In recent years, the work of Moroccan poet and writer Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941–1995) has received increasing attention, both in Morocco and abroad. One of the cofounders of Souffles/Anfas, the influential journal of culture and politics established in 1966, Khaïr-Eddine played a major role in the renewal of Moroccan and North African literature. His practice of what he called “linguistic guerrilla warfare” is based on the distortion of French language and the use of unconventional and subversive imagery. Some major features of Khaïr-Eddine’s unruly prose and poetry are generic hybridity, acerbic political critique, anti-authoritarian spirit, and the celebration of his native Amazigh (or Berber) land and culture. Most of his works, published with Editions du Seuil in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, have long been out of print.
The recent (and long-awaited) surge of interest in Khaïr-Eddine’s oeuvre is due in large part to the work of dedicated and passionate translators, including Conor Bracken and Jake Syersak. The former translated Khaïr-Eddine’s first poetry collection Scorpionic Sun (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019). The latter co-translated with Pierre Joris Khaïr-Eddine’s masterpiece Agadir (Lavender Ink / Diálogos, 2020) and translated three of his other works: I, Caustic (Litmus Press, 2022), Resurrection of Wild Flowers (OOMPH! Press, 2022) and Proximal Morocco— (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). The following interview explores their relationship with Khaïr-Eddine’s work and illuminates the context, process, and challenges of their translations. It also addresses their most recent and future translation projects.
Khalid Lyamlahy (KL): What was your first exposure to Khaïr-Eddine’s work and why did you decide to translate it?
Conor Bracken (CB): I first encountered Khaïr-Eddine’s work in 2015, in Poems for the New Millenium IV: The University of California Book of North African Literature (2013). Pierre Joris recommended I look through it when I asked him where I might find francophone poetry to translate, and when I read the poems of Khaïr-Eddine’s in there, I felt an unmistakable urgency, a fierce need not just to get out whatever was inside the mind behind these poems but to communicate with someone. It was like I’d been grabbed and shaken. Up to that moment I hadn’t found that in francophone or French poetry, which felt stately or methodical or cerebral, but this struck me. Not like an idea flashing in the mind’s sky, but like I was a door that needed to be opened. I wanted to translate that sensation.
Jake Syersak (JS): I first discovered Khaïr-Eddine’s work through the few translations that Pierre Joris had included in the same volume. At the time, I was a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. It was 2016 and looking more and more likely that the extreme right was going to successfully worm its way into the United States presidency. It was distressing, to say the least. I remember sitting in the library there, thumbing through volumes of contemporary French poetry, searching for a translation project that I could make part of my exams. All of them seemed to me like such white noise in the current political climate. I wanted to find a meaningful project—one that might, in whatever meager way, contribute to the struggle against the rising tide of GOP-fueled populist xenophobia.
Khaïr-Eddine’s poems were exactly what I needed in that moment: laced with vitriol, unwilling to compromise, fiercely anti-authoritarian, and stretching the utopian limits of imagination. Everything clicked into place from there. I had spent the bulk of my academic career up to that point studying avant garde and experimental poetics, with an emphasis on Surrealism and its revolutionary potential. Khaïr-Eddine’s work opened me up to a whole new class of writers who saw that potential and applied it with all their strength.
KL: What was your level of familiarity with Moroccan/Maghrebi literature and politics before embarking on the translation? Did you use any resources to help you prepare the translation?
JS: Very close to zero. I think I had read some Abdellatif Laâbi here and there. And of course I knew of the Négritude poets, to whom Khaïr-Eddine and others of his ilk are indebted. Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio’s Souffles-Anfas anthology (Stanford University Press, 2016) was essential to a speedy contextual education.
CB: My level of familiarity with the literature at that point was low, though I had some familiarity with the political and cultural history of Morocco and the Maghreb writ large—my family lived in Rabat for a few years, and I visited and traveled several times, so had some experience with Moroccan places, landscapes, people, and culture. While I worked on Khaïr-Eddine’s book Scorpionic Sun, I read up on him as much as possible. I also delved more deeply into “les années de plomb”/King Hassan II’s rule, and read a lot about Souffles/Anfas, the journal founded by Abdellatif Laâbi that, coupled with various political actions and protests, led to the exile of Khaïr-Eddine, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and others, as well as to Laâbi’s long imprisonment. An invaluable resource was the critical anthology, edited by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio, on Souffles/Anfas.
