Lexington, KY - As an author, Lexington poet Rebecca Gayle Howell is fully cognizant of the struggle writers have with language, but at least they are working in a language with which they are familiar. Howell also is acquainted with the formidable challenge of translating foreign verse without the aid of fluency.
Howell recently released her first collection of translations, "Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation" by Iraqi poet Amal al-Jubouri, which was selected to inaugurate the Alice James Books Translations Series.
Howell, a former director of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, is the recipient of the Jules Chametzky Prize in Literary Translation from The Massachusetts Review and a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. She currently teaches at Morehead State University.
Though al-Jubouri is the author of five collections of poetry in Arabic, Howell's version of "Hagar" is the first of her volumes to be translated into English. Howell was drawn to al-Jubouri's work and background as an Iraqi who has sought refuge in Germany since 1997.
"I wanted to translate a contemporary Iraqi poet," she said. "My theory, in general, is in any area of conflict there are poets in those areas writing about the conflict - we just have to find them."
When Howell found a faithful translation of the poem "The Veil of Religion," which is about the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2011, she realized the full potential of al-Jubouri's writing. "After I read that poem, I thought, 'I want more.'"
Howell isn't fluent in Arabic, and she turned to her friend Husam Qaisi, a Palestinian-American, to help with the translations. Qaisi and his family live in Elizabethtown, so he and Howell used Skype, an online communication program, to collaborate on the project. "We'd work at night after their kids were asleep, just about every night for a year," Howell said. They started in the fall of 2009.
During the beginning process, Qaisi would create "lexicon tables," taking the original Arabic poem and presenting Howell with what he considered to be the closest English equivalent for each word, while also making notes about potential synonyms, puns, and historical or religious references al-Jubouri may have employed. Howell would then draft the English version, and the two would return to each draft -- Qaisi revising for meaning, Howell for poetry. Slowly the poems, in their new iteration, began to take shape, as did al-Jubouri's treatment of the language.
"I could see how she was making plays on words," Howell said. "Arabic is an extremely concise language, so one word can have double, triple duty in a sentence. And Amal is a remarkable free verse poet. She really knows how to get the most out of her language. ... In this way, I got to know her as a poet one poem, one line, one word at a time."
Even though al-Jubouri fled Iraq in the 1990s, she returned to Baghdad two days after Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party fell in 2003 and lived in Iraq during the ongoing American occupation before returning to Germany. This collection of poetry (which was originally published in Arabic in 2008) is, in part, the author's comments on her home country, using the differences before and after foreign involvement as the crux of her observations.
Howell said the collection isn't an overtly political protest of the foreign, namely American, occupation, but that it is a lament for her country and for how it has become bound to the resolve of outside influences.
"What she winds up with is -- the fate of Iraq and the fate of America --
we're all in this together," Howell said. "I think many Americans, now, would agree with her."
To ensure that her translations were an authentic reflection of the author's original work, Howell invited al-Jubouri to be involved with the process. The two spent a week together finalizing the manuscript at the Kentucky Foundation for Women's Hopscotch House in Louisville.
Although some of the subjects and images of "Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation" are going to be foreign concepts to some English-speaking readers, Howell says that the collection's themes are universal.
"I think Amal (al-Jubouri) has written poems that are very accessible, while they are also true to their time and place," she said. "The story that's being told is deep grief -- 'Hagar' is an elegy, and I think we can all relate to that."