Reflections on modern literatures of the Middle East (Interview).

Beard, Michael

In this interview, the distinguished comparatist and translator Michael Beard addresses questions posed by fellow literature scholars: Ferial Ghazoul, Barbara Harlow, Samia Mehrez, Amy Motlagh, Kamran Rastegar, and Doris Shoukri. The issues discussed range from what drew Beard initially to the kind of wide-ranging comparative work on Middle Eastern literatures and languages for which he is now well-known; the disciplinary and institutional obstacles to this kind of research; the reception of Middle Eastern literatures in the contemporary US; the impact of his time in Cairo on his research; the tensions between regional comparatism and the current move towards a "global" or "world" scale in the study of literature; and issues related to translation.

Introduction

Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics approached Michael Beard, a prominent scholar of Middle Eastern and Comparative Literatures, for an interview for this issue. Michael Beard is currently Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Dakota. A graduate of Stanford University, University of California (Berkeley), and Indiana University, he has lived and taught in Iran, Egypt, and Jordan. Beard has written extensively on modern Middle Eastern literatures and co-translated major Arab and Persian poets into English; he is particularly proud of his collaborative work. Since 1993, he has been the Co-Editor (now Associate Editor) of the journal Middle Eastern Literatures (formerly known as Edebiyat) and the Co-Editor of the Middle East Translation Series for Syracuse University Press. He has received the Lois Roth Award for Translation of a Literary Work granted by the Modern Language Association in 2009 for his co-translation with Adnan Haydar of the Syro-Lebanese poet 'Ali Ahmad Sa'id, commonly known as Adonis (Mihyar of Damascus, His Songs). He has also co-translated the poetry of the Iranian poet and film director Abbas Kiarostami and the Persian poet Esmail Khoi. He has published books on Naguib Mahfouz, Sadeq Hedayat, Khalil Hawi, and Eugenio Montale, as well as dozens of articles and chapters in edited books on Middle Eastern literatures (Arabic, Kurdish, Persian, and Turkish) and on European and American Literatures.

This interview was carried out in fall 2014 by asking specialists familiar with the work of Michael Beard to put questions in writing: Ferial Ghazoul is the author of works on the Arabian Nights and on postcolonial and comparative literature; she is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Barbara Harlow has published on gender, resistance, and human rights issues; she is Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Sarnia Mehrez is the author of works on Egyptian literature and culture, Director of the Center of Translation Studies at AUC, and Professor in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Civilizations at AUC. Amy Motlagh has published on gender and Iranian studies and has recently translated The Space Between Us, a novel by the Iranian Armenian author Zoya Pirzad; she is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at AUC. Kamran Rastegar has published books on literary modernity and on cultural memory; his articles analyze Arab, Persian, and Kurdish cinema and literature. He is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Culture in the Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literatures at Tufts University. Doris Shoukri is the author of works on medieval literature, high modernism, and French Literature; she is Professor Emerita in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at AUC.

Interview

Ferial Ghazoul: You are a prominent scholar in the field of Middle Eastern Literatures--having written on, and/or translated Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Kurdish works--but your beginnings as undergraduate at Stanford University followed by graduate studies for your MA at the University of California (Berkeley) were in English literature. How did this shift from a concentration on a western literature (English) to comparative literature with a focus on Middle Eastern Literatures come about? What attracted you to this region and its diverse literatures?

Michael Beard: Accident is the leitmotif. I regretted that my undergraduate education never gave me the opportunity to concentrate on language as I would have liked. I studied Latin. I studied Greek. I studied Italian. I used my high-school French every chance I could. But, except for six months in Italy, I never had a chance to immerse. After two years in the MA program at Berkeley, my wife Victoria and I signed up for the Peace Corps.

There are two digressions I might have gone into here. One has to do with hearing Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps, speak during my freshman year at Stanford--a lecture I almost didn't go to. The idea of the Peace Corps, once in my head, never quite went away. The other has to do with the Vietnam War. I didn't want to be drafted, and at that time if you remained in school, you were likely to be passed over. Had I been drafted--I'm a coward, I wouldn't have had the courage to resist--I would have gone. Being a student or being a Peace Corps volunteer was usually a way to postpone being drafted. (This was before the days of a volunteer army.) I would probably have joined the Peace Corps in any event, but the Vietnam War determined a distinct attitude towards the experience. I didn't think of myself as representing a nation, or as representing myself either. Representing a culture, maybe.

