Diversifying French Translation: A Conversation with Emma Ramadan
A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa (Seven Stories Press) and Straight from the Horse's Mouth by Meryem Alaoui (Other Press) seem similar at first glance, at least topically; they’re both accounts of Moroccan sex workers interested in ideas like survival, self-sufficiency, connection, isolation, and loss. Yet the novels are remarkably their own, and the thoughts expressed reflect the distinct voices of their protagonists, so different from each other that it’s easy to overlook they have the same translator. Emma Ramadan translated both novels, written in French by Moroccan writers, and both were published fall of 2020.
Alaoui centers Straight from the Horse’s Mouth around Jmiaa, a sex worker in Casablanca who offhandedly chronicles her life while providing for her young daughter, hiding her occupation from her conservative mother, and shuffling through clients. Jmiaa stumbles into work with a filmmaker (Jmiaa nicknames her Horse Mouth), and the parts of Jmiaa’s life which seem mundane suddenly become compelling in the eyes of others. As Jmiaa tells her story, it’s clear she doesn’t see the reader as one of her clients. She’s uninterested in being entertaining or asking for pity, and instead, she narrates her life to us and Horse Mouth, over a cigarette and distracted by the TV.
A Country for Dying weaves together several narratives about a group of immigrants in Paris. There’s Zahira, haunted by her father’s suicide; Zannouba, pondering gender reassignment surgery with feelings of both loss and exhilaration; and Mojtaba, discovering Paris after fleeing Iran while finding in Zahira a distraction from chaos. Monologues on loss, sexuality, transition, and agency are undercut by jagged and forceful prose which braids through each of the narratives, pushing the reader forward and pulling the stories together as a whole.
I had the chance to talk with Emma about translating both novels back to back. Ramadan has translated writers such as Marguerite Duras, Anne F. Garréta, Virginie Despentes, and Ahmed Bouanani, to name a few. Her translations have been published by a slew of small presses and major publishers, including New Directions, Deep Vellum, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and The Feminist Press.
Sarah McEachern: I’ve really been drawn to your projects, because even while the translation market is often overrepresented with books from France, your translations include many francophone books from outside of Europe. In some of your previous translations like The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers by Fouad Laroui and I'm Writing You From Tehran by Delphine Minoui, you’ve centered authors who are writing in French, but their works are focused on the experience of North African or Middle Eastern countries.
Emma Ramadan: I personally have a connection with Morocco because I did a Fulbright there, and my research was focused on Ahmed Bouanani. When I was there, I had a chance to meet other authors and get a better idea of the literary scene in Morocco while I was developing a connection to the country. I left having begun promoting the authors I read and was exposed to while I was there.
My interest has kind of skewed to Morocco specifically, but there is so little Moroccan literature being translated even though there are big authors that at least some people kind of recognize. For instance, Abdellah Taïa has become known in certain contexts through his writing but also as a speaker, visiting universities for talks, as well as through his films. In the same way, Tahar Ben Jelloun has a pretty recognizable name, and Laila Lalami, who writes in English. However, I don’t see a lot of francophone writing being translated out of Tunisia, for example, or other North African countries.
SM: On the flip side, you’ve translated established experimental French writers, including Marguerite Duras, as well as Anne F. Garréta, a member of Oulipo, the experimental literary group. You received a Pen Translation nomination for Garréta’s The Sphinx, a genderless love story originally written in a gendered language. Your translation projects are often outside the box of what people expect from a francophone novel, both as ambitious works but also from places not often represented in translated literature. What kinds of diversity in French translation in particular are you interested in working on, bringing forth, and seeing represented?
