Stations in Translation: Power, Eros, and Betrayal (After Gaza)

Published in Issue 63.4: Fall 2024

You can purchase our Fall issue here

An original version of this essay was given as the Saif Al-Ghobash Lecture in Translation, an annual lecture held by the Banipal Trust of London, and was delivered on February 8, 2024.¹

As the parenthetic part of the title suggests, this essay was being drafted before Israel’s war of erasure on Gaza. Uppermost on my mind, these events and the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians by the Israeli military have by necessity narrowed this essay’s focus to the Middle East and demanded that I alternate uninhibitedly between three forms of translation: interlingual (between languages), intercultural (between cultures), and intersubjective² (the translation of self into another).

While translation has always been about trying to communicate with (or understand) the other who speaks a different language, interest in translation has ebbed and flowed over the centuries. In more recent times, one of the great engines of translation has been a philosophical change in mankind’s view of itself, mainly the claims of the Enlightenment for the equality of mankind and the resultant obligatory rights that ought to be granted each individual to assure this equality. In the modern era, dominated by the West, we’ve had two ages of enlightenment, one beginning in the eighteenth century, and a second, established at the end of World War II. Both enlightenments are characterized by claims for the equality of mankind which led to greater interest in translation as a mechanism for intercultural knowledge exchange and created a space for interlinguistic erotics and cultural kinship. But both of these currents of enlightenment and the states and institutions that represented their values have been unable to resist the power differential between the cultures and societies engaged in this exchange, whereby Europe and North America have constantly made exceptions to their stated values to justify oppression and genocidal violence. 

The fact that Enlightenment values have been betrayed does not mean that translation is not a powerful source of connection and innovation. Translation is a facility we acquired so that we may be engaged in an eternal process of knowing each other as we change and evolve. Life depends on newer versions of things emerging that bear our sameness and the traces of other lives in it, hence the analogy of linguistic exchange and reproduction, translation and eros. 

I. Eros

Eros, we may recall, is a Greek god, who is a child of Aphrodite, goddess of sexual love and beauty, who was fathered by Zeus, or Ares, or possibly Hermes. While all traces of the various fathers (power, war, command of language, and movement) can be attributed to Eros, Eros was assigned to be the god of fertility, as well as passion. Like Eros, translation has the power to break us away from the solitude of solipsism and the myopia of narcissism with empathy, affection, and the expansion of the self. It’s a process of community-making, of fecundity and fertility to ward off ignorance and isolation. The great translation theorist George Steiner tells us in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation that the first stage in translation is “initiative trust,” an investment “in the meaningfulness and seriousness of an adverse text . . .” This is a “psychologically hazardous” state that leaves the translator “epistemologically exposed.” The philosophical bedrock of this initiative trust is a belief in “the coherence of the world,” in “the presence of meaning in very different, perhaps formally, antithetical semantic systems,” as well as in “the validity of analogy and parallel”³ in human interaction.  These are the same forces that give rise to the stated values of both epochs of enlightenment. 

Steiner affirms that Eros and language mesh at every point. “Intercourse and discourse, copula and copulation, are sub-classes of the dominant fact of communication. They arise from the life-need of the ego to reach out and comprehend . . . another human being,”⁴ he explains. Eros and language/translation “construe the grammar of being.”⁵ After the translator “brings [the translated text] home,”⁶ adds Steiner, we proceed to “incorporation,”⁷ where we accommodate the new text in the new home to widen one’s grammar and vocabulary. Finally, we reach reciprocity where the translation is supposed to “body forth its object.”⁸ What we’re talking about then is a manifold relationship where fidelity, like identity, is being created. To be true to another text is not to be an Echo to Narcissus but to be curious and initiate curiosity. As such, there is no richer trail of inquiry than translation, no greater process to guide us toward the “great longing for linguistic complementation,”⁹ to use Walter Benjamin’s words. In translation’s various phases, we experience longing and its fulfillment being undone by each other, myriad encounters with the ineffable that encapsulate what we live for, and real evidence, in the translated text, that the broken languages of others can find a home within us, a process where longing becomes belonging.

Like Eros, translation is more than its function. In fact, “translation fails when it limits itself to the conveyance of information” because information “is the least essential aspect of a literary work”¹⁰ states the late Dennis Porter. Walter Benjamin posits a kinship among all natural languages, an ahistorical and pervasive expressive intentionality that exists in the world’s languages, a capacity that can never be realized in any one language by itself. As a result, all languages embody a more or less hidden, yet nonetheless urgent, aspiration to achieve the condition of what he calls “pure language,” in the same way that erotic union overcomes the physical and points to transcendence, as mystical poets from Mirabai to St. John of the Cross to the Sufi poets have contended. The translator releases his own language which is under the spell of another into or toward Benjamin’s pure language. The purity is not in the outcome but in the barzakh, the in-betweenness, the ecstatic state fana’ of being neither in the original or the recipient language, which is the bonus or excess that neither of them can garner on their own. 

This is proof that Eros, or rather translation as the god of literary fecundity and invention, can be found everywhere. In ancient China, ancient Greece, and ancient Rome, interlingual and intercultural exchanges exercised through the erotics of translation were the engines of literary and philosophical invention. When it comes to Arabia and the emergence of Islam, we often think of Mecca as the locus of a pure Arabic language, but Mecca was a multilingual space with its trade routes to the Levant and Yemen bringing with them speakers and traces of Aramaic, Greek, and Sabean. We also think of Arabic as a language of isolated nomads, but why is the simile of foreigners babbling in Greek a common trope in pre-Islamic poetry? To me, the genius of Arabic/Islamic civilization, when it was vigorous, was its ability to hitch up its cultural tent toward new linguistic pastures. 

