Huda Fakhreddine Response - Lianbi

 Susan & Chat Post-talk Notes:

I liked it. I thought it was a lively seminar that helped me understand the literary translation publishing scene in America much better. I am impressed by how dedicated they are to their work and the pressure and changes they’re working against. I appreciated a lot of the things WWB is doing to promote international literature and communication, and this group of people and their contributors have a lot to teach me. One note about my personal feeling: I was impressed by their recognition of the disadvantages translators face as non-native English speakers. I never thought that publishers would care about that. It makes me feel like my presence in this field means something and is validating to hear. We were also very happy to meet the ALTA representative there and we will make sure that we join! 

It seems like everyone I’ve talked to after the talk, including myself, likes Susan more than Chad :) I think Chad gives off aggressive energy especially during the pre-talk conversation…

Huda Fakhreddine Pre-talk Response

I cried reading the poems she co-translated from her dad! They are beautiful. I love the thoughtful introduction and she and other translators/editors included at the beginning of each translation. They are very concise and powerful. I notice there’s wordplay in English (e.g. “tomorrow” – “morrow”), I wonder what the original is like and how she transferred word plays into English.

The Mu‘allaqāt for Millennials has such beautiful and creative typography! Very interesting idea subverting the footnotes to next to the poems. I wonder why sometimes there are only notes next to the Arabic version but not the English. I also wonder about all the changes of format that happened from the Arabic to the English, for example a verse looking part translated into a poetry looking part in English, or two columns dissolving into one column in English.

The topic of boundary between prose and poetry seems to be an important one in Arabic translation. Salim Barakat is also described as someone who writes “prose poem” or “free verse,” and we see that the translators decided to keep the poem format in the English instead of prose. I wonder what the line breaks gain and lose in each case. Also I’m curious about the numbering system. Sometimes it’s alphabetical, sometimes numeric. Lastly I think about punctuation and capitalization. The poems seem to boldly diverge from English grammar a lot. 

And what I loved the most of the assigned works for today was Huda’s essay! Very rich with content and ideas yet easy to read. She is a scholar who writes with translator’s eyes and experiences. “A translator can only tap into the creative potentials of a poem in translation when she sees herself as a student of a whole tradition and not as the creator of figures or works of choice.” I love how she reasons the importance of contextualization in translation in academia, the importance of presenting and promoting non-Western literary traditions like the Arabic as worthy of study in its own right as art, not as “symptoms of cultural or ethnic or gender complexes.” She points out that “in order for Arab poets to find a place on the new Global Stage… they have to prove themselves to be active participants in Western literature and thought,” and this sad reality means that we must allow these poets to enter English with their contexts so readers can begin to understand the extent of their poetic innovations. 

I love how she then connects this motivation to the practice of translating specifically Abbasid poetry. Because they are modernist poets par excellence to her, she identifies a clear translation strategy: “allow access to Abbasid poetry as poetry which can connect to urgent and relevant concerns, and which can impose itself upon us as poetry and not merely as an artifact of times past.” I think this implies a degree of domestication but it truly means a deep and thoughtful engagement with the literary traditions and sensibilities of the target language. 

“Literary studies nowadays are clearly global in their states aspirations but persistently Eurocentric in their methods and approaches. We are thus invited to negotiate a complex dialectic of understanding literatures on their own terms without falling into nativism or isolationism.” Well said and beautifully realized in her own translation work!