Can you talk about how The Book Censor’s Library came into the world—first, the germ of the original language, and then the translation?
Bothayna Al-Essa: The idea of The Book Censor’s Library came to me because I am also a bookseller who has to deal with inspectors and censorship every day, and I always wondered what it felt like for people censoring books. How are they managing to not fall in love with the books that they are supposed to ban or censor? Or how does it really work in their heads? So I thought of writing the story about a book censor who falls in love with a book that is supposed to be banned. The ministry and everything in the book was also inspired from my own experience with the Ministry of Information [in Kuwait] when it comes to censoring books, and how they always go for literal meanings and they don’t allow a margin for interpretation, how they dismiss most of the time, have no idea what the book is talking about. So I was fascinated by this idea that censoring books is not even close to the practice of reading, even though we have two people physically doing the same thing, scanning words with their eyes. But it’s a totally different experience. And I wanted to create a journey for a book censor who becomes eventually a reader, and then he needs to protect this new identity as a reader in a world that deals with it as if it’s a crime or something.
Sawad Hussain: I’ve always been a huge fan of Bothayna Al-Essa’s work. I actually first met her in person at the Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature. I think it must’ve been around 2013 or so when I interviewed her. That was really exciting, although I’m not sure if she remembers that. I’d been trying to get a number of her works into translation for some time, starting with I Grew Up and Forgot How to Forget. And then I did some readers’ reports and samples also of Maps of Wandering. But unfortunately, none of those actually ever worked out. And so when her novel The Book Censor’s Library came out in 2019, I went immediately to Bothayna, and said, You know, please let me take a run at pitching this to Anglophone publishers because it’s so in tune with the current global conversation. I really think we have a chance of getting some good traction and being placed with a decent house. So she said, Sure. What happened then, is I prepared an excerpt for the Index on Censorship. A lot of the times as an Arabic literary translator, I don’t get paid to do excerpts for my pitch packs. I always recommend translators to find an online or in print literary outlet, which will publish your excerpt. Then you can use that very excerpt to pitch your title. So that’s what happened with the Index on Censorship, and they also ran a feature interview with Bothayna—it’s in their December 2020 issue, if anyone wants to read that.
I had pitched the book to one or two publishers but didn’t get any sort of positive response. If we rewind a little bit to two months earlier, after I had done an online event, I forget which one it was, but Christine Pardue, the acquisitions editor at the time at Restless, who has now moved on, contacted me via my website. So another tip for translators is definitely do have a website. Her getting in touch was completely unexpected. I mean, I was familiar with Restless. I was signed up to their newsletter, you know, a big supporter of theirs from afar, unknown to them. And when Christine reached out, she asked if I had any Arabic titles that would fit their list. Initially, I pitched them another novel, which unfortunately wasn’t really in line with what they were looking for. And then I just, you know, brought up the Guardian of Superficialities, which actually was the working title for The Book Censor’s Library at that time. It’s a closer reflection of the Arabic title, which we didn’t end up going with because it’s a mouthful, but it’s still very close to my heart. When I mentioned this [book] to her, she was very interested. Around this time when I actually had been working on the excerpt for the Index on Censorship, I reached out to Ranya. Back then, Ranya and I, we weren’t extremely close. We knew each other professionally. I mean, obviously since then we have grown very close and now are friends as well as translator colleagues. But I first got to know Ranya through the Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature (EALF) when I was working in Dubai, because she was working for the festival. And since then, we’d kept in touch sort of on and off about books we were reading or things we were interested in. I approached her when I came across some conundrums in the excerpt that I was working on, namely the playfulness of the title featuring in the text itself, which is something like “Guardian of the Surfaces.” Actually, the UK edition is called Guardian of Surfaces, and is out with Selkies House for those who are based in the UK or would like to order from there. And Ranya came back with—it might seem simple to everyone else—but she came back with these, you know, very well-thought-out alternatives to what I had suggested in a grid format. I think she just had me at the grid, you know? I was just like, Oh my goodness, I love the way this translator thinks, how she pieces together the aspects of this puzzle. She was really taking a run at it from a different angle that I had never considered before. And we just kind of talked through these two, three instances in the excerpt where there was this play on words. And after that, I thought, Okay, if this does get picked up by a publisher, I really want to bring Ranya on board. So back to December of 2020, when Christine Pardue said she was interested in the book, I approached Ranya and said, Hey—I only have an excerpt. I don’t have the capacity to do a reader’s report. Would you want to come on board as a co-translator and do the reader’s report, and then we see what happens with our pitch. She considered the offer and then did the reader’s report, and we pitched it at the end of December 2020.
