English PEN talks to the translators of some of our award-winning books. Next in the series is Jonathan Wright, whose translation of Hassan Blasim’sThe Iraqi Christ won a Writers in Translation award in 2013, and in 2014 was the winner of the International Foreign Fiction Prize.

Blasim has said he is not interested in preserving the beauty of standard Arabic in his writing. Is it easier to translate the colloquial Arabic he uses into more natural English than it would be with standard Arabic?

Just to clarify, Hassan doesn’t write in Iraqi or any other colloquial form of Arabic, except for a few words of dialogue here and there, on which I sometimes have to consult him. He writes in his own stripped-down, bare-bones version of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Arabs accustomed to more conventional forms of literary production find it odd, even unsettling, but linguistically it’s still MSA. If I may put words into Hassan’s mouth, and I have heard him discuss this several times, I believe his position is that language is merely a medium for conveying images and ideas, so the form is irrelevant. To go back to your question, yes, it does make it easier to translate. I’m a hard-core Chomskyan and Hassan only confirms my views on language. When people speak or write without pretensions, as Hassan does, the message comes through loud and clear in any language. Of course cultural specificities sometimes occur, even with Hassan, but they are usually peripheral and manageable.

Read the full interview in English PEN here: http://www.englishpen.org/cruel-deceptive-chaos-a-word-from-the-translator-with-jonathan-wright/

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