From Moscow to Damascus: Professor Margaret Litvin on the “Lumpy Realia” of Translingual Texts
What happens when you translate a novel that’s already translating between multiple cultures? In a wide-ranging conversation with Yasmeen Hanoosh for ArabLit Quarterly, BU Literary Translation faculty member Margaret Litvin explores the challenges and rewards of working with texts that refuse to stay in a single language.
Drawing on her translations of Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice and Khalil Alrez’s The Russian Quarter, Litvin discusses how she navigates the “macaronic” nature of Arabic literature shaped by Soviet-Arab cultural exchange: texts where Arabic is interwoven with Russian vocabulary and cultural references. Ibrahim’s novel about an Egyptian student in Moscow is peppered with transliterated Russian words like magazin (shop) and morozhenoye (ice cream) that carry double meanings across languages and represent the experience of living between cultures. When an editor pushed her to domesticate and “smooth out” these references for English readers, Litvin pushed back: the novels’ texture—their “lumps of realia” including Russian words, Soviet cultural references, newspaper clippings, and ethnographic observations—were the whole point. “Translating Sonallah’s novel into a single language would be like putting a salad through a blender,” she explains.
The conversation ranges from translating Hamlet into Arabic to discovering “vanishing intertexts”—the hidden sources that reshape how we understand literary adaptation across cultures. Litvin also reflects on polyglot writers who carry multiple languages within them, including Mahmoud Darwish, whose conversations with his Israeli girlfriend would have been in Hebrew, and whose famous “Rita poems” emerged from that linguistic intimacy. What does it mean, she asks, “to hold a language inside you that has inspired so much love and so much anger”?
Read the full interview at ArabLit Quarterly.