Humphrey Davies translated more than thirty works of Arabic literature, including works by nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. He also became Elias Khoury’s most prolific translator into English. Starting with his translation of Gate of the Sun, Davies translated all the subsequent novels that Elias wrote, revisiting earlier novels and ending with Khoury’s last work, Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea, which he completed weeks before he passed away abruptly from a short struggle with cancer in November 2021.
On one of Humphrey’s visits to Beirut, I took him and Elias to the grave of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq in Hazmieh. It was a special day for me. Here was Elias, the mentor who introduced me to the work of al-Shidyaq and placed me on a path that would define the intellectual trajectory of my life; and here was Humphrey, Elias’s translator, and the master translator who transcreated that profusely difficult-to-read work of al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg into English. The three of us came to pay our respects to the man who has, in many ways, shaped our worldview and transformed our approach to literature. I was used to visiting al-Shidyaq at his grave, for it was a kind of sanctuary for me as I battled with my academic research. The grave had been neglected for at least a hundred years, and someone had even stolen one of the pillars that adorned it. Dust was everywhere, the glass of the mausoleum that housed his grave was broken. A couple of years before our visit, part of the Bashawat graveyard, as that cemetery was known, was destroyed, and a small building with a parking lot cut it in half. The graves that were there were covered in asphalt. Al-Shidyaq’s mausoleum was left untouched, and the door to his lot was now fenced off.
We climbed over the fence and went in. Humphrey wanted to read something from the translation, but we could not do so with the grave so dirty. We decided to wash the grave, and climbed back over the fence, knocked on the door of the diet center that occupied the new building that replaced some of the graves. We asked the employees for a broom, some washcloths and water. They were startled, but quickly furnished us with what we needed. We dusted and washed the grave, then went out into the garden that is part of the mausoleum and picked wildflowers, palm leaves and olive branches to place on the grave, in place of the missing pillar. Humphrey read from his book, that famous passage on the difference between the oud and the piano that he had rendered so perfectly into English. After he was done, Elias confided that he wished to be buried next to al-Shidyaq, to keep the man company in his eternal sleep.
Elias was emotional that day. He was pained by the obvious neglect that was eating away at the memory of one of Lebanon’s towering literary giants. He had to confront how, in Lebanon, writing does not safeguard your memory from oblivion. We discussed the feasibility of such a burial, a theme that Elias did not abandon so easily, and came up again, when we visited the site a second time, in 2020, with many friends, to give the grave a proper clean up and hang a sign on the side of the street that I composed and Jana Traboulsi designed to inform the unconcerned passersby that here lies one of Lebanon’s most important literary masters.
Elias, together with his old friend and al-Shidyaq scholar Fawwaz Traboulsi, helped us wash away a century of neglect from the grave and spoke of al-Shidyaq and what he had meant for them. Then they went around what remained of the cemetery and told us what they knew about the other less famous Ottoman servants who were also buried next to al-Shidyaq. We learned that day that the land upon which al-Shidyaq is buried belongs to dar al-fatwa, and thus a sunni waqf. Thus Elias, who belongs to the Greek Orthodox denomination, could not have his wish granted to be buried next to Fares, the Maronite convert to Islam, who despite his conversion had to be buried in a Christian cemetery of servants of the Ottoman government, where the land upon which his remains are kept was given to the sunnis to resolve the embarrassing conundrum of al-Shidyaq’s conversion and its destabilizing effect on Lebanon’s delicate sectarian value system.
I conducted this interview as part of “Literature, Culture, and the Political: A Conference on Elias Khoury,” organized by Zeina G. Halabi at the American University of Beirut in April 2018.
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Rana Issa: When did you become acquainted with Elias Khoury’s novels and why did you choose to translate him?
Humphrey Davies: I first became acquainted with Bab al-Shams (Gate of the Sun), which was the first book I translated for Elias Khoury. A friend of mine in Cairo was contacted by a publisher in Britain who was looking for a translator. I had recently finished working on The Yacoubian Building and was looking for a job. She was aware of that. So they put the two of us together. I must confess, I was not aware of Elias’s work up to that point. I read the book, and it struck me as unique, as almost something that I had been looking for. It had the sense of, yes, at last, here's a text that I would really love to translate. I think the fundamental reason for that is that it dealt with issues that are exceptionally important. It tackles the sorts of things that we, in our ordinary lives, think that we understand and set aside, like memory. We don't normally consider how memory works. Elias constantly brings these things to the forefront, analyzes them, and makes one understand them better. In addition to my being enthralled by the book as any ordinary reader and lover of literature would be, there was the added value, you could say, of it being such a powerful work about the dispossession of the Palestinians. I would reject the notion of translating a book about Palestinian dispossession if it were a bad book. It would be of no interest to me simply to do it as a political act. The fact that this is such a great book and that it could therefore embed itself in the imagination of non-Arabic speaking readers and produce some change in attitude, some change in understanding made it even more important for me to translate the book.
