Katharine Halls: “I do not see myself as an intermediary at all. I see myself as a reader”
Interview with a reluctant (award-winning) Arabic-English translator
Dear Reader,
Welcome back. After a seemingly long break, the first installment of Corners of the Mind for the new year is up and running and it includes my interview with Katharine Halls, an amazingly talented, award-winning, and still so down-to-earth Arabic-to-English translator. Katharine, who has also studied Hebrew, brings to the table a long-standing experience in translation, extensive traveling in the Arab countries, and, most importantly, in-depth knowledge of the Arabic language, including several dialects. She has tested herself in all kinds of texts and literary genres, and she has managed to gain insights, excel, and receive multiple accolades for her work. In the interview below, which is edited for length and clarity, she generously reveals the essence of what translation means to her. Once a mentee of the late, famous Arabic-to-English translator, Humphrey T. Davies, she spends her time boosting the visibility of Arabic literature in translation, all around the European landscape. You can learn more about her rich body of work at http://www.katharinehalls.com and at the website of her literary agency, www.teneleven.org.
As a translator from Arabic myself, I feel deeply grateful for her generosity of spirit which shines through her elaborate answers. I am definite that translators, professionals (or amateurs) in the fields of languages and writing will find something useful in the interview below.
Hello Katharine, and thank you for agreeing to this interview. It is a real pleasure. I believe the readers can only learn from you and your experience as an Arabic-to-English translator, no matter the languages they read or translate into. So let’s start with the basics: what attracted you to Arabic for translation, in the first place? Was it by chance?
It was kind of by chance, definitely. When I started learning Arabic, I wasn't thinking about doing translation. In fact, when I was younger, I don't think I ever thought about translation as a profession. I was interested in languages (because I love languages). I studied French, Italian, and Spanish at school; I got full marks in most of my exams and I thought, well, I need something harder than this. So I decided to study Arabic. It seemed hard… and it WAS hard. Translation only came later. When I was in my third year of university, I started translating. But even then, I wasn't really thinking about translation as an act in itself or as a potential career. I just enjoyed it as a way of using the language, like talking to people, or reading. But it turned out to be a way of using language that could be useful, and could sometimes even earn me money. It also turned out to be consistently interesting and challenging. And so I just kept going.
What do you find most challenging in translating literary texts from Arabic into English? They belong to different language families, for one, and they have so many differences in terms of syntax, morphology, etc.
I think something that I always have to think hard about when I'm doing a literary translation is narrative tense because Arabic has perfect and imperfect tenses (technically, they express aspect rather than tense) which can be used fairly interchangeably in narrative and don't map onto the English past and present tense. And, at the same time, English specifically has real fashions in terms of narrative tense. Novels used to be written in the past tense, but present-tense narration is much more common now. Think of Hilary Mantel for example, and the Henry VIII novels (Wolf Hall trilogy). They're all in the narrative present. So when you're translating from Arabic to English, first you need to obviously understand the actual time setting of events, the sequence of events which may or may not be reflected in the Arabic verb forms used. That’s not usually difficult. But then you need to decide which tense you’re going to use in English. Is it going to be past tense, which might make it sound more traditional? Are you going to use the present tense, which might reflect a certain kind of immediacy or urgency of the narration, but will also make it sound like quite a contemporary text and situate it within a sort of particular trend in English writing, which may or may not be appropriate? That is something I always stop and think about. Sometimes I do multiple translations. I have, for example, written an entire story in the past and then rewritten it in the present, or maybe the opposite, I can't remember. And, sometimes, when I'm starting to work on a translation, I will just leave out the verb and then think, “How is this going to work? What verb tense am I going to use?” Yeah, I think that's number one for me.
Talking about translation only ever makes sense when you're talking about a specific text, because texts are very different. They perform different functions within their source literary world, and within their target literary world(s).
