Samah Selim
Bio
Samah Selim is a scholar and translator of Arabic literature. She has taught at Princeton University and the University of Aix-Marseille, and is currently associate professor at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt 1880-1985 (2004) and the forthcoming Translation, Popular Fiction and the Nahda in Egypt (2019). Her translations include fiction and non-fiction from Egypt and Lebanon, and she is the recipient of both the Saif-Ghobash Banipal Translation Prize (2009) and the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award (2011). She is a founding member of the Cairo-based translator collective Turjoman, and is currently working on an English translation of Mohamed Shoair’s 2018 literary biography, Children of the Alley: the Story of the Forbidden Novel.
In today’s literary translation marketplace, translators are not often afforded the privilege and the luxury of choosing their own books. I first became acquainted with Ghalib Halasa when I read Sultana almost two decades ago, and right away I longed to translate it, though there was never time enough. In the busy years that followed I read through Halasa’s entire oeuvre, but his final, and perhaps least known novel stayed with me powerfully: it seemed to me to be the culmination of everything that had come before. The novel is very long, with a complex temporal structure and a rich, polyphonic linguistic register: a daunting task for even an enamored translator. Over the years I kept a scuffed notebook full of experimental beginnings: short passages in English, lists of queries about things like food and colloquial expressions and proverbs, and even doodled portraits of some of the novel’s characters, but it was always other projects taking up my time and energy. In the end I think this was a good thing; I needed those intervening years of working at other titles and thinking and writing about translation to learn how to render a vastly ambitious novel like Sultana. I’m grateful that the National Endowment for the Arts translation award will allow me the precious time and space to do just that, and I’m looking forward tremendously to both the process and the end result.
from Sultana by Ghalib Halasa
[Translated from the Arabic]
Can I speak of Amena objectively? She is so tangled up in her legend that it’s impossible to separate fact from fiction. Even looking straight at her I see her only through the halo of her splendor. Can a legend be born from a collective emotion towards some object in a particular time and place? If so then Amena and her legend are one and the same, and even the stories of a crazy old fool like Zuayyil al-Salim may well have some truth to them. […]
How can I describe her? You really have to see her for yourself. But seeing her wouldn’t be the point. You would not be astonished by the sight of her, as you would by Sultana. Seeing Sultana is like an electric shock that reaches into the core of your being. Amena on the other hand opens up slowly under your gaze. The first glance: tall, a long but not intemperate neck; a face that suggests exhaustion, as though its owner had only just stopped crying; a sensitive nose, the eyes downcast, and lips that have nothing to do with the languor of the face. You sense that she is a beautiful woman, but that fatigue, or malnutrition or neglect has made her beauty fold in on itself and fade. You feel that she should take better care of herself and you find yourself musing about certain things she might do to that end. She raises her eyes –their unexpected wideness startles you- and looks at you shyly. You have the impression that those wistful eyes are looking inward even though she is listening to you politely and in earnest. You still don’t realize that you have fallen into a trap. Now you reconfigure her beginning with the eyes. They strike you as holding an enormous store of taut energy. The nose appears to be a miracle. Her hands are long-fingered and slightly red and you would like to hold them. They are not delicate, but finely sculpted and they burrow into your memory. Later you imagine that Raphael must have painted her as the Virgin; that he began with the aristocratic form of the hand but didn’t manage to capture that vast and finely balanced power, especially in the hands. You need to observe those hands while she talks or eats or goes about her chores.
I used to call her mother because she nursed me for a time, I don’t know how long. It was when my real mother came down with the fever. But I’ll come back to that later. Now I want to talk about the hands. I remember I was sleeping in her house. I felt her hand touch my face and caress it lightly. Her touch was part of a dream connected to the sea, to a strange garden full of flowers that spilled out in rectangular fields down towards the sea. Not the everyday sea or everyday flowers: it was all very peculiar and intensely intimate. The strangest thing of all is that the scene seemed to belong to a very old memory, a real place from the past to which I had returned. It was an image of paradise. And me—now—I interpret that dream as the summoning of a memory stored in some part of a vast neural network; a memory preserved from tens of millions of years ago when we lived as fishlike creatures in the oceans. The water appeared astonishingly familiar you see, like some warm and primordial habitation. And I know—now—that the dream began the moment her fingers touched my face and gave me such deep and intangible joy. Such a precious store of affection and tenderness she possessed and passed along through those fingers.
About Ghalib Halasa
Ghalib Halasa is a Jordanian novelist, literary critic, and translator. He is the author of eight novels, two short story collections, 10 volumes of criticism, and several Arabic translations of American and French literature. He was born in a Christian village on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan, and died at the age of 57 in Damascus, Syria. The decades in between were marked by intense literary production, constant migration and exile, and a deeply held political engagement that earned him multiple prison sentences and expulsion from a succession of Arab countries. Sultana is Halasa’s last and most autobiographical novel. It was named as one of the 50 most important Arab novels of the 20th century by the Arab Writers’ Union in 2001.