Translation and Loss: A Talk with Professor James Montgomery

On October 9, 2017, Dr. James Montgomery, the Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge and Executive Editor of the Library of Arabic Literature, came to AUP to speak about his upcoming 32nd edition of the Center for Writers and Translators Cahiers Series.

The talk, Montgomery announced, would be less of a talk and more of an explanation. “I’m here this evening to talk about this cahier,” he says, “but in order to understand why I wrote it the way I did, I have to talk to you a bit about the Library of Arabic Literature.”

The signature projects of the Library of Arabic Literature – supported by a grant from the New York University Abu-Dhabi Institute and published by NYU Press – are beautiful, carefully produced, hard-back, bi-lingual translations. “Scholarly publishing is diminishing,” Montgomery notes, “but translation is very much the order of the day. These projects are trying to keep the humanities alive, through both translating and producing texts in the original language.” Each edition prints material in both Arabic and English so when you open a book, on the left page you can read in English and on the right page you can read the original Arabic. The Arabic is translated into “Modern Lucid English.” “There are problems that come with that,” Montgomery says, “but the idea is that you should be able to pick up one of these volumes and read these books as you’d read Homer or Pushkin.”

In the last five years, the Library of Arabic Literature has produced 55 books.  However, they haven’t produced a translation of any poetry yet. “In the course of my professional life,” Montgomery says, “I’ve become extremely interested in poetry in Arabic, particularly pre-Islamic poetry. There’s a vast corpus of stuff that was recorded.” Though he had tried to translate poetry from Arabic into English, something was missing. Much of it, he thinks, was too academic. It wasn’t until personal tragedy struck that he had an insight into how he might translate poetry

“The fourteenth of August, 2014. That was a day when the A-level results came in. They are the ones that determine whether you get into a university or not. My son was walking home. That was when the accident happened.” A vehicle lost control and hit his son, sending him to the hospital where he would lose a leg.

The rehabilitation of his son was long and intense, with Montgomery’s family taking shifts to care for the youngest member of their family. One day, while he was caring for his son, destiny struck. His son was playing videogames in the next room. Montgomery thought he might have an hour or two to himself so he picked up a book of poems by Al-Khansā. He had first read these poems as an undergraduate and found them repetitive and predictable. This time, his experience was different.

“The words were springing off the page. They were jumping at me. Almost as a form of doodling, I tried to translate a few poems.”  Montgomery forgot about the poems he translated. He went back to work and back to caring for his son. It was not until the academic year finished, when he was tidying up the file system on his computer, that he rediscovered those attempts at translation. “You know,” he says, “maybe there is something there.”

That was the start of his translations of Al-Khansā. Along the way, there were many setbacks and rejections. “There is nothing more disparaging than showing your attempt at a translation to a poet and having that poet say it’s like reading Martian,” Montgomery quips. Translation is difficult, particularly from old Arabic poems. He describes the obstacles of translation, the fact that many people are entirely unfamiliar with an entire culture and an entire people.

“Here is the thing that is really difficult. The attempt to change the translations. Because I’m not the same person I was when I did the translation.” He explains that the hardest part is to resist going back to re-work the translations because “you’re never done translating. It never sounds right. You always want to back and find different words and modes of expressions.”

“Translations are often praised for the fidelity of the translation to the original language. Of course,” he says, “that’s a myth.” What Montgomery understands from the process of translation is that if you’re going to do it, “you have to embrace loss. You have to get rid of 90% of what you hear.” Only then, he argues, can the translation can come alive in its new language. He finished his talk by reading a few poems so that we might hear the poem take a breath in English.

Two branches, one tree

Two branches, one tree, in a lush oasis

Deep roots, scented twigs, plump fruit

Then Time came,

     and harvested its malice.

Time never fails

Al-Khansā