- Katharine Halls
Ann Morgan, a literary explorer we have hosted in the past for an interview, believes that if we (translators, writers, publishers) are not careful, we will have a perception of other nations that is going to be a Western construct. There is also this debate in translation, especially nowadays, with regard to Englishizing the text or maintaining the characteristics of the source language, even if it comes across as a bit “strange” to English-speaking readers.
This is the age-old debate between the so-called foreignizing and so-called domesticating of translations. I think some great things have been written in favour of both what is called domesticating and what is called foreignizing approaches. But these arguments are only ever worth making, in my view, in relation to a specific text.
I'm happy to listen to two arguments about one novel, say, where somebody says, that if you want to really translate this well, you should make it sound as familiar as possible, or you should make it sound as unfamiliar as possible, because that's an integral part of this writer’s style. But I just don't subscribe to the kinds of arguments where people say all translations must be, for example, foreignizing if they are to be subversive, which is what Lawrence Venuti says, or at least did in earlier iterations of the argument. Because I don't think translation has fixed rules. Talking about translation only ever makes sense when you're talking about a specific text, because texts are very different. They perform different functions within their source literary world, and within their target literary world(s). Even for different readers at different times, they mean different things. So I just don't think it makes any sense to say: we must foreignize, we must domesticate. I wouldn't say I do either of those things in my work, as a rule. I probably do bits of both in different texts. It would just depend on the text and what I felt that that voice and that particular text and that context called for.
Which genre do you translate and from which Arabic dialects?
I mainly work with fusHa (Modern Standard Arabic), because I primarily translate literary prose. I have on occasion, translated poetry, but not huge amounts. As a genre, I don't feel that poetry is my natural home. I don't read lots of poetry in English or in Arabic. I do literary fiction, literary nonfiction, short stories, novels, memoirs. I also work quite a lot with dialects; most often Egyptian, and then the various Middle Eastern dialects: Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian. I have also translated prose from Iraq, the Gulf and North Africa. I have just finished work on a lovely book, which is part art book, part memoir, by an Egyptian author called Salma El Tarzi, that is written in Egyptian dialect, which is really beautiful.
I also translate theatre. One example of that is Goats by Liwaa Yazji, which is written in the Syrian dialect and was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London a couple of years back. I have also translated theatre from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and possibly some other places I am forgetting as well. I also do lots and lots of film subtitles, which I love. It's quite a different skill to written translation because you also have to condense. There are technical aspects to think about, which I really enjoy.
And similarly, I also do theatre surtitles, in which have often very similar considerations to film subtitles, because you have to summarise and be concise. The last theatre surtitles I did were for a show at the Gorki in Berlin in January (2022) based on Rasha Abbas’s book The Gist of It (ملخص ما جرى ) with the German title Eine Zusammenfassung von allem, was war. And it was great. It was an experimental multilingual piece with surtitles in English and Arabic and German. They were projected over the backdrop and that was pretty wonderful.
And then I also do bits and pieces of music and poetry which are in dialect, which I think is kind of a different beast to poetry in standard Arabic.
I really love the spoken language. It's the thing I like most—I mean, it is the register of Arabic that I enjoy most. The Arabic that people speak I just think is wonderful because people are so creative in how they talk and express themselves.
A while ago, I found myself translating a play for the first time. One of the challenges I faced was how to put the words on paper in the most spoken format as possible. I was trying to imagine the actors on the stage and how they would speak or even what movements they would accompany their words with.
