Mariam Rahmani: On ethical translation and the politics of language
Dark hair cut short, eye-catching earrings, perfectly dressed head-to-toe: sitting opposite me, Mariam Rahmani radiates freshness, innovation, inspiration––all what Bennington seeks in their new translation and fiction faculty.
After Marguerite Feitlowitz’s retirement, who also inspired the founding of (M)othertongues, Mariam Rahmani will now step in as the new professor in translation, beginning with the course “Ethical Translation: Eye on Race, Gender and Queerness”, which she teaches this Fall.
As a Bennington based publication tackling themes such as multIlingualism, multiculturalism and diaspora, (M)othertongues is intrigued to hear more about Mariam’s own experiences with such topics, and to make her insights available to our readers as well. Thus, I am now sitting in Cricket Hill, amongst shelves overflowing with all kinds of books, comfortably placed in an old armchair, excited to interview her for this blog. In her crisp voice, Mariam Rahmani tells me about her career, her thoughts on “truthful” translation and how translation and creative writing can (and should) influence each other.
What are your thoughts on Bennington so far—how is it going?
Mariam: Oh, it's a lot of fun. I'm really enjoying the students and I like how the environment here is just really quite collegial. With my class, we've really clicked into place as a group.
What are your main focuses in literature, and translation, your main areas?
Mariam: HalI teach a methodology I've developed, I call it “ethical translation,” which pays attention to craft, but is then formed by theoretical and political conversations about race, queerness, and gender and sexuality. I will also be teaching fiction—I have a novel that's coming out over a year from now—and I will teach courses that are based on my PhD training, as well as literature seminars, so that's going to be a range of courses. Sometimes I teach Global Anglophone Literature, sometimes I teach World Literature—which includes literature and translation. And I have a specialization in modern and contemporary Persian/Farsi, so I may offer a course that includes that. My courses are primarily based on literature and translation, but we'll see; I might start by sprinkling that into other Global Lit courses and see how it goes, what the level of interest is.
How did you come to teach literature, translation—how did this all start for you?
Mariam: It's really, ultimately rooted in my upbringing as a bilingual speaker and reader. I don't write in Farsi, but I was taught to read—as well as speak—my heritage language, and that really informed my world view. When I went to undergrad, my first year I was in what could be thought of as a kind of “Great Books course”: it was an intensive course that took up half of my schedule the entire year, and I discovered the field of Comparative Literature. I had never heard of it before—my parents are in math and sciences—and I just really fell in love with it. And then I was also very interested in art history: I did a master in Islamic Art, and worked in contemporary art for years, but I always knew I wanted to go back to graduate school. I ended up at UCLA for my PhD based on the professors I wanted to work with, and it was kind of incidental whether they were in comparative literature or art history, and I ended up back in comparative literature, and I started to get more serious about my fiction writing at that time as well. All of that really developed together, and so it ended up being a much more formative choice than I had thought at the time, this disciplinary choice of going back to Comp Lit.
That's really interesting, though, that you also do art history.
Mariam: Yeah! I have a real interest in it! It doesn't show in my courses, at least not right now, because we have experts on that topic here at Bennington, and VAPA has such wonderful course offerings. But, I've done some work in film and, I'm going to keep integrating that; there actually is one short module on translating across media in my current course, in which we're looking at a film adaptation, as well as reading the novel and translation that it's based on.
How do your languages work together?
Mariam: I studied a number of languages throughout college and my graduate studies. Probably at this point, the strongest of those other than Farsi is French. And I've spent periods of time, up to six months, in France. So, I would say two things: on the one hand, there's a way—frankly—in which having a heritage language holds you back from investing in a third or fourth language, I've noticed; and that's not an ambivalence that I really explore very much in my current work, or my courses, but I'm starting to get more interested in that, and that might soon be reflected in the types of courses that I'm offering, or the conversations we have in the classroom. But on the positive side, speaking another language is taking on a different sensibility. And that experience has really informed how I see the world, and how I see myself, and has enabled me a kind of openness beyond the boundaries of the US. And that has just been crucial to everything I've done.
You teach the class “Ethical Translation”, but the question is, can it ever be truly “ethical” to translate something?
In translation things often get lost, or you have to find different ways to express something without changing its meaning. There's always this question of, is a translation “right,” is it true to the original, or can it ever be true? How do you deal with that in your own work?
Mariam: I believe that a translation is a new work of art in the same family as the original, so I don't see it as a replica. To use the family metaphor—it's not a twin, it's a sibling. Maybe further afield, sometimes, purposefully, it might be a cousin, a second cousin, you know. We see translations that—especially of classical works—that are purposefully trying to do something new: updating the language, going very far out in a very intentional way that's meant to bring the work close to us today as contemporary readers. That's really my starting point, seeing it as a new work. In that sense I think that there's an ethics of responsibility of the translator to many things: not only to the author and to the text, but actually to understanding the wider context of what the politics are of translating from this particular language—let's say in this case from a Global South to a Global North language—what the politics are frankly of translating from any language into English, given the hegemony of American English at this point in world history. That kind of historical—historicized to use an academic word—approach (even in the contemporary moment we can be historicized), is what I see as the ethics of translation. And ultimately, that knowledge just has to be applied to making very specific choices. You can only choose one word at a time, you can only end up with one structure. Part of the point of translation is to preserve pleasure, and to produce a readable text. So, I do think that it's possible to be ethical. I just think that, in general, the difficulty of ethics in this world is that there is always something lost, and we can only do our best in each endeavor, whether it's working in some very small way to make a contribution to understanding other cultures, honoring those cultures, and enriching our culture.