KL: Conor, what was the translation process of Khaïr-Eddine’s 1969 poetry collection Soleil arachnide like? Did you work on each poem separately and/or move back and forth between the poems?
CB: Though the poems in Soleil arachnide aren’t what anyone would call straightforward, the process of translating it generally was. First I transcribed it into a Word doc, in part to be able to ctrl-F my way through it, but also to get a feel for the poems themselves—how they moved on their own, how they gained power and definition when placed side by side. Once I finished that, I translated linearly, working until a poem felt like it was in a good place before moving to the next. I repeated this process five more times, going front to back each time, over three years. Doing it this way gave me clear boundaries about where to start and where to stop, though translating longer poems like “Le roi” (“The King”) or “Soleil arachnide” (“Scorpionic Sun”) was challenging. If we think of translating as a kind of reconstruction, dismantling a building to rebuild it on different land, then doing that for these poems was like rebuilding a whole town. But it was valuable, as a translator, to feel the poems’ relentlessness, the incredible ferocious vigor that erected them and somehow had them balancing in the precarious air through sheer force.
KL: Jake, how was your experience of cotranslating Khaïr-Eddine’s novel 1967 Agadir with Pierre Joris? How did you split the work and what kind of conversations did you have while translating the book?
JS: Our process was pretty simple. I reached out directly to Pierre one day to ask him if he had caught wind of anyone already translating it. To my great surprise, he told me he had already translated about thirty to forty percent of it for an art exhibit in London. He had secured the rights to translate the book but hadn’t had time to finish it. He asked if I’d be interested in completing it and of course I said yes.
He had translated excerpts here and there throughout the book for the exhibit. I filled in the rest. We didn’t correspond much about it; I set to work and asked him the occasional question over email when I felt the need. I trusted his intuition with his portions and I think he trusted me with mine. I feel like we have similar tendencies when it comes to translation. This would make sense, considering his past translations had a profound effect on me and how I thought about translation in general. In some ways, it was a teacher-student collaboration. The odd thing about it all is I’ve still yet to meet him in person.
KL: You also translated Khaïr-Eddine’s 1975 poetry collection Ce Maroc!, his 1971 hybrid novel Moi l’aigre, and his 1981 poetry collection Résurrection des fleurs sauvages. To what extent is the translation of his poetry different from that of his prose? Did you work on different books at the same time?
JS: It’s a difficult question to answer because of course Khaïr-Eddine himself did not put much stock in distinguishing genres from one another. To him, writing was writing. Fiction, memoir, theater, reportage, history, poetry, manifesto—they all bleed together. I think that you have to attune yourself to this same mindset when translating any of his books. When it comes to Khaïr-Eddine, what looks like prose may read more like poetry and what looks like poetry may read more like prose. Every word is volatile. Every sentence he puts down is liable to explode into something else at any given time. It’s wild. It’s chaotic. It’s unpredictable. That’s the fun of it.
Exact timelines are somewhat fuzzy at this point, but I was working on all books to some extent, including Agadir, simultaneously. Of course, there were times when I concentrated on some more than others. But I would definitely switch back and forth. It helped me stay alert to his genre-jumping and general hybrid nature.
KL: When it comes to poetry collections, do you work on each poem separately and/or move back and forth between the poems?
JS: I usually begin with what poems please me most in the original French and then jump around. I definitely do not think of or work with any of his poems in isolation. I don’t think his mind worked that way. And I don’t think I should work that way either.
KL: Khaïr-Eddine’s poetry is notoriously challenging and includes a wide range of rare, unfamiliar, and scientific terms, especially for flora and fauna. How did you deal with this aspect? Were you in favor of adding a glossary to the translation even if the original version doesn’t include one?
JS: I’m opposed to glossing the texts. I don’t think they’re as challenging as they appear on the surface. Khaïr-Eddine’s goal with deploying these terms transcends their definition. He is signaling his solidarity with the literary techniques of past Symbolist, Surrealist, and Négritude poets—all of whom sought to defamiliarize the reader’s conception of reality. Examples abound. Many of the terms are lifted straight from Césaire. In Proximal Morocco—, Khaïr-Eddine even recycles Mallarme’s infamously cryptic ptyx.
More importantly, Khaïr-Eddine is using the words from his Moroccan homeland to foster a feeling of alienation and otherness in the reader—the same feelings he had as an exile. He wants them to wade knee deep in it, twist and turn through its muck, and confront it. Keep in mind the majority of his books first came to publication in France, not Morocco, and despite them overflowing with a Moroccan lexicon, Khaïr-Eddine himself did not gloss them for his French audience.