Well, I think the interesting question about theatre is this question of speakability, like you mentioned. I don't have a background in theatre so that was not something I knew about in any formal sense before I started translating theatre. Essentially, if you're working in a spoken genre like theatre, like film, you need to make sure that your English is speakable like the Arabic. There is no use in a translation being correct if it is not something that would sound sensible coming out of a real human being's mouth. And that's one of the things I love about translating dialects—thinking about how people speak and how people naturally express themselves and trying to replicate that in English. I definitely learned a lot about doing that when I was working on Goats at the Royal Court Theatre. Liwaa was making a lot of edits to the play as we went along, so we were kind of rewriting parts, changing, taking out, and adding things. One of the people we worked with there was Graham Whybrow, and one of the things I worked on with him, was this question of the rhythm of the lines and how you maintain the audience's attention so they can understand what the line is about. For example, I remember one of the things he told me was about phrasal verbs. Usually, in English we would say, “I'm nearly ready. I just need to zip my dress up,” ie, we often separate the phrasal verb: “zip” is at the beginning and “up” is at the very end. But that kind of construction is harder for the audience to follow. What you want is to keep the phrasal verb together, so you write, “I just need to zip up my dress” rather than “zip my dress up.” Speaking this way is much more easily followed by the audience. That had never occurred to me before. So it was really wonderful to learn details like that.
Which Arabic dialects do you think are most underrepresented in translation into English (or French)?
If we're focusing our question on the literary world, which I assume we are, then I would also say some of the Arabic dialects are underrepresented in Arabic. Egypt, for example, has lots and lots of colloquial writing and novels and books of poetry and short stories published in dialect. But in some countries, that is not so much the case. But that's also, I guess, a natural phenomenon because these different registers of language are associated with different genres, right? Literary production in so many places in the Arab world is associated with poetry, for example. With song also, and poetry recitation. It makes sense that an oral tradition wouldn't be so represented in the literary world.
But maybe you're talking about which countries writers are from, rather than the dialects specifically. Most writers of novels and short stories across the Arab world are writing in fusHa, right? As you say in your question, the focus of interest for the anglophone world and for the Francophone world is quite different. There's a lot more North African stuff represented in French than there is in English, and more Middle Eastern stuff, I would say, represented in English than there is in France. That's definitely true. And then there are places that get very little visibility. Say, Mauritania. That's pretty underrepresented. But, of course, there are tons of places. I mean, Arabic literature itself is underrepresented in English translation, so within that, plenty of countries are underrepresented; Egypt, Syria and Lebanon tend to outweigh everything else. I guess also Palestine to an extent. I would say those four countries are probably the ones that are most translated.
Lately, there has been a surge in the promotion of literary works in the Gulf countries with various events and awards.
Yes, there is so much promotion of the arts in the Gulf and funding available: projects, grants, that sort of thing. I'm sure that's going to lead to more translated literature becoming available.
Which Arab authors do you admire and recommend to the foreign reader?
I just told you about Salma El Tarzi. Her book is wonderful. It’s called “An Attempt to Remember My Face” and it’s a tiny little short memoir about her life and her family. Haytham El-Wardany from Egypt. He writes wonderful short stories. They’re very dark, a bit Gothic, you might say. Rasha Abbas is great too. I really like her work, like this play I was telling you about. But she is incredibly clever with an incredibly broad imagination. Her writing style really ranges across a lot of different references and inspirations, which I really love.
I like the generosity, for example. I like the grace and lightness of Middle Eastern culture and how that’s reflected in so many Arabic expressions.
- Katharine Halls
How has learning Arabic or translating from Arabic affected or changed you as a person?
Nice question. Well, it must have changed me hugely. It must have made me who I am. But it's hard to identify specific ways. I mean, I can think of specific things that I really like about the culture in the Middle East, to use a very broad term, that I've kind of come to really appreciate. I like the generosity, for example. I like the grace and lightness of Middle Eastern culture and how that’s reflected in so many Arabic expressions.
How do you feel about being the intermediary?
I don't see myself as an intermediary at all. I see myself as a reader. I am an expert reader because I can speak the language and I know its history, and because I understand some things about the context of the text that I read. I am just one reader, among many others, and I am excited and happy to be able to give other readers who cannot read Arabic my version of these texts. But I do not want to be given this responsibility of being some kind of bridge or intermediary between cultures. I find books that I think are good and short stories that I think are good, and I try to show them to people who wouldn't otherwise be able to read them. That's my role.
