In an essay that appeared in Public Culture in 2016, “Is Arabic Untranslatable?,” the scholar, critic, and translator Robyn Creswell cites an anecdote that I often turn to when teaching my literary translation courses at Oberlin College. The story goes that the great translator of French, Richard Howard, was once asked how he would translate a particularly obscure word, “a recherché term intended to stump the Master.” According to lore, Howard responded, “I don’t translate words.” I ask my students, what does he mean? Over the course of the semester, we figure it out. Translation involves much more than finding equivalents for particular words. It entails grappling with language at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, the book, the author, and even the history of entire literary traditions.
As Creswell suggests in his essay, the translation of Arabic into English is a particularly fraught endeavor, not least due to an American media context that “cartoonishly” transforms the Arab world into “the mirror image of our idealized self.” As a critic and a translator, Creswell counters these stereotypes, both by virtue of his incisive and subtle criticism in venues like The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, and by translating works that challenge any facile notion of what Arabic literature should look like. This includes his most recent translation, a collection of poems by the contemporary Egyptian Arabic writer Iman Mersal, titled The Threshold (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023).
Mersal’s poems are earthy, wry, and intimate. Reading this collection, I felt like her voice was emanating from inside my own head. Creswell manages to communicate the specificities of Mersal’s ironic commentary on Arabic and Egyptian cultural life, while at the same time inviting this American reader to see herself in the poet’s experiences. A pair of lines from the poem “Why did she come?”—a meditation on the experience of migration—came to articulate for me the dawning experience of middle age: “Perhaps these days of sedation are the real nightmare/ Nothing here deserves your rebellion.” This poet felt like someone I recognized, someone I knew, despite the vast differences in our biographies.
In November 2023, Creswell was awarded ALTA’s National Translation Award in Poetry for The Threshold. Nominally, this became the occasion for our interview, but as a longtime admirer of his work, I was excited to ask him not only about this collection, but about his broader philosophy and practice of translation. Over the course of about 14 months, we traded questions (in sets of two) back and forth on a shared Google doc. I was particularly keen to ask him questions that come up in the courses I teach, on topics related to fidelity, agency, and accessibility—although these concepts are of course highly contested.
Anna Levett
Anna Levett: Speaking as someone whose own interest and education in Arabic came relatively late, I’m always interested to hear about how non-native speakers came to be interested in Arabic. Assuming, of course, that you are a non-native speaker, could you talk a bit about how you first started learning Arabic, and/or how you became interested in Arabic poetry? Were you already learning Arabic and then began reading the poetry, or was it reading Arabic poetry (or Arabic literature more broadly) that sparked your interest in the language?
Robyn Creswell: Origin stories should always be taken with a grain of salt. When I was in high school in Brooklyn, a terrific history teacher named Mark Clizbe taught a course on the Middle East. Our first reading was the introduction to Edward Said’s Orientalism–a bold choice for sixteen year-olds. I’m sure I understood very little, but the book seduced me: its erudition, its style, and maybe the cover too. I got a copy–probably the first scholarly book I ever bought–and read the whole thing, filling the margins with question marks. I learned a lot but I was puzzled that Said had almost nothing to say about the actual “Orient,” that is, about Arabs or Middle Eastern history (or Islam). In some ways, I think my interest in Arabic stems from that puzzlement: what was going unsaid? I spent the next summer in Morocco, in a town in the High Atlas called Chefchaouen. We were there to help build roads, I think, but mostly we smoked hashish and I made a lot of Moroccan friends, whom I wanted to visit again–and speak to in Arabic, rather than French. So I began taking Arabic classes at college; later, I worked in Beirut as a sports reporter–an odd but fascinating job–and studied Arabic formally again in Cairo. One thing led to another.
AL: Along the same lines as the question above, can you talk about what drew you to the work of literary translation? Lydia Davis has written about the “eleven pleasures of translating.” Can you articulate some of its specific pleasures and/or difficulties, especially when translating from Arabic? Is there a passage from your most recent translation, The Threshold, for example, that you are particularly proud of, or that you found particularly challenging?
