Issue No. 611
Culture
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7 - 13 November 2002 Issue No. 611 Culture |
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Critical mass
Marilyn Booth, participating in the Supreme Council for Culture Conference of Women's Writing last week, speaks to Youssef Rakha about literature in an unsympathetic world
"It's a wonderful opportunity to see writers and friends here, and also to meet writers and critics from elsewhere in the region; that's fantastic. It's been so full of papers and everything else. I think one of the most important roles that something like this plays is to give writers a chance to give their shahadat (testimonies). Because that's the personal voice that we don't often hear. I think for instance Radwa Ashour's shahada was wonderful. She managed to combine her personal voice with her academic work and her vision of writing. To me that's very moving. It's actually the best one I've heard.
"But it's also good because some writers have used it as an opportunity to read their work, and hearing a writer's work in that writer's voice often adds an extra dimension. And then the poetry sessions too -- I have not gone to all of them, they're so late -- but that's a real opportunity. Then there were the more academic papers, you know. One always gets a huge variety of things. But I think the importance of a conference like this is not so much in the specific critical interventions that are made but more in terms of showing a sort of critical mass, both among this group and to the larger society -- in the fact that a big conference could be held on this topic.
"I totally understand why writers object to the concept of women's writing. But for one thing it's the kind of tamyiz (discrimination) that's always been practised against women: you have literature and you have women's literature; there's a judgement there that should not exist. I don't really like the term women's literature, but I don't know if it necessarily undermines the credibility of a conference like this one. It's a tricky question because in sociological terms it's ok to have a conference on women's literature as long as it's not the only conference in which you talk about works by women. I think it's ok because you can point to a social and historical phenomenon, a much more recent presence in terms of women writers. And there are certain issues that you can talk about for purposes of academic discussion. We classify all the time, if we didn't classify we wouldn't be able to talk about anything. And though I don't agree in the end that one should classify literature according to the gender of the author, it is true that having a female name on a literary text does make a difference in terms of that text's emergence into the social realm. In my own research I am looking at fictional memoirs of the 1920s, and one of issues is that a lot of these books have female names on their covers but I'm not convinced that women wrote them. There are a lot of issues on gender.
"What I'd like to see next is a conference about gender as a structuring aspect of literature, and then one wouldn't be talking about women's literature but about how gender structures literature. I think in a sense that's the next step; it's telling that so many programmes that used to be called women studies are now called gender studies. I think it's very important to get beyond this kind of classification but I think that there are still issues that can be talked about in a conference that proposes to talk about women's writing even if one doesn't really accept the concept. In her paper Rejaa Ben Salama was talking about the concept of the androgyne and the sort of breaking down of traditional categories of gender. It was at a very theoretical level and she wasn't really discussing specific works, but this is the kind of critical theory that seeks to go beyond these categories, but to go beyond categories you have to use categories. We all deal with the limits of language. We have to work with what we have in order to move onto a different plane of discussion.
"I would have liked to have seen more discussion of literary works themselves and less discussion of the circumstances under which writers find themselves working -- the obstacles. What's interesting is talking about how these obstacles appear on the page, and not just as a theme. I do think that the new writing is a sophisticated response to the social and cultural circumstances that give rise to these obstacles.
"The critical mass manifests particularly in the interest that is shown in younger writers by critics and other writers -- and of course that's a very small group, whether you're talking about literature here or literature in translation -- so when we talk about a critical mass, I realise it's a critical mass in a very limited sense. But one still hopes that something like this will somehow get out to a broader audience, just in terms of maybe presenting a few more names that people will then read.
"It does tend to be a very closed circle but I think people within this group are concerned about trying to break that -- to some extent, some more than others. There is at least a concern about the reader, again whether here or there. It's a two-way thing in terms of social conditions, certainly that has its impact: who has the money to buy books, who has time or energy to read in really difficult situations, let alone our worries about politics and about the world and what's happening; sometimes it's hard to pick up a novel and read it. And then of course there is the impact of mass media.
"One of the most important things is getting writers from different parts of the Arab world together, because again there just aren't always opportunities for dialogue across boundaries. To me a conference like this is a wonderful opportunity but at the same time it's a little depressing, because not only do you constantly hear of mu'awiqat (obstacles, sing. mu'awiq), but you see them enacted right before you within a conference like this. It's a two-way dialogue. It needs to be a dynamic process, and it's always a hard one.
