The novel begins with the texts of five letters in each section, a new character finds a previous narrator’s letter by chance in a public place, then mentions it in a new letter of their own. Her most recently published project, Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost, offers an array of voices with which to play. At a certain point, though, she steps back: by the end, “I’ve done my interpretive work and then it’s up to readers to take what they can from the various voices.”

Then she tries to listen for the voice of the writer and characters-what it sounds like to her in Arabic, and what it might sound like in English. Because the Arabic-speaking world spans so many different countries, each with its own cultural history, she often begins by reading at length about the reality represented in a work of fiction, and about its writer’s lifetime. Her research career is prolific-her fourth monograph, on feminism in late-nineteenth-century Egypt, is forthcoming-but translation opens a different kind of creative universe, she says: “Translation is wonderful because somebody else comes up with the plot and the character’s voice, and then I get to play with it.” At the same time, “translation also involves a ton of research to do it right,” she explains. “I love having translation as my art,” Booth remarks from Magdalen College, Oxford, where she is a professor of the contemporary Arab world. (Booth is now at work on a second novel by Alharthi.)

Recently, Booth translated Omani writer Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies, which nimbly narrates a set of unhappy marriages the translation earned praise in The New Yorker from James Wood, professor of the practice of literary criticism: “A beautifully wavering, always mobile set of temporalities, the way starlight seems to flicker.” Celestial Bodies is the first novel by any Omani woman to cross into English, and it won the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. For nearly four decades, she has collaborated with writers from across the Arabic-speaking world to introduce dozens of literary works from cultures that many English-speakers otherwise see represented only by foreign correspondents. Marilyn Booth ’77 is one of the world’s most prolific translators of Arabic fiction into English.

Translate arabic to english voice