As for Europe, can we think of Protestantism existing without the German translation of the Bible by Martin Luther? Or the English Protestant movements without William Tyndale’s and Myles Coverdale’s English translations of the Bible, a century or so before the King James Bible? Closer to our time, modern poetry is the child of cross-Atlantic bilingualism—Poe to Baudelaire, via translation, to Pound and Eliot and the Provençal poets. Or perhaps it’s the child of European and Asian poetry, a child of many fathers like Eros; for who would Pound have been, along with a whole generation of Anglophone poets influenced by Imagism, without encountering Tagore, and Li Bai who gave him his Cathay? 

All these developments and inventions are adjustments to the culture of the other, caused by linguistic melding between peoples, by the discovery and practice of intellectual and physical kinship. And necessary to any renaissance of translation was always the arousal of the notion of oneness and a shared fate between one’s self and one’s culture with that of the other. In Islam, the Quran has no tower of Babel, but it tells us that God had meant for humanity to be made up of peoples and tribes so that they may engage in the ongoing process of knowing (لتعارفوا)¹¹. Another sacred Islamic text, a hadith, states that among the believers there is no difference between and an Arab and a non-Arab, a White or a Black person (“لا فضل لعربي على أعجمي، ولا لأبيض على أسود، ولا لأسود على أبيض إلا بالتقوى “)¹², except for their degree of
taqwa, which is more than its dictionary meaning of piety or fear of God; rather, its meaning includes all the ethics and discipline a virtuous life requires, such as balance between body and soul, possession of an inner life, and dedication to the truth. These principles allowed non-native speakers of Arabic to join and lead Islamic civilization’s pursuit of knowledge, making the lands of Arabic and Islam one of the great engines of translation. 

Turning to Europe again, since the beginning of the European Enlightenment—with its ideas of the equality of mankind, liberty, progress, and fraternity that call for society to be based upon reason and its individuals judged by their characters and deeds rather than race, origin, or faith—all the way to the United Nations and the push for multilingual and multi-ethnic democracies, we have been sailing a great ship powered by engines of translation. The eighteenth century is widely known as a “republic of letters” led by erudite multilinguists who together shaped our ideas of democracy. Multilingualism remains integral to democracy now. In our state of Michigan, my fellow citizens can vote in Arabic, Bangla, Burmese, English, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog, and Urdu.

This excitement about the knowledge to be gained from translation was not missed by one of the great chroniclers of early nineteenth-century England. I’m speaking of George Eliot, of course, particularly her masterpiece, Middlemarch, where we meet the scholar Edward Casaubon, the middle-aged husband of the novel’s young protagonist Dorothea. Casaubon, as you’ll remember, is working on a book titled The Key to All Mythologies. He is making no headway as he cannot read German, the language in which the new ideas in his field are quickly developing. Casaubon’s intellectual impotence is reflected in his complete disinterest in having a physical relationship with his young bride. His linguistic isolation from the vitality occurring in his field of research is represented by his inability to consummate his relationship with Dorothea. Casaubon’s infertility is juxtaposed with the vitality of his Polish-named cousin, Will Ladislaw, who is fluent in German and resides in Rome. A person living in translation, Will, while uncertain about his future, is forward-looking, engaged, passionate, and competing with Casaubon for Dorothea’s affection. Eliot’s message is clear, if I may bluntly express it: Intellectual vitality arises from a world where ideas are exchanged in translation, despite the uncertainties. Monolingualism is a path to frailty, bitterness, and death, which is Casaubon’s fate in the novel. Translation is joy and fecundity, indeed.

II. Betrayal

Like me, you’ve also heard the expression “translation is betrayal,” a clichéd notion that apprentice journalists have tossed at me and an accusation that I heard in my classes sometimes when certain lines or weaker passages of translated poems suggest that there’s something lost in the translation. Such statements nearly always incense me and invoke a sense of loyalty to other translators and to the necessary work they do for every language. I remind my interlocutors that translation is a gain because without it there’s a great deal that we would not know, that our general knowledge and our languages themselves are enriched by what is translated into them. But the notion that betrayal somehow shadows translation is not limited to unenlightened monolingual journalists or underclassmen.  

According to Roman Jakobson, the necessarily transformative nature of translation does indeed allow for and sometimes demands some degree of subversion. The accusation of betrayal, however, must be supported with evidence of how the translator’s choice of phrasing fails to transport the message of the text and if, in fact, the translation betrays the values that the text conveys.¹³ For Paul de Man, translators do not betray a text when they merely disarticulate the original; their betrayal lies in the fact that they reveal that the original was always disarticulated.¹⁴ De Man suggests that betrayal arises from the unavoidable resistance of linguistic forms to human meanings. He asserts that translation disrupts the original, unintentionally making the reader aware of “certain disjunctions, certain accommodations, certain weaknesses, certain cheatings, certain conventions, certain characteristics which don’t correspond to the claim of the original, so that the original loses its sacred character.”¹⁵ There’s no one to blame, if you will, in this, but the destabilizations these actions cause render translation impossible, according to de Man.

