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Maia Tabet
Discovering Elias Khoury

MAIA TABET

Discovering Elias Khoury

I discovered Elias Khoury’s writing in 1983 through a series of columns he wrote for As-Safir, the left-leaning Lebanese newspaper where Khoury was then an editor. The columns, appearing under the rubric of Zaman al-Ihtilal, or Chronicles of Occupation, were a free-form but in-depth commentary on the Lebanese (and Arab) condition in the aftermath of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

At the time I discovered Khoury’s columns, we used to scan the newspapers on a daily basis, following political and security developments closely during the years of Lebanon’s so-called civil war. For me, the newspapers were only marginally interesting: most articles seemed long-winded and predictable, but every time I read one of his columns, Elias Khoury’s writing made my heart skip a beat. His deceptively simple but powerful language, his unwavering commitment to what we would now call a liberatory politics, and his poetically-charged lyricism devoid of any sentimentality gave me feelings of pleasure mixed with excitement. As a result of various accidents of history, even though I was born to Lebanese parents and raised mostly, but not entirely, in Lebanon, my language of literary expression was English and not Arabic. And because of the way I experienced myself as being truncated between the cultures of the two languages, whenever I read an Arabic text that struck a deep chord, my first thought was and to this day remains: “I must bring this into English so that all my non-Arabic speaking friends can understand the ineffable beauty of the culture I belong to.”

And so it was that I began to translate some of Khoury’s columns. I quickly discovered that being a literary translator was very different from being a proficient technical translator, which I already was. Finding the English equivalent of a word or turn of phrase was the least of it; capturing the feeling of the text, and evoking the universes the writer invoked, those were the true challenges. Cleaving close to the Arabic, the source language, often delivered fidelity but not beauty; taking liberties meant I could convey the connotative if not the denotative meanings of words. But how much was too much? Thirty-five years later, I’m still working on the “perfect” rendition, imagining it as some kind of dance that I could one day execute flawlessly.

It turned out that I knew several people who were acquainted with Elias Khoury personally, and although I no longer remember who introduced us, the introduction took place after I had shared my enthusiasm for his Zaman al-Ihtilal columns, which I was working on with no purpose or endgame in mind. I had not the slightest idea what might come of the translations, and the notion that they might be published, or that anyone would be interested in them or their publication, was utterly irrelevant. Looking back, I could describe this as an exercise: one that might have been an assignment in a university-level course on translation.

Once Elias and I met, we became friends. We socialized, I met his wife and children, we went out for coffee, and we talked. Elias is what might today be described as masculinist – a man intent on performing his masculinity in the vicinity of women in ways that can sometimes be unpleasant – but I think he was flattered by my attention to his work and, thus indirectly, to him. He was and is a charismatic figure: erudite, brilliant, funny, sharp as a tack, both intellectually and emotionally. Although he dialed up the magnetism and charm, he was also warm and approachable. He could undoubtedly be overbearing and dismissive at times, or come across as condescending and engage in vulgarities with the glee of a schoolboy. But his unwavering political integrity and his deep sense of loyalty to his friends marked him as one of a kind for me, flaws notwithstanding. And he writes like a dream. I was in awe of his writing then, and remain so to this day.

Our conversation progressed from discussing the translation of the columns to undertaking the possible translation of Abwab al-Madina (City Gates), one of his early works, which is genre-defying. It appeared in 1981, the same year as Al-Wujouh al-Bayda’ (White Masks): a book that conforms much more closely to our understanding of a novel. I worked on the first chapter of City Gates but found it frustrating; not having the literary skills or maturity I have now, the poetic prose and completely surrealistic and non-linear narrative – if one can call it that – just flummoxed me. I tried and tried to reproduce the beauty of the text but couldn’t fully grasp its sense and therefore couldn’t do it justice. How was it possible to translate a text whose discrete words I understood but whose overall arc eluded me?

At some point, Elias suggested I read Al-Jabal as-Saghir (Little Mountain), a book with a strong autobiographical undertow that had been published in 1979 to considerable acclaim. I fell in love with it straight away, right from the moving and melodious opening lines:

“They call it Little Mountain. And we called it Little Mountain. We’d carry pebbles, draw faces, and look for a puddle of water to wash off the sand, or fill with sand, then cry. We’d run through the fields – or something like fields – pick up a tortoise and carry it to where green leaves littered the ground. We made up things we’d say or wouldn’t say. They call it Little Mountain, we knew it wasn’t a mountain and we called it Little Mountain.”*[1]

By now, it was 1986 and I was getting ready to leave Lebanon with my newly-wed husband for what seemed to me like a life of exile. We were going to Yemen, where he would lead the country program for an international NGO, and where I knew no one and had no connections. I was going to be a “wife” and in the fullness of time, and God willing, a mother. Translating Little Mountain would be my project.

