Talking with Robin Moger about ‘Traces of Enayat’
Claudia Marzollo
How did you come to translate Traces of Enayat?
Robin Moger
So the story as I remember it is that I used to live in South Africa before I came to Catalonia, and I was in England for another reason. I was in the British Library, I think, working on something. I was writing to Iman about something else, and she said: I'm doing this book and I've got a draft and I'm not sure about it, would you read it? She basically sent it to me to read. I read it that afternoon, and it was amazing. I did what I sometimes do anyway, on the basis that translation is a way of reading: I started translating it, and then I just translated all of it. I spoke to Iman and I said: this is fantastic and very moving. It was slightly different to how it is now, but it was basically the same book. She fiddled with a few things, some of them she's spoken about, because the French translator, Richard Jacquemond, had noticed some spatial problems in points where she was like: “I walked here and here” and he told her that it was impossible.
It was translated before it came out in Arabic. And then after that it kind of went through cycles of editing between me and Iman where we were treating it like a text in that sort of liminal space where it's not for publication but then it also sort of is. And that’s quite a nice place to be, where you're treating it as a text without certain kinds of ‘professional pressures’ from an actual publisher's editor or agents.
So initially my work on the book was part of a conversation with Iman, and I don't know whether she meant me to translate it. I had translated stuff for her before, and I wasn’t even trying to get it, but it would be true to say that I read it and I thought it was incredible. One of the nested interests I have is generational change, and especially with that generation of writers. The part of the book that deals with Iman herself – that whole strand of the book about being an Egyptian writer from her generation and then leaving Egypt – is in a meta kind of way one narrative of that generation which is interesting to me. Texts from the 80s and 90s, and how they interact, is this space that's fraught with a lot of romance in the proper way, so with muscularity and sadness and disappointment. Inside my own personal reading project, Iman’s book was a missing text. It was perfect for that, because it reaches out. It's not self involved. In my head, it was positioning this generation in relation to precedents, and the great critics of the 70s, and those bastards like Anis Mansour for example. The book paints a picture of that world that is so visceral, and if you’re more into that world and know more about it, it is very meaningful, but it seems to me that the book has got so much texture that the dynamics that are taking place are very immediately understandable. And I think that's how she builds the world that you have in the book: by not describing everything, but those kinds of relationships tell you everything. They almost tell you how these people smell.
Georgia
I definitely was the kind of reader that had no prior knowledge of the generation that you described. I have read The Stillborn, that's the only other reference I have, but I agree with what you say here. There's a very immediate sense of understanding and familiarity, even for someone that has very little knowledge of the context.
You mentioned a little about the process of collaborating with Iman and having translated her previously. I was wondering if you could talk to us a bit more about working together with her on this text, because you said before that it has been a really positive experience. How involved was Iman in the English translation? How involved was she in the word choices, and how closely did you collaborate?
Robin Moger
I think a good way of approaching this answer is that Iman is someone I've worked with for a very long time, on and off, whom I only knew after I left Egypt, which is actually the case with a lot of people. I didn't know them when I lived there, and sometimes they weren't there, as in the case of Iman. I did a couple of texts for her, fifteen years ago now, and they were given to me. I didn’t really know who she was, I had only read some of her poems. But in the case of Egyptian literature, because everyone knows each other, you have a sort of ghost reputation, you're a sort of ghost of the feast. So even if I'm working with a new author, they kind of know me through having talked to other people. So there's an idea, a sort of shadow of, not respect exactly, but I'm not a stranger, although I'm a new person. And everyone has their manner, and Iman is, of all the people I work with, one of the most present in the process. For a start, on the most rudimentary level, she reads English and she can have an opinion on the English. But also, like any kind of relationship of any sort, you have your particular rhythm with a person, and we're used to each other. So although I'm bringing your question down a level, I think of it as a very procedural thing: when I work with Iman it happens in a particular way. She always asks when she's not sure, she's very detailed. She really wants to know: ‘why have I used this word?’, even when, to me, there is no other choice. She's very, very detailed. And then over time, she has become more relaxed, so she doesn't have to question everything. Sometimes she'll say that she doesn’t like something, a sentence for example. It doesn't sound right to her in English. And sometimes I'll say that no, it's good English, it's fantastic. And sometimes she'll say that it's not what she is trying to do, she might even say to forget the Arabic, because she doesn't like the way it comes across in English. So that’s an interesting way to look at it. She's very aware that sometimes that can happen, even though in a book like Traces of Enayat (but really in all her prose writing), there's a real unity of tone, or a control of tone, however many registers or tones she moves through. It's quite affectless writing it seems to me; in some ways it's quite tonally neutral. Its effects are by juxtaposition and subtlety, and it's got humour in it, but it never becomes over the top. There are no actual moments to laugh out loud, they're not constructed like jokes, but they're placed there. And she's aware of the ways in which, even though the Arabic might be tonally consistent, the text is not stable and fixed, so it has a potential to change in English. And she might see something in the translation that opens a possibility of changing the effect of that paragraph. But these are quite subjective impressions of mine about what happens when we talk. Also there’s a constant revision. In Traces of Enayat there are always far more layers of working and reworking and dabbling on words and stuff. A classic Iman phrase is – ‘I've been thinking about this and I don't like it’ – about her own text. She'll say: ‘I never liked it. I wrote it, but I don't like it. I think it shouldn't be in there.’ And she'll just take a paragraph out of the Arabic. So she's very inside her text still.