The Peace Corps sent us to Iran. This was 1968: I had no previous interest in the region, even the opposite of interest, a half acknowledged conviction that it would be dull, irrelevant, outside history. The inevitable happened. I did not enjoy teaching first-year English to four classes of fifty students or so, packed into a room for twenty, but the culture I breathed in was like another air. And I finally had the experience of immersion in a language, that experience of risk, of feeling more real.

In Iran, I knew enough to understand how useful it would be to memorize poetry as I was learning conversation; Iranians know poetry and appreciated anyone who wanted to learn it. It was a way to show I respected the language beyond its instrumental use. At the end of the two years in Iran, I felt a mastery (of the culture and language) which, back in the US, I gradually realized was an illusion. I've been trying to compensate for my lapses of information and taste ever since.

When, in 1970, I began to study comparative literature at Indiana University, I thought I might study Central Asia. I was haunted by the memory of a brief encounter with a Turkmen traditional musician. The summer of 1969 we traveled in Northern Iran taping folk musicians. It is a very good way to travel. You meet the most interesting people, and sometimes they have breathtaking skills. A recently settled Turkmen population lived in Gorgan: We spent a lot of time with them. One afternoon, shortly before we left, we spent an afternoon in a little village along the Caspian shore with a Turkmen musician introduced to us as a bakhshi, a musician whose learning is considered a repository of the tribal idenity. (Later someone told us "there aren't any more bakhshis.") Among his songs, a few were unusually haunting. Months later, with the help of an Azeri friend, I ended up with a transcription and a translation. (Azeri and Turkmen aren't always mutually intelligible, but once written down, you could piece together the lyrics of a folk song.) A few years later, I felt I could put together an English version of one of those poems that wouldn't embarrass me.

I envy musicologists, by the way. A student of literature may find that musicologists know everything we know and music in addition. IU would have been a good place to study the languages of Central Asia and study musicology. It would have meant pretty nearly starting from scratch, and I didn't have the energy. Besides, Persian got more and more interesting. That's not an accident so much as a decision to go with what I knew.

Doris Shoukri: You spent four years teaching in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo (1974-1978) before you moved to the Department of English at the University of North Dakota. How do you compare your experiences in these two different departments and how did the Cairene years impact your trajectory as a literary scholar?

Michael Beard: I can't really disentangle what I learned about Arabic literature during those four years in Cairo, unofficially, from my teaching experience.

The students I watched grow in Cairo were like an exclusive club. It was a small department. I would teach the same students from year to year, and I came to know them very well. Most of them were from backgrounds which allowed them experiences and languages (sometimes French, sometimes German, colloquial Arabic, often classical Arabic) which made them tutors for me. They wore this knowledge unpretentiously, and most of them really, really cared about literature. I felt part of a coterie which had been devised to educate me--a conspiracy to humanize my academic identity. I had the feeling of being privileged, of being exactly where I should be.

AUC also allowed me to be a generalist. This meant more to me than it might to someone else. My MA was in English; my doctorate focused particularly on French and Persian. I wanted to find a way to fill in the disparate parts of my education.

Students at the University of North Dakota were at one time nearly all from very small towns. They brought with them distinct values as students. The stereotype of the hard-working farm kid wasn't so far off reality--the student who came without prior experience in literature or high culture, but who was willing to do the work and to learn. Out-of-state students are now more the norm--with a more urban style and perhaps a conviction that they know more than they do. (We're potentially a more diverse community, but the native American community has unfortunately not had a visible role in the university awareness of itself. Until recently, our sports teams were "the fighting Sioux," but by and large that's not the way the indigenous community wants to be memorialized.) If your interest is in the Middle East, one big advantage of the prairie is that students are unlikely to have any prior opinions about the big feuds of urban universities. You feel the freedom to deal with the sensitive subjects without that anticipation of classroom resistance. I feel the freedom to do any kind of research I wish.