RI: Which of Elias’s novels did you like working on the most? Which was the most challenging?
HD: Yalo is the book I enjoyed the most. The reason is a personal one. I don't see Elias’s novels competing with one another as to which is the best. That's a pointless notion. In my personal development as a translator, when I translated Yalo, I felt that I got to be a much better translator than when I started translating Bab al-Shams. I felt much more comfortable. I was more familiar with some of the tricks and strategies of narration. It was, therefore, a particularly sweet experience to translate it, and gave me a great deal of pleasure. I had much pleasure also translating all of Elias's books later, but Yalo marked a point in my personal development as a translator that was important for me. As to the most challenging, well, any novel of Elias’s that deploys, as so many do, a great deal of poetry, especially the poetry of al-Mutanabbi has got to be considered a special challenge for a translator.
Al-Mutanabbi, who figures, for example, enormously in Ka’annaha Na’ima (As Though She Were Sleeping), is untranslated into English. A couple of attempts have been made. One translation was by the great Arthur John Arberry who did some poems by Al-Mutanabbi, but they were essentially cribs. He didn't intend them to be literary translations. He wanted them to be an aid for students so they could at least understand how the language worked. Of course, you can't do that when you're translating a novel. It has to somehow, hopefully, at least give the impression that this is poetry, not just an extension of the prose into lines that are written in italics. I reckon that the largest corpus of Al-Mutanabbi translated into English at the present time is probably to be found in the translations of Elias Khoury's novels, which perhaps unwittingly makes me the biggest translator of Al-Mutanabbi in the English-speaking world. Al-Mutanabbi’s brilliance and his elan, at times, almost leave meaning behind. He's just playing. It's a display of verbal fireworks.
Translators are always in search of meaning because they're always saying to themselves, and this is the fundamental question of translation, I suppose, what does it mean? So if you have somebody who doesn't actually mean what he seems to mean, or perhaps even what Elias once said to me, yeah, I don't know exactly what he meant by that. It's all psst, psht, tisht, pshs, psht. And to get that into English is difficult. The apex of al-Mutanabbi citation is, perhaps, in Ka’annaha Na’ima. I'm not sure now, and my memory is not clear whether this is al-Mutanabbi or another poet, but there's a wonderful, several-page long passage in which Mansour is drinking arak and he sits down and he starts to recite from a certain poet, is it al-Mutannabi? I can't remember. He suddenly realizes that he’s forgotten. It wasn't like that, was it? It really goes… He interrupts himself, and you as translator are bumping along after this guy. He's going to change the Arabic, you're going to have to try and change the English so that it is very clear that he could have been mistaken. In other words, the English must at least rhyme in the same way that the first verse that he mistakenly recited rhymes. I think that probably was one of the most challenging passages that I've translated by Elias Khoury. As novel qua novel, they all have their challenges. I don't think I can pick out a specific one.
RI: Can we define a Khoury novel the way we talk about the Mahfouzian novel, an author you also translated? What gets carried over from one text to another in the Khoury oeuvre?
HD: If somebody printed three sentences on a piece of paper from Elias Khoury and gave them to you, I think anybody who's read any other three sentences would say, oh, that's got to be Elias Khoury. There's no doubt about it. What exactly makes that the case is maybe harder to pin down. There are probably some strictly stylistic strategies that Khoury uses that are carried over throughout his work. I was thinking, trying to recreate this in my mind, but without a text in my hand, I couldn't come up with many beyond perhaps the use of kana, followed by an indefinite noun, as in kana daman [and so there was blood]. This is something that has occurred in many novels, and it feels to me very Khourian and not often met with, though I know it's grammatical and it happens in some texts, but the use of it by Khoury is more than elsewhere.
Otherwise, obviously it's the themes. And I feel like a lab technician in the company of an astrophysicist. You know the issues far better than I do. But when you're reading Khoury, the first word probably that will occur within the first paragraph, maybe I exaggerate, will be hikaya. That the universe is composed of hikayat is one of the marks of all of Khoury's novels. And memory, obviously, the endlessly recurring discussion, worrying at the notion of memory: what it is and what it isn't and how it serves us, how it betrays us, these are things that carry over from one novel to the other. There are perhaps a couple of things that I haven't heard referred to but which I find very characteristic; one is an interest in color, for example in Bab al-shams there are several references to the word white. It is unusual to find one color so featured or given such prominence in a novel. In other novels, it's other colors. For example in Sinalcol there's a lot of green and also yellow. The important point is not what color there is, but the visual aspect in the novels that intrigues me and makes them distinct.