Claudia Marzollo
I like that, what you just said. When you're reading the book, it does feel like it's a text that is changing and constantly going in different directions. And then it all sort of comes together. But there are layers, and it builds, and it is a type of work that I have never really read before. It defies categorization. I was wondering, how was that? Translating something so fluid, not easily categorisable?
Robin Moger
I think two things in answer to this. This is a book that in its existence in English has been captured by the frames and terminology of the English language book world, and so by this idea of uncategorisableness, which I completely understand, and it's a good way to talk about it. But a lot of the writing of her generation and contemporary writing in Arabic can be like that, it’s a format. I think if people thought about it harder they’d see that it's not so strange, and it does exist in English. It's just that that stuff doesn't tend to occupy the same place in the book market in the English language world that this book might be able to, paradoxically. And the second thing is, I think a lot of that effect is not structural, although the structure is very important in this book and what it's doing, but it's also tonal. So even within a passage there are lots of little voices that seem to almost make it up to the surface. It’s so new, it's so carefully modulated so that you never quite get a hook on anything. That is my own explanation of the effect that the book has. When big breaks come they're very unfamiliar. That whole section when she goes out to her writing shed and starts chatting to all the dead women poets who cut off their hair, for example, would almost certainly have been ironed out of an English language text. And it was very nearly ironed out of this one. It has an effect of strangeness. But one way to look at it, which is a bit problematic to say, but there's a grain of truth in it, is to look at the editing culture in Arabic, which is maligned and talked about a lot by Arabic translators because they say there is no editing done in the Arabic and they have to do it. Which is partly true, but there’s also a freedom to do things with form and to push and to put in strangeness which is, of course, only strange when measured against the set of frames and limits that are imposed. A passage like that is very exciting and accessible, it’s not difficult. She goes into a shed and talks to women poets, and it’s ostensibly bonkers, but very human, and she is talking in this slightly forced register to them. It's almost not a passage about them, it's really about Iman, chatting quite hard at a load of dead poets and having opinions about them. And it's wonderful. It's about her and it’s not a history lesson. But that’s also, in a sense, a queasy truth about the book, which is that it doesn’t exactly have an ego at the center of it, but the indomitable spirit is Iman’s, not Enayat’s at all, because Enayat is not in the book as someone who succeeds. It's sad, but she's not extraordinary. Love and Silence isn't unambiguously a good book. It's an extraordinary book, but Iman very carefully says why it was important to her, and the reason it was important. The strong reason she gives is that there was a pressure to create for herself a literary heritage that she owns in this marketplace of avant-garde communist poets, and to reclaim something from society itself, almost at any price, and to find strangeness. The person who makes the book interesting is Iman. The book itself, is it interesting? That’s a more difficult thing to say.