But even when it’s done well, could translation still be a betrayal? This thought occurred to me a few years ago while reading a passage that Benjamin quotes from Rudolf Pannwitz, who states that the translator “must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language.”¹⁶ The duty of the translator to gift this expansion and deepening to his language, which used to fill me with optimism in the past, made me pause with realization. Until then, I had translated solely from Arabic to English and devoted much of my time working, ostensibly, to expand English, my stepmother tongue, while doing nothing for Arabic, my birth mother tongue. This guilt-ridden thought brought to mind an American critic, who intending praise, called me, among other immigrant poets, “linguistic turncoats,” which somehow stung then and still irks now. Was I betraying Arabic by not expanding and deepening it? And what am I helping English transcend by incorporating Arabic poetry in it? 

The original notion that translation is betrayal comes to us from the Italian expression “Traduttore, traditore,” its coiner unknown. It’s almost certain that the phrase is the result of both incisive intuition and spontaneous wordplay; the homophonic proximity of Traduttore to traditore is what made the saying stick, as well as the grain of truth in it. Translation can betray when it offers knowledge that empowers someone else. As Arthur C. Danto explains, “if I give away my knowledge, I lose power if others can use the knowledge I possess for their own purposes and these thwart mine.”¹⁷ He continues, “Why should I tell you the truth? If you know what I know, my power is dissipated.”¹⁸ This immediate distrust comes from those who are powerless, or nearly so. Danto suggests that translation breaks a protective realm of exclusivity that our languages give us. Once one’s language is no longer secret, that protection is lost. “A secret language gives power only so long as it is secret, and I betray the secret when I translate, putting the knowledge and the power in alien hands,”¹⁹ explains Danto. Indeed, while God may have cursed humanity by splintering our one language into many in the Tower of Babel, it’s possible that we actually needed to create new languages. We needed new languages or codes in order to share secrets among those we trust, and to exclude those we fear. A breaker of codes, translation can have a sapping effect on those who need to keep secrets to survive. 

This last point brings to mind the American withdrawal from Afghanistan and, before that, from Iraq. As the Taliban seized Kabul in 2021 and as America’s armed forces and other Western militaries and civil society organizations were leaving Afghanistan, one began to hear a great deal about the Afghani translators. Before Afghanistan, the U.S. did the same in Iraq. Going back nearly five decades, you may recall the Vietnamese people who stood on the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Many of them were translators who feared for their lives. Reading and listening to those stories about rescuing translators, I was intrigued by how persistently the translators are considered traitors in these “enemy nations,” and how sympathetically they are portrayed in Western media as benign, innocent figures. Is translating for an invading army an innocent activity? Clearly not. Is it a form of betrayal?

The late great Iraqi poet, Saadi Youssef, accused some of his fellow Iraqi communists who worked with American forces of being “translators who graduated from torture chambers….”²⁰ Clearly, among many in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam before them, there’s a sense that translators offered the invading armies certain knowledge that added to their power and weakened the invaded countries. This could happen by offering new information that the invader did not know or confirming false information that the invader believed to be true. But rather than believe their local informants, invading armies have generally distrusted their own native translators, accusing some of treachery for being sympathetic to their people. In other cases, native translators are accused of not “translating” well enough to provide the occupiers with powerful evidence to be used against native resisters. For Syrian American translator Ahmad El-Halabi, who worked in Guantanamo, he was persecuted for being a translator who betrayed America by not falsifying the words that the detainees had said during interrogation, thus “obstructing” the U.S. military’s process to convict innocent detainees.²¹ Whatever the context may be, translation as an activity that calls for fidelity and trust, is also a space fraught with betrayal.

I know I’ve taken us far away from the peaceful world of literary translation, but even in our practice, what makes translation give up the life-force of fertility that Steiner describes and its capacity for kinship that Benjamin foresees are differentiators of power—and the gradations of power between the Westerner (White) and non-Westerner (non-White) are immense. 

III. Translation—Colonial Power—Seduction 

Now that we’re turning to power, a quick historical contextualization is necessary. We will need to revisit the primary encounter between modern Europe and the Near East, mainly the Napoleonic expedition (1798-1801), to explore how translation as a space of seduction obscured the dynamics of power between the invading French and the invaded Egyptians. Along with a conquering army, Napoleon brought with him the two main principles of the Enlightenment: the equality of mankind and the scientific method. Indeed, he brought with him hundreds of scientists and researchers, whose work remains foundational today. And, perhaps due to his appearance as an invader with a human face, what followed was not an imposition of hegemony but a process of seduction, one where Arab intellectuals at the time were somehow blinded to the power differential between them and their invader.

In her excellent book, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, Shaden M. Tageldin argues that, unlike the generally acknowledged polarities of domination and resistance that we associate with colonialism and Orientalism, translation as a process of cultural exchange offered a space where Arab intellectuals came to love and be seduced by Europe. As in the intralinguistic erotics that Steiner outlines, this colonial encounter, toting the ideals of European Enlightenment, seemed to promise a great deal for the Egyptian Arabs who sought in it recognition and validation, an opportunity for equity and reciprocity, and a chance to draw strength from the language and thoughts of their European interlocuters. On the face of it, Europe seemed keen to be true to its Enlightenment values. However, as the exchange went on, translation of literary texts and cultural products proved to be a space of seduction that obscured the disparities of power between the invader and the invaded.

