You’ve translated many works into Arabic, so my first question is: Why translation? Who are you hoping to reach?

Translation, for me, is about learning. Of course we could talk about words as a source of income, but this is something else. I would like to talk about translation and how I approach it. By translating a book, for example from English into Arabic, you learn from it. You help a general readership get access to a different culture and a different experience of reading. I always learn from writers. For example, when I translated Raymond Carver’s work, I was able to understand things from a different perspective. When people talk about Carver’s work, they call his work “dirty realism.” I don’t like that term. He and other writers have opened my eyes to the richness of language. You find some people write fiction with the spirit of poetry. You find people open up to the experience of poetry. When I translate other people into Arabic I have to ask myself how they see their own world.

Writers learn from each other. I remember when I translated Raymond Carver I had a lot of feedback from other short story writers. They said it was helpful even for them to learn more about the art of short story writing. Translation for me is the noblest way to cross borders. What we know about each other comes through the media. Media is concerned with the political, and certain things don’t come through that as it can through short stories. You can gain a deeper understanding of the essence of American culture — what I consider to be creative literature — and can cross borders and get rid of prejudice and see culture through a deep lens of communication. It is a kind of understanding of one another. Translation can be defined as a deeper tool of communication.

What draws you to translate certain works and not others? What was your favorite work to translate?

This is an interesting question. Sometimes when we translate we are controlled by the market. When I was living in Syria I had a friend with a publishing house. I was at the beginning of my life as a writer, and I was studying American and English literature at university. I had access to writers who write in English, and I always like to choose a book that I like. But the question is why do you like the book? It helps you understand reality from a different perspective. Writers always talk about reality from an unfamiliar angle, and it always fascinated me. I always wanted to translate a work that moves in the same direction. I can mention two books that move in this level. One is The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. I translated the book before it became famous, so I can say that I translated it because I like the way it tells stories in a rich and powerful way. I also enjoy a book called Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman. It was written by a scientist who became a novelist. The way the book was written, by a scientific mind, has powerful imagination behind it. The language was amazing and evocative. It’s one of the reasons I choose certain books to talk about. This applies also to another publisher who bought the rights to publish the complete fictions of Raymond Carver. I translated the first book, Cathedral, because it can teach fiction writers to think of the world in unique ways. It can help writers understand the process of fiction and the creative writing that goes into fiction. These are the motives behind my choices of translation.

What do you want to say that you feel can’t be said in any way but through poetry?

For me, poetry is not about what I feel directly. What I feel personally is something personal. When we read something like T. S. Eliot or Mary Oliver we feel that the emotion expressed in the poetry is ours. It means that poetry is not about personal direct emotions but collective emotions. This means, for me, that poetry is a vision. René Char says that poetry is always a search for a word that always needs to be searched for. T. S. Eliot says, “I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust.” He talks about his view of the collapse of civilization. It’s said in a vertical way, not a horizontal way. For me, poetry is not always about the self. It is also about the other. What I want to do in poetry, personally speaking, is to be able to write and explore myself, but within a collective context in an unprecedented way. It is difficult to describe how this may happen. Poetry is about how you use language, the styles you use that no one else is using. It is about the difference in style. Compared to prose and other literary forms, poetry is a form to go beyond the norm and the known. It goes beyond the limits of a certain language. If I can talk about love in a way that no other poet has talked about or make it unfamiliar, then that is what I want to do. It is always a search for the things you are unable to say in normal language or the familiar language. No matter who reads a poem, they will find something personal in it. The personal is always in poetry, because it is your personal way of writing. That is your style. The personal is very important in poetry.

Your poetry is in both Arabic and English. How do both languages compliment or limit your artistic or poetic expression?

I originally write my poems in Arabic. I don’t write my poetry in English. As a writer I only find myself in Arabic. It is the language of my blood. I cannot write poetry in English originally. Language is about culture and the mindset through which you see the world. I see myself in Arabic. I can be more creative in it, not because it is more important than English, but because I was born there, and English is a language I have learned. I learned English because of translation. Sometimes you get a chance to be known in a foreign language, though it is not easy.

