Naïma Bouallam translates Arabic literary fiction into French for a small publishing house in Arles. She has done this for nineteen years. She estimates she reads, on her own time, somewhere between forty and sixty books a year, of which perhaps thirty are themselves translations into French or English.
She is, in other words, a heavy reader of translated work, and she has thought a great deal about what it means to be one.
The essay she wrote for this magazine in May is not about translation theory. It is about reading.
Its central question is this. When one reads, say, Olga Tokarczuk in English, what exactly is one reading? Tokarczuk wrote Polish sentences. Jennifer Croft wrote English sentences. The two writers, working in conversation, produced an English text that did not exist before, and that text is what the Anglophone reader meets on the page.
Is this Tokarczuk. Is it Croft. Is it some third thing.
Bouallam's answer, after nineteen years on both sides of the bench, is that it is a third thing, and that pretending otherwise is dishonest.
This does not mean the third thing is inferior. The English Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is, in her view, a marvellous novel in English. It is also not the novel Polish readers are reading.
The Polish reader and the English reader are, in some real sense, reading different books. They are sister books. They are not the same book.
What is required of the reader of translated work, then, is a particular kind of trust. The reader trusts that the translator has rendered the source faithfully. The reader trusts that decisions she cannot evaluate — about syntax, register, allusion, music — have been made by a person of skill and care.
This trust is not unlimited. There are translations that fail. There are translations that succeed in one register and fail in another. There are translations that are, by general consent, masterpieces in their own right — Constance Garnett's Tolstoy, Edith Grossman's Don Quixote, Lydia Davis's Proust — and there are translations that are competent and forgettable and do their work without drawing attention.
The reader cannot, in most cases, evaluate which of these she is reading.
Bouallam suggests three small practices for the reader of translated work, none of which are demanding.
The first is to read the translator's preface, if there is one, before beginning the book. This is, she concedes, contrary to the usual rule about not reading introductions until after. But the translator's preface is not a critical introduction. It is a statement of method. It tells the reader what the translator has chosen to preserve and what she has chosen to let go.
Knowing this in advance is courteous, and it helps the reader to read the book the translator has actually made.
The second practice is to read more than one book by the same translator, if possible, in order to begin to hear the translator's own voice. Jennifer Croft's English is not Antonia Lloyd-Jones's English. Both have translated Tokarczuk. The English reader who has read both can begin to triangulate.
The third practice is the one Bouallam feels most strongly about. It is to remember the translator's name.
This sounds trivial. It is not. The translator's name is, in many countries, still printed in smaller type than the author's, sometimes on the title page only, sometimes not at all. To remember the name, and to use it in conversation about the book, is a small act of restitution.
It is also a practical aid to one's own reading. Once one has remembered, say, that Charlotte Mandell translates Mathias Énard and Jonathan Littell, one begins to read both writers with a slightly different ear, and one begins to look for other Mandell translations on principle.
This is the beginning of a small, ordinary literacy in translated work, and it is available to any reader who is willing to pay a little extra attention.
Bouallam closes with an observation about her own work. When she translates an Arabic novel into French, she is aware that the French reader will probably not know her name, and will probably not care to. The novelist is the figure on the cover. She is, at best, a name in small type on the copyright page.
She does not resent this. She chose the trade.
What she would ask, of the French reader, is the small courtesy of knowing that someone has been there before her, doing the work, and that the sentences she is reading have been twice composed. Once in Arabic, once in French. The French ones, for what they are worth, are hers.