Cairo was a place where I had a lesson in language and culture just walking to work; the advantages of Grand Forks are more austere. One thought fills immensity.

Barbara Harlow: For some four decades now, since before Edward Said's Orientalism even, you have been reading, translating, and writing about Middle Eastern literatures, in particular Persian, but with a keen critical and professional sense of the changing curricular discussions in comparative literary study and "world literature." How would you estimate those changing circumstances and their effects on the critical approaches to--and reception of--Middle Eastern literatures, both within the academy and from a general readership?

Michael Beard: What they say about a lobster who doesn't feel the water heating to a boil, if the temperature rises slowly enough, may be true of me. I'm not always aware that anything is changing until I look across those forty years. My answers are anecdotal. For some reason, I've never really stood back to think about my relationship to changes in curricular dialogue. I have a habit of attempting to forget the last project in order to get to the next.

I can testify that the analysis of contemporary Iranian writers in the 1970s treated the available novels and short stories as if they were written in Europe. (This was a tactic for taking them seriously.) Contemporary Persian poets, with the extraordinary exception of Forugh Farrokhzad, just didn't exist for us. Something like this situation existed for Arabic and Turkish. (From Arabic you could find Trevor Le Gassick's translation of Midaq Alley and from Turkish Edouard Roditi's translation of Yashar Kemal's Memed, My Hawk. For Persian it was The Blind Owl. Every literature had its token.) A student of one of these cultures might argue back then that their specialization should be mainstreamed, but I doubted we were ever going to see Mahfouz or Yashar Kemal in an undergraduate curriculum. I also suspected that we liked being marginalized because it gave us more power as guardians of an exotic knowledge. We could feel we owned our topic.

The Iranian revolution and 9/11 were of course the turning points, and both evoked changes in pedagogy. We, students of the Middle East, inevitably became advocates. More translations, more commentary. Edward Said's Orientalism was not a response to the Iranian revolution (though Covering Islam was). Orientalism might as well have been, since readers had no choice but to have Iran in mind as background.

I'm glad you included the term "general readership," because as academics we quite rightly spend a lot of time speaking outside the discipline. From the beginning, the major part of my teaching was survey courses. Those courses shaped me. For some reason, though, I never felt comfortable teaching Middle Eastern cultures to uninitiated students. Perhaps I felt a kind of bad faith being the single spokesperson for a whole universe of literary values, history, religion, whatever. Perhaps I felt too emotional about them. Still, there are rewards. It has been rewarding to have veterans returned from Afghanistan or Iraq taking one of my courses on Middle Eastern themes. "I wish I'd known this before I went." Rewarding, but a little late.

I should think that PMLA and the editors of the world literature anthologies have made admirable, often successful, attempts to widen their vision. (Possible downside: The Norton Anthology--with selections from Dream of the Red Chamber, Tamil lyrics, and a Vietnamese epic: The Tale of Kieu--is too big. You can't fit more than a handful of those selections into a semester. The books have become expensive--also, literally, too big. The print and margins have shrunk and the students have to carry a big unwieldy paper brick to class.)

Barbara Harlow: Perhaps as a follow-up question of sorts, but with particular reference to our current geopolitical context, what--if any--impact do you think the US foreign policies have had--and continue to have--on developments within the field? To what extent, that is, are research agendas, international study, curricula, etc. influenced by governmental priorities? In other words, if you will, what connections (negative and/or positive) might be found between the "state of the discipline" and the "Department of State"?

