I wake up early and go down to walk on the beach alone. I want to swim right out into the deep water, where perhaps I can forget the feeling of heaviness that I’ve had since yesterday. I think about what Nour said to me the night before: he wants to travel, to go back to America, to settle his accounts with what’s left of his emotions. I ask myself if what he’s feeling are the leftovers of emotions from which he can’t find relief.
Leftovers of emotions!
Did he return to Lebanon only to let go of them?
It’s hard to swim in the sea by the Orange House because there are so many rocks scattered in the water. But I want to swim. And I want to see the sea turtles that find shelter and sanctuary for their young on this beach. I walk into the water and find it difficult to keep my balance. I try to swim but a powerful wave pushes me toward the rocks. My body crashes into them and I injure my leg. A second and a third wave take me. I return once again to the deeper water but another powerful wave propels me into other rocks. I try to swim free but I can’t. I try very hard to relax and leave my body neutral, as I learned to do in my yoga classes. I emerge from the water with bruises on my legs and arms, all over my body. I sit on the sand and for a few moments feel like I can’t walk. I try to stand up and I manage to, despite my pain.
I go back to the room and find Nour still sleeping. I go into the bathroom and wash the salt off my body, my bruises growing redder.
My swollen legs and arms pain me. I look at my body in the giant mirror that covers an entire wall of the bathroom and in the image reflected back I see that I’ve started to look like someone who can fit in better in Beirut.
I put on a loose, flowing, long-sleeved shirt. I leave a little note for Nour and go out to a nearby café to have breakfast, ignoring my injuries. No time passes before he comes and sits down across from me; he brings his body close, right to the edge of the table that brings us together. He seems to be putting all his weight on the table, as if he wants to get rid of it, to eliminate the small space that separates our two bodies. He says that in Lebanon his dreams have faltered, that he was more optimistic before he came. He says that he lives a strange life, that there’s a mere thread between himself and madness, a thread that he imagines might break at any moment, except that luck’s been on his side. He lifts his coffee cup, drinks a little and then adds, “Or perhaps it’s my bad luck that this thread hasn’t broken.” It’s as if he’s apologizing, though I don’t know for what. I contemplate the gray hair that frames his face; he seems like a young man whose head has been invaded by gray too soon.
There’s a message from Olga on the screen of my phone. I read the words “be happy.” Be happy, I repeat bitterly. It’s not until that moment that I tell myself that I won’t return to Mombasa, I won’t go back to Chris.
I look up from the screen and find Nour toying with the cigarette butts in the ashtray. He’s daydreaming, sad.
I sleep most of the way back to Beirut from the South. Nour drives silently and doesn’t want to talk.
He calls me in the early evening, at the very moment I return to Beirut with Olga. I haven’t seen him for five days. I’ve been going to the hospital with Olga for her chemotherapy. I’m tired and don’t answer his call. He sends me a short text, asking me to meet him one last time. The next morning he’ll fly to Chicago.
I text him back, “Have a nice trip back home!”
Translator’s Note
Like so many translators of creative literature, I am rarely satisfied with my work. So my initial experience of rendering Iman Humaydan’s third novel, Other Lives, in English came as somewhat of a surprise. When I first started working, words came to me more easily than they have in the past. Over long sessions I felt as if the ideas and aesthetic properties of the text were merging together into a readable English. At a certain point, I felt that this novel would perhaps not simply be the easiest I have translated, but the best work I had ever produced.
But this confidence and feeling of ease did not last long. The process of reworking the translation from the draft produced by these first attempts into a final form was as painfully difficult as translation can be. I spent hours looking at specific passages, and even specific words, convinced that I had not conveyed either the ideas or the emotions of the text in Arabic. I could not possibly show what I had produced to Iman, let alone send it to the publisher. Despite my years of experience, I was surprised at both my initial feeling of confidence and my subsequent feeling that it would be impossible to translate this work.
Why was transforming Hayawat Okhra into Other Lives so easy and so difficult? I have used this question to structure some reflections on the process of translating this novel.
The idea of “intimacy with the text,” as invoked by some scholars of translation, has helped me think through my own translation process for Other Lives. Developed in some depth by Gayatri Spivak in her well-known article “The Politics of Translation,” the idea is that translators— particularly white women translating texts from the so called third world — must have a deep knowledge of not only the texts they are working with, but the source and target languages and literary cultures. Intimacy here means knowing more than just what the words “mean,” but also calling upon the layers of meaning words create within readers and reading cultures on both sides of the translation’s linguistic divide.
In a series of “Rules for Translation” that I produced for the popular blog Arabic Literature (in English), I put this simply: (1) Choose a text you love and (2) Respect the text. But these prescriptive statements are much easier to make than they are to either quantify or fulfill. Indeed, I do love Hayawat Okhra for many reasons and I have endeavored to respect it while changing it into Other Lives. But claiming an intimacy with the text, as a white, non-Arab translator, is a more complex proposition. Part of what gave me a sense of closeness with the book was my deep awareness that even as I related to it I was inevitably distant from it as well.
First and foremost, I am not Lebanese; I did not live in Lebanon during the civil war. While the kinds of questions and issues so central to Other Lives are familiar to me and essential to many people I know — particularly the question of being permitted to forget or forced to remember — they are not central to my own life. I do not have the long history with Lebanon, the close family ties and proximity to the terrible violence of the war that Myriam and the other characters experience.
But when I think about “intimacy with the text,” I must also consider how my close friendship and comradeship with Iman Humaydan provides a unique advantage in translating her work. Because she and I have talked extensively and share certain bonds, I can at times get inside the language of the text in ways that I would not have be able to without her. My understanding of the depths of her creative work owes a great deal to this connection and to her generosity in spending the time to work and think together about language and the issues that underlie her writing.
I also translated Iman’s second novel, Toot barri, as Wild Mulberries (Interlink, 2008), which offered me a familiarity with her style and themes, as well as an established working relationship. This fact also presented me with a challenge, to keep the works somewhat consistent in style and approach — to create a voice for Iman in English. This is something that I have advocated for in my academic writing on translation politics, but which I have not had the opportunity to do previously. Translating two novels by the same author gave me a privileged position inside the text and author’s worlds. I am aware that claiming a bond with the original writer of the novel means that I am claiming that she “authorizes” my translation and this gives it weight. But I know that I am still very much an outsider to the text, language and world that Myriam and the other characters inhabit in Other Lives. Some intimacies are forged through such connections but other gaps can never be bridged — despite whatever respect and good intentions a translator has.