The big problem for me was translating the passages from Love and Silence. The editor at And Other Stories said they had a problem with these, they didn’t think they were very good, they couldn't see how the book could be based on the idea that these passages were extraordinary when they didn't feel like they were. It feels then like there’s a sort of hole at the centre of the book. I think that perhaps the translation might be less brave than the original book. The Enayat passages, although translations of the book, have the real stamp of who an Enayat was, which was a woman almost completely isolated in literary terms, and as a result, a very immature writer. She wasn't a huge reader of Arabic, and her influences were people like Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, who has had some translations published and was very influential and popular especially amongst young women and young men. His writing was romantic and rich, and he broke some social taboos about romance. But they're not very good books, if you really want to be honest. They didn't break any taboos, otherwise they wouldn't have been published. However, there is something slightly bonkers about Enayat’s writing, something off-kilter and really genuine and yearning, very painful. It's hard to look at, it's something very profound and painful and really interesting and visceral and talented, and so my initial translation was so rich, because I wanted to try and get that. Then I had to make that not seem just crap, because it felt a bit icky, and a really unpleasant way to look at it is: that's why it sat in that drawer. And of course, that's not true. But maybe those were slightly strange-ified or made more heightened, a little bit more complicated and odd, so that it had this effect.
Georgia
Was there a moment where you got that sense of finally cracking the code? You're talking about how the particular tone of the Love and Silence passages was difficult to crack, but at the same time, you have also spoken a lot about how there's a multiplicity of voices in Iman’s writing already, so there seems to be a lot of different tones that you had to find. Was there a moment where it all clicked, where it made sense? Or did that remain an ongoing process?
Robin Moger
There were lots of periods where I thought, I've cracked it, and then two months later I was changing it, and then thinking, ‘now, I've cracked it’, and then two months later I was changing it. I think also I actually liked what I'd done with the passages, but I could tell there would be a problem, and I thought it would be better to put an editor or initial readers in the position where they're confronted with it and see what comes up, see whether it's persuasive. There were certainly lots of places where there are some strong registers. For example, some of the most difficult stuff, some of the stuff that you think about most because you want it to be good although it's quite dry, is the legal stuff where she starts talking about the laws. But it's actually incredibly good fun to write the laws out in English, because there is, for example, an official translation of the Egyptian laws that you can access, but it doesn't work. It's not a very good translation, and it also doesn't capture what's happening in the Arabic. It converts it into usable English with legal precision, but it doesn't capture the effective aspects of the language used in the law, which is precisely what Iman is interested in. It makes me think of the use of the Quran in texts when people write, because I've just been doing a thing by Golan Haji, who has written a piece called The Names of Love, and its central thing is a passage in the Quran where God takes Joseph out into the Sinai desert and obliterates a mountain in front of him, and turns it into dust because Joseph said, ‘we've talked through the burning bush, and now I want to see your face’, and God’s only response is to destroy a mountain in front of him. But the whole passage is riddled with Quranic quotes, and you can't use any existing translation because what Quranic translations do is they impregnate their translation with tafsir and theological decisions about what the grammar must mean. For an Arabic reader, the quotes are expanding the possibility of that verse, the qualities that hover around each word, and so your translation of the verse has to pull itself to match what they're saying about it. And that also goes back to what Iman does with Love and Silence, the actual book: the way it's translated is entirely shaped by what she says about it. For example, I think somebody called James Scanlon might be translating it, and 100% it won't look the same as my translation because in the context of the book there’s an internal conflict, how they have to occur to each other. I don't think it can look the way I translated it, because the way I translated it is a creation of events, as it were. It's Iman’s reading of it that must be clear, it must have that potential.
Georgia
You say that your translation of Love and Silence is associated with Iman's perspective on Love and Silence. I wanted to ask you about your relationship to Cairo, and whether it maybe changed through this text? To me, having never been to Cairo, reading Traces it really felt like I was getting Iman’s version of the city in a very personal and also very touching way. So I wanted to ask you how your relationship to the city influenced the translation, or how the translation then influenced your own existing relationships with Cairo.
Robin Moger
If I'm remembering, I'm actually thinking about Cairo, physical Cairo in the book, the City of the Dead for example. I was doing another text by a poet called Ahmad Yamani who has a poem about the City of the Dead. I just thought while I was translating it that this is also where Iman was. But Iman’s writing is so strong about it that I'm not trying to search in my head for that road I know and picture her going through it and trying to match it up. I let her create her passage. So it becomes a bit of a fairyland, it sort of melts one into the other, which I think is also what she does to herself. I can have two Cities of the Dead in my head. I can have three. I can have the one that I know, the bits of it I've seen, and how I know it must look, and then Ahmad Yamani's City of the Dead, which is almost on a kind of hilltop, it's like a Polish village somehow in my head, it's very cold, and there's mist. And then there's Iman’s journey. But seeing the photo in the book was always a shock. Seeing the photos of Iman in the family tomb where Enayat is, and realizing it was sunny, was odd. I didn't see it like that. All the colors were different, and so everything was different. Especially in Enayat’s case, it's so intimate and personal. It's such a web of people. Even the physical aspects of things, like her journey through the City of the Dead and talking about all the things she sees, it's so strongly creative of an image. Of course, as a translator you have to know what she's talking about. You have to make sure your translation doesn't somehow miss the physical reality, so maybe subconsciously that's happening anyway. But it's such a strong visual image, and it's almost like that's the one I want because it's important; it must look like that to me or feel like that to me for a reason, and you sort of trust the writing.