This is why I don’t like to use footnotes in my work because I think it is related to the question of do I see myself as an intermediary. No, I don't. I'm not an intermediary who is going to say “footnote here. This is what this means.” With the kinds of texts I work with, I think it's really important to respect the reader and respect their intelligence. If something is hard to understand or if something is challenging to whatever attitude they might have, you as a translator cannot necessarily explain or fix all of that. Right? You can also let them go and look it up. You can also let them think about it and maybe it will be something that sits a bit uncomfortably with them and they will go and talk to people about it, find out more about it. This means respecting the reader enough and not trying to make something so clear and so comprehensible for them that they don’t have to do any work to figure it out.
People have been and always will be interested in other places and people; other people have been and maybe always will be hostile to other places and people. And, frankly, I am not sure I can do very much about that.
- Katharine Halls
Okay, but the next question is what is the role of translation from Arabic, especially in the East-West culture war, if we may say?
I do not believe there is an East-West culture clash. Certain people with very specific political, ideological, and economic interests have manufactured a culture war, but I don't buy it.
That said, the Middle East and Muslims are often the object of mistrust and hatred in Europe and North America, I certainly would not want to think that I was contributing in any way to feelings of hostility against the Middle East or against Muslims, so I am quite sensitive when I read my own translations or other people's translations. I think carefully about whether or not it could in any way be harmful. But I wouldn't be translating something in the first place if I felt like it was going to be interpreted as hostile in some way or another. But I also don’t think translation is a “bridge between cultures” or anything like that. I don’t think translation is a magic wand which creates understanding between nations. People have been and always will be interested in other places and people; other people have been and maybe always will be hostile to other places and people. And, frankly, I am not sure I can do very much about that.
People have considered others as their mentors forever but, nowadays, there are concentrated efforts to establish mentorship as a practice, even in translation. We didn't have it, like, 20 years ago, when I was graduating from University. How important do you think mentorship is for an emerging translator or a mid-level translator? Have you yourself been a mentor or a mentee? And how valuable is this experience?
Definitely valuable. I never had any formal mentorship, but I certainly had an informal mentor, Humphrey T. Davies, who died in 2021. He was a wonderful, wonderful translator of Arabic, an extremely intelligent and generous person. There is also Adam Talib, another extremely clever and sophisticated translator of Arabic into English. Definitely, my relationship with those two people has really enriched my translation practice.
I have been a formal mentor for a young poet and translator called Ali al-Jamri who's based in the UK. We had a really great year of mentorship organised by an organisation called New Writing North, and that was really good. I mean, really interesting for me, but I think also useful for him. I also mentored two great young translators through the Royal Court’s Young Agitators scheme and we had a very productive relationship. So, yeah, I think it's important.
I think there are two ways in which mentorship can be useful. First, working on your translation skills. There are lots of ways to do that, and a mentorship should only be one aspect of it; whether or not you have access to a formal mentorship, you should be finding ways to talk to other translators, other readers, other writers, and, of course, making sure your language skills are up to scratch. Secondly, mentorships are especially helpful with navigating the publishing industry, because it's pretty impenetrable, and it’s hard to find other ways in.
What do you like most about translation?
I forget who it's a quote from, but there is a great quote that says that translation is a very unusual practice because, on the one hand, it has to be deemed to be subjectively beautiful or pleasing, like art. As in, do I like this picture? Is this painting beautiful or not? But it also has to be measured against the original as being objectively correct or accurate. A translation may never manage to satisfy everybody on both of those counts, but it’s a great challenge to try.
Thank you very much, Katharine. I sincerely appreciate the time and energy into this interview. I have learned so much from you. All the best in your future endeavours.
It's a pleasure. Thank you for those really interesting questions.
Thank you for reading.
With gratitude,
Katerina