RC: Formal or literary Arabic (fusha), which is the only kind of Arabic I’ve translated, is an astonishingly acrobatic language. Because of its system of case markers (‘irab), the word order of almost any sentence can be endlessly rearranged without losing clarity of syntax. There’s a flexibility to the language that invites the English translator–or so I like to imagine–to think very freely, if also rigorously, about his own syntax. In her essay, Davis talks about translating as writing that is also puzzle-solving. I think this is very true: the pleasures of translation are akin to the thrills one gets from fitting jigsaw pieces together. The exciting puzzles that Arabic texts pose–for me at least–are often syntactical: how to construct an English version that conveys the gymnastic suppleness of the original. (This means that I generally don’t adopt Davis’s method of following the original’s word order. With Arabic texts, that would often be impossible. But I also want to convey a sense of syntactic athleticism.)
AL: I love what you say about translation and its relation to puzzle-solving. I had a student once tell me that translation was like sudoku, and that he was neglecting all his other schoolwork because he found it similarly addictive.
As you intimate above, Davis’s method of following the original word order just doesn’t work when translating from Arabic. And there are other translation maxims–like Lawrence Venuti’s directive to make a “foreignizing” translation–that also do not make sense for translating Arabic. As you have noted, to “foreignize” an Arabic translation by adhering to a literalist, word-for-word method only reinforces the dominant view of the Arab world as “fundamentally alien.” Considering that most American readers have little to no knowledge of Arabic language or culture (unlike, say, French or French culture), I am interested to hear how you think about your audience. In interviews you have talked about poetry having the capacity to “universalize the particular.” It feels to me like The Threshold is aimed at readers who may not have experience with or knowledge of the Arab world, and yet in poems like “Raising a Glass with an Arab Nationalist,” I really appreciate that you neither over-explain nor dilute the specificities of what Mersal is talking about. How do you imagine a poem like “Raising a Glass” or “The Threshold” lands for a reader who has little to no knowledge of the Arab world? What kind of audience do you imagine when you are translating, and what is the effect that you hope to create?
RC: As a translator—but also as a critic—I imagine that my readers are basically like me: they read a lot, are curious about things they don’t know, and won’t waste their time reading anything that isn’t carefully and vividly written. I also assume they haven’t spent most of their professional lives studying Arabic literature, so I might have something to teach them about that, or at least have something interesting to say.
Another of my assumptions is that good poems, if you read them closely enough, give you what you need to understand them. Not in any final sense, of course, and I don’t mean that poems are unrelated to history, politics, culture. But a poem (including a translated poem) does have to work, in an initial sense, on its own terms. If the reader finds those terms persuasive–insightful, intriguing, useful—then they may go on to learn about what surrounds the poem: the life of the poet, the culture of the poem, the history that informs it.
“The Threshold” is a poem about being young and rebellious, about having the sorts of friends that are maybe only possible when you are young, and ultimately about leaving them behind. The details are Cairene—the more you know about Cairo, the more meaningful or complex the poem becomes—but the experience is common, if not universal.
AL: In the opening poem of The Threshold, “Self-Exposure,” Mersal writes (in your translation), “I’m pretty sure/my self-exposures/ are for me to hide behind.” This of course made me think of translation and the way in which a translation both exposes and conceals the translator’s agency. Where do you see yourself exposed in your translations? Or, if you do not see yourself as exposed, are there ways in which your own aesthetic predilections become apparent in your translations? Could you give an example from The Threshold?
RC: Lyric poets wear masks, whether they admit it or not. If they also play peek-a-boo, what we get is another mask beneath the first one. In “An Essay on Children’s Games,” Iman writes about why she never played peekaboo with her own children and how, in games of make-believe, she always had the role of a blind girl, “the role no one wanted except me.”
As a translator, I don’t imagine myself as playing games of peekaboo either. The old ideal of a translator’s invisibility—of vanishing completely behind the poet’s mask—is a good one for me, even if impossible to achieve (I don’t mean, of course, that translators shouldn’t be properly paid or recognized for their work). If I do expose myself somewhere in my translation, I’d keep it under wraps.
