Translated by Phoebe Bay Carter.
He wasn’t sure that he actually hated his father. His childhood certainly hadn’t been easy. The fact that his father worked nights and slept days gave them little chance to develop a normal relationship. Add to that the father’s nerves, and his disproportionately violent responses to what were usually trivial infractions committed by the son, and we’ll find that if the son did not in fact hate his father, he most certainly did not love him. No feelings of affection towards his father were to be found in the son’s heart. If they had once existed, they had surely leaked out during those punishing days when the son found himself, suddenly and unexpectedly, bearing the whole family on his shoulders. However, let us not forget that this family considers itself a traditional, conservative, Moroccan family from the North. And there, you will always find respect for the father in the heart of his son, even if it is motivated by a sense of duty and nothing more.
In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, he could not quite grasp the hatred in his father’s rhetorical question, nor the loathing on his face when he looked in and saw his son’s illness. Yes – his illness! He clapped his hands. He had found an appropriate word to describe his condition. He was ill! The filth he felt coursing through him was nothing but an illness. He threw the sheet off and tried to stand up, talking to himself all the while. Every disease has its cure, and surely this illness was no exception. But he did not make it to standing. The pins and needles stabbed him and he collapsed in pain, a moan escaping his drooping lips like a howl – a howl that wracked his body with a shiver of pity for himself and everyone who’d heard him. He guessed that his mother would now cover her face with her hands and cry over his pain. Indeed, he could actually see her on the other side of the wall, exactly as he’d guessed. And he saw his sister get up to rock the baby girl, who had started crying again, and his wife turn her face away from their bedroom door, and his father pick up a glass of water from the table and fling it at the bedroom door. It shattered with a crash that drowned out, for a moment, the sobs of his mother and daughter.
When the glass hit the floor, he felt his heart shatter along with it. He recalled how Gregor Samsa had suffered a similar agony when he came out in the morning and his family saw that he’d become a filthy animal – a dirty, putrid insect. His mother fainted and his father started crying. As for the secretary sent by his manager to find out why he’d been missing work, he jumped with fright and fled the apartment, leaping down the stairs as though pursued by demons and forgetting his walking stick, which the father then used to beat poor Gregor back into his room. He was injured in several places before the door closed on him, and he crumpled to the floor in shock, his wounds oozing blood.
At least he was better off than Gregor, he thought. As a civil servant, his salary would be guaranteed for months while a cure was found for his illness. The only time he had ever relied on his father’s help was just before his graduation from the Teachers’ Institute, when one of his father’s acquaintances had intervened to make sure he was appointed to teach somewhere within Tangier’s city limits, unlike the rest of his classmates, whose luck flung them to the mountain regions with its cold villages cut off from the outside world all winter. Now he would have to turn to his father once more, and for the last time, to bribe a doctor to write a sick note without examining him, and then to take it to the school principal so that his sick leave would be registered and his monthly salary secured.
This was his wish. But I do not intend to grant our hero all his desires. This is still my story. Yes, yes… I should not interfere in events, and simply narrate from a far without meddling in the details. But if you think about it, you will realize that imagination interferes ruthlessly in the creation of reality – the present, the future, and even the past. So, I will not shy away from direct interference, from time to time, in order to push things down a particular path. I will, for example, visit the principal’s dreams now, before he wakes, and stimulate his mind with dreams that will cause his neurons to construct false memories about that glum-featured, slump-shouldered teacher whom he so loathed, on account of the way he sullied his respectable profession as an educator with that miserable trade he practiced in the market. The principal has hated this teacher for quite some time. All I am going to do is spark that dormant hatred with a false scene involving the teacher and the principal’s wife, which will have him wake in a panic and ride the waves of his anger all the way to the teacher’s house. I won’t need any other details. The anger won’t allow the principal to think of anything else, and as soon as he lays eyes on the monster that the teacher has become, he will smile triumphantly and take the administrative steps necessary to remove the teacher’s name from the civil service registry, thus terminating his salary immediately.
The thought of the doctor’s note and his guaranteed salary, which would remain available to the family, allowed our hero to open his archive of memories and access the record of last Thursday’s events with more composure and less sadness, even if his anger had in no way diminished.