Michael Beard: Again, I find myself thinking in anecdotal terms. For most of my days as a student (undergraduate to doctoral program), it was Vietnam. It's hard to remember now because the history of the war has been cynically rewritten, but the war was down there, underlying every other discourse. The government motivation was transparent enough - the obvious anti-communist anxiety. (They took responsibility for it, proudly.) For me, the Vietnam war provided a paradigm applicable to the rest of the world. Global disorder meant one Vietnam after another. The variant of this was the career of the Shah in Iran, just one more dictator put in place by our people. Iran was for us a miniature Vietnam, organized around similar anxieties (fear of an Iranian left) and economic interests. Seeing it this way made things transparent, visible. We could see what the issues were and how people were motivated. Teaching Middle Eastern cultures, no matter which political positions we took, was teaching something visible. Academic responses to the 1967 and 1973 wars seemed, to me at least, of the same type. The journal Edebiyat represented the positive side of that mentality. The literature, we felt, explained itself. Just make the material available and the rest would follow.

9/11 initiated another scenario altogether for people like us who wanted to make the cultures of the Middle East, and their humanity, visible. The stakes were higher, and the very possibilities of vision had changed. A period began in which everything seemed mysterious. Motivations were less clear. (The war in Vietnam was wrong, but it wasn't irrational.) 9/11 faced us with cultural patterns that no one could understand. The act was not just violent but insane. Our reactions to it were also beyond accounting for. The need arose to teach not just the cultures but our own built-in anticipations of them, and meanwhile, too many Americans thought they understood it fine. (Honest students sometimes say they are studying the Arab world to understand where their assumptions came from.)

The feeling has never left me that we can't be completely aware of the relationship between government policies and the academic world because so much of government decision-making is invisible. We see the results (unintended consequences so perverse words fail us), we know our government and our proud ethnocentrism set the opposition in motion, but we didn't anticipate the forms it would take. (I see the outcome of invading Iraq as easier to interpret. That's a series of disasters we should have seen coming.)

Government money has from time to time been well spent. It would complicate things, if I were to discuss the influence of the G. I. Bill and the tone set by the generation who received it, or the Fulbright program. I have to thank the Peace Corps for what it taught me and allowed me to leam (more, I fear, than my Iranian students learned from me).

Doris Shoukri: There is interest these days in world literature and in globalization. How is this to be practiced in the classroom or implemented in one's research? To me, as you may know, I feel that each scholar in his own specialty is contributing to global studies, but to assume that any one person can undertake to be a "globalist" is to guarantee a failure of specialized studies. Even if one knows four or five languages and is well read in their literatures, I should in deference to academic modesty not consider him a "globalist." Do you see a conflict between specialization and globalization?

Michael Beard: If you know one thing well, your intuitions of writers beyond your specialty are likely to be more trustworthy. When I began teaching at the University of North Dakota, I used to describe myself as a generalist. It seemed a reasonable way to explain that I didn't have a specialty in any specific topic, at least not one that might help them (though I had certainly studied modernism in some depth). I didn't prefer a specific period. I ended up teaching survey courses that spanned historical periods and cultures, and I never regretted it.

I like the term "thinking globally" (the image of roundness appeals to me), but in its noun form, "globalist," "global" doesn't mean much. Perhaps "globalism" is an aspiration rather than a possible field of expertise.

David Damrosch's suggestion that world literature is "not a set canon of texts, but a mode of reading" (I'm citing his What is World Literature 297) may be as far as we can get. I suppose when I say "as far as we can get," I'm performing that illegitimate act which reifies our own historical moment as the last word. Maybe we should consider the future just one more of those cultures whose books we will never read.

I don't like the word "postmodern" much, but this may be a postmodern issue. The notion that each scholar contributes one puzzle piece to a collective vista which might cover all possible fields is an admirable collective enterprise which might eventually cover all the cultures we want to study, but where would we position ourselves to read it? It might be a Borgesian case of sensory overload, like the dilemma of the Norton Anthology of World Literature projected on a screen too wide to take in.

Still, maybe we should try. In the Comparative Literature department at Indiana University (where I studied from 1970 to 1974, after coming back from the Peace Corps), we were not yet interested in methodologies that allowed big synoptic visions, or at least they weren't in the curriculum. We were expected to study more than one cultural tradition in depth and find ways to make them confront one another. In our coursework, we were encouraged (sometimes required) to expand our experience of literatures beyond what we could ever know in depth. So "comparative" in my education meant a comparison between specific topics and the hope that one isolated case would sensitize us to the next.

Franco Moretti may be the brand name of our moment in history. I've barely started reading him; I won't stop. His insistence on the importance of translations is self-evident but still carries some shock value. (It suggests that there is a legitimate knowledge we learn without attending to the word-by-word style of the individual work.) His book The Atlas of the European Novel sketches a form of globalism which may overtake the discipline. His overview of the genre takes the form of an aerial view based on maps, literal maps of the writers and events of novels. Damrosch calls it the world systems approach and cites one of my favorite books, an earlier formulation of an aerial view, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. From time to time, I've run into students whose specialty is called scientific computing or computational science. If I understand it correctly, it is the study of big systems --something like statistics expanded to quantify increasingly complicated collective phenomena (like linguistics related to the study of an individual language, public health to medical school, studying imbalances of power in general as an underpinning to activism in a particular issue). The examples I've heard apply to traffic patterns, distribution of goods or weather. Moretti's maps make you wonder how close quantifying systems could come to humanistic ones. You hear of projects that came out of the University of Venice in the 1990s, studying word frequency in Persian classical poets, and wonder how far that really is from Quintilian's Institutio oratoria or George Puttenham's Art of English Poesie, which simply quantify literary style.

I don't know if it is scandalous or not to feel that there are human universals, but I think the hope to articulate a few is another one of those impossible aspirations we might want to take seriously.

Kamran Rastegar: Reflecting on changes in the field of comparative literature, how do you see the attempts of new movements (e.g. world literature) to reconfigure the global hierarchies that have long defined Western and non-Western literatures? In your view, do these articulate structural changes to these hierarchies, or are they simply window dressing (or something in between)?

Michael Beard: It's a troubling question for me, because it forces me to ask whether a fundamental aspiration in the field is likely to succeed. It even forces me to ask whether our aspirations are possible.

In one respect, we have been successful already because even people who deny the importance (or existence) of global hierarchies need to use our terminology to make their argument. (It's like the power conservative forces in the US have found when they set the terms of the argument. The obvious example of demonizing Obama; if you deny it, you acknowledge it as a real position rather than an absurd one. I don't think I need to describe this.) Once the word "orientalism" is out there, for instance, whether it is misused or not (and goodness, hasn't it been abused and over-simplified!), there is no option for an opponent but to take it into account.

A comparable success is that the new movements have allowed into the curriculum material conditions that were missing from my education: for proverbs, folk literature and common discourse, how they are disseminated and utilized; for literature proper, how a particular book was funded, accepted, bound and printed, how many copies were sold, who the readers were, who paid the bills and how that patronage shapes both ideologies and conscious commitments. I have experienced an aesthetic power in those studies.

Comparative literature has been resticted to privileged institutions. I'm not sure how we could change that.

On the other hand, we need to acknowledge that even utter success in the process of reconfiguration would simply prepare a space for further reading. Reading more clearly would still require something to read. Aesthetics, formalist aesthetics, wouldn't disappear and might come back with more force than ever.

Kamran Rastegar: If you were directing a large humanities research fund, what priorities would you put forward to innovate in the field of comparative literature? Put otherwise, what institutional means would you develop to meet the challenges that literary studies face to become more "worldly" as well as to address the charge that they are not relevant? Michael Beard: I like this question because it allows me to fantasize, to imagine how far ideal funding might bring us towards an ideal institutional structure. (I think it was Northrop Frye who said, perhaps in the book on Blake, that if we can't imagine our own personal version of utopia, we can't really understand our own less ambitious, practical desires.)

One front is to ask where the students come from. Often, it is a language program which draws them in. Language programs have the advantage that they appeal to students whose primary interests are politics, anthropology, history, or international relations. We see them entering our literature programs because they discover an unanticipated interest in literature--or they discover that understanding literature helps them understand the other disciplines. Money which supports language programs is an obvious first step, or money to support students who come to us with a language already in their arsenal.

Another front is harder to define. How could funding increase the possibility that a student of comparative literature might aim for something other than an academic career?

