Chapter 3: A Small Death

Translated by Phoebe Bay Carter.

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He blinked several times, but nothing changed. The same putrid stench, the same pins and needles all along his right side, the same damp under him. He checked again to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. He must have worn himself out yesterday, he thought, walking further than he had in years, and then slept wrong, causing part of his body to go numb, which affected his bladder in some way, leading him to lose control over it, which was a reasonable explanation as to why he had wet the bed at his age, and this last involuntary action was behind the smell. Having explained away what had disturbed him upon waking, he let out a sigh of relief.

He began to shift onto his back, careful not to wake his wife. He was surprised that the smell had not already done so. Unless the smell was not really as bad as he imagined. He smiled and continued rearranging himself.

He had been sleeping on his left side all the way on one edge of the bed, while his wife slept all the way on the other edge, as far from him as possible. When he went to roll onto his back, he did not realize how close he was to the edge, so as soon as his center of gravity bid farewell to the mattress’s firm surface, he found himself sprawled on the floor. He screamed.

The bed was not high, and the pain from the fall was not the reason for his scream.

When he fell and the bedsheet slipped off him, he did not find himself underneath.

No, this was not his body.

The first thing to catch his eye was a forest of hair covering his chest. He raised his head a bit higher and saw that the course hair covered his whole body. Then he noticed that all the toes besides the big one on each foot had merged into one broad, flat toe. He turned his head to the right, towards the wardrobe, which had a mirror covering one of its doors. It was then that he let out the scream that would shake every corner of the apartment and wake all its sleepers. What he saw reflected in the mirror was not him at all. The hairy creature looked to him like a monkey. A short monkey. A dwarf monkey. But he was not short. He had always been the tallest in whatever group of humans he found himself in.

This could not be possible, unless it were just a dream.

But it was not a dream. Not even close.

His wife jumped out of bed in a panic. She clutched her hand over her heart and recited several breathless bismillahs as she looked around the room. Her heavy eyes landed on him as he stared into the mirror in horror. Her eyes widened and then it was her turn to scream a scream no less forceful and frightful than her husband’s. Then she collapsed into a faint. At that moment, their two-year-old daughter opened her Mongolian eyes and plump lips and launched into a fit of crying that would prove no easy feat to quell.

His mother bolted out of bed in fright. In the hallway, she found her daughter emerging from her room, face pale and eyes red. The mother cast a glance toward her husband, who was pressing his forehead into his prayer rug, engrossed in a long prayer that began every day at dawn and did not end until he smelled the morning coffee.

With a racing heart, the mother knocked on her son’s closed door and, with lungs gasping for air, asked what was going on. There was no answer other than the cries of her granddaughter who had been awoken, in turn, by her mother’s scream, which exceeded her tolerance for sudden noises. The sister jiggled the door handle with nervous, useless movements, then tried to shove the door open with as much strength as her tender, twenty-one-and-a-quarter-year-old body could muster, pounded on it with both her fists, and finally cried out, sobbing, to her brother and his wife. No reply besides the cries of her niece, who was not accustomed to such a morning racket.

Meanwhile, the son and brother was still entranced by the mirror. He was frozen in front of the image of the monster monkey, which stared back at him from that other world beyond the mirror. Now that he could see his face clearly, he discovered how it, too, had been disfigured. Half his face was paralyzed. He remembered reading somewhere that this was called Bell’s palsy. The right side of his lips hung limply, and the eyelid on the same side had gone slack, leaving the eyeball bulging out to revealing the white of the eye, now almost completely obscured by a web of red capillaries.

His nose had grown accustomed to the putrid smell emanating from his body like sulfur that might perfume a satanic temple, and he had even begun to feel that his outward appearance was the pinnacle of beauty, when suddenly he felt a river of filth flood his veins. His heart tightened and his eyes began to water. Then his entire body shuddered as the tingling on his numb right side intensified. He felt violated, as though a strange being had invaded his body and took up residence in it. If he believed in jinn, and their ability to possess humans, he would have thought immediately that the weight of filth he now felt within was nothing other than a legion of demons taking hold of his body. But he did not believe any of that. Although, later, he would recall the novel the Exorcist and compare these sensations with the effects of little Regan’s possession.

Between the child’s sobs, he heard the key turning in the lock. He remembered that his father kept a spare copy of all the keys to the house. He looked around in panic and his eyes landed on the bedsheet. He stretched out his hand and pulled it towards him, then crawled to the corner of the room, covering his body with the sheet just as the door swung open.

He saw his father first. He looked at his son for a few brief moments as signs of displeasure appeared on his face, before turning his gaze to rest on his daughter-in-law’s body, which was visible through her flimsy, lacy nightgown.