I saw that you’ve recently gotten invested in photography. What are you trying to express through photography? Is it another avenue of storytelling for you?

There’s a story about my interest in photography I would like to tell you. In 2013 I was living in Chicago and I was invited by the Italian renowned artist Marco Nereo Rotelli who had an installation at the time called Light and Sound. The idea was to transform the facade of the Field Museum in Chicago into a poetic image of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He invited a number of poets to write poems inspired by the Divine Comedy. I wrote a poem about the Syrian war and the hell it created, and when we met later for dinner, he looked at me and told me that I should take photographs and write poems about them. He talked about the relation between poetry and photography and writing poems inspired by photos. I started trying and I found that I related to photographers. I started looking at the visual world in a different way. Anyone can take a photo now. Anyone can press a button. But that is not photography. To take an artistic photograph there is an inspiration, something I can’t define in realistic terms. I can’t see it in the normal state of walking around. Capturing a good photograph is like writing a poem. It is a fleeting thing that you have to capture. In photography, like poetry, there is inspiration. It’s more technical, but it’s still about inspiration. I believe the most important thing about photography is the eye and how it sees things. I’m working on a photographic project about Chicago. You are a wanderer with your camera, you think of things as a photographer. I’m planning my next exhibition and working on it. On my Facebook, when I post a photo, I also write a poem about it. Photography has helped me in a way move away from trying to rationalize things logically. The photograph has saved me from being trapped under the influence of great literary giants. It helped me see poetry in a different way.

What do you find most inspiring about your current work in progress?

What I find interesting and inspiring is the struggle to achieve it. I’m working on poems right now that I feel needs more work. There’s a feeling of imperfection that motivates you and makes me excited about going back to rewrite. There’s a lot of confusion, but when you work, it starts to make sense. Arabic has a tradition going back more than two thousands of years of poetry being a high status symbol. To have a foothold here, to be regarded as a good poet, is something that happens after a long process. You have to struggle with language, you have to write and rewrite. This process makes the magic of writing, and that’s what I think is interesting about it. Something else, now that I live in the United States and my country is too far, this feeling of distance is also very interesting. It helps me see things in a different light that I was unable to see when I was living in the culture.

What keeps pushing you to create?

It’s the feeling that the great book that I’m dreaming of is not written yet. In a sense, writing is an act of searching for perfection. But writing is always related to imperfection. When you write a poem or a book you ask why because you always have more to find that you haven’t expressed before. What evades me is the perfect book. I look at what I’ve written and I think that it’s not what I want. It creates a justification for the act of writing for me.

Why do you think people should keep trying to tell stories or write poetry?

I like this question a lot, actually, so I’ll tell you a story. A famous Arabic book, Arabian Nights, tells the story of the king Shahryar. The king, after discovering his wife has been unfaithful, kills her, and kills those whom she had been unfaithful with. He starts to hate women because of it, marrying and killing a wife each day until there are no more candidates. The minister in charge of marrying the king has two daughters, one of whom is trying to get the king to stop killing his brides. She devises a scheme and convinces her father to marry her to the king. She crafts a story of something she continuously works on, and the king decides not to kill her because he is interested in what she’s creating. She tells interesting stories, yet always keeps them incomplete. I think this is about the power of telling stories. They can prevent death or delaying it. We should keep telling stories to overcome our fear of the unknown, or to enrich life, or to discover the deep parts of ourselves. We travel through deep parts of ourselves. It is a way of creating deep connections between cultures. Here, also, is the importance of translation as well as telling stories.

Sophia Maas is the 2021 In Process intern. She is preparing for her graduation while carving out the time to help new writers develop self-confidence, create her own stories, and find inspiration in more experienced writers.