If a translator’s task is to responsibly steward the influence or what I often refer to as the “force” of a work into the contemporary moment—and I think it is—then glossing Khaïr-Eddine’s texts seems something of a betrayal to me. It would mean erasing the foreignness he originally embedded in his work. The transgressive nature of Khaïr-Eddine’s work can still resonate in the Anglosphere with all the same subversive and radical attitudes with which it burst onto the scene in French. Adding explanatory notes and definitions would silo his work to someone else’s experience, or, worse, to a particular time or place. Khaïr-Eddine is not ready to be relegated to the annals of history. He still has history to make.
CB: Initially, I was bewildered. Many I’d never encountered before. And my first inclination was that maybe I should soften them, make the text a bit less prickly. Thankfully, I came to understand how much they add in terms of intellectual, political, linguistic, and local texture to the poems themselves. Part of what I felt was going on with Khaïr-Eddine’s use of these was to demonstrate his vast grasp of different lexical registers; another, to evoke the flora and fauna of his surroundings with incontrovertible specificity; but the most important one, to me, was how a certain precision, in language, can end up placing distance between reader and experience. Language, like a shovel, is a tool. It is arbitrary. The moral dimension of its use has nothing to do with it, but its wielder. And the affective dimension of language is distinct from its semantic one, though it is often bridged by eventual familiarity. The first time you hear ranunculus without knowing what it is, you might not associate it with flowers or delicacy; you rely on sound to suggest something, and often those suggestions are incorrect or inexact. For this reason, I was in favor of having a glossary at the back of the book, so readers wouldn’t have to go too far to get some help in identifying certain terms, but so they’d encounter the words first, without glossing, and sit with the unfamiliarity, feel language at its limits and thus refresh, and trouble, their relationship with it.
KL: Conor, in your afterword to Scorpionic Sun, you write that Khaïr-Eddine’s poems “are aware of themselves as bodily phenomena, artifacts that emerge from and recompose themselves in a body”. Can you elaborate on the importance of this bodily dimension and the extent to which it influenced your translation?
CB: The corporeal aspect of the text was enormous to me, first in grabbing me and then in guiding me as I translated. I found it to be most present in the materiality of the text—the sound and vigor of the language itself—and in the imagery. Blood and vomit and milk abound, and bodies are dragged and prostrated and raised throughout. Bodies and their adjuncts are the medium through which much of the poems’ effects are communicated. And though the poems’ surreality often precludes neat narratives, they’re full of sensation, which the poems’ rhythms and thick sonic texture enhance. To me, this seemed like an especially central part of the project: that language and the body are thematically and physically connected. Poetry doesn’t just have to touch the minds and memories of readers, the abstract precincts inside us; it can, if not should, seize the reader’s body, by the ear and the tongue, and remind us that language affects bodies—in an immediate, sensory way, but also in the way that language as political instrument is used to police and bludgeon the bodies it aims to control.
KL: Jake, in a note at the end of I, Caustic, you highlight the “ecstatic energy” of Khaïr-Eddine’s work and describe its “sonic force” as “the lifeblood of the text”. Can you comment on these aspects and their importance for your translation?
JS: I, Caustic, like many of Khaïr-Eddine’s works, is only partially built from text. The rest of it is built from textual residues: implications, resonances, tones, frequencies, registers, dialects, double entendres, puns, noise, confidence, anger, humor, sadness, etc, etc.
It’s the combined momentum of these improvisatory residues that produce the lightning that is I, Caustic. You won’t catch the whole if you follow a tessellation or two. So I chose the thunder.
KL: Have you read each other’s translations of Khaïr-Eddine? What would be the differences, if any, between your respective approaches to Khaïr-Eddine’s work?
JS: I’ve read every other translation of Khaïr-Eddine, to the best of my knowledge, including those of Pierre Joris, Marilyn Hacker, Hédi Abdel-Jaouad, James Kirkup, Martin Wilmot Bennett, Nadia Benabid, Guy Bennett, Baba Badji, Zineb Riboua, and Gaelle Raphael. I hope I’m not forgetting anyone, but I probably am.
Many translations take a unique approach—it’s hard to compare myself to such a diverse and talented multitude. I can say that I’m drawn toward those translations that exude confidence, those that develop a compelling vision of what his poetry should be, do, or say. I like those translations best that are daring and full of bold choices, those that make no attempt to disguise and showcase those choices. I am less interested in translators that write as though they are sentient dictionaries.