At first, colonial Europe, via its “Orientalist discourse,” Tageldin informs us, “appeared to affirm Egypt’s Pharaonic and Arab-Islamic pasts as unbroken, still vital and uncolonized”²² sources of strength and cultural integrity. European colonialism appeared to validate the Arab-Islamic culture even as it denigrated it, putting Egypt and Egyptians on an illusory footing of equal exchange. While there is nothing wrong, on its face, with the validation that the invaders offered, it is the pretense of equality between those with a glorious past and those who militarily controlled them that allowed for European hegemony to take hold. The invaders’ familiarity and stated admiration of Arab culture lead Egyptian intellectuals to mistake the invaders’ denigration of them for modesty. 

Secondly, translation created a momentary parity as an erotic encounter. Tageldin suggests that Europe translating itself into Arab-Islamic terms tempted its Egyptian interlocutors to imagine themselves “masculinized masters of the Europeans who were mastering them.”²³  This emphasis on presenting Europe as a feminine seducer continued through the twentieth century. In Lord Cromer’s Modern Egypt, written in 1908, he hints that to win Egypt, England must shed its matronly respectability and become an “attractive damsel;” “Only then . . . will Egyptians . . . rush headlong into England’s open arms”²⁴ as they had done with France. Rather than simply “raping the native’s histories, traditions, or pasts,”²⁵ the colonizer was engaged in flattering them to give the colonized that sought-after sense of parity. This pretense of equality between those with a glorious past and those who militarily controlled them continues to be part of Western imperialism’s “diplomatic” arsenal, a deeply duplicitous approach that is often effective in fostering unwarranted trust among less powerful nations and peoples. 

Furthermore, the French colonizers’ early use of the Arabic language was also part of the nativizing of the dominated people in 1798. Napoleon circulated a proclamation, in Arabic and mimicking Quranic style, that assured the predominantly Muslim people of Egypt that the French were “sincere Muslims” like them. Such words “preceding the force of arms—disarmed Egyptian intellectuals, whether they believed Napoleon a friend or foe,”²⁶ contends Tageldin. Napoleon’s self-translation into Arabic situated the Egyptians “in the guise of their precolonial selves”²⁷ as owners of a “sovereign” language (Arabic) and culture (Islam) in an attempt to dissolve the difference between the subjects and objects of empire. 

More than a century later, when the Italians invaded my native Libya, their declarations to the Libyan people utilized a language heard in Friday sermons, something familiar and filled with compassion for the natives. And in 1936, three years after completing a genocidal project that led to the demise of one-third of eastern Libya’s population, Mussolini made a pilgrimage to the Fourth Shore and crowned the visit by accepting The Sword of Islam, a title given to him by local dignitaries. Mussolini went beyond symbolic gestures when it came to giving Libyans the impression that he is a champion of Islam, and that their faith had an honored place in his new Rome. Indeed, Il Duce built mosques and Quranic schools and erected facilities to service the pilgrims going to Mecca, even setting up an Islamic high school to train local imams. It should be noted that colonial Italy was itself run as a proto-apartheid system that denied native Libyans education beyond elementary level, enforced a wage structure based on race whereby a Libyan’s wages could not exceed a third of what is paid to Italians, and established a lower status of citizenship for Libyan-Italians that denied them the core civil rights granted to their “fellow” Italian citizens. Nonetheless, the colonial Italians’ self-translation as Muslims provided a measurable degree of calm in the country after two decades of armed struggle.

IV. Translation, American Imperialism, and Seduction 

You might say that was the age of Napoleon and Mussolini, not now, not us. Let me then propose that we turn to Saadi Youssef’s poem “America, America,” which explores how the dissemination of American cultural products presented a myth of democracy and equality that was easily accessible, or rather translatable, to Arab intellectuals engaged in anti-colonial struggles after WWII. Youssef, who is the best known translator of Walt Whitman to Arabic, begins his poem with English phrases, used verbatim, welcoming them as honored guests into Arabic poetry. He continues by expressing his love for American culture, and then his dismay at how America has treated his people.

God save America,
My home, sweet home!

I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island
and John Silver’s parrot and the balconies of New Orleans.
I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steam-
boats and Abraham Lincoln’s dogs.
I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.
But I am not American.
Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me
back to the Stone Age?²⁸

As you will note, in the first couplet, Youssef, mistakenly but appropriately, conflates Britain and the U.S. Instead of saying “God bless America,” as most American presidents close their speeches, Youssef replaces “bless” with “save,” as in the British anthem, “God save the queen,” or king, as the case may be. Then this is followed by the American idiom “My home, sweet home!” Whether deliberate or mistaken, in the conflation of British and American idioms there is a cultural continuity between colonial, monarchical Britain and democratic America, that their shared language and cadence somehow presented an unbroken discourse that could not allow for their separate identities. The poem proceeds to present us a list of alluring objects or myths from America, mostly with nineteenth-century references that allude to music, beautiful architecture, and emancipation. The poet’s love of these things about America, however, does not prevent the American pilot from wanting to turn the poet’s homeland to “the stone age.” The expression of America turning a country to the Stone Age is an oft recorded threat that American generals have used against adversaries, such as Vietnam, and even allies, such as Pakistan. The poet ends this passage wondering if there is anything that could spare him and his people from the threat of annihilation by America. Apparently, he cannot rely on his familiarity and identification with American culture to allow America to identify him or his people as human.