He saw his sister push through the door and stare straight at him. He saw the blood drain from her face, leaving it a garish yellow. Then it was her turn to faint.

He heard his mother’s scream before he saw her push his father out of the way and bend over her daughter. Once she had checked her daughter’s breathing, she raised her head and he saw the shock etching its mark across her prematurely wrinkled face. He saw her get up quickly, holding back tears, and lift his daughter from her crib before fleeing the room. Then he heard her sobs from the hall.

He saw his father ignore his sister and carry his wife from the room.

His sister began to come to. She pushed herself up to sitting. Waves of pain, fear, sadness, pity, and terror washed over her face as she looked at him. Then she started to cry. He wanted to help her up, to console her, he who needed consolation more than anyone, but his father came back in and helped his daughter up and out of the room before locking the door behind him.

His mother managed to calm his daughter. Silence reigned for a little while, and then he heard his wife’s sobs, whom he imagined was sitting on the sofa, hugging her bare legs, the white of her thighs surrendering to his father’s gaze.

He heard his father’s voice crawling toward him across the floor, slipping under the bedroom door, passing next to the bed, and climbing his legs to finally enter his ears, drenched in hatred and loathing, carrying four words: “What is this demon?”

He closed his eyes in sorrow, then lifted his head and scanned the room. He noticed that during his fall, he had knocked over the reading light, along with a book that had been on the table next to the bed. He remembered how his hand had reached out instinctively when he lost his balance and started falling, in an attempt to catch himself on the table that served as his desk. But his hand had landed on the book he had been reading before bed, causing both hand and book to slip. He fell, and the book fell with him onto his face.

His gaze fixed with surprise upon the picture on the cover. Now he remembered where he had seen that face before. That man all covered in black that he had seen by the sewer, who had seemed so familiar yesterday – he looked like Kafka! No, he was Franz Kafka. Unless this was all just in his head.

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Notes from the translator:

Dear Readers,

Last week, I dedicated my translator’s notes to the question of how to translate the phrase (صدحت في الحانة لأول مرة أصوات التكبيرات) which I had tentatively translated as “Cries extolling God’s greatness rang out for the first time in the bar.” I was thrilled by the thoughtful engagement I received in response to this and other aspects of the draft, which came in the form of comments, emails, and conversations. An email from fellow translator Caroline Benson articulated the challenge of this phrase quite well, and posed some possible solutions. She wrote:

I usually try to downplay the religiosity of phrases with Allah as much as possible as, as you notice, they are quite usual and sometimes indicate merely surprise or frustration […] However, since the religious context is significant here because of the "first time" comment, what do you think about "exalting" which is perhaps more natural re: God than extolling? However, might there be a way to also indicate that these are quite usual phrases outside the bar […] -- what about "popular/common exaltations" or something along those lines?

After playing around with these possibilities for a while, I settled on “exaltations of God’s greatness.” You can hear this and other changes I’ve made to last week’s draft by listening to Paula Haydar’s recording of Chapter 2, also published today. Many of the edits are thanks to Paula herself, who, through her own reading aloud, found several ways to bring out the text’s rhythm and humor more clearly.

The question of rhythm was very much on my mind as I worked on this week’s chapter. Rhythm is one of my central concerns as a translator, because it is one of the elements that makes up an author’s particular style and voice. How long or short or varied are their sentences? How do they use punctuation? What about nested clauses, parallelism, and repetition?

An author’s individual choices in these matters, however, is couched within the stylistic norms and linguistic affordances of the language they write in. Arabic, for example, allows for much longer sentences than English, for both stylistic and linguistic reasons: because it is a language with grammatical gender and case endings (meaning that words contain more information about themselves), you can construct longer sentences without becoming either overly ambiguous or overly convoluted. So, my considerations as a translator are both, what features of the author’s unique style do I want to try to convey in English? And, what features of Arabic might I want to let shape my English prose? A paragraph-long sentence wouldn’t be out of the ordinary in an Arabic text. In English, it might sound Joycean. Or it might just sound bad. But, pulled off gracefully, it could be an opportunity to inflect English with something of Arabic style.

Part of the beauty of reading and writing in translation are the possibilities it opens up for different, unfamiliar englishes. Though there is a tendency in the publication, review and marketing of translated texts to favor the “natural,” “smooth,” “I can’t believe it’s a translation” translations, many translators favor a more challenging, resistant approach that defamiliarizes English and insists on reminding you that you are, in fact, reading a text in translation. (See Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility for a canonical scholarly treatment of this debate, and the politics of what he terms foreignizing vs. domesticating translation).