CB: I have read some of them, yes. And it’s excellent that so much of Khaïr-Eddine’s bibliography will soon be available in English to jostle and cajole the target language and aesthetics. I’ve only read Agadir at this point in its entirety, and the largest difference in terms of our approaches would be paratextual—how do we frame the translation and the original for an audience fresh to both? Jake and Pierre were very hands off in Agadir (and to my understanding, Jake’s approach in other texts will be the same), in favor of letting the text, as an aesthetic phenomenon, make full, unmediated contact with the reader. My approach, as the glossary in Scorpionic suggests, is a bit more moderate, where the text still has a chance to speak for itself first, but can also be situated in the other contexts in which it was created—linguistic, sociocultural, historical, etc. Aside from this difference between treating the text as an aesthetic object or as one that is bounded/informed by the time and place it was made, I think we’re pretty similar in approach, with minor divergences on what rhythms, consonance, and images we foreground.
KL: How were your translations received in the United States and beyond? Do you see an increasing interest in francophone poetry in translation, and if so why?
CB: Like most poetry in translation, my translation didn’t make much of a splash, commercially speaking. But commercial success isn’t the metric, I think, for poems like Khaïr-Eddine’s. Many poet-translators whom I respect ended up reading the book, and based on anecdotal evidence, enjoyed it, which is exciting on a personal level, but especially an aesthetic one. To have work like Khaïr-Eddine’s—radical, triple-jointed, erudite, and unapologetic—in the United States bloodstream hopefully means we’ll see more work like it. The fact that the translation has featured on various syllabi for courses in translation and poetry, suggests this, too. I think it’s hard to say that there’s a big uptick in interest in francophone poetry specifically, but I would say that there’s an increase in people’s interest in poetry of Khaïr-Eddine’s type—incendiary, ravenous, political, abject, surreal, indefatigable. His work feels part of a larger, international conversation that includes poets like Raul Zurita, Kim Hyesoon, Joyelle McSweeney, and others, who approach poetry as an almost hallucinatory, but also politically engaged, practice.
JS: Honestly, I’ve been a little underwhelmed with the reception, despite Agadir having been nominated for the National Book Award in Translation, especially considering how intriguing Khaïr-Eddine’s life story is, in addition to his work. But that’s always the case with avant garde and experimental writing. These things can take a while to catch on. However, I have to say that there’s been plenty of people from more avant-leaning circles who’ve shown genuine excitement, and who’ve even extended very gracious helping hands in the publishing sector and beyond. I’m extremely thankful for their support and their service to literature of historic import.
As for the second half of your question, I’m not sure. It’s always tough in the United States to find homes for translated work. It’s as if Americans approach translation with a sense of distrust, as if it’s trying to trick the reader. To be more specific, there’s a very popular and dangerously misguided sentiment in the United States that a translation is a cheap, weak copy of an original. I’m not sure what it stems from—maybe some deeply-entrenched effect of capitalism, some internalized sense that if something isn’t “new,” that if something can’t be ascribed to the individual efforts of one person or has been passed down, shared, or changed possession, its worth is depreciated. I’m sure someone has thought this through more thoroughly—I’m just spitballing.
KL: What did you learn from translating Khaïr-Eddine and did his work somehow influence your own poetry?
JS: Momentum. I learned to love the propulsion forward more than the looking backward.
CB: It’s been very influential. A lot of what I learned and applied in my own work was attitudinal—don’t apologize, be brash, elliptical, ferocious, abject, angry, prolix. His work affirmed my own work in terms of sound and music being central, but also opened it up in allowing it to be more aggressive and surreal in tackling political subject matter, while allowing for some hermeticism, and self-implication.
KL: You are both poets and poetry editors. Do you agree with the dictum that only poets can translate poetry?
CB: Not necessarily. It’s true that when poets translate poetry they pay attention to different things than, say, an historian or visual artist might pay attention to. But poetry is so rich, almost inexhaustible in its particularity and sociocultural positioning, so every translation, so long as it is undertaken with care and attention, will convey something vital and interesting about the poem. I am, in all honesty, more drawn to translations of poems by poets, because of their focus on texture, image, sound, etc., but I learn, too, from different translation versions, as well as an approach to reading and translation that invites more versions. The more the better, in my view.