I think that interplay between what you might know and what is real is what happens. I quite strongly feel if someone who knows Cairo better than me, who lives there, is reading it, then it's going to create a different image, perhaps even a deeper one, because the potency of our image will be almost strengthened by being trembled with an even more physical constraint. But then there are other books I can think of where the places are chosen because they're so atmospheric in their reality that they become scenes for it. There are places in Iman’s book as well, especially the homes, which are very familiar, like the description of Nadia Lutfi’s home, and that club in Maadi as well, that feel like I'm remembering an absolutely real place, and the qualities of sound and the textures, they are very much drawn from reality. I think possibly in that case, it's hard to convey that. But I don't really care about that so much. There’s always this idea of what's lost in translation, but it's an odd way to look at reading and texts in general, the idea that that’s a loss. It's not, it's chance, it's your own path through life as a reader, and what reading is, and it's not something to fret about exactly. When you're little and you grow up reading, you don't really know very much about life, but you're reading about quite extraordinary things, and that tension is the point of it. There's nothing wrong with being strange. It must be explained, which is a common complaint, but you see it doing what I do.
Claudia Marzollo
You mentioned intimacy, and it felt like a very intimate book to me. The intimacy that gets created between Iman and Enayat is so intense that it felt like I was part of it at some point. And I was taken aback, because I thought, ‘wait, this is their relationship, it's not my relationship within Enayat’. And I was feeling like I was intruding into something very personal and very private. How did you feel about translating something like that?
Robin Moger
That’s such an interesting thing you say, first of all, isn't it? Because it's a trick of the writing. It's not intimate and personal and private: she's written a book about it. But it's a book about relating to things, and the fact that you see yourself in it is because it's not really a book about finding out who Enayat is. It's as muchba book about what it means to be curious and to look, and the motivations for looking. That's why I would say, again, it's about Iman, it's this ego, in the technical sense, driving it. What happens with Enayat is this queasy thing that we know from friendships and strong relationships we have in life, where we shape someone by expectations and by what we need. She is simultaneously describing a whole range of people who, in Enayat’s life, and after her death, used her, and she is trying to cut that away. But what she offers in place of that isn't the truth. She offers a better friendship or a different one that comes from a better place, maybe. And she acknowledges this in the book: would we have been friends? It's a fantastic passage, I think, if you come at it from that point of view, because it's really subtly an acknowledgement that she's offering a relationship that's purer, and that's purer because of her own uncertainties. She's not utilizing it. Although she’s made a book out of it. But she is saying, there's a power relationship in what I'm doing with Enayat, we're not the same, and it helps. We are the same and we're not the same, and it's this sort of pain.
I find the center of the book in that: the uncomfortableness. For example, I never found myself rooting for Enayat, exactly. At some point the book lets her go, long before the end. Enayat is dead, and she made one book. She got got by life, and Iman didn't. And that's one difference. There's a sort of necessary coldness in the book at some level: Enayat is being written about because Enayat is important to Iman, and she's important out of a very beautiful attempt to appreciate what has happened to this woman and what could have happened. But she repeatedly says: Enayat went her way, it's different. Maybe she will be happy, maybe she can be at peace. At one point I had a slight discussion with myself because I was almost uncomfortable with the fact that, at the heart of the book, which is intimate, there's something where, structurally, Enayat is a device as well. This isn't a criticism, but I think it's really brutal in that sense, really brutally honest. It's a really painful thing, and it also makes what Enayat went through, even in her death, genuinely obscene. The only thing she left was a book that's interesting, and the possibility of a new book and the possibility of a new relationship, but the book that Iman writes doesn't bring her back to life. None of those things ever end. There's no redemption for Enayat. There's only a very painful story, with a child and a husband.
