Translation and Travel: An Interview with Allen Hibbard
“Travel, writing, and the quest for romance have been key motivating factors in my life, propelling my movements and influencing my career path.”
Allen Hibbard is Professor of English and Director of the Middle East Center at Middle Tennessee State University. From 1985–89, he taught at the American University in Cairo, and from 1992–94 he was a Fulbright lecturer (in American literature) at Damascus University. Hibbard has written two books on Paul Bowles (Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction, 1993, and Paul Bowles, Magic & Morocco, 2004, recently translated into Russian), edited Conversations with William S Burroughs (2000), and published a collection of his own stories in Arabic (Damascus, 1994; Amman, 2021). His essays, stories, translations, and reviews have appeared in American Literature, Centennial Review, Cimarron Review, Comparative Literature Studies, Grand Street, International Literary Quarterly, Interventions, Jadiliyya, Middle East Studies Bulletin, Passport, and elsewhere. He recently completed a translation (with Osama Esber) of A Banquet for Seaweed, a novel by contemporary Syrian writer Haidar Haidar. During the pandemic he wrote a book on writing: An Audience of Four: Writing for Yourself and Others. He is now writing a biography of the quirky, wickedly talented Jewish American writer Alfred Chester (1929–1971).
What in-process work are you sharing with us, and what is unique about it within the context of your oeuvre?
I’ll be reading from a biography I am writing of the contemporary, wickedly talented, quirky, Jewish American writer Alfred Chester (1928–1971). The story of Chester’s life reads like good fiction, which is what first drew me to him as a biographical subject. The narrative of his life is so fascinating, improbable, and compelling, so full of passion, wild escapades and adventures, disappointments, interactions with an array of friends and lovers, and amazing creative output, with a sad ending. His life is of interest in part because of his bold exploration of queer identity a generation before Stonewall. His friendships with a string of important writers of the period (including Cynthia Ozick, Susan Sontag, Irene Fornes, Edward Field, James Broughton, Paul Bowles, Charles Wright, William S. Burroughs and others) also make him a figure worthy of attention. Finally, Chester was a brilliant writer. My hope is that this biography will call attention to his literary production, particularly his novel The Exquisite Corpse — an extraordinary postmodern masterpiece he wrote while living in Morocco.
This project has been long in the works. A couple of decades ago I was madly darting about — from Tennessee to Paris, to Tangier, to Greece, to Jerusalem, to Mobile, Alabama, to Port Townsend, Washington, to New York City, to Austin, Texas, and to Newark, Delaware — interviewing people who knew Chester, combing through archives, and retracing Chester’s steps. I began plotting out a design for the book and wrote drafts of sections at that time, but never completed the manuscript. It lay dormant for a couple of decades. Now I am coming back to the project, with a fresh vision of how to tell the story, seeking ways to weave together aspects of my own story as biographer/detective and the story of subject. I’ll probably read from portions of the book devoted to the time Chester spent in Morocco (1963–67), which I have been working on this summer.
While I have written and published stories, travel pieces, academic essays, books on the American expatriate writer Paul Bowles, and translations, I have never written a biography before, and will likely not write another one. At this point in my life and career I am thinking about legacy. What will I leave behind? I want to complete unfinished projects, including this biography
What do you find most challenging about your specialties: travel, translation, and non-fiction?
Travel, writing, and the quest for romance have been key motivating factors in my life, propelling my movements and influencing my career path. These elements converge harmoniously. Travel often supplies material for writing. (I wrote and published stories while living in Egypt and Syria, responding to those scenes.) The desire for romance can be an impetus for travel and is often inscribed in writing. Translation is naturally linked to experiences with other languages and cultures encountered in travel and life abroad. I was in Egypt when Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I had read some of his fiction (what was then available in English translation) before I traveled to Egypt. I continued to read his work while living there and upon my return to the U.S. In Syria I was delighted to learn about (and often meet) contemporary Syrian writers, some of whom my friend and colleague Osama Esber and I translated for a special issue of The Cimarron Review. Travel, writing, and translation all extend one’s knowledge of language and culture. These activities also make life more fun and interesting.
I am now a different person. I have not been on a plane or been out of the country since March of 2020. (We all know what happened then.) During the last couple of years I have spent a good deal of time in Taos, New Mexico, legendary as a place where writers and artists have congregated. Like Candide at the end of Voltaire’s novel, I have been staying put, tending my garden, waiting for the harvest.
As a translator of many works of literature, what draws you to literary translation?
I’ve always been interested in what happens to people, literary works, and ideas as they move from one cultural/historical scene to another. My translation work has been integrally connected to my own movements between the U.S. and the Middle East. I’ve often seen my translation work as a kind of play or exercise — working on developing rudimentary language skills. I have always translated (from Arabic) in collaboration with native speakers of the language. The act of translation has, thus, for me always been associated with a deepening and solidifying friendships. The person with whom I have collaborated the most is my Syrian friend, poet/writer Osama Esber, who came and read at last year’s In Process Series. Finally, translation serves a critical and important cultural function, providing readers with windows onto cultures and traditions they otherwise might never know.