Then we heard back from Christine that they wanted to make an offer on the rights in February of 2021. Only two months later. Not even a full two months, I would say closer to a month and a half. That’s definitely been, out of all of the books that I’ve pitched, the shortest acquisition period. And so from there, they then made an offer to Bothayna, and we then just started translating. I really want to thank Restless Books for taking a chance on us. They didn’t know us, they’d never worked with us before. I’m just really grateful for them believing in us. What I would like to encourage all publishers to do is to take a chance on translators you don’t know. Reach out to people who are currently working in different literatures that you are interested in, and especially Arabic. I would encourage all editors, seeing as there are three titles from Arabic currently longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, why don’t you just get in that boat and sail on the seas of Arabic literature? They can be choppy at times, but I definitely can assure you that they are highly, highly rewarding.
My final note is that Bothayna also has another recent release in English translation for a title I mentioned earlier, the literal translation of that would be “Maps of Wandering,” but it has been rendered by the highly esteemed Kuwaiti translator Nada Faris as Lost in Mecca, and it is published by Dar Arab here in the UK. And so I highly, highly recommend for people to check that book out. It’s available in ebook and paperback. And then if there are any publishers who want to . . . ride this wave of fantastic Arabic literature and Kuwaiti literature in particular, I would strongly encourage them to contact Nariman Youssef, who is my translator colleague, and is currently pitching one of Bothayna’s later novels, because she’s coming out with one about every two years at this rate. She just released a new one only ten days ago! So the one I was going to mention is The Blind Sindbad: Atlas of the Sea and War. It’s a dark mystery novel, a page-turner. It’s one of those books that stays with you and you end up rereading it after the explosive ending. And so I don’t want to give too much away, but Nariman Youssef has a pitch pack ready to go. So publishers, please contact her for that. And the last thing I just wanted to say is thank you to the National Book Award for Translated Literature for longlisting us and to the judges because we had never anticipated the audiences to which this book would travel. It has just been such a joy to see everyone engaging with it at the level that they have.
What particular translation challenges arose as this book was brought into English? Were they points that the author anticipated, or was there something of a process of discovery in which the author found that the translator shed light on unexpected aspects of the original-language work?
Ranya Abdelrahman: One of the most interesting and challenging aspects of translating this book was dealing with the intertextuality. It’s full of literary Easter eggs, and we did our best to chase these down and unpick them to help inform our translation. The direct quotes were perhaps the most straightforward to deal with, but Bothayna finds so many different ways to refer to other works, say by echoing sentence structure or a particular scene or using certain words, and some of these allusions are multilayered. For example, in a nod to the way language is stripped of all nuance in 1984‘s Newspeak, censors in the book are told to consider words and formations in pure isolation and avoid all ideas and interpretation. But this is also a play on, or actually an inversion of, a rhyming Islamic legal maxim which prioritizes intent over literal language in contracts. And we tried to bring a hint of the original into English by making the translation rhyme too. There are so many links to other works that we wouldn’t be at all surprised if we’ve missed some, but we hope that readers, perhaps more erudite than us, will still find and enjoy them.
Bothayna Al-Essa is the bestselling Kuwaiti author of nearly a dozen novels and additional children’s books. She is also the founder of Takween, a bookshop and publisher of critically acclaimed works. Her most recent book, The Book Censor’s Library, won the Sharjah Award for Creativity in the novel category in 2021, and is her third novel to appear in English, after Lost in Mecca and All That I Want to Forget. Al-Essa was author-in-residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation for the summer of 2023, and the recipient of Kuwait’s National Encouragement Award for her fiction in 2003 and 2012. She has written books on writing and led writing workshops throughout the Arab world.
Ranya Abdelrahman is a translator of Arabic literature into English. After working for more than sixteen years in the information technology industry, she changed careers to pursue her interest in books, promoting reading and translation. Abdelrahman has published translations in ArabLit Quarterly, The Markaz Review, and The Common, and is the translator of Out of Time, a short story collection by iconic Palestinian author Samira Azzam (1927–1967). Her latest translation is best-selling Kuwaiti writer Bothayna Al-Essa’s satirical novel The Book Censor’s Library, which she co-translated with Sawad Hussain.
Sawad Hussain is a translator from Arabic whose work has been recognized by English PEN, the Anglo-Omani Society, and the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, among others. She is a judge for the Palestine Book Awards and the 2023 National Translation Award. She has run translation workshops under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, Shubbak Festival, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library, and the National Centre for Writing. Her most recent translations include Black Foam by Haji Jaber (AmazonCrossing) and What Have You Left Behind by Bushra al-Maqtari (Fitzcarraldo Editions). She was selected to be the Princeton Translator in Residence in 2025.
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