Translating Nouzha Fassi Fihri's La Baroudeuse: A Case Study in ...

Appendix E: Marilyn Booth's e-mail response to the questionnaire
When you were translating "My Grandmother's Cactus," did you have an
audience in mind?
Yes, but vaguely so. At the time, I was living in England (and then in Cairo when
I did the final editing/page proofs etc.). I was a bit "spoiled" in that the UK
audience is more sophisticated than the US one in terms of translated literatures,
so in some ways I probably subconsciously took audience for granted, didn't think
about it as much or as specifically as I might now, depending on the project. Let
me describe briefly how the Cactus project came about. I was in London seeing
my friend Zelfa Hourani, at Quartet Books, and she asked if I'd thought about
putting a short story collection together. I hadn't, but we talked and I got very
enthusiastic. I had a couple of specific motivations: I wanted English speakers to
recognize female Arab writers who were not Nawal el-Saadawi (for whom I have
a lot of respect as an activist--after all, I did translate her prison memoirs! but at
the time, it seemed like she was the only female Arab writer that one saw in
bookstores). I have to really put myself back into my thinking at that time: it has
been quite a while and I've done a lot of translating since, so I am trying very hard
here to not let later experience shape what I am saying. Anyway, and this is
connected to your next question, I thought first in terms of a fairly "conventional"
anthology--that is, a more or less historically organized collection, one story per
author, probably starting with Suhayr Qalamawi (some of whose work I would
still like to translate!), and so forth. However, when I started to read, things
changed. I'll put hat off until your "audience question" below where it more
properly belongs. Anyway, so this idea that was genuinely mutual, formulated
with Zelfa, had behind it a vague sense of audience, but I had a lot to learn!
If so, what individuals might you list as belonging to this audience? (yourself? the
author? your publisher? a professor you had? classmates in one of your courses?
professional readers? non-professional readers?).
Definitely, at the time, nonprofessional readers. I felt (and feel) strongly about the
political responsibility of translators--or at least of me as a translator--in trying to
complicate a nonacademic (as well as academic) audience's understandings of
and/or reactions to Arab and Muslim-majority societies and histories and to what
is going on now culturally in terms of contemporary Arabic literature. Since, at
the time, I wasn't teaching and really wasn't even thinking much about teaching,
an audience of students was not foremost in my mind. But inevitably, I'm my own
first audience. That is, I have learned the hard way (about a year after I finished
Cactus) that I should not translate something I don't like--it is excruciating. And
being my own first audience is certainly pertinent to the way Cactus evolved.
Here, I take up the story I started in the previous answer. When I began to read
stories (before this, what I had read by Egyptian women was mostly novels), and
to collect more in Cairo once I was there, I started to feel a bit panicked. I
recognized the historical importance and "emplotment" of women's stories from
the 1930s on, but did not feel that my audience--however vaguely imagined--
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