Tradittore traduttore: Treacherous Translation & Backslang

Chad Post at three percent offers a lead to a post in US litblog Reading Ahead. Blogger Harold Augenbraum has been posting about US literary culture for about a year, and this post comes in response to a blogpost in the Guardian on 12 September entitled 'The new wave of French urban fiction.' The appositely-named Andrew Gallix offers an overview of what could be called banlieu fiction, explaining why it's so radical in France, particularly in its use of verlan (Arabic-influenced backslang) and also its desire and ability to bypass traditional publishing channels. He notes that:

Livres Hebdo points out that "More and more young authors don't want to be published by the big houses so are self-publishing via the internet". Antoine Dole has been instrumental in bringing them together and fostering a sense of community. In November 2006, this young writer produced the first issue of a home-made fanzine which showcased some of the "word activists" — rappers, slammers, bloggers — who were using blogs or social networking sites to bypass mainstream publishing. En attendant l'or soon became a word-of-mouth success via MySpace and a focal point for Les Décalés, a burgeoning literary movement which coalesced around Dole and Elsa Delachair.

Commenters on Gallix's post immediately raised the issue of translation: for example, GMcG commented,

Could be very interesting but will we ever see any of it translated into English? Given the comments regarding banlieue slang and pinches of Arabic it will probably be incomprehensible to even fluent non-native French speakers.

Reading Ahead makes a similar point, but with regards to the confines of the US market and its (in)ability to adapt/listen to macaronic texts. He points out, though, that writers like Junot Diaz have broadened not only ideas of literary form, but of literary languages as well, playing brilliantly and profoundly with what Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien has called Weird English. Her book celebrates the changes wrought in 'traditional' English (itself a hybrid language created by conquests, trade and empire) as its global dominance brings it into daily parlance for millions of non-native speakers.

Sarah Ardizzone, who has translated Faïza Guène's two seminal banlieu novels, Just Like Tomorrow and Dreams from the Endz, mixes up Algerian slang like "bled" with contemporary British street slang like "bare butters" to give a sense of Guène's fast-paced, punning, slurring sounds (or soundz). In her translation note, she thanks a number of British teenagers who advised her on current words, which raises another question: not only is the slang used in "immigrant fiction" in some cases specific to one community, but even to one (age or other) group within that community. Does that have to match up with the same group in the "target" language community? And what happens to the translation as that "target" group moves on?

Reading Ahead mentions cinema as a possible middleman, citing Stephen Frear's film of Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette (which as far as I remember has very little slang). Gallix mentions Matthieu Kassovitz' La Haine as a reference point for non-French (and perhaps non-banlieu) readers approaching the new French fiction - a great example as the film is about young people from different communities within the banlieu hanging and chatting together. But its cinematic language is more inventive and contemporary than its spoken language. Perhaps Danny Boyle's film of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting comes closer -- and that was screened with subtitles in the US.

A final thought: translation scholars such as Lawrence Venuti, arguing for what he calls an "ethics of difference," have suggested that one of the functions of translation is to preserve the challenging and generative encounter with unfamiliarity -- so rather than translation smoothing over difficulties of cultural exchange, it could work to foreground knotty points to bring them into thinking and discussion, rather than hiding them under the cover of familiarity and easy parallels.

Memory Online

A beautiful, meditative article by journalist and novelist Robin Yassin-Kassab (aka blogger qunfuz), about French Algerian culture, Chab Hasni, and rai. Written for the National, it pushes the blog towards the literary essay. Blogs are so often about the present moment -- new media offers a way to record, map and share the present in a way that is unprecedented -- so it's strange and wonderful to read such an extended memory-piece online.

Middle Muddle PS: A Comix View

From Jennifer Camper's awesome comic Ramadan, published in the anthology, Juicy Mother:

Middle Muddle, or Garlic, Arabic and Definitions

A very funny, pointed blog post from rockslinga, aka novelist Randa Jarrar, about food, geography, conversation, and the limits of definitions, as a great garlic sauce gets her talking to a grocery store clerk about what, exactly, is the Middle East. It's interesting that garlic is the conversational motor, as geographical definitions relating to how and what people eat, cook or trade pre=date, and are perhaps more resonant, than top-down political definitions. Jarrar ends the post on a confident note that it starts in Morocco and ends in Iran - but as Turkish academic Sedat Laciner writes, the term has a difficult, colonial history, having been used internally by the India Office but first seen in print in 1902, in an article by Alfred Thayer Mahan about the strategic importance of the Persian Gulf. Mahan wouldn't have recognised Morocco as the western boundary as his concern was for the defense of the British Empire in India.