That's the other thing as well, which is also in another book by Iman, Motherhood and Her Ghosts, this relationship between being a working writer and a mother, and your relationship with your children. This idea of what's important in life is something that Iman writes about so well. It's in this book as well for me, which may be bringing it from outside, but I think it's present. Iman is very careful. When she's talking about traveling to Egypt, she tells you why she can travel to Egypt. She's got a sabbatical, and it's part of real life. She's saying, for a reason I feel, that she's not free to disappear, she doesn't have enough money and freedom to abstract herself, it's not like Netflix, it's not entertainment.
Georgia
I think, also for me, that was one of the most compelling parts of the book, the fact that you really saw Iman as a researcher as well, undergoing this research process. You said that Enayat has no redemption, that she does not get redemption out of this book, but also, at the same time, this research endeavor doesn't get any easy answers. I really appreciated that. I also found that there's a part of the book where Iman talks about her own belongings and her own archive, and about looking for Enayat’s very elusive personal archive. I really like this development from searching for this elusive personal archive that Iman hopes will have all of the photos and all of the answers – all of this material that will bring Enayat back to life – to a point where, by the end of the book, it felt to me that we had let go of this search for that archive. Iman was talking more about her own archive and questioning what forms that archive. I would be really curious to hear more of your thoughts on this research strand of the book as well.
Robin Moger
That's another sleight of hand where, as it goes on, Iman has that passage where she talks about books as places to get lost in. Those books are a universe in which you can get lost, there is a redemptive quality to those books, where one thought hops to another, through etymology, through context. And what the book you have in your hands replaces is the product of all the research with its directed focus, of trying to find something, some papers by Enayat that are going to answer some questions. Of course, when I say there's nothing redemptive about the book, that's its redemption. I mean, it's also difficult, because you also do want to know about Enayat. Also, I suppose this is the only way in which you could possibly know answers, by putting these things together and by showing their relationships, by having a world, a real world in which Enayat lives, and the obstacles.
There's another book by Iman called Archives and Crimes published by Kayfa ta that is worth reading. One of its centerpieces is this scene with Saddam Hussein, which you can go and see on YouTube. It's a bit of a horror movie, and maybe if you if you don't know Arabic it's even worse – it’s that scene where they're all sitting and they bring up this guy that everyone thought was dead, and he’s just been tortured, this old man, and he starts reading out all the names of his supposed accomplices. In the book, this is a scene about the archive. It's about trying to make the archive really literal and terrifying. She's obsessed with that, and she's really, really good at it. But if you trace the pattern of it, (I think she said this once), it's like looking at those river maps, like some sort of 19th century survey of the river Mississippi showing all its different flood beds and how it had moved over the last 400 years. It looks absolutely beautiful, and you don't really understand the mechanics behind it necessarily, but it also represents proof. It asks: what do you want out of the archive? What are your obstacles? In Traaces, Iman goes looking in Cairo and it's impossible: the National Archives are a disaster, and you have to sort of maneuver your way through. It's in the interactions and in the difficulty that she’s trying to give you the flavor of Egypt, a way to really learn about the world in which Enayat lived, or didn’t, because she's loosely Egyptian in that sense.
Georgia
Across our projects with In Other Words, we talk a lot about the politics of desirability and the fact that a translation into English comes with so many questions around power dynamics. We also talk a lot about the desirability of languages to be translated. Could you speak to us more on these power dynamics inherent in translation?
Robin Moger
I feel that every time you ask a question, you sort of trigger a torrent. Because, of course, the politics of translation is the politics of money, and that's really what it is.
Arabic translation has always been deeply problematic and marginalized. Slowly, over time, prize culture has become more important, the rise of prizes in the Gulf. But it has been a failure as well because they haven't produced any effect on the English language markets. With the English language market being the biggest one in terms of earning potential. If you translate to Spanish, for example, it's a huge market. But, I'm sure I don't have to tell you how much an autonomous translator is paid, and I have now met, I think, or been in contact with, every single literary translator of Arabic to Spanish in Spain, and they're all academics. Mainly, I would say almost exclusively, they translate things that have been first translated into English.
So I find what's happening in translation very, very interesting. In Arabic, in particular, there's a certain crisis around it, in this idea of identity and discourse. If you think politically about book marketing, about what gets chosen, and why, there are very developed discourses about that, and then a financial reality that makes people who say one thing do exactly the opposite.