Maybe you’ll accept instead a story about resisting the temptations of self-exposure? In my introduction to The Threshold, I talk about using Iman’s voice—rough after years of smoking and living in Cairo—as a tuning fork for my versions. (When it comes to translation, I find musical metaphors more helpful than theatrical ones). At the end of the book’s second poem, “Amina,” the poet contemplates kicking a friend out of their shared hotel room: “The empty space you leave behind / might make me bite my lips in regret / as I ponder your toothbrush, / wet and familiar.“ In my original draft, the final adjectives were reversed, “familiar and wet,” which is their sequence in the original, and also made a rhyme with “bit my lips in regret.” The rhyme felt like a gift (I wasn’t looking for it) and gave me the opportunity to perform a little flourish. But the voice in the poems is or should be Iman’s, and hers is “raspy” (as she writes) rather than mellifluous. So I muted the rhyme, however regretfully, and hope the line sounds more like her than me.
AL: Thank you so much for this beautifully specific example! I plan on using this in my translation classes as a way to help students think about the kind of choices they will need to make, and how they can decide what to do.
Can I push you on this topic just a little bit more though? Infidelity, as you mention in your introduction to The Threshold, is one of Mersal’s important themes. You write that her interest in the subject is related to an interest in artistic renewal – “betrayal is needed to make things new; it is an artistic principle as much as a political and an erotic one.” Reading this, I cannot help but think about “fidelity” in relation to translation. My sense is that you do not view fidelity as a matter of word-for-word semantic “accuracy” (whatever that might mean), but you nonetheless adhere, as you mention above, to the notion that the translator should be “invisible.” Have there been instances, in your translations of Mersal or perhaps elsewhere, where a “betrayal” was necessary in order to “make things new”? How do you understand “newness” in relation to translation?
RC: Sometimes newness is easiest to see against a background of previous translations. One of my happiest experiments—I guess that all translation is basically an experiment—was an attempt to English Imru’ al-Qays’s sixth-century mu‘allaqa or “hanging ode.” I tried for years to convince the poet Frederick Seidel to translate this poem, to no avail. He got stuck on the monorhyme. So I did it myself—or rather I did portions of it, since there were sections that I didn’t feel were within my reach. The poem is foundational in Arabic and has been done into English many times, by William Jones in the eighteenth century and—among many others—Desmond O’Grady in the twentieth. But I didn’t think any English version spoke in the voice I heard in Arabic: tender, very male, plangent, mischievous, gallant, naughty. I felt previous versions made him wooden or rhetorical (though I admire O’Grady’s playfulness). I know some readers don’t find my version accurate—they’ve told me so—and they’re right. But in this case, as in my translations of Iman, what I wanted most to capture was a tone of voice.”
AL: Last question! What advice would you give to a literary translator who is just starting out?
RC: I would quote to them a pair of couplets from the Earl of Roscommon’s “Essay on Translated Verse” (which every translator should read at least twice):
Examine how your Humour is inclin’d,
And which the Ruling Passion of your Mind;
Then, seek a Poet who your way do’s bend,
And chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend.
AL: Thank you!
Robyn Creswell is a scholar, critic, and literary translator of both Arabic and French. An Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale, Creswell is the author of City of Beginnings: Arabic Modernism in Beirut (2019). His translations from Arabic (in addition to The Threshold) include That Smell and Notes from Prison by Sonallah Ibrahim (2013), as well as Abdelfatah Kilito’s The Clash of Images (2010) and The Tongue of Adam (2015), both from French. Creswell also regularly writes criticism for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere.
Anna Levett is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Oberlin College, where she teaches courses on literary translation, world literature, and Mediterranean and Middle East studies. She is a scholar of modern and contemporary French, Francophone, and Arabic literature; her current book project concerns the translation of surrealism into Sufism (and vice-versa) in the work of 20th-century Arab authors. She translates from French.