Often this interest in color is associated with the also highly characteristic leap into quantum space that happens sometimes when we're going along and the world is the world. Then suddenly, we're in a different universe, a lyrically beautiful or terrifying universe. I hate to use the word magical realism because it's been overused and because quite probably I don't understand it the way that you do, because you all have read a thousand books of magical realism and written no doubt another thousand books about it. But, for example, there's a scene in Sinalcol in which the two boys, the twins, who are very young, become intrigued by the figure of somebody they call the Green Woman. She's a character who hangs around the neighborhood, and I can't remember the exact details but they follow her to her house. At one moment, to them, she ceases to be a green woman and she becomes a tree. This so beautifully captures the ability—captures the childish imagination, that she could be both a tree and a woman simultaneously. And this is not something ridiculous or illogical. This is how it is. Then the naughtier of the two boys picks up a stone and throws it at the woman or the tree. And the stone never falls. It just goes on through infinity, one may suppose. This kind of sudden lyrical epiphany is one of the things that I love most about Elias Khoury's novels, and that I think distinguishes them from any other writer that I know.
RI: Elias positions himself in lineage with Ahmed Fares al-Shidyaq, One Thousand and One Nights, and other canonical prose in the Arabic tradition. As someone who has worked on al-Shidyaq and Khoury, do you find a connection between the two authors?
HD: Yes, one obvious connection, I think, is that they're both concerned, self-consciously concerned, explicitly concerned, with language and how language works. So al-Shidyaq has, within his wonderfully very strong construction of Leg over Leg—it amazes me when people say that it's a chaotic book. It's not. It's extremely well-structured—after, I think, every 15 chapters, there's a maqama. And the first maqama is called a maqama on chapter 13, (or is it a maqama on the concept of chapter 13?). And it's this kind of ability to be in two spaces at once, that of the person who is writing because he wishes to tell a story, and that of the person who is watching the person who is writing and commenting on them, seems to me certainly present in al-Shidyaq and of course in Elias' works which circles around this idea of writing. Elias is constantly aware of the idea of writing, of the difficulty of writing, of the impossibility of writing, throughout his oeuvre, I think.
RI: If we are to follow the logic of translation studies theory, works of literature since the colonial era have been domesticated in what is called World Literature. You mentioned earlier how Bab al-Shams for you was a work that could introduce to an Anglophone audience the dispossession of the Palestinians in highly literary language. Theorists advocate, because of the imbalance between Arabic and English, untranslatability as a way to preserve the integrity of a text. Does theoretical discourse on untranslatability and world literature appeal to you as a translator and does it impact your work on Khoury? Is there a place where you feel that in Khoury's work there is an untranslatable element that you need to preserve in the English?
HD: This is where I feel especially like a lab technician. I have not devoted my life to reading the theory of translation. I have decided that the next six months of this year, or maybe twelve months coming, I will make this a project and get on top of all the theories of translation just for the intellectual interest. I personally don't believe that an awareness of translation theory would make any difference to how I translate. I believe that the act of translation is not one that emanates from an intellectual framework that one has set up in one way—"I have understood domestication and foreignization, and I will therefore translate as follows.” I think the act of translation, in some sense, however humble, is perhaps an act of creation. In moments of acts of creation, one doesn't think about theory.
Having said that as a kind of introduction, the least understandable thing to me of all the theoretical notions that I've heard about translation is that one shouldn't do it. I mean, this does strike me as bizarre. If I didn't translate, if everything is untranslatable, then what am I doing here? Maybe I don't understand exactly what is meant by untranslatable. But I can see, I have in my mind a concept of untranslatability. But it is very limited, and it concerns technical issues such as the pun. If you want to reproduce a pun, you just have to pray to St. Jerome that you can. Because, and occasionally, amazingly, you can. But that's because St. Jerome is a really good guy. But sometimes you can't. So you're just going to have to work around that and do something maybe similar somewhere else in the text close by to somehow compensate.