He had not expected her to fall on him with a hate-fueled slap, followed by an insult that would strip him of his honor as she stripped him of his fruit crate and threw it in her car before charging towards him, sparks of rage flying from her eyes, to kick him between the legs, sending him to the ground in a howl of pain, then following that up with a second kick to the stomach and a third to his side, before stopping, breathless, hands on hips, to look at him sprawled at her feet, moaning in pain and humiliation, then finally yelling at him again, “How dare you, you son of a bitch?”
Time stopped and all movement in the market ceased, apart from the cackles of her assistant, who laughed, and laughed, and laughed, as he pushed the fruit and vegetable cart behind the police car.
His tears caught behind his eyelids. The indignity of the slap hurt him more than the policewoman’s kicks.
He lay on the ground, curled in on himself, hugging his knees to his chest and sobbing silently. He asked for nothing but the price of the fruits she took. He let his tears roll hotly down his face and into the dusty ground of the market, and the policeman’s cackles echoed in his ears in an endless loop as consciousness leaked from him little by little.
What seemed like an eon passed before he tried, sluggishly, to get up. He made it to his knees and looked around at his fellow vendors, who lowered their eyes in shame at their inability to help him. He was cocooned in despair for a sudden moment, during which he thought about getting up and going straight away to buy enough gasoline to burn himself alive in front of the Municipal palace. Then he thought of his mother and sister, who would be left without a breadwinner after him. He convinced himself that the world didn’t need another Bouazizi, and dragged himself, weighed down as he was with humiliation, toward the mosque toilets to wash himself and return home to finish his lesson plans for the first days of the new school year.
The clock on the wall struck eight just as someone struck several violent knocks on the front door, and he awoke teary-eyed from his revery, wondering who this early visitor could be. He raised his eyes and pierced through the wall with his gaze to see past the door of the apartment, then trembled when he saw the principal. He yelled in a hoarse, strangled voice not to open the door.
His yell, which reached the living room like an indistinct bellow, arrived too late, after his father, who had never before done so in his life, had already gotten up and opened the door.
The principal asked to see the teacher, but the father apologized that his son was sick to the stomach, and it was in no one’s best interest to see him. The principal insisted, his argument with the father becoming heated and his anger intensifying until he pushed through the door and strode into the living room and then stopped, aghast, in front of the whiteness of the teacher’s wife. Only then did everyone realize, too late, that the wife was sitting in their midst in her nightgown, practically naked. With an indignant howl, the teacher overcame the pangs of numbness and stood up, grabbed the bedsheet, opened the door so forcefully he nearly ripped it from its hinges, burst into the room, and threw the sheet over his wife.
The principal turned his enraptured gaze towards the hairy, droopy-featured beast that had come storming in and, upon seeing his face, let out a shout. This was no scream of fear, but a whoop of joy. He turned on his heel and sprinted toward the door.
The father blocked the principal’s way, begging and pleading with all the respect he could muster for him not to tell anyone about the curse that had befallen his son. The principal looked at the father with disgust, then turned to the son with a look of triumph, pushed past the father, and bounded out of the apartment.
Neither the mother nor the sister had taken anything in, while panic appeared on the wife’s face and the father stood back up and reached for the vase. Taking it in both his hands, he flung it with all his skinny, nervous might, at his son’s chest. It shattered, its shards burrowing into his chest and its force knocking him onto his back. The animal within him wanted to cry out in pain, but he quelled the urge, just as he had quelled his tears under the strikes of his father’s belt as a child. He pulled himself together, flipped onto his side, and slunk into his room.
His wife exclaimed that she could bare it no longer and ran into the kitchen, returning with a large knife. Before anyone realized what was happening, she had entered the bedroom.
Malice beamed from her eyes as she pointed the knife at her husband, warning him not to come any closer as she stuffed clothes haphazardly into her suitcase and fastened it shut, then tucked her tall, alluring body into a tight-fitting jilbab and pulled her suitcase out behind her, still brandishing the knife.
No one dared approach her. His mother tried to calm her, but she bellowed in her face until the poor mother withdrew. His wife cast a final look of good riddance at her sick child and left the apartment.
The father didn’t move a muscle, but his displeasure was evident on his face. The sister turned toward the mongoloid child and let fall the tears she’d been holding behind her eyelids. As for the husband, he fell once more to the ground, resting his back against the corner of the room and moaning faintly. The father rose and closed the door to his son’s room to block out the sad, animal whine.
He could not remember when he first regretted his marriage, nor at what point he discovered that marriage was a social trap that everyone pushes you into with sadistic glee until the suffering that everyone has been concealing from the bachelors spreads to ensnare them, too. At any rate, he was obliged to marry after committing that disgraceful mistake – after that diabolic seed was sown before his marriage.
