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[Alcalay continues]... This idea of NOT translating has become increasingly important to me. As I said before, now that we've entered a kind of post-NAFTA world, along with the post 9/11 idea that it might not be a bad thing to be informed about other parts of the world, all kinds of people are ready to step in as speculators, in some sense panning for the gold of some unknown potential Nobel Prize winner by suddenly becoming interested in all kinds of previously obscure literatures. I think of Thoreau's wonderful line that goes something to the effect of, if a man comes to your door trying to help, turn around and run. While there are a lot of good intentions out there now and some very valuable work being done, I remain deeply skeptical and suspicious about how translation continues to be done in this country. We get solitary literary works, removed from any context, and often this only helps to buttress and reconstitute the privileged ideas of art and the literary artifact in our own tradition, removing texts from social, political, economic, historical and spiritual contexts. So we get the one or several great novels of a writer or the book of selected poems without the letters, biographies, literary histories, politics, gossip, and everything else that embeds a text in a particular time and place.

This allows for a kind of money laundering, in which people deeply discredited in their own countries can come to us, the uninformed, and seek full rehabilitation through translation and adulation by our own mediocre and insular intellects who use these works as opportunities to display their own apparent courage and social consciousness. This ranges from the farcical to the truly demonic - there will be no shortage of Baathist writers lauded by gullible westerners who don't know the simplest facts about Iraqi repression or literary history and will simply take those seeking rehabilitation at their word. The general racism of many popular Ashkenazi Jewish Israeli writers towards Arabs and Arab Jews, something that is common knowledge amongst the victims of that racism in Israel, rarely gets dealt with here, so huge reputations are built on completely false premises. You can find these kinds of examples in almost any culture, once you get to know it well enough. Since we have no real venues for the kind of deeper public debate such cases would entail, these things usually pass unnoticed.

LRS: These questions of production points and contexts seem very much related to "intellectual ethics," as you put it in your first response. Can you name some Middle Eastern poets Americans should be reading, and suggest a way of reading that won't result in some kind of pure consumption, divorced from context?

Alcalay: This is a tough question because we really only have the barest minimum available in translation. Having said that, if one digs a little further, some things can be found. The poet and translator Khaled Mattawa has done some excellent work in translating the Iraqi poets Saadi Yousef and Fadhil Azzawi. Many works by the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish are available, particularly his prose masterpiece Memory for Forgetfulness, in Ibrahim Muhawi's extraordinary translation and presentation. There is an excellent Penguin book of Modern Arabic poetry translated by Abdullah al-Udhari that gives a very good overview; unfortunately, it's out of print but can be found in a good on-line search. A recent bilingual edition of the great poet Adonis, translated by Shawkat Toorawa, presents a kind of model of how such things should be done. We have our own treasure, Etel Adnan, an Arab poet who happens to write in American English. Some Arab poets, like Abdellatif Laabi, have written in French, and his work is available through City Lights in a book called The World's Embrace for which I wrote an introduction. In the UK, there is a superb journal called Banipal that only publishes contemporary Arabic literature in translation. It is the best place to get a wider sense of what is going on, to read younger, lesser known writers. Having said all of this, we are still very far from really getting into a deeper sense of what is going on.

I was just involved in a very small project with a friend, Khaled Furani, someone who just finished a fascinating doctoral thesis that is, in essence, an ethnography of Palestinian poets. In this project, our task was to choose a handful of post-Oslo Palestinian Arabic and Israeli Hebrew poems for a new book edited by Joel Beinin and Rebecca Stein that Verso is going to publish. In going over the Palestinian texts with Khaled, I was struck by the very different generational and experiential materials emerging from this group of younger poets that were born into and grew up with the occupation. While their language derived from many of the contemporary masters like Adonis and Darwish, their poetic decisions were very related to the claustrophobic conditions of their lives, with none of them having the recourse of an independent life in Beirut, Cairo or one of the European capitals as has been the case with so many major Arab poets.

In terms of figuring out how to read these poets, context is everything: all I can suggest is immersing oneself in whatever aspects of the culture and history one is interested in - a lot of exploration is needed and with a little bit of work and a decent library you can begin to find out of print anthologies, special issues of journals, interviews, critical articles in both scholarly and non-scholarly publications. Once a certain amount of material is amassed, you can begin to start making more sense out of it, as you hear names repeated, movements referred to, historical dates cited, and so on. The stuff will not come to you, though; it really does require an active effort.

On another note, the work of Middle Eastern Jewish writers remains, in many ways, more obscure and harder to get at than many contemporary Arab writers - this is because the Middle Eastern Jewish writers are fighting marginalization and racism within Israeli culture and then the dominant Ashkenazi imagery and power structures that operate globally.

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