By Fire: Writings on the Arab Spring

A Note on the Translation

After leaving the Paris bookstore with a copy of By Fire, I found a bench in Park Monceau and read the book without looking up. It was as though I did not even take a breath while I read. The sky had clouded over; it was already late afternoon. I closed the book and sat quietly for a while with my eyes closed, imagining those last few hours of Mohamed’s life. I heard his desperate voice and felt an unusual urgency for Anglophone readers to encounter Mohamed as soon as possible. Without moving from my bench, I took out paper and pen and began translating. As I worked, images from Mohamed’s life and death vividly unfolded before my eyes. Some of the passages left me trembling, breathless.

When I came across the following passage, Mohamed’s entire life, and then death, passed through my mind like sharp, clear snapshots:

A confused jumble of images rushed through his mind: His mother in bed, his father in his coffin, himself at the Faculty of Arts and Letters, Zineb smiling, Zineb angry, Zineb begging him not to do anything; his mother getting out of bed and calling for him; the face of the woman who had slapped him earlier, who slapped him again; his body bent forward as though he were offering himself to an executioner… his French teacher praising him; himself taking his college exams, showing his diploma to his parents; the diploma pinned to a sign beside the word unemployed; his diploma burning in the sink at his place; his father’s burial again; screams; birds; the President and his wife wearing huge black sunglasses; the woman who had slapped him; the other who had insulted him… the police brutalizing him again; insults, blows, insults, blows…

I tried to imagine how he might have felt a moment before self-ignition. I decided to concentrate on Mohamed’s agonized voice that spoke to me; I wanted to translate his stream of thoughts during those last days of his life.

Beyond By Fire and The Spark, I have translated and published several other works by Tahar Ben Jelloun, including his autobiographical novel L’Ecrivain public (The Public Scribe) and several short stories. What appealed to me when I first read Ben Jelloun is his language. His poetic French, which is so characteristic of most of his work, however, is a dramatic contrast with the writer’s simple, direct, and straightforward language in By Fire. The plot moves fast, and so did my translation. Here, Ben Jelloun dispenses with superfluous details. Instead, he goes straight to the point. Nothing is left ambiguous, neither Mohamed’s life nor his death. The writer himself said in his interview with the New Yorker, “Obviously the style had to be simple, direct, dry. The subject didn’t allow for adjectives and flowers! I had to stick closely to the human being and to what he was going to do; I had to stay as close as I could to life and to death” (Treisman 2013).

Translating Mohamed’s life and death was a deeply emotional experience. Recreating the text in English was stimulating; from French it flowed effortlessly into English. Troublesome were certain French idiomatic expressions and slang words. A few other words and phrases were difficult to translate either because they are cognates with different meanings in French and English or because the concepts do not exist in English. The word concierge, used for the receptionist at the town hall, for example, has a different meaning in French than it does in English. I translated it as “man at the front desk,” or “the front-desk clerk.” I translated phrases like camarade de lute as “fellow activist,” un député de la majorité as “MP,” and des diplômés chômeurs as “unemployed graduates”—words and a concept not as widespread in the West as in the MENA region.

Another word is rial, which Ben Jelloun uses as the local currency in Par le feu. I found this odd when I first read the book. Rial is Iranian, Omani, and Yemeni currency, not Tunisian. Later, Ben Jelloun confirmed to me his intention of portraying his Mohamed as any Mohamed from any Arab country. Ben Jelloun uppercases P for President (which I have left in uppercase), even when not preceding a proper noun like Ben Ali. I believe his use of the uppercase P is to show the fear and reverence the characters feel, especially government officials, when they speak about their president. Overall, there are few untranslatable lexical choices or constructions in Par le feu, and even fewer in L’étincelle. In The Spark, Ben Ali says at one point, “Yes, I, the Raïs — I have cried.” The word Raïs is a title used by the rulers of Arab states in the Middle East. Though it is translated as “president,” I have kept the original word.

I have strived to preserve Ben Jelloun’s tone and diction, his compassion for the protagonist, and his representation of Mohamed’s toxic environment. Priorities in my translation were faithfulness to the text’s lexical choices, Ben Jelloun’s aesthetic, and his voice, which is unique among Arab writers. I have sought to preserve the essence of idiomatic expressions. Above all, by respecting its cultural sensibilities, I have resisted domesticating the text, as an American Englishing will not tolerate Ben Jelloun’s voice. In Par le feu, there appears several times the word flic, whose translation is “cop”; I chose “police” or “police officer,” and used the word cop only in dialogue. I left all cultural elements and sensibilities intact as readers depend on them for access to Ben Jelloun’s streets full of vendors fleeing security agents, parrot men, sellers of pirated DVDs and loose American cigarettes, acrobats performing tricks, monkey trainers, storytellers, drivers who stop to buy fruit through the car window, and town halls where front-desk clerks repel people like Mohamed.

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Translators have an especially important task when they undertake texts from acutely inflamed areas of the world. Literary texts and their translations can open for readers the work of writers who bring news from a space unseen and unseeable by television cameras and officials’ sound bites. The Arab Spring is perhaps history, yet conditions throughout the Middle East continuously plunge into overwhelming humanitarian crises. Human rights abuses run rampant as beheadings and legions of starving, exploited refugees dominate news from the region. The chaos of war and the continuously shifting allegiances of sects, clans, and rebels birth rumors and confusion. There are stories of illegal emigrants making treacherous journeys to find employment, and there are stories of many young Tunisians and European Muslims joining the so-called Islamic State.

Then there are the Mohamed Bouazizis embedded in this mélange of violence and irrationality. They do not want to fight. They want to feed their families and live in peace and dignity. Ben Jelloun tells the story of one such man whom his government failed. Then the sky fell in. Hopes soared for a new era with the Arab Spring, and they collapsed. Now, more than ever, continuous war appears to be the new normal. Beneath the smoke and the rubble, the collapsed homes and desperate refugees, there are real people — individuals, not groups. Redeeming the individual sufferer amid the masses that the West sees on its iPhones and iPads is Ben Jelloun’s moral imperative. Neither the historical Mohamed Bouazizi nor his double are Everyman. Rather than generalize, though, Ben Jelloun, through the double he creates as an act of literature, reveals Mohamed Bouazizi in all his specificity.

Translation is an art. It requires creativity. Above all, it offers understanding of the global perspective. Translating By Fire and The Spark was not a process of replacing one word with another. It meant capturing the essence of the texts. The translation process and recreation of the texts fostered in me a sense of empathy like I never experienced before. It offered me a deeper understanding of how people like Mohamed might feel. I translate Tahar Ben Jelloun’s stories because they help me understand the human condition. I translate his work because he confronts and denounces dictatorship, corruption, exploitation, violence, and female repression. Like the author himself who speaks for all those who cannot speak, I want to translate the silence of all those who hope and wait for someone to tell the world of their suffering. Ben Jelloun’s achievement is to peel back the West’s layers of culture, fear, suspicion, distance, and apathy, and allow us to see — to really see, in a way that only art enables — one specific son, brother, and lover in his humiliation, desperation, and death.