Precisely the thing that is meant to make a translation “better”—this elusive intimacy with the text — at different points threatened to stall the entire project. An example of this is the hauntingly tragic scene of the death of Myriam’s brother Baha’. The violence that Myriam witnessed and experienced affected her body. She had nightmares and often felt suffocated. As I was working on these sections — particularly the descriptions of Myriam’s nightmares about trees — I could often experience Myriam’s sense of suffocation. The experience felt real to me. It seemed impossible to try to convey, in translation, the emotion of passages that had such a deep impact on me as a reader.
The first time I read the novel, I did not experience this same visceral reaction. In fact, the passages that affected me the most upon the first reading were those about Myriam’s reactions to Olga’s cancer, her contemplation of their long friendship and the way she supported her friend at the end of her life. My reaction to the passages about Olga’s cancer seemed “natural” to me, as it is close to my own embodied experience — I was undergoing cancer treatments myself while translating the book.
Textual intimacy is a concept often invoked and difficult to define, as is how it is connected to embodied experience. Perhaps what makes Iman’s writing so powerful is how deeply it touches and exposes human experiences, particularly those that we often do not speak — most particularly, the lives of women marked by violence. We see Myriam as a woman who often feels disconnected from the people around her and the places she inhabits. She is restlessly in motion, searching for a home she cannot find. Her inability to settle is meticulously laid bare and depicted in all its raw emotions. Iman gives readers a privileged insight into Myriam’s psyche, the places inside Myriam where her unspoken emotions can be expressed.
This concept of textual intimacy, however, offers little practical insight into the specifics of the translation process. In this translation I have used a number of techniques that are based on the principle of allowing the text to “read as a translation,” in order to capture the beauty and haunting qualities of the Arabic original. I have worked closely with the editor of this work, Hilary Plum, to create a balance in the novel between a smooth or easily readable text and a text that continually reminds the reader that it was not originally written in English. For example, the words that appear in italics in the translation are all written in Latin letters in English in the original novel. Preserving the italics gives the reader a sense of the layering of language in the original.
In rendering this work in English, I also had to face the challenge of Hayawat Okhra’s mix of narrative styles. The novel unfolds through both deeply personal, excruciatingly and intensely depicted passages and dry, factual, almost disconnected narrative passages. To reproduce this in English is difficult. The short declarative sentences written in deceptively simple Arabic work differently than such sentences might in English, where they may sound inconsistent or boring. I did not wish to sacrifice this aspect’s of the work’s narrative technique for the sake of making the translation smoother or more — as the translation theorists say—“domesticated.”
Another challenge specific to this novel was how to represent references to the Druze community, particularly implicit references, with which many readers presumably would not be familiar. I decided that my overarching goal was to preserve the aesthetic qualities of the novel, so I chose not to include a glossary or to “cushion” passages with explanations not available in the original. Some of this sort of cushioning exists in the Arabic novel; the author explains such things as the transmigration of souls and how this belief circulates amongst Druze characters. But I have not added additional references. The most important example is the layered meanings of the title Hayawat Okhra, and its use of a relatively esoteric Arabic plural of the word for life, which can imply a Druze understanding of “lives.” The English title, Other Lives, cannot convey these layers of meaning.
All translation from Arabic into English faces the challenge of how to translate tenses. The most important translation strategy I used in Other Lives was to render much of the novel’s narration in the present tense. This novel moves back and forth between times and places so seamlessly that the confusion of tenses adds to the text’s meaning rather than detracts from it. Motion, Myriam’s physical and spiritual restlessness, is a major theme of the work. Because Myriam herself confesses that she experiences time as nonlinear — she describes time as a spiral — I have conveyed as much of the text’s main narration as possible in the present tense; this means that some of what is written about in the present tense here happened “in the past.” Creating this confusion and questioning about time within the narration itself challenges the reader constantly to be aware of the importance of space, time and chronology in the novel. This very much mirrors my own challenges as a translator who has sought to give “other lives” to this novel by transforming it into English.
Michelle Hartman, Montréal, January 2014
Translator’s Acknowledgments
First and most importantly, I would like to acknowledge Iman Humaydan’s participation in and contributions to this translation, not only as the work’s author but also as a colleague and friend. Working with Iman has been a true collaboration; I have learned so much in the process of talking about language and literature together and for this I am extremely grateful.
For a number of reasons, this translation took some time to appear in print. Thanks to the people at Interlink for making it happen and to Michel Moushabeck for his patience. Much more than a line of thanks is due to Hilary Plum. It is not a cliché to say that her work is truly more than that of an editor, even a really good one. Her careful and thorough eye, together with a love of and flair for literature in translation has made this translation as good as it is. The bulk of this translation was finished in Lebanon and I would like to extend the warmest possible thanks to Yasmine Nachabe and all the Taans for providing me with space and conversations that greatly improved the work. Much of it was completed in Yasmine’s office at the Lebanese American University and she, along with other friends and colleagues at LAU, offered me the opportunity to teach translation theory and politics while working on it. Merci kteer to Elise Salem, Mariam Marroum and Nada Saab. I would also like to acknowledge the participants in my 2011 LAU seminar on translation: Zeina al-Abed, Eylaf Badreddine, Hicham Kharroub, Mona Majzoub and Yasmine Nachabe. Shukran to Abbas Beydoun for helping facilitate the opportunity to talk about this translation with Iman in Sour. Students at McGill also contributed to this translation — thanks in particular to Dima Ayoub and Shirin Radjavi, as well as Katy Kalemkerian, for helping it take its final shape. Rula Jurdi Abisaab and Malek Abisaab provided conversation and support that helped me to complete the translation, as did Aziz Choudry and rosalind hampton. As always, I must acknowledge the women whose work allowed me to complete this work. Thanks in particular to my mother Julia, sister Amanda, (Mama) Rachel, Alison, Marie, Amar, Randa and Farah.