There is a longer answer which I can only sketch. Wlad Godzich, when he taught at the University of Minnesota, told me a fascinating story about the tactic he used to get tight-fisted businesses to donate to their comparative literature program. He would tell anecdotes about courses where he had his students do a particular sort of problem-solving that other disciplines wouldn't allow. The implication was that studying literature could give you a flexibility of mind that was useful in business or the sciences. I think I'm restating what I said above, that with money allowing departments more leeway to cross disciplinary boundaries, even if it meant simply money that freed the faculty to teach courses to explore the spaces between disciplines, we might discover for ourselves what links there are between literature and the social sciences, statistics, economics, physics, mathematics, and design.

How much money are we talking about? Do we have enough left over to plan a massive library of epic size, with open stacks suitable for browsing, full of physical books? It should be much more beautiful than it has to be.

Samia Mehrez: You have collaborated with others on more than one occasion to translate works from Arabic and Persian into English. Could you tell us about this process of collaborative translation? What were your respective roles in the process? To what extent do you perceive translation as an act of collaboration?

Mlichael Beard: There are anxieties which disappear when you translate with a friend. The two of you circle each line of poetry; you minimize blind spots. It can be the occasion for the kind of dialogue you aim for and reach in a classroom only rarely, probably never. We have always worked on poems I could never have translated alone. I'm usually the amanuensis; a standard first move is for me to say "here's what it looks like to me" and ask "am I reading this right?" Characteristically, the answer is "No!"; there is a nuance I didn't catch, or a contextual oversight, not infrequently a word I didn't understand. My advantage is that there are things an outsider sees, because for me, as an outsider, the language is less transparent. (I am certain to hear echoes of an earlier word which occurred elsewhere in the poem, occasions when a difficult turn of phrase is difficult for a strategic reason.) I can't help but read very, very closely.

Above all, you try to determine what makes it a poem. If you have found that, you know what you are aiming for in English. You know what you're aiming at. There's no guarantee the translation will have the same effect--it probably won't--but you can make the reader think "I can see why that was effective in the original."

There is an article I never published, but have delivered as a lecture, about a four-line poem by Adonis that Adnan Haydar and I attempted to translate and gave up on. We included a version of it in the program for an Italian documentary about Adonis (Certezza dell'ombra, 2011), but what we came up with was a paraphrase, not a translation the way we understood a translation. It just told what the words meant, capturing a few nuances. To my mind, it didn't capture what made it a poem.

I've co-translated two collections of short poems by film director Abbas Kiarostami, both of which were acts of friendship. One was a collaboration with my friend Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak. One was with someone I never met in person, the Iranian scholar and public intellectual Karim Emami. It's a testimonial how close you can get to a friend via e-mail. He died while the book was going to press and the translation became a kind of memorial.

Samia Mehrez: In your translated works, do you strive for fluency and transparency in the target language or do you seek to foreignize your text? Could you comment on your choice with examples from the texts? Michael Beard: My own first impulse is always to domesticate, to make the text (usually a poem) sound like something one might actually say in English, or rather to find a register in English--not my voice--in which such a poem could be spoken.

When you speak or when you write, and for me this includes translation, you don't really know where the words come from. After the fact, it becomes possible to say what the translation principle was, but not while the words are emerging unbidden. At times I have realized in retrospect that one translation is more faithful to smaller units, another more faithful to broader ones, or to references outside the poem.

My subjective feeling is that the poem carries in it something that tells you how it wants to be translated. Moments of foreignizing sometimes seem inevitable. The title of Adonis's Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi simply had to be "Mihyar of Damascus, His Songs." The conceit that the poems are by a (fictional) poet from an unspecified antiquity (not exactly Mihyar al-Daylami who died in 1037) allowed us to use an archaic English elocution and to avoid a double possessive. (The idafa [genitive] form in Arabic, like its counterpart in Persian, is always a dilemma in English because English has such little tolerance for too many "of's.) But first, the words felt right together.

