After reading Sebald yesterday, I realized that translating Austerlitz was an easier project than The Emigrants, possibly because the latter laid the bitumen, smoothed the ride, for Austerlitz. A troublesome issue arises in translating Sebald into Arabic. His style, drawn-out and elongated sentences that wrap around the page and their reader, seems at first glance to be an ideal fit for Arabic, where use of punctuation is less formal. (Translating Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis was a relative breeze.) However, Sebald’s ubiquitous insertion of Jacques Austerlitz’s tongue into the unnamed narrator’s first-person narrative was difficult to convey precisely, since Arabic, like Spanish, drops pronouns more often than English or German. Sebald’s I spoke for at least two people.
The above problem has invaded my thoughts like algae this morning. I’ll reread my translation of The Emigrants, which I haven’t looked at in years. I must examine how I solved the problem then. But first I must bring it forth out of storage.
I don’t wait to finish my tea before searching for a flashlight — from the dark I come and into the dark I return. I have two flashlights, but can’t find either. Both are in the kitchen, I’m certain of that. I count to ten before searching once more, repeating every step in case I missed something the first go-around, returning to where I’ve been before. In vain. I down my tea, place the cup in the sink, and wax two candles onto the saucer. The rim of the saucer’s depression is lightly discolored — a dusting of rust and red and brown, remnants of teas gone by that did not wish to be washed away, refused to be forgotten, the age rings of a small plate. The maid’s room, barely larger than the boxes stored in it, is in the back of the kitchen behind the maid’s bathroom. I live in an ambitious building: all four apartments have identical layouts, with midget maid’s quarters, yet no resident has ever had a live-in maid that I know of. The room has no light; its ceiling bulb expired years ago. I am tall, but I’m uncomfortable with heights. I depend on a handyman to change high lightbulbs, hence the need for a flashlight or candles.
I begin the march toward the room, saucer and candles in hand, a breath of smoke and sulfur in my nostrils.
Crates fill the maid’s bathroom. No need for candles in here. No shower, no bathtub, just a low metal spigot and a drain, toward which the tiled floor is slightly angled. A street-facing lofty window, a wedge of early northern light, illuminates the cartons of manuscripts. The toilet has three boxes stacked atop one another. These aren’t what I’m looking for; these are boxes from the last ten years, overflow from the maid’s room.
The windowless maid’s room devours light and messes up my circulation. It has been more than a few years since I’ve opened the door — since the room overflowed into the bathroom, I no longer enter as often. The room induces an irrational heart. Sometimes upon entering, my heart works so hard it reaches the point of seizing. Other times, it thumps so joyfully it approaches the point of bursting. On still other occasions, it slows to the beat of torpor and dies out. This morning the veins in my temples throb with a big, blooming, buzzing confusion.
“Irrational heart”—I love the phrase, read it in Murphy years ago, and it carved itself a prominent place in my memory. I could also have written that my heart behaved “like a rocket set off,” from Welty’s “Death of a Traveling Salesman.”
I’m unable to translate Beckett because he wrote in the two languages that I don’t allow myself to work from. Early on, I decided that since some Lebanese can read English or French, I wouldn’t translate writers who wrote in those languages; might be a somewhat arbitrary decision, but a necessary one I felt. Restricting choices is not always a bad thing. I have never translated a French writer, an English writer, or an American one. No Camus, no Duras, no Faulkner, no Welty, no Hemingway (thank the Lord), and not the young writers I admire, Junot Díaz (wonderfully macaronic language) or Aleksandar Hemon (macaronic in a single language). My self-imposed rules meant that I couldn’t translate some African writers, say J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, or Nuruddin Farah, since they wrote — write — in English. No Australians, not Patrick White, whom I adore, not David Malouf. I can’t translate Milan Kundera, the Czech, because he wrote and rewrote the French versions of his books, nor can I work on Ismail Kadare, because the English versions of his novels were translated from the French, not the original Albanian.
However, I’m fluent in only three languages: Arabic, English, and French. So I invented my own special system: to achieve the most accurate representation of a work, I use a French and an English translation to create an Arabic one. It is a functional and well-planned system that allows me to enjoy what I do. I know this makes my translation one step further removed from the original, like Kadare’s English novels, but it is the method I continue to use. Those are the rules I chose. I became a servant, albeit voluntarily, of a discipline, a specific ritual. I am my system, and my system is me.
I wouldn’t translate Beckett’s Murphy even if it were written in another language, say Serbo-Croatian, because I dislike the novel. I’ve read Waiting for Godot three times and I still can’t tell you what it is about. If, as some critics claim, it is about being bored while waiting for God to return, then it’s even duller than I thought.
Crates, crates, boxes, and crates. The translated manuscripts have the two books, French and English, affixed to the side of the box for identification. Tolstoy, Gogol, and Hamsun; Calvino, Borges, Schulz, Nádas, Nooteboom; Kiš, Karasu, and Kafka; books of memory, disquiet, but not of laughter and forgetting. Years of books, books of years. A waste of time, a waste of a life.
Sebald’s box lies atop Nooteboom’s, under three other translations. I place the saucer of candles on a pile. I take the top boxes down, making sure they don’t fall on me. Sebald is weighty, as if it added heft during its perfectly sedentary lifestyle all these years. I can barely carry it, so the saucer is out of the question. I blow out the candles, throwing the maid’s room into darkness, just the smell of smoke and must and dust.
After one of the Palestinian fighters defecated on the floor of this bathroom, a hand’s width south of the drain, I spent hours on my knees cleaning the soil of the soldier, the silt and dregs. I used a coarse wire scrubbing brush, like a blackboard eraser, most innocuous of instruments. Out, out. Even though no trace remains, I always step over the spot as if it were an Israeli landmine—upborne with indefatigable wings over the vast abrupt. The passel of Palestinians didn’t steal much, there wasn’t much to steal — there was never much of a market for books.
I place the heavy box on the floor next to the reading armchair. With a slightly damp cloth, I wipe off the dust. I tear open the masking tape and remove the lid. The reams of paper are there, of course, just as I left them so many years ago. I remove a short stack from the top. The first page has the title of the book in Arabic written in indelible ink, Sebald’s full name, and mine, Aaliya Saleh, below it, a bit smaller. The sheet is slightly brittle at the edges, nothing too worrisome. I stretch my back and consider whether I want another cup of tea before delving into Sebald’s world of melancholy.
I shouldn’t have opened the door, should have looked through the peephole, but I certainly wasn’t expecting my half brother the eldest to appear. I haven’t seen any of my half brothers in years, and none has been to my home in a decade or more. Yet I should have known it was he. I’d heard Fadia’s voice say, “Trouble,” when my doorbell rang. From the landing, she has an unobstructed view of my door, my comings and goings. He rang the bell, and because my movements have slowed and it took me a few extra seconds to get to the door, he rang the bell once more, a longer, more persistent ring. My half brothers, like so many men and boys, have the impatience of the entitled.