It wasn’t love. But there was certainly a mutual attraction which had allowed them to pass safely through that period. He had never imagined that he would do that, and fall into such an error. To this day, he did not know exactly what had happened. He was being treated for severe burns on his arms and chest after a teapot was spilled on him in the teachers’ lounge. And she was a nurse who cared for him with utmost expertise for several days at Mohammed V Hospital. Was it loneliness, frustration, depression, anger, or a pure drive towards self-destruction? Perhaps all those raging feelings combined to lower a veil of mist over his eyes and destroy his defenses, and he surrendered himself to this woman’s embrace. The only way to extinguish the fire raging within him was to let the volcano spew its lava. Yet sometimes, in moments of diabolical doubt, he thinks she pulled him into her that night to secure an alternate lifeboat for herself after the seed’s true sower abandoned her.
Only a few months later, she miscarried the seed and entered a period of depression that would leave her a lifeless corpse. He astonished himself by not grieving the loss, which he considered a salvation. So, when the next pregnancy resulted in a child with Down syndrome, he immediately concluded that this was divine punishment for his repudiation and suspicion of his wife, whom he had very nearly abandoned after her first miscarriage, before his sympathy got the better of him.
It was not today that she had left him, he thought, but long ago.
At some point, sleep overcame him. Or maybe he lost consciousness as he lay huddled in the corner of the room. The rest of the family remained fixed in place all morning, until the noontime prayer was called from the neighborhood mosque. The mother started, as though waking from a deep sleep. She realized she had not prepared any lunch for the family, nor had anyone even had breakfast yet. Supporting herself on the chair’s armrests, she heaved herself up. But before making it all the way up, she let herself fall back into the chair and succumbed to a bout of crying, lamenting the fate of her poor son and insisting, with all the solemnity of her faith, by the honorable Grace and the immaculate Kaaba, it was the neighbor woman who had bewitched her son after he refused to marry her daughter, whom the whole city knew was a loose woman who kept the company of all the city’s men.
The father roared at her to shut up, then got up and quietly opened the door to peer in cautiously at the monster that had afflicted him since the morning. He closed the door again and turned to face his wife and daughter. “He’s sleeping now. Quit your crying and fix us something to fill our stomachs.” And he left to perform the noontime prayer.
The daughter tried to console her mother, reminding her that the whole mess with the neighbor’s daughter was three years old. If their neighbor had really wanted to bewitch her brother, she would have already done so a long time ago. The mother paused for a moment, then resumed with fresh determination. It was his wife, then. That snake. I never trusted her. I told you before that she got pregnant before her wedding. She’s a witch who tricked your kindhearted brother, and then when he no longer suited her, she turned him into a monster and ran away.
Nothing like a mother’s faith, the daughter thought as she helped her mother up to prepare a bite to eat for her father before he returned from his prayers; there was no way they could bear his anger – not now, with her brother in his room and God only knows what had befallen him.
Notes from the translator:
Dear Readers,
This week I want to talk about footnotes. Or, rather, the various options available to translators to provide additional explanation or contextualization that the assumed readership of the translation might require – local customs, popular figures, food, and other such references that would be readily understood by the original text’s assumed audience, but not the translation’s.
What got me thinking about this was this week’s chapter’s mention of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who self-immolated in front of the governor’s office in 2011, after a female police officer slapped him, insulted him, and confiscated his fruit cart. This was an inciting incident for the wave of anti-authoritarian uprisings across the region (the so-called Arab Spring). Here’s the passage from the text:
He was cocooned in despair for a sudden moment, during which he thought about getting up and going straight away to buy enough gasoline to burn himself alive in front of the Municipal palace. Then he thought of his mother and sister, who would be left with no breadwinner after him. He convinced himself that the world didn’t need another Bouazizi, and dragged himself, weighed down as he was with humiliation, toward the mosque toilets…
The main options in such moments are:
1) No explanation, footnote or otherwise. If it’s not in the original text, the argument might go, don’t add it. It’s your job as a translator to convey what’s on the page, not to explain what isn’t. On the other hand, the role of the translator is to make the text legible in a new context, which is not purely a matter of linguistic translation, but cultural translation as well.