This is a conversation I am sure I will return to in later reflections, but for now, I want to look at the first paragraph of this chapter, because it is one I found myself rewriting every time I reread it, trying to get the rhythm “right.” (“Right” meaning something along the lines of, a rhythm that flows of the tongue when read aloud, while evoking in English the pace, pitch, and affect of the original, while ideally allowing a hint of the Arabic to pulse underneath).

Here’s the Arabic:

رمش بعينيه عدة مرات لكن لا شيء تغير. الرائحة النتنة ذاتها، التنميل ذاته على كامل نصفه الأيمن، والبلل ذاته تحته. تأكد مجددا أنه لا يحلم. فكر أنه بسبب تعب الأمس، حين تمشى طويلا كما لم يتمش منذ سنوات، وربما بسبب تمدده على الفراش بشكل غير صحي، تعرض جزء من جسده للتخدير، لذلك يشعر بالتنميل، أثر ذلك التنميل في المثانة بشكل ما ففقد السيطرة عليها، وهذا تفسير معقول لتبليله الفراش في هذا العمر، وهذا الفعل اللاإرادي الأخير هو سبب الرائحة. تنفس الصعداء حين تمكن من تفسير وتبرير ما نغص عليه استيقاظه.

Here is my attempt at a more literal translation that replicates the sentence structure as closely as possible, while still being grammatical in English:

He blinked his eyes several times but nothing changed. The same putrid smell, the same tingling over his whole right half, and the same dampness under him. He confirmed again that he was not dreaming. He thought that it was because of the fatigue of yesterday, when he walked for a long time as he had not walked in years, and perhaps because of his lying on the bed in an unhealthy way, part of his body had gone numb, that numbness affected the bladder in some way so he lost control over it, and this is a reasonable explanation for his bedwetting at this age, and this last involuntary action is the cause of the smell. He breathed a sigh when he was able to explain and justify what disturbed his awakening.

In an earlier draft, I was tempted to break up this long sentence in the middle, and condense the paragraph as follows:

He blinked several times, but nothing changed. The same putrid stench, the same pins and needles all along his right side, the same damp under him. He checked again to be sure he wasn’t dreaming. It must be that he had worn himself out yesterday, he thought, walking longer than he had in years. And maybe he had slept wrong, which had led part of his body to go numb, hence the pins and needles. And the pins and needles had affected his bladder, causing him to lose control over it, which explained why he had wet the bed at his age. And this last involuntary action was causing the smell. Having found a reasonable explanation for his unsettling awakening, he let out a sigh of relief.

But this is not one of those Arabic sentences that just happens to be long because it can be. One of the things that delights me about Mohammed’s style is the way he varies sentence length, alternating short, punchy phrases (“The hairy creature looked to him like a monkey. A short monkey. A dwarf monkey. But he was not short.”) with long, winding sentences that pack in whole storylines and trains of thought that derail themselves mid-journey. (Here’s a favorite such sentence of mine from Chapter 2: “As you can see, as much as this description clarifies the nature of the relationship between the son, who found himself suddenly bearing the full weight of his familial duties like Planet Earth upon his shoulders, and the father, who had changed all at once for reasons entirely unknown to his family and stopped caring for them without a second thought… But of course there was no need for a second thought.”)

These cadences convey the narrator’s own personality, while often providing a window into the other characters’ consciousnesses. In the paragraph quoted above, the narration puts us in Jawad’s head in the moments after his awakening. The first few sentences are short and direct, as Jawad apprehends piece by piece the details of the strange reality he has awoken into: the putrid stench, the pins and needles, the damp bedsheet. Then his mind starts racing, and the narration picks up speed, each thought running into the next without a break as he tries to rationalize his incongruous reality. Only when he has settled on a satisfying explanation does his mind settle down again, and the final sentence decelerates the pace of the narration.

Here it is again, as it stands in the current draft:

He blinked several times, but nothing changed. The same putrid stench, the same pins and needles all along his right side, the same damp under him. He checked again to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. He must have worn himself out yesterday, he thought, walking further than he had in years, and then slept wrong, causing part of his body to go numb, which affected his bladder in some way, leading him to lose control over it, which was a reasonable explanation as to why he had wet the bed at his age, and this last involuntary action was behind the smell. Having explained away what had disturbed him upon waking, he let out a sigh of relief.

I’m still not entirely satisfied with it. Can you think of ways to adjust the rhythm in the long sentence to better approximate Jawad’s racing thoughts? Do you think I’ve gotten too colloquial, and strayed too far from Mohammed’s Arabic, with phrases like “he must have worn himself out” and “slept wrong” and “explained away”?