Translation is not a neutral transfer of words. It is a series of choices about loyalty, loss, and the emotional residue a sentence leaves behind. In this interview, I talk with Nadia Haddad, a literary translator working between Arabic and English, about what it means to carry a novel across languages when the source text is rooted in a specific political and emotional landscape. We discuss the ethics of smoothing over difficult syntax, the pressure to make a book “marketable” to English-language readers, and the quiet grief of knowing that some meanings will not survive the crossing. For readers of this blog—where we often examine the emotional and ethical undercurrents of contemporary fiction and memoir—translation is a natural extension of the same questions: Who gets to tell a story? What is lost when a voice is altered? And what does a translator owe to a writer who is no longer alive to object?
Nadia Haddad has translated three novels from Arabic to English, most recently a work of literary fiction set in Beirut during the 2006 war. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and has worked with several independent presses in the Pacific Northwest. Our conversation took place over two afternoons in a café near Powell’s Books, with frequent interruptions from the espresso machine and one long pause while she searched for the right English word for a particular kind of silence.
Starting With the Unsayable
Eliza Gale: You’ve said before that translation begins with failure. What do you mean by that?
Nadia Haddad: I mean that the first time you read a novel in Arabic and feel it working on you, you are already aware that the English version will not do the same thing. Not because English is weaker, but because the emotional architecture is different. Arabic can hold a sentence together with a single verb that implies time, gender, and number, and then pivot into a metaphor that would sound overwrought in English. So the translator’s first job is to accept that the book you love will become a different book. Not a worse one, necessarily. But a different one.
Eliza: Is that acceptance something you learned, or something you still fight against?
Nadia: I still fight it. Every project, I go through a period of resentment. I resent the English language for not having a word for ghurbah—that particular estrangement that is not homesickness, not exile, but something closer to being a stranger in your own body. I resent the publisher for wanting a glossary instead of letting the word sit in the text and do its work. And then I get over it, because the alternative is to produce a translation that is so faithful to the dictionary that it becomes unreadable.
The Ethics of Smoothing
Eliza: Let’s talk about the pressure to make a translated novel “read smoothly” in English. How much of that pressure is real, and how much is a kind of self-censorship?
Nadia: It’s both. There is a real market pressure. English-language readers, especially in the United States, are often told that a good translation is one that doesn’t feel like a translation. That’s a strange standard. It means the translator’s work is judged by its invisibility. But if you make the Arabic invisible, you also erase the fact that the novel is coming from a different literary tradition, a different set of assumptions about what a sentence can do.
I remember a specific passage in the Beirut novel. The author wrote a sentence that, in Arabic, repeats the same root word three times in different forms. It’s a rhetorical device that creates a kind of incantatory rhythm. In English, if you translate it literally, it sounds like a mistake. If you smooth it over, you lose the incantation. I chose to keep a version of the repetition, even though an early reader told me it felt “clunky.” I don’t think clunky is always a flaw. Sometimes clunky is the sound of a different way of thinking.
Eliza: Did the author have a say in that choice?
Nadia: The author was alive, yes. We had several long conversations. He was generous, but also tired. He had been through this before with a French translation, and he knew that some of his stylistic choices would be flattened. He told me, “Do what you need to do, but don’t make me sound like an American.” That became my rule. Not “don’t make me sound foreign,” but “don’t make me sound like an American.” There’s a difference.
Money, Time, and the Independent Press Reality
Eliza: You’ve worked mostly with independent presses. What does that mean for the practical side of translation?
Nadia: It means the advance is small, sometimes embarrassingly small. It means the timeline is long, because the press is run by two people and a part-time intern. It means you are often the only person who has read the Arabic original and the English draft side by side, so you are also the de facto copy editor, fact-checker, and cultural consultant. I don’t say that to complain. I say it because people imagine literary translation as a romantic act of devotion, and it is, but it is also a job that pays less per hour than tutoring high school French.
Eliza: Has the money ever made you compromise on the work?
Nadia: Not on the work itself, but on the scope. There was a novel I wanted to translate that was 600 pages in Arabic. The press could only afford to publish a 300-page book. So we had to cut. Not abridge in the sense of trimming sentences, but actually remove two entire chapters. The author agreed, but I still feel sick about it. Those chapters contained a subplot about the protagonist’s sister that explained why she makes a certain decision near the end. Without them, the decision reads as impulsive. We added a translator’s note, but most readers skip those.
Eliza: That’s a real ethical compromise. Not the kind people usually talk about.
Nadia: It is. And I think translators are often afraid to admit that these compromises happen. We want to protect the idea that the text is sacred. But the text is also a product, and the product has to fit a certain size and price point. The question is whether you can make those compromises without lying to the reader. I’m not sure I succeeded.
What the English Reader Misses
Eliza: What is the most common thing English-language readers miss when they read a translated Arabic novel?
