The interpreter of shadows for numbed consciences

Nizar Qabbani

di Aldo Nicosia [*]

My friends, I announce to you the death of the old language/ and the old books/ I announce the death of / our speech that is full of holes like old shoes/ and of the terms of prostitution, satire and cursing/ I announce to you. I announce to you/ the end of the thought that led to the defeat [1].

These verses, with which Nizar Qabbani began his famous poem Margins on the Notebook of the Naksa, sparked and continue to spark widespread debates in the Middle East, since 1967 setback. Recently, a critic mocked the Syrian poet, concluding from his verses that «the old language and the old books were among the causes and victims of the defeat» and that «these verses are the personal venting of a poet (…) who is good at destroying everything, (…) just temporary emotions (…) or perhaps one of the manifestations of the fatal disease that struck many poets, as stated in the Holy Quran “…Hast thou not seen how they stray in every valley, and that they say what they do not do?”» [2].

Until now, these few verses haunt me, awakening my own memories of when I worked as interpreter (and translator) from Arabic to Italian and vice versa, in a government office dealing with issues of illegal immigration and humanitarian or political asylum in southern Italy, and also as a freelance interpreter/translator for local courts in trials concerning cases of Arabic-speaking immigrants, in the nineties of the last century and the first decade of the 21st century.

So what is the relationship of Qabbani’s aforementioned verses to language interpretation or translation?

After I tasted the bitterness of personal defeats and setbacks, while trying to face the challenges of a difficult job, I wondered: Was this due to “pierced speech” of Qabbani’s poem, and to “old language” (useless to me, in my work as interpreter in that specific context), or maybe because of my …pierced mind?

Many factors had ganged up on me to cause my feeble perfomances. First, my Naples orientalist studies didn’t provide any linguistic formation except fus-hà (the favorite mantra of my teachers was «No worries. You’ll learn spoken Arabic when you go and visit the Arab world»). Even the Italian ministerial commission that appointed me as translator/interpreter, after succeding in an test, oral and written, in classical Arabic, ignored the complex linguistic reality that imposes on every learner of Arabic as a second language a comprehensive knowledge of the most widespread “dialects”. Due to both their neglect of the requirements of the translator specialized in oral translation, in undertaking such sensitive tasks (immigration, crimes, asylum seekers’ issues), and the lack of appropriate educational tools and dictionaries at that time  (nowadays the situation is much better), how can they expect one can master the Arabic dialects, to understand the speech of immigrants and ordinary people and properly explain to the Italian authorities and institutions their oral statements of risky life experiences? And in the workplace, how many times should one justify himself, in front of a judge in the lawcourt, or in a prison, or a doctor in the hospital, or a social assistant in a sheltering centre, telling them that the person he should interpret does not speak the language he studied at university and he was tested on in order to be appointed  by Italian ministries?

No doubt that the non-Arab translator of Arabic becomes the first victim of linguistic diglossy of the Arab world (while your Arab friends shrug and minimize the issue, in their view).

But if you are a translator sitting in front of a desk to deal with poems or journals, or resonant speeches, or to decipher Arabic manuscripts, even if you have to face different difficulties, at least you can take your time, and you are  not confronted with real people usually the oral reports of oppressed, tortured and despised people of the earth (having no time to choose the right word or expression, if you manage to understand it), on one side,  and to officers, on the other side. The latter ones can probably start to doubt about your skills as interpreter, for example, if they listen a short translation, for example of 15-20 seconds, after 1 minutes of Arabic talk by the witness.

Coming back to Qabbani’s verses, one can ask: What is the fault of language in the Arab political and geostrategic defeats and the misery of people’s fates?

I do not think that Qabbani intended to say that language is the cause of the Arab repeated defeats and calamities. Even though we assume that it is one of its victims, as the abovementioned critic commented, which one will replace “the old language”? Will it be able to overthrow dominant powers that impose a “wooden” language, i.e. devoid of feelings and generally far from the daily concerns of the recipient. In an essay entitled Politics and the English Language [3], George Orwell had pointed out that language and terminology are distorted by the deterioration of thinking, which in turn is due to the increasing ambiguity of linguistic expression, and that happen because politics takes speech as a way of deception [4].

Besides dyglossy, any translator/interpreter of Arabic suffers from wooden language, meaningless phrases, i.e. clichés, frozen and fixed expressions. Words are eroded away just like worn-out shoes, because of human overuse of them, so they become obsolete and the recipients are no longer affected by them. If we agree that words are shadows or traces of things [5], then these shadows become so faded to the point of disappearing. Or maybe, as Foucault showed in one of his essays, «words do not talk about things, they rather stop talking, or at least, they just speak of their silence» [6].

In the short film Sawt al-akharin (“The Voice of Others”, 2023) [7] by the French-Algerian director Fatima Kaci, we observe how an interpreter is advised to refrain from expressing her emotions when she translates to the commission officer refugees’ testimonies. According to one of the translators, the rules of professionalism require neutrality and coolness. It often happen that empathy with the person we are translating for becomes numb due to the routine of the task. Paraphrasing a common Arabic proverb (“at-Tikrar yu‘allim al-himar”), that means “repetition makes donkey learn”, I think that in this case it  makes the donkey insensitive.

