Translating Mohamed’s life and death was a deeply emotional experience. Recreating the text in English was stimulating; from French it flowed effortlessly into English. Troublesome were certain French idiomatic expressions and slang words. A few other words and phrases were difficult to translate either because they are cognates with different meanings in French and English or because the concepts do not exist in English. The word concierge, used for the receptionist at the town hall, for example, has a different meaning in French than it does in English. I translated it as “man at the front desk,” or “the front-desk clerk.” I translated phrases like camarade de lute as “fellow activist,” un député de la majorité as “MP,” and des diplômés chômeurs as “unemployed graduates”—words and a concept not as widespread in the West as in the MENA region.
Another word is rial, which Ben Jelloun uses as the local currency in Par le feu. I found this odd when I first read the book. Rial is Iranian, Omani, and Yemeni currency, not Tunisian. Later, Ben Jelloun confirmed to me his intention of portraying his Mohamed as any Mohamed from any Arab country. Ben Jelloun uppercases P for President (which I have left in uppercase), even when not preceding a proper noun like Ben Ali. I believe his use of the uppercase P is to show the fear and reverence the characters feel, especially government officials, when they speak about their president. Overall, there are few untranslatable lexical choices or constructions in Par le feu, and even fewer in L’étincelle. In The Spark, Ben Ali says at one point, “Yes, I, the Raïs — I have cried.” The word Raïs is a title used by the rulers of Arab states in the Middle East. Though it is translated as “president,” I have kept the original word.
I have strived to preserve Ben Jelloun’s tone and diction, his compassion for the protagonist, and his representation of Mohamed’s toxic environment. Priorities in my translation were faithfulness to the text’s lexical choices, Ben Jelloun’s aesthetic, and his voice, which is unique among Arab writers. I have sought to preserve the essence of idiomatic expressions. Above all, by respecting its cultural sensibilities, I have resisted domesticating the text, as an American Englishing will not tolerate Ben Jelloun’s voice. In Par le feu, there appears several times the word flic, whose translation is “cop”; I chose “police” or “police officer,” and used the word cop only in dialogue. I left all cultural elements and sensibilities intact as readers depend on them for access to Ben Jelloun’s streets full of vendors fleeing security agents, parrot men, sellers of pirated DVDs and loose American cigarettes, acrobats performing tricks, monkey trainers, storytellers, drivers who stop to buy fruit through the car window, and town halls where front-desk clerks repel people like Mohamed.
. .
Translators have an especially important task when they undertake texts from acutely inflamed areas of the world. Literary texts and their translations can open for readers the work of writers who bring news from a space unseen and unseeable by television cameras and officials’ sound bites. The Arab Spring is perhaps history, yet conditions throughout the Middle East continuously plunge into overwhelming humanitarian crises. Human rights abuses run rampant as beheadings and legions of starving, exploited refugees dominate news from the region. The chaos of war and the continuously shifting allegiances of sects, clans, and rebels birth rumors and confusion. There are stories of illegal emigrants making treacherous journeys to find employment, and there are stories of many young Tunisians and European Muslims joining the so-called Islamic State.
Then there are the Mohamed Bouazizis embedded in this mélange of violence and irrationality. They do not want to fight. They want to feed their families and live in peace and dignity. Ben Jelloun tells the story of one such man whom his government failed. Then the sky fell in. Hopes soared for a new era with the Arab Spring, and they collapsed. Now, more than ever, continuous war appears to be the new normal. Beneath the smoke and the rubble, the collapsed homes and desperate refugees, there are real people — individuals, not groups. Redeeming the individual sufferer amid the masses that the West sees on its iPhones and iPads is Ben Jelloun’s moral imperative. Neither the historical Mohamed Bouazizi nor his double are Everyman. Rather than generalize, though, Ben Jelloun, through the double he creates as an act of literature, reveals Mohamed Bouazizi in all his specificity.
Translation is an art. It requires creativity. Above all, it offers understanding of the global perspective. Translating By Fire and The Spark was not a process of replacing one word with another. It meant capturing the essence of the texts. The translation process and recreation of the texts fostered in me a sense of empathy like I never experienced before. It offered me a deeper understanding of how people like Mohamed might feel. I translate Tahar Ben Jelloun’s stories because they help me understand the human condition. I translate his work because he confronts and denounces dictatorship, corruption, exploitation, violence, and female repression. Like the author himself who speaks for all those who cannot speak, I want to translate the silence of all those who hope and wait for someone to tell the world of their suffering. Ben Jelloun’s achievement is to peel back the West’s layers of culture, fear, suspicion, distance, and apathy, and allow us to see — to really see, in a way that only art enables — one specific son, brother, and lover in his humiliation, desperation, and death.
Bibliography
Beaumont, Peter. 2011. “Mohammed Bouazizi: The Dutiful Son Whose Death Changed Tunisia’s Fate.” Guardian (London), January 20. Accessed November 19, 2014.
Ben Jelloun, Tahar. 2011. L’étincelle. Paris: Gallimard.
——. 2011. Par le feu: Récit. Paris: Gallimard.
——. 2013. “By Fire.” Translated by Rita S. Nezami. New Yorker, September 16.
Chan, Sewell. 2015. “Nobel Peace Prize Is Awarded to National Dialogue Quartet in Tunisia.” New York Times, October 9. Accessed December 9, 2015.
DeLillo, Don. 1993. “The Art of Fiction.” Interview by Adam Begley. Paris Review, Summer. Accessed November 2, 2014.
Kundera, Milan, and Michael Henry Heim. 1981. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Translated by Michael Heim. New York: Penguin.
Le Clézio, J. M. G. 2000. “Tahar the Wise.” Banipaclass="underline" Magazine of Modern Arab Literature 8 (Summer): 3–5.