Nadia: The humor. Arabic literary fiction is often very funny, but the humor is tied to wordplay, to dialect, to a kind of dark irony that doesn’t always survive translation. English readers tend to expect Arabic novels to be either tragic or political. They want the war, the exile, the oppression. They don’t expect the joke about the uncle who fakes his own death to avoid a family wedding. But that joke is in the novel. It’s just that the English version makes it sound like a plot point instead of a joke.
Eliza: Is that a failure of translation, or a failure of the reader’s expectations?
Nadia: Both. I can’t control the reader’s expectations. But I can try to preserve the timing, the rhythm of the joke. Sometimes that means adding a word or changing a cultural reference. If the original joke depends on a specific Egyptian soap opera, I have to decide whether to keep the reference and lose the laugh, or change the reference and keep the laugh. There’s no perfect answer. I usually keep the reference and add a footnote, but footnotes are their own kind of interruption.
The Translator’s Grief
Eliza: You mentioned earlier that some meanings will not survive the crossing. Can you give me a specific example?
Nadia: There’s a scene in the Beirut novel where the protagonist is sitting on a balcony after a bombing. The Arabic says she is listening to the samt—the silence. But it’s not just silence. It’s the silence after a loud noise, the silence that is still ringing. English doesn’t have a single word for that. I could say “the ringing silence,” but that’s a phrase, not a word, and it sounds poetic in a way the Arabic does not. The Arabic is plain. It’s just samt. But it carries the weight of the bombing inside it. I ended up writing “the silence that was not yet silence,” which is clumsy. But it’s the closest I could get to the feeling of a silence that is still vibrating with the sound it replaced.
Eliza: Do you grieve those losses?
Nadia: Yes. Not in a dramatic way. But there are moments when I read a passage in Arabic and think, “No one will ever know what this did to me.” That’s a lonely feeling. It’s also why I keep translating. Because the alternative is that no one will know anything at all.
Practical Advice for Translators and Readers
For translators working between Arabic and English, Nadia offers a few concrete practices that have helped her stay honest to the source text without alienating English readers:
- Read the Arabic aloud before drafting. The sound of the sentence often carries meaning that the dictionary definition misses.
- Keep a “loss log.” Write down every word, phrase, or rhythm you could not carry over. Review it before submitting the final draft. Some losses can be recovered in a translator’s note.
- Ask the author about intent, not just meaning. “What did you want this sentence to do to the reader?” is a better question than “What does this sentence mean?”
- Resist the urge to explain. If a cultural reference is important, let it sit in the text. Readers can look things up. The novel is not a classroom.
For readers who want to engage more deeply with translated Arabic fiction, Nadia suggests reading two translations of the same novel when possible, or reading a translation alongside a review by a bilingual critic. “You start to see the choices,” she says. “And once you see the choices, you stop treating the translation as a window and start treating it as a conversation.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do some Arabic novels sound “flat” in English translation?
Arabic prose often uses repetition, parallelism, and a more formal register than contemporary English literary fiction. When translators smooth these features to meet English expectations, the result can feel flat or overly simple. The flatness is not a property of the original; it is a consequence of the translation strategy. Some translators now resist this smoothing and allow the Arabic rhetorical patterns to remain visible, even at the risk of sounding “foreign” to English readers.
How do translators handle Arabic words that have no English equivalent?
There is no single method. Some translators use a loanword and let context carry the meaning. Others use a short English phrase that approximates the emotional weight. Some add a glossary or a footnote. The choice depends on the word’s role in the sentence, the expected audience, and the translator’s relationship with the author. Nadia Haddad tends to keep the Arabic word in the text when the word is doing emotional work that a paraphrase would flatten.
Is literary translation from Arabic to English financially sustainable?
Rarely on its own. Most literary translators supplement their income with teaching, editing, commercial translation, or grants. Independent presses often pay advances between $1,000 and $5,000 for a full-length novel, which does not reflect the months of work involved. Organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund offer grants that can make a project possible, but competition is steep. Translators who work with larger commercial publishers may earn more, but they also face more pressure to produce a “marketable” text.
What should I look for in a good literary translation?
Look for a translator’s note. A translator who is willing to explain their choices is usually a translator who has thought carefully about the ethics of the work. Also pay attention to whether the translation preserves the author’s stylistic fingerprints—sentence length, repetition, humor, silence. If the English reads like it was originally written by an American MFA graduate, something has probably been lost.
What Comes Next
Nadia is currently working on a translation of a 1990s Arabic novel set in a Cairo apartment building, a book that has never been translated into English. She is also teaching a workshop on literary translation at a small writing center in Portland. “The workshop is not about technique,” she says. “It’s about learning to sit with the discomfort of not knowing whether you’ve done the right thing.”
For this blog, the conversation with Nadia opens a larger question we will return to: how do independent presses in the Pacific Northwest decide which translated voices to publish, and what does that curation say about the region’s literary identity? I’ll be following up with editors at two Portland-based presses in a future post. If you have questions for Nadia or for those editors, send them through the contact page. I read everything, even when I don’t reply quickly.