While we awaited our Yemeni visas we honeymooned in Cyprus, in June 1986. I sat scantily-dressed at a table on the balcony of our hotel room in the crisp and sun-filled Troodos Mountains, and began on my first book-length literary translation. We had no laptops or computers then, and I worked with pen and paper, filling yellow legal pads with my handwriting. By July we were in Sana’a, and as soon as I’d found my bearings, and in between obligations incumbent upon me as the new mudir’s wife, I returned to my project. My husband would leave for his office each morning, and I would sit in our Yemeni house, with its white-washed walls, traditional mafraj or reception room, and brightly coloured stained-glass domed windows, a dictionary and a Thesaurus at my elbow, translating. In time, I became pregnant with our first child. But truth be told, Little Mountain, as the book would be called in English, felt like my first baby: it was only after I had put the final polish on it, typed it all up, and sent it off to the publisher that I was able to give birth to the flesh-and-blood baby I had carried for nine months. In the interval between starting the book and finishing it, I had returned to Beirut for a visit, meeting several times with Elias to go over the English text. We’d sit in his living-room in the evenings, with a tray of nawashef to graze on as we discussed word choices and constructions, images I hadn’t quite captured, or unclear meanings that had remained out of reach. He seemed very pleased.

I returned to Sana’a to produce a final draft and Elias secured a publisher with the help of Edward Said, who wrote the foreword to the English text. Minnesota University Press (MUP), which had recently launched its Emerging Writers series, was interested in publishing Little Mountain and they were going to pay me! When MUP told me the amount, I calculated that I would earn less than the hourly wage of what Americans refer to as janitors. I was aghast and indignant at first, but quickly learned that it was par for the course. Like writers, poets, and other authors – except for the famous, commercially successful ones – translators are not remunerated commensurately with the labour they perform.

By mid-1989, I had two thriving babies: my daughter Yusra, who was by then going into her second year, and a real pages-and-ink book published by MUP, which went on to be reissued several times. But there was also another move, this time to Cyprus. Another baby arrived in 1990 and, in 1992, with a toddler and a four-year old, my husband and I made the decision to move to Pakistan for a job he had been offered with yet another international NGO. I would not have the right to work there, so this was my chance to embark on another translation project. With two very young children, an often-absent husband and no family close by, I had done little bits and pieces of work here and there, freelancing as an editor and translator and also tutoring in English. But there had been no “project” since Little Mountain. This move was going to be different: my children were of pre-school and school-going age, I would have the luxury of a living situation as an expat with domestic help, and despite various obligations would be able to see through a proper, book-length project. Although Elias had been consistently producing a novel every two to three years since 1979, I decided on White Masks. The book had appeared in 1981 and marked a significant milestone since it was the first novel written by an ally and “activist” who was openly critical of the purportedly progressive political forces involved in the war. (Interestingly, the difficult City Gates appeared in a translation by Paula Haydar in 1993, the same year I started working on White Masks.)

My new project took on an epic quality. During the Pakistan years, I made good progress but life events kept getting in the way: I had an unwanted pregnancy, which I terminated; my father fell ill in Beirut, and later died; my godmother, who was a major figure in my life following the loss of my own mother at a tender age, also died; I was misdiagnosed with cancer and told I had six months at the outside; my husband changed jobs; we moved house; my marriage faltered. To crown it all, four months into the new job, we learned that the requisite visas had been turned down and were notified that we had to leave the country forthwith. We left, with the book unfinished.

Landing in the USA in 1997, we started over again. Setting up camp, registering kids in school, getting drivers’ licenses, attending to the myriad bureaucratic requirements that govern life in a “high-functioning” country, finding jobs (and losing them), and moving – always moving! The absolute requirement to become an earning if junior member of a dual-income family meant setting aside my unfinished project. White Masks went dormant. I had already found motherhood to be an all-consuming enterprise and had no aptitude, energy, or mental bandwidth for labour that required lengthy hours of uninterrupted solitude. I could barely keep my head above water as my marriage finally collapsed. I worked part-time initially and then full-time as a professional cook, cooking instructor and private chef – work that did not require uninterrupted solitude and that I could do around my children and their schedules.

Fast forward eleven years. In 2008, I received an email from Elias telling me that he had a publisher for White Masks in English, if only I would finish the translation. By this time, he had garnered an international literary reputation and had a dozen or so books to his name, almost all of which have been translated into other languages, and Humphrey Davies had in effect become his “traducteur attitré” in English. I told Elias that the only way I could finish the book was to be paid as I worked on finalizing the text, and that waiting for payment until the book was under contract was not an option. By then, I had become a single mother and financial stability, which had always been elusive at best, was now downright precarious. He agreed and fronted the money. Thanks to the internet I was able to get it finished, going over revisions with Elias long distance. I had not been back to Lebanon for twelve years and would not return again until after White Masks came into in being in 2010, thanks in the end to Archipelago Press: a small publishing house known for its beautifully-crafted books and its commitment to foreign literatures.

Today, with my kids mostly grown, I have resumed literary translation as a serious vocation. Working various day jobs in the last decade, I have carved out time to immerse myself in other book translation projects, with three of these published since the appearance of White Masks and a fourth now on the way. In a satisfying closure of the circle, I am today Elias Khoury’s colleague: he is the editor of the Beirut-based Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya and I am the associate editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, the flagship publication of the Institute for Palestine Studies, which produces both journals. Over the seas and across the ether, our collaboration endures and we continue to talk.

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Note:

[1] Little Mountain was the popular name for the Ashrafiyyeh neighbourhood of Beirut.

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Check out the rest of the feature in Banipal 67 – Elias Khoury, The Novelist

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