Jack Clift

Jack Clift is a doctoral researcher affiliated with the Multilingual Locals, Significant Geographies (MULOSIGE) project.

Jack Clift is a doctoral researcher affiliated with the Multilingual Locals, Significant Geographies (MULOSIGE) project. He recently completed his doctoral thesis on Hindi and Urdu historical novels from the mid-twentieth century. Jack initially studied Spanish and Arabic as an undergraduate and briefly worked in television and film production (working primarily on Arabic-language documentary films), before pivoting to focus on South Asian languages and literatures as a postgraduate. His research interests include comparative and world literature, gender and sexuality studies and the interface between literary criticism and material culture.

Translation strategies

Working with a multilingual archive like the Al-Motamid and Ketama journals has necessitated a number of translation strategies to deal with the particularities of the texts they contain. For a couple of the texts – Carles Riba’s ‘El temps, fill de la mort’ and Salvatore Quasimodo’s ‘Fresca marina’ – it has not been possible for me to work effectively from the base source texts, in Catalan and Italian respectively. Instead, I have focussed on translating the poems from their Arabic and Spanish translations and, in the commentaries that accompany these translations, exploring how the translators’ choices interact with and relate to each other.

A second, similar grouping of translations in this archive are those for which we have two source texts for the same poem, one in Arabic and one in Spanish: Mohammed al-Bu’annani’s ‘Ibnat al-Andalus’/’Hija de al-Andalus’ and the ‘Dhikrā Shilb’/’Recuerdo de Silves’ pairing traditionally attributed to Al-Mu’tamid. In these instances, though it is possible to assume that the Arabic texts were the ‘source’ texts and the Spanish texts were the ‘target’ translations, I have translated each poem independently of the other before drilling down, in my commentaries, into the particular linguistic and stylistic choices that are visible when these pairings are translated into English. In doing so, I hope to give some idea of how the bilingual (or multilingual) reader of Al-Motamid and Ketama might have reacted to these poems if and when they were read together.

A final grouping of translations are those for which the English translations included here continue an existing ‘chain’ of translations: Miguel Hernández’s Spanish poem ‘Elegía,’ translated into Arabic in Al-Motamid as ‘Rithāʾ,’ and translated here, into English, as ‘Elegy’ ; Gibran Khalil Gibran’s ‘Me aconsejó mi alma,’ the original Arabic title of which I have been unable to find, which I have translated here as ‘My Soul Offered Me Advice’; and Mikhail Naimy’s ‘Yā baḥr,’ translated by Leonor Martínez Martín in Ketama into Spanish as ‘¡Oh, Mar!’ and translated here into English as ‘Oh, Sea!’. I have, in each of these cases, carried forward the translation process, bringing Arabic or Spanish poems that have been translated into, respectively, Spanish or Arabic into English, while at the same time trying to keep both the ‘first’ and ‘second’ source texts clearly in view. As the commentaries on these poems make clear, this allows for a fruitful discussion of the different linguistic and stylistic choices that these poets and their ‘first’ translators make and, in some instances, helps to clear up difficulties insofar as the intended meanings of these poems (particular in the translation of Naimy’s ‘Yā baḥr’). I do not wish to suggest that I am providing a ‘definitive’ translation of any sort here – rather, I hope, by reading these source texts and translations side-by-side and by creating translations of translations, to leave the creative process of both writing and translating open both for discussion and, potentially, for further translation.