Yasmeen Hanoosh and Marilyn Booth on Gender-Conscious Translation
A perceptive conversation between Marilyn Booth, translator of Elias Khoury’s As Though She Were Sleeping, and Yasmeen Hanoosh, translator of Khoury’s first novel, On the Relations of the Circle (forthcoming from Archipelago), is live in Arablit as part of their “Between two Arabic Translators” series.
We need to constantly remind people everywhere that feminist writing in the Arabophone region as elsewhere has a long history and that these works are both enjoyable and historically significant . . . Concerning women’s writings specifically, they remind us of how much social as well as aesthetic labor women have exerted on behalf of their own aspirations, for a very long time and often in extremely adverse social-intellectual climates—where, for instance, if a woman’s writing was deemed “good,” then people questioned whether it was really written by her.
Translation is already an interpretation—we could say that the text is “framed” internally through a translator’s choices. The reader is getting my reading of a text, although I hope that when a text is ambiguous (as I read it, anyway), I preserve that ambiguity. To the extent possible, I want the reader to be able to access multiple ways into the text, to form her own interpretation. As to framing a text, sometimes that is very important . . . We can offer afterwords or introductions that contextualize gender relations and images in a novel, as I did for my translation of the great Latifa al-Zayyat’s classic The Open Door . . . However, the cases I know of, when original texts have been altered in a major way, concern women’s texts. I can’t help wondering whether such tampering most often has to do with pressures to “present Arab or Muslim women” in a particular way.
Read the full piece here.