JS: I don’t think that only poets can translate poetry. By that logic, I’d have to also believe that only poets can write poetry. I often find it in unexpected places.
KL: Jake, you’ve also translated the Tuareg poet Hawad. How do you select your translation projects? And is it important to work on poets from different areas and backgrounds?
JS: I selected both Hawad and Khaïr-Eddine’s work because of my interest in Surrealism and the many forms it takes. Both authors have extended and applied its principles in fascinating ways. I would say it’s important to feel passionate about whatever you’re translating. It can’t hurt to translate a multitude of different writers. You’re bound to discover new techniques, cultural perspectives, and approaches to language, among other things.
KL: Conor, you’ve translated two poetry collections by Haitian poet Jean d’Amérique (the first, No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace, came out in 2022 with Ugly Duckling Presse), and more recently Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun’s early poems. How do you select your translation projects? Is it important to work on poets from different generations and backgrounds?
CB: As I’ve spent more time translating and more time seeking poets to translate, the thing that most entices me is a particular kind of relationship to language. One that is suspicious, playful—not just for the sake of play but for the sake of reenergizing language and the reader’s relationship to it, so we understand that it is at once arbitrary and miraculous, powerful and misused, and that there are other, sometimes better, generally exhilarating ways to use it. It makes some intuitive sense to me that poets like Khaïr-Eddine and D’Amérique use language this way: as inheritors of its riches through the polluted waterways of colonialism, and as poets who are all too aware of the price of transmission, they use it critically. Brilliantly, and coruscatingly, but also always in a leery way. They break it open again, as they do the scabs of history, and make their readers think about what familiarity and distraction allow us to forget. I do think it’s important to translate across time and backgrounds, in part because of how it can reveal to the target language audience the richness beyond their own borders, but at the heart of it all, translation for me is about finding other writers dis- and rearticulating language so that it can better convey what has, what is, and what might happen, not just what we wish was happening.
KL: What are you working on at the moment and what are your future projects?
CB: At the moment I’m finishing up translations of work by Jean D’Amérique and Tahar Ben Jelloun and doing preliminary work on my next project. One of my guiding principles in selection has been this quiet pet project of mine. My father worked for the United States government in a capacity that had us overseas quite a bit. I want to offset the kind of pro-United States boosterism and info-gathering his work entailed with translations of radical poets from each of the countries he worked in. Right now, I’m looking at poems by Abdoulaye Mamani, a Nigerien poet and politician, and hopefully a novel by the Algerian writer Malek Haddad. I’ll also be working soon on translations for a forthcoming anthology of poems by contemporary Haitian female writers, as well as on a novel by the Congolese writer and artist Sinzo Aanza.
JS: Right now, I’m trying to find time to work on Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s early novel Le déterreur. It centers around a protagonist who has been condemned to death for unearthing and eating corpses. Sick of being treated as an object of consumption by the political order and prevailing ethic perpetuated by industrial society, he decides to resist by adopting that implicit ethic explicitly—deciding to become the consumer. It’s equal parts fascinating and darkly humorous.
I’ve also been working on an unpublished collection of Khaïr-Eddine’s poetry that his surviving son, Alexandre, recently sent me. It was written shortly before his death in 1995 and is called Quasars.
I’m working a lot slower these days. But after translating and finding publishers for four of his full-length works in less than four years, I’m pretty ok with that.
Conor Bracken is a poet and translator. He is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017) and The Enemy of My Enemy is Me (Diode Editions, 2021), as well as the translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019) and Jean D’Amérique’s No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022), which was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. A recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Community of Writers, the Frost Place, Cornell’s Institute for Comparative Modernities, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, he teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
Jake Syersak is the author of the poetry collections Mantic Compost (Trembling Pillow, 2022) and Yield Architecture (Burnside Review Books, 2018). He is also the translator of several books by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine: Agadir, Resurrection of Wild Flowers, Proximal Morocco–, and I, Caustic. He lives in Olympia, WA.
Khalid Lyamlahy is Assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Chicago where he teaches North African literature. His articles have appeared in PMLA, Research in African Literature, The Journal of North African Studies, and the Irish Journal of French Studies. He coedited Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond (Liverpool University Press, 2020) and translated into Arabic Felwine’s Sarr Habiter le monde: essai de politique relationnelle (Kulte, 2022). He is also the author of two novels, Un roman étranger (2017) and Évocation d’un mémorial à Venise (2023), both published by Présence Africaine Editions in Paris.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: