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- [00:01]
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- [01:28]
Turul Mende
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everybody, and welcome back to New Book Network. I'm Turul Mende, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Professor Michelle Hartman about her work on Iman Humaydounis novel Songs for Darkness, which is forthcoming at Interlink Books this spring. Welcome to the podcast, Michelle hi.
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Michelle Hartman
Thanks for inviting me.
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Turul Mende
Michelle Hartman is a literary translator and professor of Arabic Literature at McGill University, and she has translated various novels from Arabic to English, including other novels by Iman Humaydoun as well. And we are very happy to have you here today. And maybe we can start with that. You read one passage or two from the novel so that the listeners can get a sense on which what the style of the novel is about.
- [02:21]
Michelle Hartman
Sure, that would be great. So the novel Songs for Darkness by Iman Hamadan is framed by a letter. So the person who's writing the letter is named Asmahan. And I'm going to start off by reading the beginning of the opening letter and then I'm going to pause and I'm going to read a piece from the end of the novel. And I'll let you know when I'm switching. So the very first part is called the letter. New York, December 18, 1982. Dearest Wea, you know that you've been my best friend since childhood. You were there all throughout my teen years. And now it's my turn to pack. I'll pack up my clothes and my daughter's clothes in a suitcase and leave. It was really difficult to get everything together in just a few days walk. Walk all the way to East Beirut and get on a boat to Larnaca. But the most difficult thing was getting over my fear. And not just that, but also pursuing the desire I'd suppressed for so long out of that fear. Fear of doing something, anything. Fear that Mazen would be able to stop me from traveling with Lama at the last minute. Fear of confrontation. Fear of making decisions to move, to travel, to live in exile. On the day of my son's seventh birthday, I began to feel I was a stranger in my own country. Maazin came and ripped him from my arms that day. And there was nothing to protect me. Not my family, not my education, not the law, not all my knowledge of the way the world works. None of those things could protect me from male privilege, supported by religion, enforced by law. Nothing at all could protect me or defend me. As a mother in Beirut, I feel both nostalgic and estranged. I'm afraid to leave the city, but I don't know how to live anywhere else. At the same time, I know all too well I'm not protected. There conflicting emotions. Perhaps there is subconscious coping mechanism to keep me from going mad. They'll help me adapt to this place which is so changed that I no longer recognize it. Loss structures my life now. Every moment is loss. Loss informs everything. The roads filled with militiamen who prevent me from moving freely. Lonely children, hungry cats. Houses destroyed by bombardment. Desiccated trees, mountains with their guts spilling out. Dark streets, deadly news reports. Corpses displayed heartlessly on television screens. Pictures of martyred teenagers, their bodies used to fuel the fires of war, line the walls of Beirut streets. Despite all of this, I stayed in Beirut. And every morning I search for a reason to get out of bed, only to say, good morning world. Good morning, misery. I found comfort in writing. I did what my mother couldn't. And then I'm going to read a little bit more. A piece from the end of the novel, which is titled as Mahan 1982 and she's still writing and reflecting on some of the same issues that we see in the opening. I'll write about myself in the first person. I don't know how to write about myself in the third person. Like I wrote about Shahira, Yasmin and Laila. My writing will thus come full circle. I started sharing stories about my family in a letter I wrote to Wedda. But I'll end here with some longer stories, larger than the dreams of the women in my family. This story won't end, though I wish it would. I'm sick of the past. I'm sick of disappointments, despair and false hope. I'm also tired of repetition, violence, hope, war, violence again. It's a loop, an endless loop that we can never escape. I don't want to stop questioning and asking why, because I'm afraid of dying. I'm afraid to die, feeling that I haven't been born, that I've not yet been born. I was born, though I was born in 1944, on an ordinary July morning.
- [06:17]
Turul Mende
Thank you so much, Michel. And as mentioned earlier, you already translated few works by the author previously. And what makes you want to come back to the author's work? And why did you want to translate this particular novel again from her?
