Translator’s Note

YASSIN ADNAN is a lover of language. A poet, literary critic, and cultural journalist, he is a writer who is highly attuned to the great richness of the Arab literary tradition, and the linguistic diversity of Arabic as it exists today in Morocco. One of the great challenges and joys of translating Hot Maroc was carrying this diversity over into English. Arabic is no different than other languages in that it is comprised of many registers that express and are determined by context and class—social, political, racial, educational, economic, and more. Arabic can be described as diglossic, or multiglossic. That is, Arabic has distinct varieties that are used under different conditions. The most basic division of labor in Arabic is between speaking and writing, and across the Arab world, in any given place, the spoken variety can be quite different from the written, and there are multiple levels of the spoken register. As for the written language, it is somewhat standard across the Arab world, but there is local variation, and different registers of the written language exist as well. In this translation, I have done my best to reflect the linguistic multiplicity that exists in Morocco today. As Adnan moves deftly between varieties of spoken and written Arabic, the reader is able to sense, to hear, the voices as we move through slums, university classrooms, upscale and working-class neighborhoods, political rallies, and all sorts of online worlds.

While my translation strives to remain as true to Adnan’s Arabic as possible, I have also allowed myself some flexibility to reflect the rhythm and rhyme of poetry and song that is so essential to the novel, as well as the essence of vapid political droning and faux-intellectual speech and writing, the self-righteousness of ideological and uninformed religious arguments, and the colorful and artistic curses of Marrekechis young and old that would make a sailor blush!

Hot Maroc takes place in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the internet was just beginning to change life in Morocco, and worldwide. But of course, no time or place exists in a vacuum, and Hot Maroc is replete with references to the vast well of Moroccan literature, history, and culture—“high” and “low,” written and oral, local, national, and global. Besides a few stealth glosses, I chose not to provide notes or a glossary. Not only do I think it is entirely unnecessary for understanding and enjoying the novel as it is, but it would distract the reader from the universal depiction of what makes people who they are, and how we interact with one another, in real life, and online. Those who need to know more about any given reference in the novel need only heed the snarky advice of the narrator: “So why did God create Google, you idiot? Why did God send Our Master Google, upon him peace, to the electronic illiterates among His servants? . . . At least type the name into Google and let it do its work.”

In transliterating proper names, I have generally used the French spellings, since that is how names are spelled in Morocco (when using Latin characters). So, it is Jaouad instead of Jawad, Houcine instead of Hussain. Also, I think it is important to preserve the Moroccan-ness of the novel, and these spellings more closely reflect the sound of the names in Morocco by providing a visual cue to the Moroccan sound that tells us that they are similar to, yet distinguished from, their Egyptian, Lebanese, or Iraqi counterparts—all part of the Arab world, but speaking with different accents. I have transliterated names from the historical and literary tradition in a more scholarly way so as to give them the heft that they possess in Moroccan society (e.g., al-‘Abbas Ahmad bin Muhammad bin al-Wannan al-Tuwati from Fes).

A few specific translation notes: Qur’an quotations are based on A. J. Arberry’s translation. Bible quotations are from the King James Bible. The quoted verses from Labid’s ode, “The tent marks in Minan are worn away,” are from Michael Sells’s Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989); I have always found Sells’s translation of pre-Islamic poetry quite wonderful, and as much as I tried, I could not match his closeness to the original, and poetic touch. Everything else is translated from the Arabic by me. I have translated the Emil Cioran quote in the novel’s epigraph directly into English from the original French, not from the Arabic translation of the French. The original French reads: “N’est profond, n’est véritable que ce que l’on cache. D’où la force des sentiments vils.” De l’inconvénient d’être né (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).

Alexander E. Elinson	Brooklyn, New York
	November 2020