Later in the poem, and perhaps alluding to narratives of contact between Europeans and native peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, Youssef utilizes the ritual of gift exchange found in such narratives as a means of having a conversation with America. It’s important to note that this poem, “America, America,” was written in the mid-1990s when the Clinton administration was considering bombing Iraq and, around the same time, when U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated that the death of nearly half a million Iraqis due to Western sanctions “was worth it.” Using the ruse of gift exchange, Youssef conflates various epochs of colonial conquest with events happening in the late twentieth century, arguing that nothing has changed since then. For America in the 1990s, Iraq was not different from the tribal people it has encountered and exterminated in centuries past. The ceremony of gift exchange, as non-White native people understood it in their encounters with Europeans, were merely opportunities for respite and desperate attempts to stall inevitable slaughter and conquest. 

Here’s what the poet offers America in the cultural exchange of gifts:

America:
let’s exchange gifts.
Take your smuggled cigarettes
and give us potatoes.
Take James Bond’s golden pistol
and give us Marilyn Monroe’s giggle.
Take the heroin syringe under the tree
and give us vaccines.
Take your blueprints for model penitentiaries
and give us village homes.
Take the books of your missionaries
and give us paper for poems to defame you.
Take what you do not have
and give us what we have.
Take the stripes of your flag
and give us the stars.
Take the Afghani mujahideen beard
and give us Walt Whitman’s beard filled with butterflies.
Take Saddam Hussein
and give us Abraham Lincoln
or give us no one.²⁹

America has brought smuggling, guns and spies with golden pistols, increased drug trafficking, missionaries, and Islamic radicalism symbolized by the Afghani mujahideen beard, a violent and intolerant political current created and funded by the CIA that spread throughout the Middle East. These violent developments were not what was promised in America’s seduction of the region. Instead, America had offered Marilyn Monroe’s giggle, a prominent feminine feature of America’s allure; the soulful melodies of jazz, music of the descendants of freed slaves as an empathetic form of art that could speak to the suffering and aspirations of colonized peoples; and the fatherly beard of Walt Whitman brimming with butterflies, as Federico García Lorca had described it, an  image of the beauty and brotherhood of democracy. With the reference to Saddam Hussein and Abraham Lincoln—again, the poem was written before the second war on Iraq—Saadi suggests that the oncoming engagement with the region should either bring emancipation or not take place at all.

An earlier artistic response to the American penetration of the region is the Moroccan song “Lmirikan” (The Americans) by Lhussein Slaoui, released in 1961. The song hearkens back to World War II, the first deep American engagement in the Arab World. Under the aegis of Operation Torch, and three days after the Allied victory in El Alamein, American troops landed in various locations in Algeria and Morocco, both occupied by the French colonial administration. The operation helped bring an end to all Axis presence in the region and set the invasion of Italy in 1943.

As scholar Jamila Bargach notes in her excellent article on the song, Lhussein Salaoui’s “Lmirikan” chronicles a crucial period during Moroccan resistance to French colonial occupation, a time when Moroccan working people began to form a dual resistance to the French occupiers and the Moroccan upper classes that collaborated with them.³⁰ Couched in multiple layers of irony, both through the misogynistic tone of its singer and the mingling of classical and bawdy musical allusions, “Lmirikan” depicts a period of materialistic frenzy caused by American dollars and shoddy consumer products. The arrival of the handsome American soldier, “the beautiful blue-eyed one,” caused many changes to “befall” the singer’s community. “Old hags” began to “wear face-veils,” as a sign of increased status, and to “chew gum;” and married women “found a reason / to temporarily leave their husbands.”³¹ The singer also refers to a type of woman he calls al-ma‘shuqa (the loved one) who “became valuable among the Americans.” Younger women, perhaps teenage girls, also learned they have a place among the Americans. 

The impact the Americans had is rather farcical: 

They distributed menthol candy and added chewing gum
[The women] put on more face-powder made of chick-peas and ate candy
Even the oldest nannies of them now drink rum with Americans…³²

The Americans infantilized the occupied Moroccans with candy, chewing gum, and cigarettes. Women of various ages begin to develop a taste for alcohol and began using all the local know-how (chickpea powder) to make themselves more beautiful for the blue-eyed one.

What’s not directly mentioned in the song is that the Americans’ engagement with the community has basically generated a new prostitution industry.

Money becomes abundant and people are winning…
With Americans, you only hear okay, okay, give me a dollar…
You only hear okay, okay, come on, bye, bye.³³

The deep impact on the community, as expressed by the disenfranchised singer who can no longer afford a seat on the horse drawn carriages, is nonetheless taking place in a verbal vacuum: “With Americans, you only hear okay, okay, give me a dollar.” It’s not clear who’s saying, “okay” and who is being persuaded. It is very clear who is asking for the dollar.

The last line in the passage above, which is the last line in the song’s refrain, is the wonderfully syncopated “okay, okay, come on, bye, bye.” It’s safe to assume that these lines are being stated solely by the American interlocutor. The repeated “okay” can be seen as being stated by a slightly put-upon American soldier, agreeing to the persuasions of the locals for money or a tryst. The tone changes quickly to the forceful “come on,” which can only be stated by the more powerful interlocutor making sure they get what they want. And then, finally, we hear the Americans saying, “bye, bye” once their business is done, be it propositioning a local “loved one” or in the case of when the American troops left for Italy a few months later, simply saying, “bye, bye,” leaving behind them a community broken apart by money and base desires.

In comparison to the drawn-out process of colonial seduction enacted by France and Egypt that Tageldin outlined for us earlier, the American process of seducing the region’s people is equally devastating. The encapsulated verse, “okay, okay, come on, bye, bye,” brilliantly describes the sum effect of America’s engagement with the region, and aptly describes the American bait and switch process. Especially when it comes to the question of Palestine, the U.S., like Graham Green’s ugly American, has always portrayed itself as burdened by the role of being the world’s policeman-peacemaker, despite all the evidence of its utter bias toward Israel. The weary “okay, okay” is representative of how American diplomats began their diplomatic peace efforts, from the Rogers Plan to the farcical Abraham Accords to Blinken’s cease fire agreements written with crocodile tears. The peace-seeking “okay, okay” becomes a forceful “come on” where the arms of the weakest interlocutor are twisted for further compromises while bombardment increases to force such capitulations. And when the unjust deal falls apart because Israel or the U.S. realizes they never meant for the ceasefire/peace agreement to actually take place—as is in the case with Biden’s most recent Israeli plan, proposed in June of this year—America and Israel walk away from the table, saying “bye, bye”, allowing for the slaughter to continue. Slaoui’s lyrics capture the American conman’s game plan perfectly. The horror of horrors is that it continues unabated, annihilating millions of lives and laying waste to the region’s shrinking resources. 

V. Translation and Power: Then and Now

My question to us as translators, as part of the economy of cultural gift exchange, is in what way is our work playing a part in this disequilibrium? Is it part of an emancipatory effort, or something not clearly defined, lost in the shuffle of political priorities? Where are we? Where does our work stand? As we, the latter generation of translators working in the West, seem on the surface to be engaged in a different project in a more inclusive and emancipatory era, I wonder if we too are caught in a similar erotics of validation that had ensnared our predecessors who translated Western works to Arabic. Like them, we too vehemently oppose Western imperialism, but are deeply engaged in, or rather depend on, Western aesthetics and epistemologies to uphold the humanity of our people, and the rest of humanity for that matter. Like our predecessors, we assume a shared love coming toward us, although it has remained perpetually deferred, while the subjection of our people has grown more oppressive. In our time, the world guided by a post-World War II rules-based order, starting with the U.N., itself a beehive of translation—relations between the people of the world, the books and ideas they offered, were expected to receive validation, to stand on equal footing in a process of exchange, and to engage us in reciprocity and kinship that binds all peoples. But as in the first era of the Enlightenment, Euro-America in our current era perpetually makes wide exceptions to its stated values. This is what we are witnessing in Gaza. Indeed, things may have changed, but the principle of exceptionalism that grants Euro-America the right to commit violence against others remains the primary force impacting our region and the world. The list of these exceptions from the two ears of enlightenment is long and runs from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia to Baghdad burning “like a Christmas tree.” 

This exceptionalism has translated itself into a new manifestation of  what Frantz Fanon saw as compartmentalization³⁴ under colonial rule. In our phase of the American-led enlightenment,  non-Euro-American cultural products are segregated in terms of how they’re received and perceived in the global market of ideas. Marked generally as anthropological artifacts of little artistic value they serve more as evidence of the non-Europeans’ otherness rather than a shared, universal humanity. In this world of literary and artistic compartmentalization, here are the accommodations that have been made for us: 

1. You are emblems of the past.

When it comes to non-European cultural products (translated or otherwise), these products and their artists are seen as coming from the past; for the future only belongs to Europe and North America. These works of art have to compete for their place in the “fundamentally unequal ground”³⁵ of Western temporality. This plays into the European celebration of the colonized peoples’ past glory and past contributions to civilization. This is how Tagore, Gibran, and the ancient Egyptian mummies were welcomed in the Western world. Our literature is often presented as something already seen, snippets from antiquated ways of living that have little bearing on the big world, the industrial-technological world.

This designation of the non-European as an obstacle from the past, impeding the march of progress, is still with us. Here’s The New York Times blowhard Thomas Friedman telling it like it is a few months ago: “On one side is the Resistance Network, dedicated to preserving closed, autocratic systems where the past buries the future. On the other side is the Inclusion Network, trying to forge more open, connected, pluralizing systems where the future buries the past.”³⁶ As I speak to you, Friedman’s Inclusion Network is wholeheartedly engaged in a war on nearly two million Gazans who are living out in the open, being shelled and buried under rubble, starved, and deprived of medical care. 

2. You are victims of the past and need rescue.

Despite the fact that the rules-based order spearheaded by the United States has led to the creation of more war victims and refugees in the world than any other historical era, the other recognizable platform for artistic or literary production offered to us necessitates that the author or artist be a victim of that non-European past, or what Friedman called the Resistance Network. The requirement here is that the victim must seek shelter in the West. Artists who engage their cultures on sensitive matters but do not seek Western approval or rescue are either insufficiently victimized or not liberated or future-oriented enough. Whether we like it or not, this crude formula has impacted what we translate, how and definitely what gets published, and how it’s framed and presented. Gayatri Spivak warns against translated texts from the colonized world where the translator is more focused on creating a “translated” text that metonymically acts as representative of a whole culture, choosing only to translate texts that appear to fulfill such a designation, or translating texts in a manner that fulfills what are ultimately biased and stereotypical representations that rob the texts and authors of their agency and artistic individuality. She adds that there remains “so much of the old colonial attitude, slightly misplaced,” perhaps due to good intentions, “at work in the translation racket.”³⁷  In this already set context, or what Spivak terms “the translation racket,” the translator is asked not to bring something new but to feed the established narrative with fresh raw material. 

