(She and Him) when the text moves between two languages to stabilize
Yemen
Yamanat
Mohammed Al-Mekhlafi
When I received a draft of the play (She and Him) by the Yemeni writer living in France Hamid Uqabi, I found myself faced with a text that was small, but large enough to make me rethink the meaning of estrangement and the way we try to understand ourselves when we are besieged by circumstances over which we have no control.
I read the text in Arabic and came back to it again and again, and each time I felt like its sentences were pointing beyond their apparent meaning, as if waiting for another language to help them settle. Therefore, when I started translating, I was not so much concerned with translating the words literally as with trying to maintain that subtle calm that moved between the lines.
The publication of the text in a book combining the two languages by Dar Mutun al-Muthaqaf made the experience clearer. It seemed to me that the presence of Arabic and English in the same book is like two mirrors facing each other. Each language reflects the other and each reading gives a new layer to the text. The English version opens with an introduction by the American artist Brian Carlson, to whom the text is dedicated. In his introduction, he spoke about his personal relationship with the piece and his feeling that estrangement is not a distant place but rather a condition that continues to haunt a person wherever they go, and this idea accompanied me when translating the work.
The events of the play take place in a strange room: an artificial grass floor, plastic trees, and dim lighting that reveals little and leaves no room for rest. A man and a woman wake up in this place without any explanation, and each tries to understand its existence before the other understands it. A later text does not provide answers, and this is perhaps what makes the piece close to our daily lives; We experience many moments whose beginnings and endings we do not understand, and we simply move forward within them as they do.
As I worked on the translation, I was struck by the presence of the telephone, which interrupts the silence of the two characters with meaningless messages and announcements. The telephone seemed to me like the symbol of an outside world that was not listening, a world that was adding noise to the two people’s lives instead of giving them a way out. These small details made the text more realistic, despite the strangeness of the place.
As events progress, both characters’ feelings shift from apprehension to something resembling a confession. The fear does not disappear, but it becomes less intense. Ultimately, when they find paintings signed with the name Brian Carlson, the text quietly turns to another revelation, hinting that the man is Brian himself and the woman is only a reflection of an ancient dream, memory, or fear.
What I liked about this text is that it doesn’t pretend to be deep, but simply achieves it. For me, as a translator, the experience was more like entering a calm space while trying to maintain a balance between two languages and two souls. Perhaps this is why I consider (She and Him) a text worth reading, because it reminds the reader that estrangement is not always a distance, but rather a feeling that can accompany us even when we are in the place we consider home.
Yemen