Appeal

Notes

The PTC were invited to Manchester to take part in a day of translation workshops to celebrate International Mother Tongues Day. We were kicking off the day, meeting at 9:30 for the first of the sessions.

I think of translation, and especially of the PTC’s collaborative approach to translation, as a conversation. If I meet a friend to chat I hear what they are saying but I also contribute. And the context of what they are saying sits within the context of our physical location and is shaped by, say, what we had for breakfast, how well we slept, an infinite number of factors. Those are all part of the separate object (or perhaps performance) that becomes the conversation. And so, as we sat down to discuss and attempt to translate the work of Cabdiqadir Qalinle, the beautiful room we were in at the Anthony Burgess Foundation, the city of Manchester that the PTC were visiting for the first time, the amount we had each slept and the contents of our respective stomachs were all added to the poem’s existing context. Our group was made up of a great variety of backgrounds and varying degrees of knowledge of Somali (from nada upwards), it contained seasoned writers and translators and complete newcomers, those who were already friends and new acquaintances.

Our bridge translator, Elmi Ali, chose a fascinating poem. 'Garnaqis' which we translated as ‘Appeal’ but especially suggests the legal sense of the term. It is a sort of dramatic narrative in which a speaker is woken in the middle of the night by an unknown woman knocking on his door asking if he will marry her. Looking at the bridge translation many of us assumed “Gaboye” was a name, but in fact it is a particular tribe (akin to a caste) the lowest possible social background. The woman character is only ever identified by this association, introducing herself immediately as such.

So we have a contemporary situation, but the language in this strange tale plays with the poetry register, incorporating rhythms, repetitions and archaisms. As Elmi pointed out, it recalls Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Raven’, evoking a gothic, dreamlike atmosphere. This is why we ended up using the word “maiden” for a word which could very literally have been translated as “girl”, but would then lose the definite sense of being unmarried and a virgin that it has in the Somali. Likewise we wanted to keep the sense of an obligation to hospitality that the word for “guest” held, while making it clear this visitor is unexpected. We eventually chose “caller”, as this connected to the idea of a plea or appeal that seemed central.

As you can see, this was an exercise in compromises; in making decisions that would calibrate the tone and emphasis of our own version of the original. Inevitably we were unable to translate much of this long and complex poem in the time we had. We discussed and disagreed… and still the little we did produce is unsatisfactory. But lively debate about just these few lines gave us plenty to consider and was an illuminating introduction to some of the many issues of translating from Somali to English. When we try to reach across languages in this way, knowing we will never succeed but still trying, I believe we take part in something special. As David Shook said in the following masterclass, we have to embrace the impossibilities of translation, to see them as a liberation. This workshop was really a conversation—between all of the participants, the translator, the poem and the poet—and a fantastic start to a great day celebrating the special, impossible, essential, imperfect art of translation.

Emily Hasler, Poet-translator