One of the ways I think about this is in terms of hospitality. How hospitable or inhospitable am I making the text for different kinds of readers? Some readers may be encountering the place represented in the text for the first time through my translation. Adding a bit of explanatory notes in some form or another can be a way of inviting these readers in, sparking new curiosities, and teaching them something new. Some may be new readers, or non-native English speakers, and so simple choices like italicizing non-English words in the text can be a way of easing their encounter with the text.
On the other hand (and there is always another hand), this question goes back to what I mentioned last week, about how smooth and transparent we should really be aiming to make a translation. I don’t want my translations to be too hospitable, to the point that readers can slip inside them with no resistance from the text, and no effort on their part to reach beyond themselves and their own context.
2) On the other end of the spectrum of choices is to insert in-text explanations or glosses, as though they are part of the narration. So, something like, “He convinced himself that the world didn’t need a repetition of Mohammed Bouazizi’s public self-immolation, which had sparked the fire of revolution across the region in 2011…”.
3) In this particular example, this strikes me as unnecessary editorializing because, even for readers who do not recognize his name, the context in which he is mentioned makes it clear that he is a well-known figure who lit himself on fire, most likely for reasons similar to Jawad’s circumstances. And for curious readers, a quick google search will fill them in.
Beyond this specific example, however, I tend to steer away from in-text glosses. There are two reasons for this. On an aesthetic level, this kind of explanatory insertion ends up sounding so much like exactly that: an explanatory insertion. This is particularly evident in free indirect style (when third-person narrative approximates the first-person perspective of one of the characters). When the narration is following a character’s thought process, it strikes as particularly out of place to have that thought process define or explain the terms it’s using to think to itself. To insert additional information about who Bouazizi is into this moment would pop us out of Jawad’s direct experience of the moment. (Although, as Zora points out in her comments on last week’s chapter, the presence of our “jocular narrator” does complicate the close-third person narration, and perhaps affords a certain flexibility for additional asides.)
In addition to these aesthetic considerations, this kind of translational solution to difficulties that arise in moving a text from one context is a way of smoothing the jagged edges of a translation that might trip a reader up, packaging it up for easy consumption by a generalized, global, Anglophone audience. I want to maintain these moments that might catch the reader up, make them pause, remind them that maybe this text was translated for them, but it wasn’t written for them. Otherwise, translations into hegemonic languages like English “can only reproduce the power relations of colonialism” (to quote Samah Selim’s reflections on translation, via Gayatry Spivak, which Caroline Benson sent to me in response to last week’s post).
4) An intermediary solution is to use a footnote. This allows the translator to add some context while making it clear that this is the translator’s intervention in the text, and that the addition is on behalf of the text’s new audience in translation. I rely on footnotes sparingly, trying to determine when something really won’t make sense or an important dimension of the text will be lost without an extra bit of clarification. The line between crucial information and over-interpretation can sometimes be a blurry one though, especially in poetic texts.
In the case in question here, I do think something is lost for readers who don’t recognize the parallels between the character of Jawad and the historical figure of Bouazizi. One of the features of this novella is the way it locates itself in relation to global geopolitical events, as we saw, for example, in chapter 2, with the scene of Jawad’s father on the evening of September 11, 2001. While the social commentary in the chapter functions without the extratextual referent, the parallel adds a certain richness and weight.
5) A final option, if there are enough instances to justify it, is a glossary in the back of the book. It’s there to be consulted if and when the reader wants it, while still leaving room for productive moments of not knowing. It also provides the translator a bit more space than a footnote to illuminate key dimensions of the text, which, if well done, can create a deeper readerly engagement with the text.
What was your experience reading this chapter? Did you wish for a footnote here or elsewhere? Has anything in the translation so far prompted you to seek out more information?
I like the idea of a glossary. Bouazizi was not familiar to me. Also, I'd rather have a reference point in the book, instead of having to break off reading to google facts to tie together.
I'm thinking that one of the great advantages of online publication (as opposed to traditional printed text) is the ability to embed the footnote or glossary entry in the text as a hyperlink (or some other technical tool I'm not familiar with). The reader can choose to click or hover over the term when ready, without being distracted by the presence of a note at the bottom of the page or having to flip to a glossary at the end of the book. These could later be compiled into a glossary in the print book. Doing this would provide a lot of flexibility in the meantime, and reader responses as you continue weekly chapters could help gauge whether there are too many or too few of these, which is always challenging for the translator once she's decided to include any notes (rather than avoid them at all cost).