The National Book Award Interviews: Samar Yazbek and Leri Price

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?

Leri Price: There were a couple of things that I think were quite specific to this text. I think the first one is probably the entirety of the opening chapter. For those of you who’ve read it, the book’s framing device is, there’s just been an explosion. Some soldiers have been accidentally bombed by their own side, and the book opens in the aftermath of the explosion. And the book follows the day that elapses after the friendly fire and interspersed with flashbacks from the protagonist Ali’s life.

The opening chapter takes place in the second after the bomb has fallen and this sense of complete disorientation: Ali doesn’t know what’s happened, and he is having almost an out-of-body experience due to the shock and the trauma of what’s just happened to him. This is conveyed by Samar very effectively, this sense of disorientation, disembodiment, and you have some very surreal images that open the book, and the narrative voice, the point of view is very—how do I put it?—untethered, it’s not bound to any particular character at this point and it’s not rooted in anyone’s subjectivity really. This chapter is about Ali coming back to himself and in the meantime he’s having this this weird vision of a funeral that he comes to realize is not his. But that whole chapter is intentionally quite discombobulating and I know that the first time I read the book I was very confused, which is the point.

I don’t know how many times I went back and back over that chapter to really pin down what’s happening, what we’re seeing. We go from this disembodied floating eye in the sky to these delicate earthworms that are eating their way through the soil. I mean, we just were encompassing so many experiences and . . . corporealities, it’s just, it’s a really remarkable opening. But for a translator, it was very challenging. Luckily, Samar is just a joy and a dream to work with. We spoke for hours, hours on the phone, hammering out many details throughout the book and sort of discussing the characters. It was just absolutely magical to work with her.

[An addition challenge is that] the book takes place in the Latakian mountains in Syria. It’s a very specific geography and Samar makes reference to particular geographical features. I am not a geographer, I don’t really know much about what is the difference between a cliff and a bluff and an outcrop. So I had to do a lot of work figuring out what those differences are and Samar very kindly sent me many pictures of the region that she was talking about so that I could have those in my mind as I was translating and I went back to them frequently actually to try and get a real of place. I had visited that region many, many years ago but it was really helpful to have that immediate reminder of the landscape.

Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer, novelist, and journalist. She was born in Jableh in 1970 and studied literature before beginning her career as a journalist and a scriptwriter for Syrian television and film. Her novel Planet of Clay, also published by World Editions, was a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Warwick Women in Translation Prize. Her accounts of the Syrian conflict include A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution and The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria. Yazbek’s work has been translated into multiple languages and has been recognized with numerous awards—notably, the French Best Foreign Book Award and the PEN-Oxfam Novib, PEN Tucholsky, and PEN Pinter awards. She was recently selected to be part of the International Writers Program with the Royal Society of Literature.

Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. She has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, in 2021 for her translations of Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, and in 2019 for Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work. Her translation of Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work also won the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

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?

Leri Price: There were a couple of things that I think were quite specific to this text. I think the first one is probably the entirety of the opening chapter. For those of you who’ve read it, the book’s framing device is, there’s just been an explosion. Some soldiers have been accidentally bombed by their own side, and the book opens in the aftermath of the explosion. And the book follows the day that elapses after the friendly fire and interspersed with flashbacks from the protagonist Ali’s life.

The opening chapter takes place in the second after the bomb has fallen and this sense of complete disorientation: Ali doesn’t know what’s happened, and he is having almost an out-of-body experience due to the shock and the trauma of what’s just happened to him. This is conveyed by Samar very effectively, this sense of disorientation, disembodiment, and you have some very surreal images that open the book, and the narrative voice, the point of view is very—how do I put it?—untethered, it’s not bound to any particular character at this point and it’s not rooted in anyone’s subjectivity really. This chapter is about Ali coming back to himself and in the meantime he’s having this this weird vision of a funeral that he comes to realize is not his. But that whole chapter is intentionally quite discombobulating and I know that the first time I read the book I was very confused, which is the point.

I don’t know how many times I went back and back over that chapter to really pin down what’s happening, what we’re seeing. We go from this disembodied floating eye in the sky to these delicate earthworms that are eating their way through the soil. I mean, we just were encompassing so many experiences and . . . corporealities, it’s just, it’s a really remarkable opening. But for a translator, it was very challenging. Luckily, Samar is just a joy and a dream to work with. We spoke for hours, hours on the phone, hammering out many details throughout the book and sort of discussing the characters. It was just absolutely magical to work with her.

[An addition challenge is that] the book takes place in the Latakian mountains in Syria. It’s a very specific geography and Samar makes reference to particular geographical features. I am not a geographer, I don’t really know much about what is the difference between a cliff and a bluff and an outcrop. So I had to do a lot of work figuring out what those differences are and Samar very kindly sent me many pictures of the region that she was talking about so that I could have those in my mind as I was translating and I went back to them frequently actually to try and get a real of place. I had visited that region many, many years ago but it was really helpful to have that immediate reminder of the landscape.

Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer, novelist, and journalist. She was born in Jableh in 1970 and studied literature before beginning her career as a journalist and a scriptwriter for Syrian television and film. Her novel Planet of Clay, also published by World Editions, was a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Warwick Women in Translation Prize. Her accounts of the Syrian conflict include A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution and The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria. Yazbek’s work has been translated into multiple languages and has been recognized with numerous awards—notably, the French Best Foreign Book Award and the PEN-Oxfam Novib, PEN Tucholsky, and PEN Pinter awards. She was recently selected to be part of the International Writers Program with the Royal Society of Literature.

Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. She has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, in 2021 for her translations of Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, and in 2019 for Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work. Her translation of Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work also won the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.