The film suggests that one of the biggest challenges facing the interpreter/translator is the awareness of the necessity of his reaction as a transmitter of the testimonies of the heroes of human tragedies. Sometimes he feels confused in conveying these feelings to official bodies or committees recognizing the status of humanitarian asylum or other parties. Sawt al-akharin doesn’t show any images of the migrants’ trajectories and misadventures to get to the European shore, depending totally on oral fragments of life stories, which human imagination should translate into scenes.

Actually visual language seems more effective than words in conveying a message in the best possible way, and we are witnessing that in the current war on Gaza, as Israel deliberately eliminates anyone who can document its horrible and inhuman massacres in Palestine [8]. The Zionist-biased Western world’s televisions, in most of their channels, do not allow this, and so called “social” media (of what kind of society, I wonder?) hinder the broadcast and spread of bloody scenes depicting the remains of innocent Palestinian corpses, because they are likely to affect the viewer and make him react and side with Palestine. Obviously, in people’s minds, if massacres are not accompanied by images, they simply do not occur.

Even descriptions with words and figures do not affect anyone. It seems that 40000 Palestinian killed (60-70 % are children, woman and old people), so far, in almost ten months of brutal attacks, just evaporated in the air. Only the journalist carrying a camera can becomes the most effective transmitter of the misfortunes of the Palestinian people or other peoples suffering wars.

About the more and more frequent phenomena of iconoclasm, censorship or manipulation of images in Western countries massmedia and social networks, David Freedberg [9] maintains that the love and hate for images depend on the awareness of the greater affective grip on watchers, so images, films and videos are subject to censorship more than books and written or oral texts.

In this context, are the words conveyed by a translator enough to engrave or draw a situation with clear or convincing lines to the point of making the reader take a tangible position?

Maybe that can happen but we notice that the average reader/spectator often does not move from the stage of emotion to that of action or reaction, as if he is content with emotion, sometimes to avoid being subjected to government repression. He feels anger against the complicity of most governments in the world in the genocide of the Palestinian people and compassion for the victims can be limited to a cathartic function and being content with venting feelings. As human beings, we all feel the pain of others, but what comes after that?

In her book on war photography entitled Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag discusses a Robert Capa’s famous 1937 photograph of a Republican soldier falling at the very moment he is hit by a bullet. She suggests that the shock provoked by war images is swiftly translated into emotions [10].

 On the other side, Tonino Griffero, who paraphrases in the title of one of his articles De Montaigne’s famous saying (“Fortis imaginatio generat casum” [11]), with the substitution of “imaginatio” with “verbum”, affirms, quoting Freedberg who comments Virginia Wolf’s [12] lines:

«the emotion aroused by a birdcage hanging empty in a bombed house” can be aroused not only by the image but also by the “imaginary evoked by language» [13].

Here our perspective goes beyond the emotional (or body response) level to question if a word or a specific sequence of words is so strong enough not only to evoke strong images, but also to activate practical behaviours, strong actions. We doubt that, at least in the case of Standard Arabic, so we cannot help asking ourselves: Does pierced or non-pierced words become a substitute for action? And does the interpreter/translator of Arabic turn into a mere transmitter of shadows or ghosts of things and concepts that only a few are able to grasp?

The last hypothesis that can absolve language or the translator’s perfomance is that what we are witnessing now can be classified as a sort of political speciesism applied to mankind. In a recent declaration, following the 7th October events, Israeli President said that “Palestinians are human animals”: so can we assume that Western “democracies”, irreproachable Israel and USA watchdogs, have been considering them in a similar way, even if they are not able to admit that, at least since 1948?   

Dialoghi Mediterranei, n. 69, settembre 2024 

[*] Abstract

«Amici miei, vi annuncio la morte della lingua vecchia, delle parole bucate come scarpe logore. ….Vi annuncio la morte del pensiero che ha portato alla sconfitta»: questi versi del poeta siriano Nizar Qabbani, scritto all’ indomani della sconfitta delle armate arsbe contro Israele nel giugno 1967, mi evocano pesanti  esperienze di lavoro come interprete/traduttore di arabo  sul fronte immigrati, asilo politico etc. Le caratteristiche dell’arabo standard e la “langue de bois” che domina i discorsi ufficiali spingono verso una ulteriore riflessione sulla capacità della lingua, in generale, di esprimere i reali sentimenti della gente comune, e di conseguenza, la capacità del traduttore/interprete di veicolare un messaggio che possa influire sulla vita delle persone. Il film La Voix des autres è un esempio di come a tale professionista è richiesta una neutralità e un distacco emotivo nel riportare le testimonianze dei richiedenti asilo. Appoggiandosi su analisi di Sontag e Freedberg sulla risposta emotiva alle parole ma soprattutto alle immagini, si pongono interrogativi sulla insensibilità dello spettatore ai drammi delle guerre attuali: è colpa della lingua bucata, o della scarsa capacità dei massmedia di rappresentare la realtà, o si tratta di specismo politico diretto contro certe popolazioni? 

^[*]   This article is an adaptation of a shorter article in Arabic, by Aldo Nicosia, published in ترجمان الأشواك الواخزة للضمير | النهار العربي (annaharar.com) , on the 8th of August 2024.

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