Alameddine’s main character, Aaliya, is an old woman living alone in Beirut. She begins, “You could say I was thinking of other things when I shampooed my hair blue, and two glasses of red wine didn’t help my concentration.” Already I am smitten. We get history—her forced marriage, coming to terms with her mother, bombing in Beirut—but literature is where this unnecessary woman makes her home.
The book sparkles with literary references and anecdotes, including to Junot Díaz, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Patrick White, David Malouf, Milan Kundera, Gogol, Roberto Bolaño…
Reviewing Horacio Castellanos Moya’s The Dream of My Return, translated by Katherine Silver (The New York Review of Books, January 14, 2016) Norman Rush muses on the “canonical mold” of the superfluous man, Turgenev’s 19th century hero. He traces the lineage of such characters—Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Melville’s Bartleby, contemporary examples. Castellanos Moya’s hero is a variation on the type, and the discussion is interesting: I refer you to the review. Parenthetically, Rush allows that he knows of “no parallel tradition of applying that 19th century coinage to female characters: there is no category of ‘superfluous woman.’”
There is now. And Alameddine chose the title adjective with intimate knowledge of the literary traditions that do or do not contain his protagonist:
Joseph Roth ends Flight Without End with the sentence: ‘No one in the whole world was as superfluous as he.’ I beg to differ. No one in the whole world is as superfluous as I . . . I am the one who has no occupation, no desire, no hope, no ambition, not even any self-love.
Aaliya’s observation in a dark moment is followed by a meditation on writers who committed suicide: Arbus, Hemingway, Plath, Woolf, Borowski… Unlike them, she gets over the urge. For that also, I love her. Her name means “the high one.” She lives in books, is a translator and at odds with the world into which she’s born. Hello, my sister. Taken out of school and married off at sixteen, she observes: “marriage is a most disagreeable institution for an adolescent.”
…epigraphs by Fernando Pessoa in his Alberto Caeiro persona, by Marianne Moore and Franz Kafka. Poem excerpts by Brodsky, Larkin, Rilke…
Her husband divorced her long ago. “Nothing in our marriage became him like leaving it,” she paraphrases. Name that play. Childless, she doesn’t remarry, runs a bookstore, starts translating a new book every January. Like Emily Dickinson, who put her poems in a trunk, Aaliya stacks manuscripts in boxes, fills the spare bedroom to the ceiling. Emily on steroids.
… references to Eudora Welty, Camus, Faulkner, James Baldwin, T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Proust, Alice Munro, Joyce, Primo Levi…
Brodsky disparaged Constance Garnett’s translations of the Russians, but Aaliya thinks it well to remember that before Garnett’s efforts, none of us could read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Yes, she admits, Garnett skipped over words she didn’t know, cut long passages, and worst of all, wrote in the English of her times. “Using Edwardian prose for Dostoyevsky is like adding milk to good tea. Tfeh!”
She meditates on problems in her own work, the conundrums translators love. I’m often plagued by the absence of pronouns in my Spanish to English translations and related readily:
A troublesome issue arises in translating Sebald into Arabic. His style,drawn-out and elongated sentences that wrap around the page and their reader, seems at first glance to be an ideal fit for Arabic, where use of punctuation is less formal. (Translating Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis was a relative breeze.) However, Sebald’s ubiquitous insertion of Jacques Austerlitz’s tongue into the unnamed narrator’s first-person narrative was difficult to convey precisely, since Arabic,like Spanish, drops pronouns more often than English or German. Sebald’s I spoke for at least two people.
Aaliya has not tried to publish her translations. “Translating, not publishing, is what I bet my life on.” She quotes Pessoa:
The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential.
…Walter Benjamin, Javier Marías, Italo Calvino, Virgil, Henry Miller…my rough count of literary references came to 132… Foucault, Conrad, Muriel Spark, Vallejo, Edna O’Brien, Bruno Schulz…paraphrases and quotes without attribution:
Water, water everywhere…
Into the valley of Death/rode the six hundred…
Yo, la peor de todas
I, the worst of women. My translation. “Women” is not in the original.
Many I don’t know: Nooteboom, Karasu, Imru’ al-Qays, al-Mutanabbi, Nadas, Claudio Magris, Samir Kassir, Danilo Kis, Kertész…
Aaliya rode out the war in her Beirut apartment, wonders “what it’s like to live in a reliable country.” When the war ended in 1990, Beirutis didn’t think it would happen again. But “In 2008, the Shiites and Sunnis—a plague o’ both your houses—clashed briefly and violently along these streets.” Shakespeare again. Aaliya thinks “we are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not.” At a time when Israel was bombing Beirut, she confides:
I’m sure you’ve noticed that I dislike Israel, that ridiculous pygmy state dripping with self-overestimation, yet many of the giants I respect are Jewish. There is no contradiction. I identify with outsiders, with the alienated or dispossessed. Like many nation-states, including its sister pygmy state Lebanon, Israel is an abomination.
Israelis are Jews who have misplaced their sense of humor.
Produced by outsiders, great literature is colorblind, gender-proof, able to leap nation-state borders in a single bound. Its creators look past nationality to see humanity, an ability that allows a man like Alameddine to shape this woman who speaks to me, with whom I want to have coffee and swap translation stories. Toward the end she quotes:
I am nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t even wish to be anything.
Aside from that, within me I have all the dreams of the world.
“Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa’s bisexual dandy poet, wrote that. He is welcome in my home anytime,” Aaliya concludes. And she is welcome in mine.
Bruno Schulz!