Reading Mister N is a pleasure on multiple levels. That is even more true for translating it.
The novel demonstrates Najwa Barakat’s characteristic descriptive power, applied both to her fictional characters and to the city of Beirut in approximately 2016. Even before the port explosion of August 2020 and Lebanon’s subsequent economic collapse, we see a city fighting to survive. The garbage goes uncollected, the river runs with mud and waste, and once beautiful buildings are retrofitted with ugliness. Yet still the city grows, a home to migrants past and present who flee war, persecution, and starvation: Lebanon’s poor, Armenians, Palestinians, domestic workers, sex workers from Africa and Asia, and now refugees from neighboring Syria at the height of its civil war.
Mr. N is driven out of the shelter of his comfortable apartment into the chaos of this bewildering city, and it provides the setting for the shock he experiences on a side street when Mr. N encounters Luqman, the murderous antihero of a grim novel he himself wrote fifteen years before. How a fictional character can appear in the flesh is as much a mystery to Mr. N as it is to the reader, and we follow Mr. N’s memories, reflections, and investigations as he grasps for the truth. Suffering from psychosis and memory loss, this unreliable and inconsistent narrator begins to excavate painful stories long buried. Like Mr. N’s mind, the narrative is disjointed and fragmentary. It circles back and contradicts itself as it slowly uncovers the mystery of Luqman—and of Mr. N.
As a literary translator, I delight in the process of composing English sentences that capture as much as I can of the meaning and artistry contained in Arabic ones. As a translator of Najwa Barakat, my goal is to preserve the rich texture of her sentences, the vivid descriptions of people and of cityscapes, the willingness to explore human pain and human cruelty.
As a general rule, translating verb tenses in Arabic narrative prose can be challenging. They contain less specificity than is required by English, and it is common in Arabic to use the present tense when narrating the past. The translator must adapt these passages to equally standard forms of narration in English, while trying to preserve Arabic’s sense of immediacy, and without getting bogged down in coordinating frameworks. Verb tense in Mister N is particularly tricky to translate since the narrative jumps without warning between time frames. Episodes may be Mr. N’s present reflections, a memory from the near past or the remote, or even prose written by Mr. N, often about himself, now in the first person, now in the third. This structure mirrors the instability of Mr. N’s mind: his failure to comprehend his situation, his inability to remember critical details, his confusion about the sequence of past events. While translation always demands interpretation, the translator of Mister N must take care to avoid erasing these ambiguities in the text.
Among other things, this is a novel about the relationship of an author to their characters. What are a character’s conscious or subconscious origins in the author’s mind? What does an author feel about characters after they are committed to the page? What does an author owe them, and how might a character react to their portrayal? In what sense are characters real? While such questions naturally arise from a novel in which the main character grapples with the meaning of language and the terror of encountering a protagonist from his own early fiction, the final pages of the Mister N take us one step deeper by connecting the narrative and the characters even more closely to the author of them all, Najwa Barakat, who wrote the very novels ascribed to Mr. N before abandoning fiction for fifteen years. Once again, fiction steps out into the world.
On a personal note, I am doubly grateful for the opportunity to translate this novel because of my work on Barakat’s Oh, Salaam! some ten years ago. My former Arabic teacher, Khaled Al-Masri, introduced me to that novel about Luqman, and his dissertation chapter about the depth of Barakat’s exploration of gender and violence persuaded me to undertake the translation despite an initial reluctance to become more intimately acquainted with such brutal characters. The themes and style of Barakat’s novels in the 1990s played an important role in the development of contemporary Arabic literature, and I look forward to collaborating with And Other Stories again in the very near future to make her modern classic, The Bus, available at last to English readers.
LUKE LEAFGREN, 2021
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS