〖 Found in translation 〗
Found in Translation
The reader will find, seeded throughout Issue Three, some translation tales from writers in Arabic, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish, finding their way into German, Greek, Italian, Serbian, English and more. These tales can be filed with (also in this issue) Oksana Forostyna’s parsing of « untranslatable » Ukrainian humor and with Alexander Wells’s defense of Denglisch (and Berlinglisch, and Globish).
Translation, as a topic, tends to invite polemic or lamentation. Does the ERB have a stance? Not really. Our premise is that translation finds as much as it loses. The ERB’s editorial assistants, Nienke Groskamp and Job Wester, asked nine writers not what was lost but what was found in translation, as a text is given new surfaces and new depths. What’s the rightest or wrongest or closest or strangest thing that a reader has found in a new language? What’s something you wish would be found?
An inquiry into varieties of translational experience became a series of reflections on artful error and unexpected intimacy.
☞ Mona Kareem: « Bidoon » ➞ « Bedouin »
☞ Carlos Fonseca: « Para Ati » ➞ « Para ti »
☞ Agnes Lidbeck: Why are you so cold-hearted?
☞ Defne Suman: Borrowed time is borrowed money
☞ Hans von Trotha: Judge a book by its covers
☞ Iman Mersal: Panties of the people
☞ Krisztina Tóth: « droid » ➞ « druid »
☞ Lavinia Braniște: Overalls & eyeglasses
☞ Lydia Sandgren: Read between the stripes
We asked nine writers not what was lost but what was found in translation, as a text is given new surfaces and new depths. What’s the rightest or wrongest or closest or strangest thing that a reader of yours has found in a new language? What’s something you wish would be found?
As a stateless poet, whenever my work is translated, one thing that seems to be persistently contested is my identity label. When I sent my book of poetry to the publisher in Cairo, where it was published in 2004, I didn’t have a chance to look at drafts of the manuscript. I was in Kuwait at the time, and emails and PDFs were not that common yet in the publishing process. I received a copy of the published book, like any interested reader.
One change — a violent mistranslation perhaps — I still find amusing was with a poem titled 1965. It was a very short poem in reference to the 1965 census. In Kuwait, this was the first census after the independence of the country, and it’s used against us, the Bidoon [a stateless minority in Kuwait, the word itself meaning « without » in Arabic], to erase us from history, from our presence in the country. The Egyptian publisher did not understand the reference, assumed it was a typo and proceeded to change it to 1967, as in the year of the Six-Day Arab-Israeli war. This story still makes me laugh, as does the fact that my being « Bidoon » is often mistaken for « Bedouin ». I think these mistranslations speak of the impossibility of minority identities finding host in larger identities and contexts.
Mona Kareem ( كريم منى ) is a Bidoon (stateless) poet born in Kuwait and exiled in the United States. Her poetry collection I Will Not Fold These Maps, translated by Sara Elkamel, will be published by the Poetry Translation Center in London in the spring of 2023.