ER: When literature comes out of countries that haven’t had a lot of books translated into English, it can be a big sensation if the books are marketed as “the first book published in English translation from this country” or “the first translation from this author.” That sensation can actually become a problem, when one book gets translated from a country and it’s somehow expected to be representative or to shed light on an entire people and country. The books are held up as symbols, like, “here are the lessons from this country.” It doesn't allow a reader to get to see a diversity of literature from these countries or see weird literary innovation or strange stories or fun, light-hearted stuff. If it’s the first book that ever gets translated from a country, then there is this expectation that it’s a book that’s meant to do a lot of work. It's unfortunate if we only have one example of literature from Madagascar, for example, because it’s limiting in terms of how we can understand a given country’s literary landscape.
Translators from French need to do the work to translate literature from outside of France, and I think it's our responsibility to not be hyper focused on France, because enough stuff is getting translated from France anyway. If we diversify the things we’re pitching or accepting as translators, we’ll get a way more interesting body of translated work—and a way more interesting body of work in the market, period.
SM: For me, Straight From The Horse’s Mouth has such a conversational feel. Jmiaa is often name-dropping Moroccan TV shows and pop songs, the type of media that she’s interested in. It offers a really authentic feel of living a working-class life, which is often filled with things like watching TV and drinking shitty beer.
ER: Part of why Straight from the Horse's Mouth is so special is that it’s a fun book, and how often do fun books get translated at all? And how often do fun books from Morocco get translated? It’s not a book meant to teach a specific lesson, and it allows itself to just be a good book. Like, yes, it does take place in Morocco and references Moroccan cities, but in a certain way, it’s not a Moroccan novel in that it’s meant to be held up as “this is what Morocco is like.” It’s meant to be unique to Jmiaa’s life, and she’s a relatable person. I appreciated that it defies our ability to classify it as just a novel about a person in Morocco.
SM: Because both A Country for Dying and Straight From The Horses’s Mouth are written in the first-person of sex workers, the characters frankly discuss sex, genitalia, and bodies. I’m very interested in the vulgarity of French used here. How do you choose an appropriate “level” of crudity in an English translation that feels representative of the author’s intentions in French? Can you talk about translating vulgarity?
ER: I find that the French have way more elegant ways of being vulgar. Words like le sexe or la bite sound kind of pretty. In English, everything sounds clinical or pornographic, and especially when it comes to female bodies. We have vagina and pussy. One is clinical and not sexy, the other is intense, crude. There isn’t an in-between.
SM: I have a real memory of a former French professor teaching art history, who remarked that in English we have more than one way to talk about nudity: naked and nude. In French, there’s just nu. When you’re describing paintings with nudity, having the word naked in your vocabulary can add so much and describe something nude doesn’t imply. When it comes to describing bodies, how did you balance this binary of pornographic or anatomical in English?
ER: I think in Straight from the Horse's Mouth, I got away with more vulgarity because of the nature of the world described by Jmiaa, and her voice. In A Country for Dying, I remember I had used penis [in the section about Zannouba’s discussion of receiving gender reassignment surgery], and the editor had crossed out penis and replaced it with cock instead. We decided on changing penis to cock because the voice is spoken. I feel like people don’t say penis in conversation unless they’re in a doctor’s office. It’s a bit clinical. I trusted the editor on this one when he noted that when speaking out loud, in the context of the characters’ conversations in the book, one would sooner say cock.
In both books, when deciding on the degree of vulgarity, the question was: what would these characters use in the way they’re speaking? Is it going to be jarring or is it in line with the characters' voices? I originally erred on the side of penis because Zannouba’s passage is actually clinical, in a sense, and I didn't want the vulgarity to take away from that. I did agree with the editor’s decision to change it because we were trying to make it read in the way that felt the most real. That chapter with Zannouba is kind of a vulgar tirade, so cock fit better in the end.
SM: How do you make sure the level of vulgarity “fits” the text?
ER: As a translator, I do the same thing with vulgarity that I do with slang. I try to go with whatever I can imagine myself saying. If I read it aloud, and it doesn’t sound like normal people talking, then I won’t use it. When I’m translating French, the author might use verlan, which is slang that everyone uses in France, but there aren’t always equivalents in English. For example, there’s a verlan word for nose in French, which is zen, or the inverse of nez, but in English we don’t really have an equivalent. I wouldn’t say schnoz to talk about a nose in everyday conversation. If there isn’t a natural sounding way to put something in slang in my translation, I match for meaning instead, and work slang in somewhere else.