Poetry as a whole is another very difficult area in which one might say untranslatability lurks, but primarily because it's very difficult to rhyme in English. It's almost too easy, I would say, to rhyme in Arabic. Arabic produces. It generates rhyming forms and patterns. It is the nature of the language. English doesn't do that. So given that classically, at least, Arabic poetry is all mono-rhymed, you would be extremely lucky if you could come up with ten rhyming words that would fit in the translation of a given poem. So that's a headache that one has to get around as best one can. Usually, by trying to produce a translation that at least strikes me as a translator, as somehow poetic at least, it isn't prose. But it's not going to rhyme, and let us not even go to the notion that Arabic poetry has meters, right? Because typically English poetry uses a variation of a few meters, and we all know that Arabic has fifteen. So I think that's a lost cause.
Does untranslatability mean that there are certain words that you can't carry over? That, for example, if I'm describing a situation in a ghorza and somebody pulls out a goza that because nobody in England has ever been to a ghorza and nobody in England, nobody's ever seen a goza at least they've seen shishas now. This is something that the translator must work massively to overcome, or that it poses some fundamental theoretical problem. I don't see that. A goza is an instrument for smoking ma'asil, or whatever it may be. And a ghorza is a place where people smoke ma'asil and so on and use the goza. I think most audiences and most readers, and there's often a tendency to underestimate the readerly intelligence of readers, will quickly understand the functions of these things even if you don't translate them. Suppose you just put the word goza into the text and just left it like that, the way that, for example, Amitav Ghosh, who's a writer I very much like, has written a trilogy of books about the Indian Ocean in the late 18th, early 19th century, featuring the opium trade and commerce and the interaction of peoples. He must have used twenty words per page that are completely unfamiliar to most readers, and I've never heard it said that his books are unreadable. On the contrary, his books have a large following and people get it. They get what they need to get, and that's fine. And so, untranslatability, not high on my list of favorite things.
RI: Let me push more on untranslatability. You gave us an example on untranslatability with al-Mutanabbi and how it features in Elias's work as a particularly difficult intertextual reference to render, and the style of how it is written with interruptions and as work of memory that make it particularly challenging for a translator. So one can think of untranslatability this way. But one can also think of untranslatability in terms of, and here I'm going to the theories, the politics of translation. How do we translate Arabic literature in this case? Should the English reader be aware that what they are reading is a work of translation, and therefore they are not reading the original text, but reading a version of the text that the translator has produced for them? And does that impact the work that you do? Is there a particular way you translate to make sure that your reader knows? Is it important, actually, for the reader to know that what they're reading is a work of translation, not originally English, or what they call a domesticated text?
HD: Yes, I think it is important, but on the other hand I can't really imagine what a fully domesticated text would be. I mean, when I'm reading a text, I'm reading a culture as well. I'm reading specificities, and those specificities can't be lost. But who in their right minds would approach a book set in Lebanon in the middle of the 19th century and somehow try to work a magic, which would be extremely difficult, to make the reader feel that they were reading about England in the 19th century or something of the sort. I mean, I think the works impose their own personalities. And so, to make a huge hue and cry over domestication versus foreignization is probably a storm in a teacup, in my opinion. I know a lot of ink has been spilled on the internet saying many teacups full of ink. But from my purely translational perspective, it doesn't seem to me that it's as big an issue as people want to make out. You have talked about translation. I think there's an essential difference between things being difficult to translate and untranslatable. Untranslatable is an absolute, right? That's it. You can't do it. Difficult to translate is normal. I mean, many things are difficult to translate, or pose specific difficulties to which one can oppose certain strategies. And that's an essential... And there may be some confusion between these two things, but I think in the end there's a real difference. To claim that things cannot be translated. Well, if they cannot be translated, then the whole enterprise is a waste of time. You mentioned world literature, and the idea that somehow within academic discourse, world literature is an intrinsically bad thing. To me world literature is simply the sum of books that have been written in the world and for every book that you add, you change that concept, you complicate that concept. See, I can speak that jargon, too, and enrich it and offer readers yet more perspectives. How can that be bad?
Rana Issa
Rana Issa is a writer, translator and curator. She is the author of The Modern Arabic Bible, Tung Tid Mor (Heavy Times Mother), and the forthcoming memoir Ummiyat. She is cofounder and artistic director of Masahat for Arab Arts and Culture in Exile, an institution that programs and produces cultural expression by Arab and global south artists and writers in Norway.
Humphrey Davies
Humphrey Davies was an award-winning translator of some twenty works of modern Arabic literature, among them Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, four novels by Elias Khoury, including Gate of the Sun, and Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq’s Leg over Leg. His awards included the inaugural Banipal Prize for Arabic literary translation for Gate of the Sun.
