary Lebanese literature as marked by the violence of collective trauma? What role can literature play in coming to terms with, mourning, or even exorcising this pain? Do you believe in a “cure through art,” as the writer Racha Mounaged said in your interview with her?
AJN: Chickens always come home to roost. The collective trauma of the civil war was never properly dealt with because of the absence of memorialization you mentioned. In some ways, the explosion was a result of thirty years of negligence and corruption among the civil warlords who eventually made up the political class. Now I see it as incumbent upon every Lebanese writer and artist to react to August 4—it was too seismic not to react—and so many creatives are still responding to it. Unfortunately, the work of artists and thinkers tends to be generally removed from the public, which might explain why there are larger turnouts for anti-vaccine protests than anti-corruption demonstrations, and this is a global trend I’ve observed.
Regarding trauma, it’s very individualized and I’m no expert at all on the subject. Those I feel the most for are the families of the victims who still have not reached justice. Art might work for some. For others, they can only begin to heal through escape, but then they encounter an entirely different pain, the sort of exilic pain. I want to say that I have seen positive developments in my generation though, in terms of fighting back against the terrible system inherited from their parents as well as a melancholic spiritual condition. Recently, I have been invited to take part in a Lebanese Civil War Documentary Watch Party moderated by a young Lebanese activist and comic book artist who ensures that it’s a safe space with zero tolerance for bigotry. These things can’t help but inspire.
AT: Many works from Lebanon translated into English have to do with the traumatic aftershocks of the Lebanese Civil War and its unspeakable violations. I’m thinking, for instance, of Elias Khoury, Hoda Barakat, and Rashid el Daif. Is this a consideration for you when you’re thinking about what texts you’d like to translate into English? What other factors do you consider? Do you feel a certain responsibility to Lebanese literature or any pressure to speak on behalf of Lebanon?
AJN: I feel a certain responsibility to raise awareness about Lebanon to people in the United States. In terms of translating, my main criterion is that I have to like the text. When you’re young like me, you have to say YES to all opportunities that come your way before you can be in a position to selectively translate. Luckily, in reflecting back on my first book translation project (Threshold of Pain by Hassan Samy Youssef), I would always agree to working with the wonderful Rebecca Joubin. I am eternally thankful for her influence, instilling in me a love for teaching and a belief that translation is both art and a labour of love. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most thankless acts: you finish a book and few people seem to recognize how much toil went into it.
For example, after translating Threshold of Pain, we received little attention in the United States, despite Hassan Samy Youssef’s celebrated status in Syria and the Arab world, more broadly. I think this partially has to do with the small independent press that published it, but there are so many other factors for why and how books reach commercial success. As the famed scholar and literary translator Roger Allen said in a recent interview, there has been a serious diminution of interest in the publication of Arabic literary works in the United States, whereas British and European audiences seem more receptive.
Right now, since I have a bit of experience under my belt, my co-translator Nick Lobo and I are in the midst of considering whether to publish Rachid el Daif’s historical novel Paving the Sea with a mainstream or a university press. The worry is that with the latter it won’t be read by many.
AT: What was the process of translating Threshold of Pain by Syrian Palestinian novelist Hassan Sami Yusuf in collaboration with Rebecca Joubin and Nick Lobo? Why did you choose that work? Were there parts you found difficult to translate—untranslatable, even?
AJN: I chose this work because it was presented to me by Rebecca. The work is a semi-autobiographical tale of the Palestinian-Syrian screenwriter Hassan Samy Yusuf about his experience of bearing witness as a Palestinian to Syria’s war. It’s about love, the Kafkaesque realities of the security apparatuses in Assad’s Syria, the lonely life of a writer, and the forced separation of family members, among many other themes. The most difficult parts to translate were a few lines of pre-modern Arabic by the egomaniacal tenth-century Arab poet Al-Mutannabi. Sometimes, I turned to Facebook and engaged both a scholar-translator community and native speakers. Award-winning translator Jonathan Wright administers a page, where he posts translation questions all the time. By the way, he also worked for years as a journalist for Reuters, which demonstrates what I said earlier about the journalistic and the literary.
AT: Which Lebanese—or perhaps Levantine—writers should be better known in the Anglophone world, and why?
AJN: Charif Majdalani’s Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse (translated by Ruth Diver), if you want to know about a certain type of collective Lebanese experience and the explosion. Alawiya Sobh, the Lebanese novelist whose books are banned in most Arab countries, just finished her fifth novel she spent a decade writing—Ann Ta’ashaq al Hayat (To Love Life). It marks a turn from her past writings focused on issues of gender and patriarchy towards exploring forms of religious fundamentalism plaguing Arab society. Adonis, the modernist poet who redefined Arabic poetry in many ways, is well-known but I am not sure about his equally if not more avant-garde contemporary poets such as Unsi el Haj or Shawqi Abi Shaqra. Rabee Jaber should be more translated—part of the reason is because he avoids the spotlight at all times. Rashid el Daif has been translated and his works have reached the status of world literature, but his more recent novels haven’t, at least in English, which surprises me. I think he has one of the most serious writing projects. Do you know how much he reads both before he writes and while writing? I think el Daif read over a dozen autobiographies—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hisham Sharabi, Mahmoud Amin El Alem, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others—before he wrote his autobiography Al-wah or Tiles, which won Lebanon’s 2018 Ministry of Culture Prize for Arabic Fiction. I talked about the faux pre-modern-modern divide earlier; he is one of the rare people who truly have one foot in both worlds.
AT: If you could have dinner with any three writers or translators, living or dead, who would you choose?
AJN: Obviously I am going to choose deceased writers because I still hold onto the illusory hope of having dinner with some of my favorite living writers and translators.
So I would use a time machine to have taboule, kibbe, and a glass of ‘arak with the famous Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi who was apparently very hospitable and would demystify the claim that Lebanese are Phoenician; the American writer Flannery O’Connor whose short stories about the American South first turned me onto writing and sent chills down my spine; and the mysterious female poet Sufi Rabia al Basri who left a rich teaching of Divine love.
AJ Naddaff is a journalist and Arabic-to-English literary translator based in Beirut, Lebanon. In addition to reporting for the Associated Press, he’s written for the Washington Post, the Intercept, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Columbia Journalism Review, among others. He tweets: @ajnaddaff.
Alex Tan is an assistant editor (fiction) at Asymptote.
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