The untranslatable is that which the translator can never fully encompass within his or her own words, yet to which every one of these words is both ontologically and materially indebted. In this talk, I explore how particular strategies of translation enabled me to deal with the untranslatable aspects of the contemporary Arabic novel Līmbū Bayrūt (2013) by Lebanese writer Hilāl Shūmān (b. 1982) as I was translating this work into English. By critically interrogating my own translation praxis in this way, I stage a rhetorical move away from seeing translation as either a problematic attempt at, or a politicized rejection of, the domestication and absorption of a source text into a new language.
Translation takes shape here instead as a procession of intimate and affective exchanges between text and translator, and between Arabic and English, that serve to reproduce in the translated volume qualities of the original text that are irreducible to a metric of dictionary equivalence. Taking seriously Jacques Derrida’s admonition that the untranslatable is what animates language, and that without it there is only death for language and for those who dwell within it, I examine the preservation of untranslatables within a specific translation event as a matter not only of pragmatic importance but of ethical responsibility.
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Anna Ziajka Stanton is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Arabic Literature at The Pennsylvania State University. Her current book project interrogates the multivalent processes of her own translation practice to open up a critical zone for rethinking the figure of the Arabic/English translator, present and past, through the theoretical intersections of ethics, affects, Orientalism/postcolonialism, and philosophies of embodied reading. She is also interested in mapping how 21st-century Arabic literary prizes are reshaping the ways that contemporary Arabic novels emerge into, and circulate within, today’s world literary marketplace. Publications include “A Whole Imaginary World: The Incomparable Fiction of Waguih Ghali” in the Journal of Arabic Literature (2015) and the English translation of Lebanese author Hilal Chouman’s novel Limbo Beirut (2016).
sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, The OSU Humanities Institute, Department of Comparative Studies, The OSU Middle East Center, and the OSU Center for Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
