When a text moves between two languages to find its resting place
Yemen
Yemenite
Mohammed Al–Mekhalfi
When I received the draft of the play (She and Him) by the Yemeni writer Hamid Oqabi, who lives in France, I found myself faced with a text that was small in size but large enough to make me reconsider the meaning of exile and the way in which we try to understand ourselves when we are besieged by circumstances beyond our control.
I read the text in Arabic several times, feeling each time that its sentences pointed to something beyond their apparent meaning, as if waiting for another language to help them settle.
Therefore, when I began translating, I was less concerned with transferring the words literally and more with preserving the subtle stillness that flows between the lines.
The publication of the text in a bilingual book by Dar Mutoon Al-Muthaqaf clarified the experience. The presence of Arabic and English in the same book was like two mirrors facing each other, each language reflecting the other, each reading adding a new layer to the text.
The English version opens with an introduction by the American artist Brian Carlsen, to whom the piece is dedicated. In his introduction, he described his personal relationship with the play and expressed the idea that exile is not simply a distant place but a state that continues to haunt a person wherever they go. This idea accompanied me throughout the translation.
The events of the play take place in a strange room with an artificial grass floor, plastic trees, and dim lighting that reveals little and does not allow for rest. A man and a woman awaken in this space without explanation, each trying to understand their own existence before understanding the other.
Oqabi’s text offers no answers, and this is perhaps what brings the play closer to our daily lives. We experience many moments where we don’t understand the beginnings and endings, just moving through them as the two characters do.
During translation, I was struck by the presence of a telephone, breaking the silence between the two characters with meaningless messages and advertisements.
The telephone seemed to symbolize an outside world that doesn’t listen, a world that adds noise to the characters’ lives rather than offering them an escape. These small details make the text more realistic despite the strangeness of the setting.
As events progress, the characters’ feelings shift from distrust to something resembling recognition. The fear does not disappear, but it becomes less acute. Eventually, when they find paintings signed by Brian Carlsen, the text slowly shifts into another revelation, suggesting that the man is Brian himself and the woman is a reflection of a dream, a memory, or an old fear.
What I liked about this text is that it doesn’t pretend to be deep, it achieves depth through simplicity.
As a translator, I felt like I was walking in a quiet space, trying to keep the work balanced between two languages and two minds. Perhaps this is why I consider (She and Him) a text worth reading, because it reminds the reader that exile is not always a distance but a feeling that can accompany us even where we call home.
Yemen