3. Working from Inside the Moderately Corrupt Republic

For those of us who are endeavoring to undermine these negative views of non-Europeans, our efforts have focused on trying to humanize them/ourselves in the eyes of the West. Indeed, my first impulse to translate emerged from the Steinerian reproductive encounter with Arabic poems that flashed with powerful rays of Benjamin’s pure language as I rendered them into English. Edward Said calls this process “the voyage in,” “a conscious effort to enter the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories”³⁸ and, perhaps even realities. Granted access, empowered with a variety of skills, and positioned in institutions that appear to place diverse cultures and languages on equal footing, intellectuals and translators from the Global South took up the task of presenting their cultural heritage in a wide variety of ways. But that may have been naïve. Indeed, we may have failed to recognize, as Tageldin suggests, that “cultural imperialism [is] a politics that lures the colonized to seek power through empire rather than against it.” Like our progenitor translators of Western works to Arabic, we had hoped in translating Arabic literature to European languages to position our “cultures into an empowered ‘equivalence’ with those of [our] dominators and thereby repress the inequalities between”³⁹ us. But compartmentalized as our works have been, marginalized, ghettoized, and ignored, the promise of equity and a sense of shared humanity through translation has been a mirage, luminous and alluring, but not reachable.  

Among diasporics like me, who have also chosen to work on the inside of empire, many of us have had conversations similar to those between the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and his friend, the Indian philosopher, Raja Rao in 1969. Addressing Rao, Milosz writes, “I learned at last to say: this is my home, / here, / in a great republic, moderately corrupt.”⁴⁰ Similarly, many of us have accepted this corruption, the oblivion filling our chests, and the consenting silence presiding over our interactions with others “even before the flames have died.”⁴¹  The flames will surely subside, we thought, and we’ll go on doing God’s work, writing, translating, lecturing, teaching, explaining to whoever will listen. At this point, as this infernal point of Gaza stretches toward a year of genocidal slaughter, our adherence to our delusion should by now have loosened its grip on us.

VI. After Gaza: Reaching for Clarity

I think what we can say about Gaza is that something new has happened, mainly that the second phase of Western enlightenment is coming to an end. We can say that much of what used to be the Right in Western nations has shifted away from its neoclassical liberalism into a racist, populist ideology. The center to left of center, as represented by Obama, Biden, and Macron, has also been unable to resist the Islamophobic anti-immigrant current despite their rhetoric of diversity, inclusion, and equity. Gaza has proven the fragility of this commitment, and the leading Western nations, led by the United States and including Germany, France, and the U.K., have actively supported Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on Gaza and their unmistakable effort to ethnically cleanse the Strip, as well as the West Bank, of Palestinians. The current war on Gaza has proven again that indeed Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim lives do not matter. The aim, as it was during the Napoleonic expedition through persuasion, the extension of kinship, the drafting of collapsable peace treaties, or the barbaric use of advanced weaponry, is to bring the region to its knees, to render its people and their resources powerless under unquestionable Western hegemony. 

Gaza suggests that the enlightenment game is over. As our sister Arundhati Roy recently stated, “the moral architecture of western liberalism . . . is disappearing before our eyes.”⁴² It was always hypocritical, but “even that provided some sort of shelter,” a position half-heartedly claimed and unevenly practiced by powerful nations but that allowed those invested in Enlightenment values to pursue them in earnest, even with limited outcomes. No more! “Gone is any pretense of post-colonialism, multiculturalism, international law, the Geneva Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Gone is any pretense of Free Speech or public morality,” states Roy. We really can’t go back to these conversations with powerful entities in Euro-America and keep a straight face. The hypocrisy and the imposition of silence on those who are calling for the dignity and the freedom of the Palestinian people has been chilling. The post-World War II West has gone beyond Milosz’s ironic description; it is now a republic that is immoderately corrupt, repugnantly racist, and hypocritical.

As translators, how do we now go back to translating and to the institutions that we’re working in, as we’d done in the past, in the face of their neglect of the humanistic values we share, their selectivity regarding which humans are worth saving and which deaths we must accept as justifiable? Things are changing; people have been utterly changed. The university campuses, squares, and streets of the free world are thronging with supporters of Gaza for the sake of saving lives, spurred by a desire to uphold equity and justice. They’re calling on us to help make the change, to hold our institutions to their beliefs. Students, younger scholars, poets, and novelists are taking brave stances and endangering their careers. As translators and the necessary link between languages and cultures, we need to practice the fidelity of our calling in its broadest sense. We listen, apprehend, interpret, and give voice; that’s our habitual mode, our breathing evenly keeled on a horizon of justice. This gift gives us a moral authority that we should exercise now more than ever.

But we must do things differently and bypass the institutions, our institutions, that have come to value censorship more than freedom of expression and are hell-bent on punishing those who stray from the establishment’s point of view. So comfortable have we become with established institutions that practically all the world’s knowledge, its creation and assessment, has been surrendered to them. Since the onset of globalization, Western universities, foundations, publishers, and libraries control more of the world’s knowledge than ever before, creating a heavily centralized superstructure rather than a worldwide, decentralized engine of creativity, the pipedream propagated by Friedman and other false prophets of globalization. This hegemony over intellectual production needs to be circumvented, bypassed, and even boycotted. 

Perhaps one of the most important tools of hegemony is the English language itself, which has become, like the U.S. dollar and the euro in the world of commerce, the currency of scientific and cultural exchange. English, a language spoken by vast stretches of the world’s population, needs to be freed from Western hegemony, from the control of universities, publishers, and prize givers who determine who gets to be read and, increasingly, who is silenced for saying or thinking the wrong thing, especially about Palestine. English can become, I’m convinced, a tool of liberation rather than hegemony.