- [06:36]
Michelle Hartman
Honestly, even if I hadn't translated her works before, I probably would have wanted to translate this novel. It's a really special text. It is a big story and it's a big history, and it traces generations of women's lives in this particular location in Mount Lebanon. So it kind of works with and deals with a lot of the kinds of things that I'm interested in and that I know about and that I've translated before. And I feel like I can do a good job translating. But honestly, I really love working with Iman. We have worked together on a number of novels and a few other projects. And over that time, which has now been. Oh, we realized the other day, almost 20 years that we've worked together, we've developed a relationship, we've developed a friendship, we have a way of talking to each other. And so it's both like Iman, as a person who, you know, I've worked with and I have that relationship with, but also her writing. Like, I really know her writing really, really well. And it's something that, you know, as a translator, I kind of know that in the abstract, obviously, I've worked with her before, and so I know that. But when I read the novel, it was like reading something I already knew about, even though I didn't know about it, if you see what I mean. So there was like a familiarity already there in the novel, even when I first, the very first time when I opened the pages. So that kind of relationship to a text is really interesting. And it provides a different kind of way into a text for me as a translator, which is not so common. Right. You don't find this in all kinds of texts. So for me, that's a really special thing. So it wasn't really kind of even a question like, would I translate it? Like, it just, you know, I was like ready for it and it just came and I felt like I already had this like, long standing relationship with the text when I was working just reading it with it the first time. And then when I started working on it, you know, then that all kind
- [08:40]
Turul Mende
of developed from there because I think, you know, the language of her and the style like she's writing. I mean, even if you don't know the new novel or the new material, but you get a sense of how she would write, I think. So it makes maybe easier to connect with her work.
- [09:01]
Michelle Hartman
Probably exactly like in both in the. This is the thing that's interesting, right? Both in a kind of, you know, more obvious or technical way where you say, oh, you know, it's these kinds of phrases, it's these kinds of expressions. You know, I know her really well. But there's also a kind of intangible element as well where you feel, you know, for me as a translator, I could feel just directly kind of implicated inside of the kind of stories. I know that, you know, when Iman writes, the world of her texts is a very big world. It's much bigger than what we read in those pages. And she constructs these huge kind of stories and we're only seeing a little bit of what is constructed. The world she constructs is much, much, much bigger. And so, and I know that about her. And so I start to also feel like I really understand those worlds well.
- [09:58]
Turul Mende
Yes. And when you start translating a new work, do you first translate like whole passages or whole chapters? Or do you go like from passage to passage? Or how do you have like a translation method that you use for translating novels? Or how are you starting to work on it?
- [10:21]
Michelle Hartman
I mean, it depends obviously on the kind of text a little bit in a novel like this one, this one is pretty long, right? It's a big text, it's not a short text, and it's not one that is very easy. Not that I can think of any novels I've translated that I would call easy. You know, it's never easy, but, you know, it is very deep and it's very rich and it has a lot of interconnections. And so I guess the first thing that I always do is to read it at least once. I mean, you know, usually I would read it once just to kind of read very fast and just kind of, you know, enjoy it, but also just get a feeling for the whole text and then probably read it again slower and kind of thinking about while I'm reading, okay, maybe this is what I might do with this, maybe this is what I might do with that. But just really reading and not write it. And then when I start the kind of writing process of translation, have a kind of a plan mapped out for the text. For this text, what I did is translate the first, the opening and closing. Because it is a kind of frame story. The novel is. The letter is sort of a frame story for the entire novel. And so I wanted the language there and I wanted that kind of frame to fit together very well. So I did that first and put that together and then translated. I thought of each section from there on as kind of its own unique section. Even though they do really flow into each other to form a novel. There are these kind of. There's a bit of a conceit in the novel that it is collecting the stories of the other women. So kind of those different stories, I grouped them and thought of them as kind of discrete parts to work on. And then it's a matter. The way that I worked on this novel is to complete a full draft and then go back to it numerous times. But I didn't. So I did it more or less in order, but with the exception of this kind of frame letter.
- [12:36]
Turul Mende
Since you have a close relationship with the author, did you work closely with her on the translation process or is it more like a solitary process while translating it?