SM: Because A Country for Dying concerns immigrants in Paris, and Straight from The Horse's Mouth takes place in Casablanca, these novels offer snippets of several languages between the characters, most particularly Arabic but also Farsi. Can you talk about these novels and how other languages appear in them, and how you decided to depict this as a translator?
ER: My tendency generally speaking when there are things in Arabic or another language in the French text is to leave them in that language, because they would stand out as being in a different language in the original, so they should also stand out as another language in the English.
SM: Straight From The Horse's Mouth has a glossary, where the names of Moroccan pop stars, neighborhoods in Casablanca, and Moroccan television stars are noted. Can you talk more about the glossary, the choice to include it in the English translation, and which words you added to it as a translator?
ER: The glossary was in the original as well, and many of its entries are Alaoui’s. It wasn't our decision to create the glossary. One or two things were added for an American audience, like bac being short for baccalaureate, which would be obvious to a French reader. I think you can read this book without the glossary, but it’s nice for readers who might not necessarily know the word for a particular brand of Moroccan cookies, which was added by Alaoui who would have wanted readers to have more insight. I think that you can tell these characters would be speaking Arabic most of the time, and Alaoui inserts Arabic words and phrases here and there, like song lyrics in Arabic. I like having these moments in another language so you’re reminded that they’re not speaking English. You’re aware that they're speaking Arabic, a colloquial, slangy Arabic. One of the earliest entries in the glossary is anafa, which is a Moroccan pronunciation of the French en avant (in front). If my editor had wanted me to put something like that into English, I would have fought to keep it in Arabic because having it there adds important context.
SM: Can you speak in particular about an early entry in the glossary of how much Jmiaa is paid by one of her clients? This is noted in the glossary, but she makes from five to eight American dollars.
ER: The glossary entry for rial was in Alaoui’s original text, but we added in the dollar amount equivalent for the specific transaction Jmiaa describes. It seemed important for Alaoui to communicate to her French readers how much Jmiaa was making as a sex worker, so we wanted to give the same context for English readers.
SM: Each of the novels have such strong voices of the narrators throughout, and in the case of A Country for Dying, several narrators. I’m wondering, as a translator, how do you approach books that have very strong voices?
ER: In Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, it was almost easy to get into the rhythm of the voice because Jmiaa is so strong and so overpowering, and the whole book is told in her perspective. It was easy to get in the swing of it just by reading it out loud a little bit.
In A Country for Dying, I struggled a little bit more because the three voices are distinct, they change, and they’re all sort of communicating in their own way. They’re all doing different things, but I think what spans all three of the voices is Abdellah Taïa’s prose. His short sentences are poetic, and they have such a strong rhythm. I’m obsessed with Marguerite Duras, and his rhythm can be akin to Duras’s prose in the way that it compels you through the writing. I think this was the connecting thread through A Country for Dying, and as long as I could hold on to that, I could tune into the three voices while translating.
Emma Ramadan (@EmKateRam) is a literary translator of prose and poetry from France, North Africa, and the Middle East, currently based in Providence, Rhode Island where she co-owns Riffraff bookstore and bar. Her translations include Anne Garréta's Sphinx, Virginie Despentes's Pretty Things, Meryem Alaoui's Straight from the Horse's Mouth, and Abdellah Taïa's A Country for Dying. After this interview, A Country for Dying was longlisted for the 2021 Pen Translation Prize.
Sarah McEachern (@amymarchinparis) is a reader and writer in Brooklyn, NY. Her recent work has been published in Catapult, Pigeon Pages, The Pacifica Review, Entropy, and The Spectacle. Her reviews, interviews and criticism have been published or are forthcoming in Rain Taxi, Pen America, BOMB, Full Stop, and The Rumpus.