Posts filed under 'dialogue'

A clear sky so blue two bodies can bathe in sunlight: A Conversation with Hanaa Ahmad Jabr and Jennifer Jean about Where do you live?

October 1, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

I was translating life itself, each poem being written in the raw present, each a reply to another. . .

Where do you live? is a bilingual collection of collaborative epistolary poems between Iraqi poet Dr. Hanaa Ahmad Jabr (writing in Arabic) and American poet Jennifer Jean (writing in English), published earlier this year. Bridging language and borders, the collection begins and ends with the titular question, as two poets living in different countries exchange their “anger / at the way things are when they should be / better” with “one eye open / staring at the ruins of the old city,” while the “other eye is closed / hiding dreadful war scenes.” In this interview, I spoke with both poets on their collaboration, the revelations that come with the letter-writing form, and how literature serves to bridge distances.

Tiffany Troy (TT): The title of this collection is also that of the poems that begin and end the collection, and it is a provocative question because “Where do you live?” is similar yet completely distinct from “Where are you from?”. Here, where one lives becomes the space that one wants to embody. Can you speak to the decision to start the collection with the eponymous poem?

Hanaa Ahmad Jabr (HAJ): Every poem Where do you live? carries (whether directly or indirectly) an answer to that very question. When we chose this title for both my and Jennifer’s poem, it was a poetic decision, but also one that reflected deep reality; poetic, because the question reaches beyond mere geography, asking not only about place but also about the very essence of living—and reality, because between these two poems lies a rich, vivid life: one woven with memories, dreams, longing, exile, homeland, love, war, family, and friends. That’s why the collection had to open with “Where Do You Live?” for the English reader and close with “أين تعيش؟” for the Arabic reader.

Jennifer Jean (JJ): Since every poem appears in both languages, we spoke about the book being read from left to right for English readers, and also from right to left for Arabic readers. We even asked Arrowsmith Press to create two covers, one cover in English and—on what would be “the back” in America—another cover in Arabic. When I was a kid, these things were known as “flip books,” but the press wasn’t able to grant our wish due to technical difficulties. What remains of this wish is the placement of these title poems. The query in the title still opens and closes our “conversation in poems,” no matter the reader’s home language. Now that I think about it, these two poems are the furthest apart, but both explore the hometown of the heart and express the comfort of our conversations. As Hanaa says: “We are the two eyes together . . . forever.”

TT: In the epistolary-poetic tradition, prominent examples include Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, but in those relationships, the correspondence takes the form of letters rather than lyric poems. Can you speak about how you first embarked on the collaborative process, and how the need to translate back and forth added layers to that lyrical discourse? READ MORE…

Flowing Speech: On the Complexities of Audiovisual Translation

September 11, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

It’s really beautiful to get carried away by your emotions while translating.

Over the course of its four-season run, U.S. television show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend won acclaim and awards for its groundbreaking musical format, treatment of mental illness, and reinvention of romantic comedy tropes. Plus, it’s funny—really funny. Every episode contains jokes, quick banter, songs, and a slew of puns and double-entendres. Audiovisual translator Alicia González-Camino, who translated the scripts for Spanish dubbing, knew she’d have her work cut out for her. I spoke with González-Camino via email. Her responses to my questions, compiled below, illustrate her translation process and relationship to this project. Here she is, in her own words, discussing the show’s challenges and whether audiovisual translation counts as a literary art.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity and translated from Spanish.

—Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large for Argentina

As a translator, I started out doing any translation that fell into my hands, mostly technical, and it was so boring. I didn’t enjoy translating at all. Audiovisual translation, on the other hand, allows me to be more creative. I have fun translating, and I can feel proud of the result when I successfully make a scene or especially complicated speech flow well and sound natural. It’s a kind of translation where, on the same day, you can have animated drawings with rhymes and little made-up names, something with mafiosos, full of cursing, and something funny and comedic. And in my case, since I translate from five languages, you can also change from one language to another in one day. The result is that you can have really engaging days thanks to the variety.

Plus, in the case of dubbing, the translation comes to life in the voice of the actors. And if you’re lucky, a translation of yours can become part of the whole country’s vocabulary when a show or movie is really well-known and some phrase takes hold in the popular lexicon for posterity. That hasn’t happened to me yet with my translations, but leaving my footprint through language seems incredibly fun to me, in addition to being an honor.