- [12:46]
Michelle Hartman
A little bit of both. A little bit of both on this one. I mean, so we like know each other. We have each other on WhatsApp conversations and, you know, it's the kind of person I could be working and ask her a two second question and she might write me back and then, you know, or then I can call her later or, you know, so we like. It's very easy. I don't have to kind of, you know, it's not someone I don't know well where I have to kind of prepare a long email or something like that to send or, you know, prepare for a call. But I think, and I Definitely talked to Iman and I can't remember if we had these kind of longer conversations before I actually started or maybe when I was just first starting the process. Obviously when she first sent me the novel, she wanted to know what I thought of it, just talk about it. Right. So I can't remember if I had already started translating when we had those conversations or if it was maybe just before. But I wanted to talk to her and I. I like to do this when I'm translating. Just talk to the author and hear what they say about it. Not so much for like help or for, you know, specific information, but to get the feeling of what it's about and to. To kind of understand a bit the process. Right. So this text, and I knew this obviously before I read it. Imran had been working on it for a long time and she did a huge amount of research for it. Right. It has a lot of history in it. And so I knew that this was this very long process. So I wanted to just hear her talk about it and I wanted to kind of get kind of way of talking about the characters. And Iman is the kind of novelist where you can talk to her about the characters for hours, you know, like, what did Lida do when this happened? And what did, you know, Yasmine? Why did she say this? And you know, like she, like, she'll really into it and I'm a bit like that as well. So we could have those conversations. So we had those kind of conversations and then, you know. But most of the translating part in the words on the paper is a bit more solitary for me, you know, and I'm really kind of doing that. Like we're not sitting next to each other. We've worked on other texts more closely, like where we would be in the same place and then we could work really side by side. And this one, you know, I was in Montreal and she was in Beirut, in Paris. We did meet in Beirut once and we had a long kind of work session, but at that point we were more kind of going over, finalizing things just in terms of the timing of when it happened and kind of ideas about kind of flow and kind of big picture things and not so much small things. We did a few. We did do a few conversations about small bits that were challenging and like kind of problems, you know, those like problems that you run into. And Iman is amazing because she would love to talk about, you know, these. Even if we don't come up with the solution in the conversation. Like a lot of doors are open to think about when I'm going back to fix them myself, you know.
- [15:31]
Turul Mende
And you said that Iman did a lot of research herself for her novel. And in the past you published with Sierra Cruz as well about woman voices and in the Lebanon civil war. Did it help you to have like, a certain voice for the woman in the novel that you did for your own research in the past as well?
- [15:51]
Michelle Hartman
Of course. Right. And I think it's really interesting for me to reflect on in translating this novel because this novel has an oral, like history kind of component to it, and it very much is framed as women's stories. And of course, there is the backdrop of war at several points in the story as well. And so even though the stories that are collected in my research, oral history work with my colleague Malik Abi Sab that we published, even though those works that we did are quite different in a way, there's so many connections and similarities. And so another thing that I really liked do when I'm translating that I do is I try to read a lot, not so, you know, per se, as quote, unquote, research for the translation, but as a way to kind of immerse myself in the time and the place and the kind of writing in English that's done around these things. So it doesn't mean I will necessarily use that same kind of writing, but I want to kind of feel out that sort of writing. So, of course, the translations in the oral histories that I did for what the war left behind in women's war stories are my own translations. So it's my voice mixed in with other women's voices. So I did also read other kinds of works to try to kind of get some more voices in my head so that I would be able to better write. Right. Because translation, at the end of the day is writing. And you do very much find yourself influenced by the words that you are around and the words that are part of your life, both consciously and unconsciously, subconsciously as well. So I do try to do that when I'm translating. Just be sure that I'm reading texts that give me a lot of other kinds of voices to tap into.
