I recently read a novel called If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga, and it is one of the best books I have ever read. I’ve been thinking about it every day, and as I was reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay and watching Chip Kidd’s talk, I realized that I have no idea what the cover of If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is supposed to represent. It looks like a sort of Caravaggio-style portrait of a handsome young man in armor, and does not appear to have anything to do with the book (at least, not that I can think of). One of my favorite parts of this book is the vivid characterization, and in my mind, I can see the characters perfectly clearly. I know how they walk, how they sleep, how they comb their hair; I know it based on the words I read. As I was listening to Chip Kidd describe the cover of Murakami’s 1Q84, it occurred to me that I may not want the cover to tell me something about the contents of the book. I want to decide for myself what the book holds, not hold it in comparison to some interpretation I have of the cover art. This reminds me of what Lahiri says, how she wishes her covers could be a still life by Morandi or something of the sort, and I like this idea. I completely recognize, as Lahiri discusses, that books are objects that need to be sold, and therefore, the cover does not serve merely the book but rather the needs of its material value.
I know that my attraction to the abstract and opaque in book covers is reflective of my own taste, and I am not attempting to argue solely for them as opposed to other styles and approaches. Lahiri writes that “A cover that one person cherishes is devoid of meaning to another. What does this mean? I fear that, even in a globalized world, it signals an inability to recognize oneself in the other.” (53) This idea reminds me of the Bellos article, which deals with one of the most unanimously difficult questions of translation: what to do with the ‘foreign’? Is mediating the foreign not at the core of what we, as translators, set out to do? I understand Bellos’ argument that preserving foreign elements in translation relies on the reader’s relative understating of the functionings of the source language, and therefore, for more underrepresented and marginalized languages, the impact of foreignizing can actually do more harm than good, in further ‘othering’ the source language and marginalizing it from the speakers of the target language. There is no easy or correct solution—that is for sure. But I am trying to have a more positive view on this, and think of creative solutions. Bruna Dantas Lobato inspired me when she advocated for “keeping the weirdness” of the source text and language: a goal that can manifest itself in a variety of different outputs. Perhaps it could just be an effort to mirror repeated vowel sounds from the source into the target (something I often try for in Arabic to English). Sure, the reader of the translation likely won’t make the connection that this is mirroring the original Arabic sonics, but at least they are feeling a sort of similar aesthetic experience, even if it is not overt. Isn’t it enough to just let the reader feel something new and different, without them necessarily having to be able to recognize it as a feature of some language?
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