Sometimes the foreignizing is minimal. In a short story ("Brother's New Family") by the Iranian writer Mahshid Amirshahy, in Persian, a character says to another "You're yellow as turmeric." I remarked to a friend that I was translating it, and that I thought I would render it "You're pale as a ghost" or "You're white as a sheet." My friend (my mentor from way back, Robin Magowan) remarked that anyone reading it in English would understand "yellow as turmeric" without any explanation, and that one reason a person reads a translation is to have a sense of how people talk. I took his advice, and have always scanned since then for ways in which small turns of speech can survive the transition to English. Northrop Frye makes a similar point somewhere, that a key word (like virtu in Machiavelli's Prince) often works better untranslated. The reader gets it from context and understands that it is a key word.

Presumably there is an opposite of the foreignized elements in a translation: phrases which are domesticated, familiar to the reader. (The famous example is Scott-Montcrieff s title for Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu: "Remembrances of things past." It isn't right exactly but it does feel familiar, whether or not we remember it is from Shakespeare's sonnet 30: "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrances of things past ..." Somewhere in the translation of Hawi's Naked in Exile is a line from Shakespeare which matched the meaning and felt right. I can't remember where it is.

Your question makes me aware that I think of translation primarily as a series of individual choices, a process seen from inside, rather than general principles. And I have seen a lot of translation. Most of what I teach is translated. I make a point of checking the original language, even if I don't know it very well. (You can do this even with a language you don't know at all, like the multiple languages you find reading Gilgamesh. The first volume of James B. Pritchard's The Ancient Near East translates the fragments of the tablets which are our only source, showing which passages are from what fragments and in what languages they were written--Akkadian, Sumerian, whatever--and where the lacunae are. All over. You show a few pages to the class and let them go back to whatever translation is in the anthology that year.) I still am not sure what it is that makes one translation feel, for me, authentic and others self-indulgent or simply mistaken. I can say that Robert Lowell's translations of Baudelaire or Burton Raffel's of Horace are less translations than pathetic sources of innocent fun for the reader with a sense of humor--not great ways to introduce either poet. Even the poems Aijaz Ahmad elicited from major American poets, each of whom translated the great Urdu poet Ghalib (from Ahmad's prose versions), are painful for me to read. Conversely, why do I feel licensed to tell a class that Robert Adams' Candide or Richard Wilbur's Baudelaire are trustworthy?

Samia Mehrez: What determines your choice of texts to be translated? Could you comment on some of the choices you have made? What are some of the problems you have encountered in translating poetry versus those you may have had in translating prose? Could you give examples and comment on the ways you sought to resolve these issues?

Michael Beard: I very rarely choose a text. They fall into my hands by accident and I choose them in the sense that I say "Let's go with this accident rather than another." Khalil Hawi had been a teacher of my collaborator Adnan Haydar. Adnan showed me the Naked in Exile poems and we tried translating a few lines. The experiment was fun and we just kept going. The poems have a stylistic intensity. They come across as muscular; it was fascinating just to devise English equivalents whose point was to be similarly vivid. (I was an English major at a time when the stylistic extravagance of the 17th-century poets we call "metaphysical" was the dominant taste.) The translated phrases often fell into patterns that fit early into standard English meters. I felt there was an English equivalent more or less, and that (though I have no desire to be a poet) it could seem to fill a gap in the English canon, or to sound as if it did.

The Iranian writer Mahshid Amirshahy's short stories were for me another accident. A mutual friend got us in touch: We were corresponding about other things, she sent copies of her books, and a story caught my eye that was so funny it gave me the desire to imitate it. The speaker was a precocious pre-teen named Suri, growing up in a privileged Tehran family. (I didn't in fact know such families, but I knew the turns of speech that characterized her.) I felt a desire in me to be funny in the same way. Later, I realized that Mahshid had written other stories also narrated by Suri, and I translated I think three of them. Later, someone else translated the complete set of Suri stories in a single collection, and I regretted not having been faster. I would have liked to assemble that book in my own version of Suri's voice.