That makes sense. There are so many mistranslations which bring cultural things to the wrong context. Especially older translations, if you look at what kind of conflicts just incorrect translation can also create.
Mariam: Right. I tell students when I'm teaching essay writing and making an argument, or even an interpretive essay in which you're making an argument about a certain text, it's not that we're saying there's a right or wrong answer, but there are better and worse interpretations. And that's just the same in translation: there are better and worse translations. Of course, sometimes they might be better or worse in different aspects, you know, they might be doing something and they had to give something else up, and that was a choice the translator made, so I also really like to teach generosity in reading. I think it's more helpful to understand what's going well in a text, as well as what might be problematic.
You recently translated In Case of Emergency. Why did you choose this work exactly? What did you like so much about the original that you really wanted to translate it?
Mariam: The voice and structure of that work really compelled me. I thought it was very tightly crafted, and that attracted me to the book. It's a book by Mahsa Mohebali that was published in 2008, and it ran under the Farsi title نگران نباش. Now, politically, I was really interested in that work because it follows a storyline of contemporary Iran that's not often depicted in the West. It's about a kind of alternative scene: young folks who have problems with addiction, who are quite countercultural in a lot of ways, not just in the strict sphere of what we think as politics, as in—let's say, political parties and electoral politics—but also the politics of gender and sexuality, family politics, etc. All of that was quite attractive to me, and also something that I thought American readers especially, but, Anglophone readers in general, in various contexts across the world, should hear and should have access to, and might be interested in.
What obstacles did you face in the translation of this book?
Mariam: The most difficult thing was to get the tone right. It's quite crass and there's a lot of humor. There's a ton of slang. It depends on a very particular moment, and the particular class positioning of a kind of Tehran vernacular, that's quite specific. Bringing that to life in English without sounding cheesy and keeping that edge—recreating, actually, because that's always what you're doing, you can't really keep something from one language to the next; you have to recreate it—recreating that edge was extremely difficult, and it took years, honestly, to get to the point where that finally clicked into place, and I could translate the rest of the book and revise what I had done on the basis of crystallizing that voice. And then just in terms of the nuts and bolts, it was quite a long process to find a publisher and bring it into the light of day; and it was my first book of translation, so that added to some of the difficulty of just getting folks to trust me, and to trust in the story. There is some literature from contemporary Iran that's published, but it's only a tiny, tiny portion of what comes out in translation, even from indie presses. There's not a lot of access to Iranian culture, since the big break between US and Iranian relations, so all of that sense of foreignness really contributes to making it quite difficult to even have editors feel capable of taking the work on.
So you said you also write fiction, and that you will also publish a book in early 2025. What inspired you to write this book, and is your view as a bilingual person, as a translator going to be present in your fiction as well?
Mariam: Yes. Certainly it is; the novel takes place between Los Angeles and Tehran, and so a lot of the text is, in a way, translated. When I write dialogue that I imagine taking place in Farsi, I compose it in Farsi, and then I translate it. That process is quite tedious, but I'm invested in it. But really, I think the bigger way in which it impacts the text is this sense of both constraint and lack of limits that the protagonist is confronting. There's a kind of worldliness that she wants to engage in but there are limitations to that, there are issues of belonging, and that happens in every context she's in, whether it's here, or there, or anywhere else.
Do you believe that, in general, just knowing multiple languages and being a translator helps people in general with their creative writing?
Mariam: Absolutely. I am a firm advocate of translating as a way to teach yourself craft. I also think it's a responsibility that if you have fluency in English in today's world, you have a responsibility, given Anglophone hegemony, to use it to honor the voices of other writers and your peers. But selfishly, I think it's the best way to teach craft. It forces such a close dissection of language, and grammar, and sound, and sense, and just bringing together the formal aspects of a work with complexity of meaning, and this kind of multitudinous world that a work can open up. I just think digging in elbows-deep with translation forces you to answer and ask questions that you then train yourself to ask of your own work, and your work really improves. I saw that in my work, certainly.
So do you also feel that it also kind of brings you closer to your own language, in a way?
Mariam: Certainly. And of course, there are truly bilingual, trilingual, etc people who have that capacity in multiple languages, so when I say “your language” it could also be “your languages.” But I think that translating, even for those folks, really teaches you to just look so carefully at everything that's going on in one single sentence, and that's so valuable.
What are your favorite works of art in Farsi?
Mariam: My mind doesn't work in terms of favorites, but one corpus of work I've lived with for a very long time is work by مولانا, who's known in the West as Rumi, and I've found my way back to that work at various points in my life I first started really engaging with it in my teens, but had heard this poetry quoted my entire life. Recently I started translating him more seriously, starting small, with a ghazal.
Mariam Rahmani
Mariam Rahmani holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, as well as a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA ; she has received many honors and awards for her work so far, such as the 2021 Henfield Prize, a 2018 PEN/Heim translation grant, and a US Fulbright fellowship. Her first full-length translation, In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali, was on the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 list, and otherwise her fiction, essays and translations have appeared in many renowned magazines as well.
We as the editorial board of (M)othertongues are excited to welcome Mariam in her new position and look forward to further engaging in conversation and collaborating with her.