I've been lucky in the sense that I started quite a long time ago, when I was able to live for a long time in Egypt, making almost nothing, doing other things, and I didn't have any overheads or responsibilities, and I learned a lot without feeling financial pressure of any kind, nor did I think of myself as a professional translator. Or I stopped myself, I didn't think of it as a career. So I was just producing text, and then occasionally things were getting published, and I was learning. I had absolutely no pressure to self-identify as a translator, or to answer questions like the ones I've been doing today. At the time, I didn't even understand things like academic courses in translation or the theories of translation. I was able to read that in my own time and decide to take it or leave it. I think things now are very difficult for most people.
One really interesting idea to me is that, for example, if you take something like Korean literature, it's had a boost. One of the ways it has happened is that there has been a combination of good marketing, fantastic work, people who are very committed, but also funding, and also talking very strongly about its marginal status beyond the point at which that ceases to be true. Then you also find different kinds of marginal languages in competition. In itself that discourse, which is supposed to be empowering, creates competition. One of the things that happens a lot in publishing is the idea that, if that author has been published before and didn't make it, no one will go back to that world, especially now, there's far more pressure, you either succeed the first time, or you do something unusual enough the first time to allow yourself to build on it. I've discovered often with Arabic translation that authors that were translated badly or published and disappeared, whether translated badly or not, will not be accepted now regardless.
Georgia
A follow up to this question about archives then: what do you think would form part of your own translator’s archive? What are significant texts in your professional life, things that have shaped the way you think or you translate, moving a step further away from this particular translation, more towards your wider work as a translator?
Robin Moger
Well, I don't know. One way of looking at it is the cumulative effect of reading. If I understand translation as reading, then to a degree, all translation helps me read. And if a translation is an attempt, finally, in terms of the commercial market, the mercantile capitalist concept, to eventually produce a text, a final text to be bought and consumed as a finished product, then anything forms a personal archive of experience, even technical things like translating UN reports on palm trees, or for example, for a while I was the guy who translated FIFA football reports from Arabic. You learn how to write in that sense, how to transit, how to conceptualize certain registers of Arabic in English, how to change it, which is a sort of polyphonic thing in your head. Or wherever it is that you learn reflexively, which is, I think, what you learn as a translator, I think when you start out, you have to think about everything, and you're not sure what weight to give it. Over time, because you don't have any time, you go to your experience rather than to your forebrain, whatever it is, you just reproduce things very quickly. You know where you're going. You don't have to think.
I always say that there’s a book, not in terms of translation because it's not really about translation, that was always very important to me. There's a Glaswegian author called James Kelman who was big at a certain point, and he won the Booker, but was treated unbelievably badly by the press. The judge at the time was a woman who was on Radio 4 – Rabbi Julia Neuberger – she was very famous, a radio voice for a kind of liberated English personality, and she came out after he'd won the prize and said she didn't agree with it. He swore too much, she didn't think it was literature. And James Kelman, although one of the greatest British authors, in my opinion, of the last half the 20th century, extraordinary guy, he was never allowed to really make it and have all his books read. But he carried on writing anyway, and he wrote this book of short stories called Not Not While the Giro. And he did that thing that I think Irvine Welsh did in a more kind of commercial way, and then a lot of Glaswegian authors did, which is writing various registers of dialect, but in very, very clever ways, ventriloquising characters, but also doing extraordinary things. So for example he'd write a story where there was no detectable dialect. He wasn't doing anything, just little things with the structure of the sentences, and it felt like everyone was talking heavy Glaswegian. Then he'd write an entire one which is in the heaviest accent possible, but in which the dialect plays no part in constructing the characters, and you read it as unaffected English. And that is what, as a text, I find most useful in thinking about writing, if there's one text. It’s almost like this manual, where you think about how he's done something, or why he's done it, or just the effect it has. And that's very inspiring, although it might not have anything immediately to do with what you're doing.
Georgia
Claudia and I have been talking a lot about dialect in Italian, and your thoughts on dialect also resonate with some of the things that we've been saying, or mostly Claudia who’s the native Italian speaker between the two of us, so there's a lot of resonance with James Kelman.
Robin Moger
I've just moved to Catalonia after many years outside of Europe. I've never lived in Europe. I lived in Egypt and South Africa, and I’ve come here. So I've had three years, and I've learned Castellano and Catalan at the same time, because I've got a son who's got to go to school in Catalan. And it's very exciting for me, because I'd never really learned a romance language. I mean, I've had French lessons, but English style. I hadn't learned it. I didn't understand why they were doing that to me. I wasn't interested. Now I am interested, and even something like Catalan, which is seen as a minority language, has got an insane density of accents and for its size, a super interesting range of mixtures with Spanish and French and all sorts of lunatic things, and it's lovely to think about.