"If you think about translations, for example -- we just had a round table today on the sourat ibdaa al-mar'aa fil-gharb (the image of women's creativity in the West) -- you see there is a real problem there. I was talking as a translator, and how frustrating it can get. I can give you a very precise example there. I've translated two novels by Hoda Barakat. One of them, Harith Al-Miyah (Ploughing Waters) was published when she got the Naguib Mahfouz Prize a couple of years ago. And the other one was Ahl Al-Hawa (Those In Love), her second novel. It's a beautiful book, it's actually my favourite of her novels. I've shown it to a number of publishers and the reaction is always: that's a really interesting novel, a good translation, but we can't publish it.
"Part of this is that readers in the West don't expect to have to work hard when they read an Arabic novel. That also has its impact on the translated text itself, the politics of translation as seen within the text. There's often a desire to have a text that is somehow made easier for readers in the West, in which things are explained. That's an insult to the Western reader but it's also a problem getting that Western reader to do his or her part. I think to a large extent you can say it's market mechanisms, but again it's more complicated. It's not just a matter of people not wanting to read, it's also that these things aren't reviewed outside academic and translation journals.
"It's hard to say which of my translations will turn out to be the more successful because some of them are new. My short story collection, my Grandmother's Cactus was very successful although I think mostly for academic use. I don't want to minimise the importance of that, as somebody who teaches literature in translation -- finally we are at a point where there are more than enough good translations of good novels from which one can choose; that hasn't actually been true for very long.
"Another issue, of course, is the quality of translation. It's great that there are now comparatively a lot of people in the US who want to translate, but the translations aren't always very good. A reader there is going to pick up one novel and if he or she finds that the translation is not very good they're not going to bother to find another one. Unfortunately and wrongly they're going to judge all of modern Arabic literature on the basis of that novel. I'm exaggerating a bit but not all that much. I actually think that that's been a big problem. I think a number of Mahfouz's books for instance are not very well translated. I would say according to literary criteria, yes, but I think one can be more specific about what makes a good translation.
"A good translation as much as possible is going to try to get across the distinctive voice of the writer. That's one very important element. Another element is that when I translate I aim for a translation that holds in tension both languages. On the one hand as one reads one should be able to forget that it's a translation, it reads well as a literary work in English; you know that's why translation is an art. On the other hand you also try to preserve a little bit of strangeness. What I want the reader to do is to read and to forget that it's a translation, and then to be brought up short at certain points. This also means that the reader has to work harder.
"There is more than one level on which I think translating Arabic literature is important. I do think it's important for political reasons, because the situation in the States is so awful and there is so much ignorance about the region and what most people get is the most superficial skin off the top. So I do think it's important to try to get people to read literature in order not only to understand better -- and what you hope is that, rather than taking it as a sociological document, they will read the novel as a novel -- but to think about this part of the world in terms of the culture and the writer and everything. So there is that aspect of information in a complicated way, but literature is a way to complicate people's views and make them think in other ways about the region. When I translate a novel I regard it as a political act, and it's important for me to do that.
"But beyond politics, whatever one may think of the quality of what's coming out now, Arabic literature is a world literature; it ought to be on the map.
I think there are some really fine things being written here, and yes it deserves to get out just on literary terms. Hoda Barakat's novels are one example. And the next novel I'm going to translate, Hamdi Abu Golail's Lusous Mutaqa'idoun (Retired Thieves), I think is a wonderful book and, yes, I do think it can compete internationally."
Marilyn Booth is visiting professor of comparative literature at Brown University. Prior to assuming this post, she was an independent scholar and freelance translator. After procuring her BA in Arabic at Harvard University, Booth specialised in Bairam El-Tonsi at Oxford, producing a PhD dissertation that appeared in book form in 1990; the Arabic translation of this book was published last week by the Supreme Council for Culture. While working on her dissertation, and later from 1985 to 1990, Booth lived in Cairo, developing links with writers and critics. She has continued to maintain a professional interest in marginalised cultural production, particularly the use of colloquial as a language of literature. She has translated some of the best contemporary Arabic literature, keeping up with the latest books while sustaining a scholarly interest in the late 19th century, with particular attention to feminist discourse as it manifested through alternative forms of writing, e.g. biographies of famous women; her next book will be on Zeinab Fawwaz.
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