I guess audiovisual translation is somewhat literary, because we’re all tied to a style we have to respect. We approach works that have existing souls and, in some sense, we create works with new souls that our respective audiences can understand, provoking the same emotions and reactions as the original.

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Translation Tuesday: “At the Hotel” by Tripura

September 3, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Goutam Piduri

Soft, dark, infant-faces. Secret fox-faces. The faces of a tiger, who had just killed a buffalo and was stripping it to the bone.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features a befuddling slice-of-life translation from the Telugu Writer Tripura. The movement of the dialogue is through a flow of floating statements and people that occurs over an hour in the dining room of a hotel. As if the hotel itself is listening, snippets of conversation drop readers into mid-century southern India. The effects of modernism inform the layout of this story, and the semi-public space of the hotel demonstrates the use—and imposition—of English in speech, as well as the untranslatable cultural particulars of the Telugu. It is a statement to the density of subjectivity and the messiness of codes. Sparse narration and memorable voices place the reader well within the confines of a time of great change and exploration in this genre-bending piece. 

At the Hotel

Eight in the morning. The patter of rain above. Wet inside.

“My pop said he’d bury me if I did shit like this. Brainless.”
“That’s old people, ra. These old hags need to be shot by a firing squad, like Hitler
massacred the Jews.”
Empty cups in front, cigarettes at the ends of lips.

#

“Have you guys read Dharma Bums?”
“Leave it. These Beatniks are just rootless fellows. The Angry Young Men seem better.”
In the cups, coffee getting cold.

#

“Fucking idiot. Said there was no touching the file if I didn’t give him a tenner. And a kid, an upstart to boot. Got him to sign it after throwing the ten at his idiot face. What to do. Can’t die, no.”
“Idiots nowadays are like that only. Work’s done only if the money’s in their hands.”

Empty idli plates on the table. The first man’s pockets are searched for a beedi. READ MORE…

In Conversation: Lesley Saunders on translation, poetic collaboration and creating new writing with refugees

May 31, 2017  |  in Translator's Profile  |  by Theophilus Kwek

I think there’s a place opening up where poet-translators can have a kind of collective presence

Lesley Saunders has published several books of poetry, and a new collection Nominy Dominy is due out from Two Rivers Press next year. She has won several awards for her poetry, including the inaugural Manchester Poetry Prize, the Stephen Spender Award for poetry in translation and The Poetry Business 2016/17 International Book & Pamphlet Competition; she is currently working on a book of translations of selected poems by the acclaimed Portuguese writer Maria Teresa Horta. Find our more about her work at www.lesleysaunders.org.uk

Theophilus Kwek (TK): Congratulations on winning the 2016 Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation with your lovely translation of Poema by Maria Teresa Horta! In your commentary, you write about that striking central image of the poem—a ‘prowler-intruder’—which, as compared to Hughes’ ‘thought-fox’, is felt rather than seen. Did you face any challenges in rendering such a tactile ‘muse’ in a different language?

Lesley Saunders (LS): This is a really hard question! I’m very much guided, in my translation, by a text I’ve come across quite recently: James Underhill’s Voice and Versification in Translating Poems, which is wonderful – and which I first discovered by being asked to review it. I started reading the book more out of duty, then was completely captivated by how Underhill describes the difficult but not impossible challenge of translating poetry.

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The Tiff: How Should We Review Translations?

October 21, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Maia Evrona and Sue Burke

Sue Burke and Maia Evrona on the ideal review for a translation—and the tendency to forget the translator entirely.

Sue Burke: The book review said that Angelica Gorodischer “writes poetic, vigorous prose.” Yes, she does. And she doesn’t – that is, I wrote the poetic, vigorous prose.

I’m the translator for Gorodischer’s novel Prodigies, published this year by Small Beer Press. The review was in Kirkus. At least it listed me as the translator and it was favorable, even if it wasn’t ideal.

What would be an ideal review for a translation? While any book review has to cover a lot of ground, at some point I think it ought to explicitly acknowledge that the work being reviewed is a translation and mention its apparent approach, since a translation in some way rewrites the original. If possible, it might compare a passage of the original to the translation and note whether the translation wrestles successfully (or not) with linguistic and cultural challenges, captures its literary quality like elegance or immediacy or wit, and accurately conveys both the meaning and subtext.

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