Some of my own work has also been translated into other languages. A collection of my stories has appeared in two Arabic editions (Damascus in 1994 and Amman in 2021), receiving favorable notice in the local press. Over the past two years I have developed a marvelous friendship with a Russian woman, Ekaterina Zavariskaya, who has just finished translating Paul Bowles, Magic & Morocco into Russian. I just received a copy of the cover, which features a painting by the translator, which she sent me as a gift. I had suggested she use it for the cover and sent her a photo of it. It is stunning. These are cheap thrills, very gratifying. What will happen to the book as it enters the Russian scene?
Do you often form relationships with the authors of work you translate? What are those relationships like?
I have had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with the two main writers whose work I’ve helped translate. I first met Adonis (arguably the greatest living Arab poet) at Princeton, where he invited me to join him for a symposium on his writing while he was a visiting poet there. No doubt because his nephew (Osama Esber) and I were friends, he embraced me warmly. We later met in Paris, where he has lived the past several decades, and communicate with one another from time to time. (He is now about 90!) I clearly remember meeting Haidar at his seaside hut, on the Mediterranean, near the Syrian city of Tartous. He was tan and exuberant, a Syrian Zorba the Greek. I learned that Melville and Hemingway were two of his favorite writers. Friendships with both of these writers have been rich, rewarding, and inspiring.
What kind of writing do you most enjoy translating?
I have tended to take on difficult, complex works, ones which other translators might not tackle, works that are important because of their potent, controversial content as well as their innovations in style and form, often exploding conventions in the Arabic literary tradition. For instance, Adonis’s poetry is full of surreal imagery, literary allusions, and modernist features. And Haidar Haidar’s novel A Banquet for Seaweed (now complete and under consideration at a press) is heteroglossic, with a range of styles and mixture of dialects (Iraqi and Algerian, primarily). I’ve sometimes compared it to Moby Dick. Its criticisms of engrained ideologies and political practices in the Arab word are powerful.
While sometimes there are moments of delight in the translation process — when finally a solution of a seemingly unsolvable puzzle is found, or when working on a translation with a friend over coffee or Jack Daniel’s — the work can be very tedious, demanding stubbornness and persistence.
What are your goals when you begin translating a piece?
To create a text in the target language that is faithful to the original, one that produces the same effect in target language that it produces in original. That means being attentive to the sounds, cadences, and allusive qualities of the original. In any translation there will be losses as well as gains. It is often difficult to come up with equivalencies in the target language, so one must be clever and creative. Ultimately, through a laborious process of revision, my goal is to make the English version readable — which (as is the case in many modernist texts) does not always mean that reading the translated text will be readily accessible or easy to grasp.
How have your experiences as an educator influenced your writing?
This is a tough one. My initial response is that the paths of an academic and the pursuit of creative writing are not compatible. Time is what writers need, as well as rich and varied experience and the freedom to read and explore without constraint. The demands that accompany an academic career (committee work, research and publishing, preparing for classes, etc.) are apt to squeeze out time for the free-play of the imagination and long, uninterrupted periods of time needed for creative work. I would advise students who want to write NOT to pursue academic careers. They should rather find jobs like working the night shift at the reception desk of a sleazy hotel, allowing time to read and write. What would Emily Dickinson or Thomas Pynchon have produced if they had full-time teaching positions in a modern university?
That being said, I feel extraordinarily fortunate to have had the opportunity to teach writing and literature. It’s a great profession. It is a pleasure and privilege to share my passion for writing and introduce students to literary works and traditions they may be encountering for the first time. I especially enjoy teaching young writers in English composition where I can talk about almost anything, because anything can be related to writing. For the past decade I have chosen to teach an Honors section of freshman writing every fall. Out of that experience, came a book on writing, An Audience of Four: Writing For Yourself and Others, which I wrote during the pandemic.
I often teach my literature classes as though I am teaching young writers. For example, in the Modern Novel class I once taught regularly, we would take note of structural and stylistic qualities of Kafka’s Amerika, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Toomer’s Cane, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea — all such wonderful works. Similarly, in an American short story class I’ve taught, we would attend to the handling of time, point of view, and distinctive voices in marvelous stories such as Welty’s “No Place For You, My Love,” Richard Ford’s “Under the Radar,” Annie Proulx’s “The Mud Below,” and John Edgar Wideman’s “Fever.” And in my graduate seminar in modern theory, we would take note of various rhetorical styles and strategies in pieces by Nietzsche, Freud, Woolf, Vizenor, Hall, Anzaldúa, and others.
Perhaps through all these years of teaching I have gained a better sense of how literature works, in ways that inform my own writing. The reading and study of literature, however, are distinct from (yet not unrelated to) the practice of writing, in which writers figure things out as they sit down at the desk and write. That’s what a writer is — someone who gets up each morning and — like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill — goes back to where he was the day before, perhaps in mid-sentence, struggling to write the perfect phrase, using just the right words, then going on to the next line, watching things take shape, gradually and surely.
Mia Kuhnle is a junior at Middle Tennessee State University. She is an Agriculture Education major with minors in English and Creative Writing. She plans to combine her creative writing skills with her love for science to pursue an MFA in creative non-fiction.