Claudia Marzollo
We did a series of seminars on Elena Ferrante, and she never really, or very rarely, writes dialect, she just writes in the standard Italian, but the feel of it is a lot like what you were saying before about James Kelman. She also does a very good job at that.
Robin Moger
Yeah absolutely. Actually, if you're interested in that, there is an essay by James Kelman talking technically about how to be very, very, very, very precise on a Glaswegian council estate without writing in dialect, how each person is speaking. And you can just do very small things with syntax. And even me – my grandmother's Glaswegian, she's from a Glasgow council estate, so through listening to people I'm acquainted with that dialect – but I can feel his precision. I sort of know what he's doing without knowing it. It's a very interesting thing. It makes you wonder, what's behind the dialect? What is he communicating? Because he's not communicating the dialect at all, and I don't know the dialect, but I still know the difference, and I know it's important to the story.
Georgia
Through these interviews with translators, we are putting together a library of important texts, or reference texts for the translators we speak to. So we’ll include that James Kelman essay in the Translators’ Library, because that sounds so interesting.
Georgia
The final question we will ask is something we ask of everyone we're interviewing: what is a book that has been translated into English that you would recommend, and what is a book that has not been translated yet that you think should.
Robin Moger
A Catalan novel that I was going to translate, actually, and then I discovered it was translated. It was in 2014 and it's called Els Nois, “The Boys”, by a writer called Toni Sala. It's about Catalonia in the crisis, in 2013, in a town in l’Empordà, which is just north of Barcelona, and two boys who died in a car crash, which is ostensibly the center of the story, but also not. It doesn't start like that, it starts with a bank branch. And it's about land and money and Catalan identity during the crisis. It's super dark in some ways, without being violent or anything like that. And it is a bit crazy, It's again one of those books that you think couldn't quite be published. Catalan is another great language for publishing things that are slightly wilder or outside restrictions. They accept a lot more, even if it's a small production run. I haven't read the translation, so I don't know how that is, but it's a really good book, and I'm sure the translation is very good.
And then a book that has not been translated, I think, is one I want to translate. Actually, you know, it's quite hard for me not to think like that for that question. I am actually reading this book, there's an Egyptian author called Hamdi Abu Golayyel, who has been published. I translated, actually, a book of his, and he has been translated by Marilyn Booth, and then by Humphrey Davis before he died. But he wrote his final book, and died, recently, before he finished it, which is a book all about his mother. It's called “My Mother’s Rooster”, or “My Mother's Cock”, but you can't call it that. He’s Bedouin, from the Fayoum of Egypt, and he made it to Cairo and then became an author. And he died very young. So he was in his late 50s or 60s when he died last year. He was raised by a single mother, a single Bedouin mother in the Fayoum, and he's written this elegy to her. He writes in this extraordinary, which is his sort of signature thing, this mix of Arabic: of formal Arabic, Bedouin dialects, and then peasant Fayoum dialect. He moves in and out of them without any reasons, like talking to someone, but it’s quite tightly controlled. You think it's like talking to someone. Then you see, it's very spare, and he repeats himself a lot. He repeats a story a lot, and tells it differently, almost contradicting himself. And it's just a bank of stories about growing up, he's hopping backwards and forwards in time, his childhood and the Fayoum, and it’s hilarious and incredibly sad, and just incredibly moving. He just starts talking and all his family members who are all deformed or dishonest or semi-criminal or violent – there's this sort of extraordinary, semi gangster-ish world of Bedouin in the Fayoum – it's affectionate, but they're all kind of hopeless, ultimately. And he writes like that a lot. But for the first time, he feels sad about his father. He has this ability to write this genuine portrait of a father who is half mad, deeply unpleasant, selfish, but whom he loves. It's a very clever, beautiful book, and I'd love to see that translated, because then I'd have another job, but also because it's a beautiful book.
Also, a book in Catalan, which is a poem by Martí Sales, called La Cremallera, which is “the zip”, and it's this epic poem about Barcelona, but based on the fabric and textile industry, and it’s the quite political in its underpinnings of industrialization of Barcelona in the late 19th century. But it’s set in the present day, it's a sort of 19th century, early 20th century poem about the spirit of Barcelona crawling through the streets. It’s really cool.