- [17:49]
Turul Mende
And the novel itself centers around more or less four women from the same family in different generations. And do they have each of their own voices, and are they reflected in the style of language that Iman uses for the each different woman? I mean, I read it in English, but was it in Arabic, like that they have different voices kind of. Or how would she differentiate those women
- [18:19]
Michelle Hartman
in There is A shifted voice and there's a shift, you know, there's a shift in time. So the novel covers like a long amount of time. So again, I don't want to exaggerate it too much. It's not sort of like very experimental with like very, very different kinds of ways of writing or very, very different Arabic or something. But there is, there's a differentiation in voice and in context that I think is important to try to capture and that and to also remember that the text, it is being narrated through also Asmahan. Right. So Asmahan is the vessel through which we get the stories of the other women as well. So there's this kind of unity of voice but then there also are these distinct kind of moments in time and these distinct char that are kind of coming through. There's quite a lot of speech, there's quite a lot of storytelling and of course also the songs. Right. So there's quite a lot going on in the text. It's a very, very interesting text, a very rich text that does a lot of things inside of it.
- [19:20]
Turul Mende
And what would you say would be like the main subject and themes about this novel? I mean of course the war is one big context, but surrounding the woman, what would you think about, are there issues and the central themes of the novel?
- [19:37]
Michelle Hartman
Well, it deals with a lot of things, right. So it deals with the kind of roles of women, women's lives everyday, women's lives across this big historical backdrop. So there's the war, 1982 and the lab during the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli invasion. But the historical elements that really inform the text go way back to the Ottoman Empire and the, the famine, World War II. Right. So those moments in the text. So you know, the idea about like how women like survive in war also is told against like different kinds of backdrops. Right. Like the famine from World War I is very different than the kind of hiding in, you know, burnt out apartment buildings in 1982. Right. That, that we see. So like the, the ways that women cope with their lives in those different kind of scenarios is defin kind of a theme and I think also really thinking about women's lives in patriarchy and sort of how women are able to live and thrive and be themselves and find their way through the world in with the kind of different things that make that difficult. So the patriarchal structures, the kind of conservative societies that they are living in and the kind of external pressures of war and colonialism and so on. So that all comes in and then there's also like these themes of like women's friendships and women's relationships, both like the mothers to the daughters and grandmothers and then also their friends. And so we see generations also of women who are friends. And I think that's really an important theme that kind of how friendships develop and also how they change over time. So there's like a lot of kind of social, socio, political kind of commentary and in particular about how women live out those moments. But there's also quite a lot of sort of interpersonal relationships and the way that people live their lives through those relationships.
- [21:59]
Turul Mende
And I mean, since you translated quite a few works of the author, how would you describe or analyze her development as an author? Like since the last novel, which came out in 2024, I think songs, Songs, sorry, Songs for Darkness. And since the first novel that you read of her, like, how. How was her writing developed? Could you tell us a bit about her process of writing?
- [22:32]
Michelle Hartman
I mean, as a reader, like, you know, looking, if I look over all of her writings, there's a way in which you can really see them fit together. Like, you can see like a very distinct style and a distinct kind of way of treating and dealing with certain kinds of themes that are. That are similar, even though the novels are quite different. You know, the first novel of imams that I translated was Tutpari the Wild Mulberries, which is a very small novel. So it's very different from this one. It's very, very small. And it. And it is set in a mountain village which is similar to the setting of this novel. And it really is about a girl kind of coming of age story. And it's, It's. It's much shorter and it' in this very distinct kind of time period. So like in that sense they're very different, but there's a similarity, I think. And we can see this in all of her writings in this kind of very deep interior portraits of the characters, particularly women characters, and the kind of exploration of their lives and their feelings and how they kind of connect to the things around them. I think what you see in Songs for Darkness is compared to both this novel, but her other novels as well, which kind of fit together. The ones about Beirut and the war. Right. The other, her other texts. This one is really bigger in scope. You see her very similar kind of a style. This very kind of like beautiful lyrical style with like a lot of details and all of these kind of like interpersonal relationships kind of together with those historical moments, but it's much bigger. And by bigger, I don't necessarily mean longer just as a text, but it's like kind of bigger in scope. She's taking on a larger kind of set of questions in a bigger time period. And really kind of. Rather than kind of going really, really, really deeply into either that life of one girl or into the war and the. The Civil War and specificities about the Civil War at a particular moment. She's cover lot of time and a lot of different people. And that's a d. That's. That's a departure for her. And I think it's a really interesting one and that it works really, really well. Like the. The interconnected stories of the women through the generations are very compelling. I think the readers will find that you kind of really want to know what's going to happen to these characters in their kind of family dramas, but also in their own kind of selves.