The geographical, linguistic and cultural boundaries -- and the usefulness of the idea, both to external commentators and inhabitants -- of the Middle East is something that we've engaged in at PEN as the first stage of the Atlas developed: the countries represented are, inspired by the British Council's 2008 focus on New Arabic Books, delimited as the "Arabic-speaking world," which has slightly different borders from Jarrar's Middle East as it doesn't include Iran (which has a completely different linguistic and literary history). Would Jarrar include Comoros and Djibouti? And, as a Facebook Atlas fan asked, where does that leave writers from those countries who write in English, French, Hebrew, German, Kurdish, Berber, etc., whether living in the Arab world or abroad? Language usage, like cooking, doesn't map out a stable, shared Arab cultural history, whether meeting up with (and often suppressing) indigenous languages as it did from Morocco to Afghanistan, or where Arabic itself was suppressed either explicitly or implicitly under European colonial rule, so that (for example) Ahlam Mosteghanemi is the first Algerian woman writer to publish a novel in Arabic, inspired by the writer Malek Haddad, who wrote in Les Zéroes tournent on rond that:

"Même en s'exprimant en français, les écrivains algériens d'origine arabo-berbère traduise une pensée spécifiquement algérienne, une pensée qui aurait trouvé la plenitude de son expression si elle avait été vehiculée par un langage et une écriture arabes."

As Haddad's work itself shows, French (like English) is "un langage et une écriture arabes." For some writers, it is a case of -- as Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird entitled their anthology of contemporary Native women's writing from North America, Reinventing the Enemy's Language; sometimes it's about nationality or heritage, as for Lebanese-born French writer Andrée Chedid. In the case of Comoros, Arabic is the language of news publications, but Comorian and its local varieties are spoken, while the best-known Comorian writer, Soeuf Elbadawi, writes in French as part of a Francafrique heritage -- one in which French becomes African, as in the verlan, or banlieu backslang, used by young Algerian-French novelist Faïza Guène.

As with the Ali Baba garlic sauce that Jarrar loves, geographical and cultural attribution can be a fantasy; individual writers are shaped differently by different social, economic and cultural pressures to write in certain languages or dialects (for example, the tension between literary and colloquial Arabics in Egypt), to draw on (or repudiate) certain literary canons or models, to adopt or adapt another language in exile... What's exciting for me is how a writer turns any language into an idiolect, a language shaped by one imagination working over and through many histories, texts, conversations, just as every cook will create a slightly different dish from the same recipe.

Win a Sontag!

Not the fabulous wave of grey hair so distinctive that Saturday Night Live had a special "Sontag" wig just so (you canbuy your own clip-in "feminist hair wear" from Art Metropole), but the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation of $5000 (US). The 2009 competition has been announced, and excerpts from the 2008 winners are available on the website. It's open to anyone under the age of thirty, for a Spanish to English translation of their choosing.

Sherko Fatah

Sherko Fatah, an Iraqi Kurd who was born in the GDR and currently lives in Germany, has been nominated for the 2008 German Book Prize. Fatah has published three novels in German, including Im Grenzland (At the Borderline) -- Words Without Borders published an extract online, translated into English by Andrea Heyde. Qantara.de has a compelling review of the nominated new novel, Das dunkle Schiff (The Dark Ship), which tells the story of a reluctant jihadist who flees from Iraq to Germany. None of Fatah's novels have been published in English yet -- perhaps a win in the German Book Prize will lead a publisher to his work?

The Nobel Art of Blogging

Jose Saramago has started a blog. It's in Portuguese, so if you speak the language it looks like a great way to get the inside scoop on a Nobel Laureate's writing process, particularly as Fernando Mereilles' film adaptation of Saramago's Blindness is released.

Saramago will be welcomed to the litblogging community by writers Ghada Abdel Aal, Marwa Rakha, and Rajaa Alsanea, who are part of a new trend in the Middle East for gossip-girl novels based on blogs. These women writers have successfully used the internet as a forum in which to speak about the inner lives of Arabic women, to dispense advice about marriage, men and education, and have found a following for their work. Where Rakha is a sharp, secular critic, Alsanea writes about balancing halal behaviour and belief with the desire to be an emancipated, educated woman. All three point to the hypocrisies and double standards exploited by men in their societies -- but their powerful critiques are delicately layered inside what seems like Sex and the City fluff.

Perhaps these aren't novels that might win a Nobel prize for Literature, but can the time be far off when a blook wins one of the major literary awards?