VII. Reclaiming Anteros

In closing, I want to invoke, and perhaps remind us of, Anteros, who was the son of Ares, the god of courage, and Aphrodite. Anteros was given as a companion to his brother Eros, who was lonely, with the belief that love must be requited if it is to prosper. The myth goes that Aphrodite complained to Themis, the goddess of justice and divine order, that Eros remained a perpetual child. To this, Themis suggested that Aphrodite give Eros a brother. With Anteros by his side, Eros grew and matured, but once Anteros was away, Eros shrank back to his childhood. To prevent Eros from impulsively flinging arrows of affection, and possibly arousing love, seduction, and betrayal, Anteros is there to urge Eros to act prudently and judge before arousing affections that lead to hatred and injustice. 

Anteros also had to do much of the healing and repair needed for those afflicted with the damage that his brother had wrought. Those of us, like myself, who have invested much devotion to translation in the hope that our work would undo some of the contempt rooted in Western culture for all that is other, need the help of Anteros to regain a sense of equilibrium as we continue to witness Gaza and its people being bombarded into ash by the nations and institutions we thought had embraced us and our cultures. We need to find ways to redirect our tools and skills for creating human kinship and understanding toward others who will reciprocate and not betray our love; for translation, as an impulse to render the truth of another’s words, is above all an act of love. Spurned and betrayed, grieving yet sobered, we must find other ways and means to translate, other spaces and spheres for love.

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1. As above. ↩︎
2. Intersubjective—the translation of one’s self to resemble another. ↩︎
3. Steiner, George. After Babel: On Language and Translation. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 321. ↩︎
4.  Steiner, p. 39. ↩︎
5.  Steiner, p. 40. ↩︎
6.  Steiner, p. 314. ↩︎
7.  Steiner, p. 316. ↩︎
8. Steiner, p. 316. ↩︎
9.  Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge, 2012, p. 81. ↩︎
10.  Porter, Dennis. “Psychoanalysis and the Task of the Translator.” MLN, Vol. 104, No. 5, Dec. 1989, p. 1067. ↩︎
11. The Quran, 49:13. ↩︎
12. Islamweb: https://www.islamweb.net/ar/fatwa/24158/لون-البشرة-لا-أثر-له-في-الانتقاص-من-كرامة-الإنسان#:~:text=وقال%20صلى%20الله%20عليه%20وسلم,لغة%20أو%20عشيرة.
    ↩︎
13. Jacobsen, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” Language in Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1987.  ↩︎
14.  De Man, Paul, quoted in Porter, Dennis. “Psychoanalysis and the Task of the Translator.” MLN, Vol. 104, No. 5, Dec. 1989, p. 1070. ↩︎
15. De Man, Paul, quoted in Porter, Dennis. “Psychoanalysis and the Task of the Translator.” MLN, Vol. 104, No. 5, Dec. 1989, p. 1071.
    ↩︎
16. Benjamin, p. 81. ↩︎
17.  Danto, Arthur C. “Translation and Betrayal.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 32, Autumn 1997, p. 62. ↩︎
18. Danto, p. 62. ↩︎
19. Danto, p. 62. ↩︎
20. Youssef, Saadi. “إعلان”, I‘lan, [Personal ad] (my translation): http://www.saadiyousif.com/new/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2022:2016-10-13-08-35-56&catid=24:-&Itemid=35.
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21. Audi, Tamara. “The Guantanamo Spy Who Wasn’t.” New York Times Magazine, 4 April 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/04/magazine/guantanamo-spy-case.html?searchResultPosition=3. ↩︎
22. Tageldin, Shaden M. Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. ↩︎
23. Tageldin, p. 7. ↩︎
24. Tageldin, p. 14. ↩︎
25. Tageldin, p. 26. ↩︎
26. Tageldin, p. 14. ↩︎
27. Tageldin, p. 14. ↩︎
28. Youssef, Saadi. “America, America,” translated by Khaled Mattawa. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2002, p. 174. ↩︎
29.  Youssef, p. 175. ↩︎
30. Bargach, Jamila. “Liberatory, nationalising and moralising by ellipsis: reading and listening to Lhussein Slaoui’s song ‘Lmirikan.’” The Journal of North African Studies, Vol. 4, Issue 4, Winter 2000, pp. 61-88. ↩︎
31.  Bargach, p. 63. ↩︎
32. Bargach, p. 64. ↩︎
33. Bargach, p. 63-64. ↩︎
34. See Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. ↩︎
35. Tageldin, p. 10. ↩︎
36. Friedman, Thomas. “A Titanic Geopolitical Struggle Is Underway.” The New York Times, 25 January 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/25/opinion/israel-gaza-war-ukraine.html. ↩︎
37. Spivak, Gayatri. “The Politics of Translation.” Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 189. ↩︎
38. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994, p. 216. ↩︎
39. Tageldin, p. 10. ↩︎
40.  Milosz, Czeslaw. “To Raja Rao.” https://www.uv.es/~calaforr/to_raja.html. ↩︎
41. Milosz, Czeslaw. “To Raja Rao.” https://www.uv.es/~calaforr/to_raja.html. ↩︎
42. “Arundhati Roy Calls the Siege of Gaza a Crime Against Humanity.” https://lithub.com/arundhati-roy-calls-the-siege-of-gaza-a-crime-against-humanity/. ↩︎