- [25:21]
Turul Mende
Thank you so much, Michel. And coming to the last two questions, I do not have only a relationship with the author, but with intelligent books as well in the past as well, which publishes this new novel too. And do you have any advice for young translators who want to start publishing translated novels? Like how do you get in touch with publishers or discovery? Did you decided you want to translate this novel and then you search for a publisher or contacted interlink Books directly or how would you go on with that?
- [25:59]
Michelle Hartman
Okay, got a couple of questions in there. So I have. I've worked with interlink Books for a really long time. We're now interlinked. I've probably. We're inching up probably on more like well over 20 years, maybe closer to 30 years have had a relationship with them. And they are a really wonderful small publisher in the United States, an independent publisher in the United States who has a beautiful list of Arabic fiction translated and other works as well into English. And they really do amazing works. So if people aren't familiar with them, I would really encourage people to check them out and see what they're doing, both with Arabic, but with other things as well. Arabic and translation. Arabic literature and translation. I think the publishing of translated fiction and other kinds of translations, it has been changing since I started, which is a long time ago in the, you know, late 20th century, as the young people call it now. And so there is. There are more people translating, there are more of the course publishers publishing. And so the field of public publishing works from Arabic into English looks a bit different. What I would advise people who are interested in doing translation is to really get to know translation. Like, um, it's not Something to just kind of do in an isolated way. Ideally, even if you might be doing your actual. As we were saying before, right, you might be sitting in front of your computer all by yourself for a long time, often translating. And it can feel very lonely. There's a world of translation out there to get to know. So to really get to know what's been translated, how it's being translated, what are the different kind of ideas about translation? What are the different ways to translate things? Get to know the other translators. You know, the. Again, the field is growing, but we're still pretty small. And so most Arabic English translators are really happy to have a conversation with young translators. And so, you know, get to know the field, get to know what's going on, get to know other works, read everything that you can. So that is one type of advice. And then, you know, I also really advise people to work on things that they really love and projects that they really love and that they can get really involved in and feel a really strong connection to. It's sort of a very big process to translate something, and it's very intense and it's very involved. And so you want to kind of have like a reason to do it and a good connection to the things that you. That you translate. And then from there, you know, you. Then you are looking at a mix of kind of good placing works for translation. You're looking at a mix of kind of the research that you've done and meeting people and the kind of interests that exist out there for the kind of work that you want to translate.
- [29:03]
Turul Mende
Thank you so much, Michelle. And you worked obviously a lot on novels from Lebanon and you worked on stories from Palestine and Gaza. What, what are you looking forward to working on next? Do you have anything you can share with us that you are working on right now?
- [29:22]
Michelle Hartman
I have two projects I'm working on. They're both really interesting. They're different and very different and very interesting. I have another kind of very long, kind of big story of one woman in Lebanon, and it is the novel by Hanina Sayeh that is in Arabic called Mithaq Nisa. And we are translating as Daughters of the Same Secret. And that will come out probably later this year also from interlink. And it is a long, interesting story of a Druze woman's kind of coming of age and finding herself in her life and kind of making a life for herself. It's really, really interesting. And then after that, I'm working on a short, kind of very funny, kind of cynical text by Badar Salim, who is a young Palestinian novelist based in Montreal. And I think people will be really interested to see this text in translation. It's a very, very challenging and fun one with a certain kind of sharp and ironic humor, like very different than these kind of big historical novels. So I'm really looking forward to that, getting into working on that one as well.
- [30:54]
Turul Mende
Thank you so much, Michel, for giving us an insight into your work and on how you're working on translating novels and for joining us to the podcast. Thank you so much.
- [31:05]
Michelle Hartman
Oh, I had a really good time. Thanks for inviting me, Sam.