In the 1980s, Grand Forks was host to a lot of refugee communities. I came to know a lot of Kurds whose persistence in maintaining their national identity, in the face of what seemed impossible odds, astounded me. One older member of the community (younger than I am now) had written a series of patriotic poems in Kurdish. When he showed them to me, I realized what fierce will was in them, and how accessible they were linguistically; Sorani Kurdish was not unlike Persian. Having him as a friend, seeing the poems, hanging out with him in the student union--all these accidents made it inevitable we would put together a collection with an English component. I wonder if any copies still exist. "Look through the crosshairs of these poems": The title certainly suggested poetry with material power. At that time, they seemed the voice of a lost cause. My connection with them was an accident at the time. I just noticed that three sentences back I used the words "accident" and "inevitable" in one sentence.

For me, the default position in a translation is to domesticate, to make the translation sound like sayable English. There is a category of domestication which may be extreme, but which I like particularly. Translating a poem entitled "Walt Whitman's Funeral" by the Egyptian poet 'Abd al-Mun'im Ramadan Ahmad, for "Words without Borders," I added a word:

   So finally, atop the fender of a tank,
   lounges Walt Whitman.
   Finally he observes the streets of Baghdad.
   He sees above him birds of paper.

I don't have the Arabic text at hand, but Whitman simply "leaned against" that fender: "lounges" was from a poem of Whitman.

I learned from translating Mahshid that I translate very slowly, and I regret it. It is one reason I like collaboration so much, because it guarantees I'll keep to schedule. (Happily I have always worked with collaborators who are more efficient than I am.)

The choice of Adonis was not an accident. I had been fascinated by him since I first began studying Arabic, at Indiana University. He exerted that same fascination I find in other modernists whose difficulty is conceptual and whose syntax is easily accessible (Montale in Italian, Wallace Stevens in English, Kiarostami in Persian). If Hawi was a poet who comes at you very fast, Adonis's lyrics are like a Calder mobile, a collection of well-worn shapes that circle slowly in the breeze. You read them slowly, with the trust that there will come an unanticipated click. Adnan and I worked on them for more than ten years before we had the opportunity (at a research center) to work on them full time.

Translating poetry is, strictly speaking, more difficult than prose because the stakes are higher, but I'm drawn to poetry because it produces one of the few occasions when I feel enforced leisure. I think the prose translations I most enjoyed were the Suri stories of Mahshid Amirshahy because they demanded close attention, and because they were funny. The demands of humor are, to my perception, very like the demands of poetry. I loved finding witticisms in English that could be counterparts for their equivalents in Persian; I loved going back over them and making them consistent with the way she might talk; I loved rereading to make the rhythms of speech sound possible to speak. (Prose rhythm is sometimes all I care about.) Another kind of difficulty comparable to poetry was in a beautiful, impossibly dense, and sometimes funny review article I translated anonymously, from the Italian of Gianpiero Bellingeri (Edebiyat n.s. [new series] 9.2, 1998). It took me so long I had to delay it from one issue to the next.

I should add how much I admire translators who take on projects requiring more staying power. I should list a few I consider role models. Jawid Mojaddedi's ongoing translation of Rumi's Masnavi (Mathnawi) has an understated, sneaky eloquence you notice only gradually. Julie Meisami's translation of Nizami's Haft Paykar carries off 269 pages of tetrameter couplets which never lose control of the rhythm. I'd add Kamran Rastegar's much-needed translation of Dowlatabadi's Missing Soluch.

One of the sources of satisfaction in co-editing a translation series is discovering role models. To cite another recent one, Samah Selim's translation of a charming historical romance, Jurji Zaydan's 1914 Tree of Pearls, Queen of Egypt, managed somehow to suggest the style of the period without resorting to antiquarian diction, simply by period syntax and formal prose rhythms.

Kamran Rastegar: If you were to choose a single work, from any language, that has not been translated to English for translation and publication, what would it be and why? As a follow up, are there any texts from any language that have personally affected your thinking that are in your view essentially untranslatable?

Michael Beard: No question. Sadeq Hedayat's Tup-e morvari, "The Pearl Cannon." And not just because I never finished reading it. (Should I be using this forum for confessions?) You Persianists will know that it was written shortly before his suicide (1951), and that it's an uncontrolled, troubling book, with something offensive for every reader, as wild and undisciplined as The Blind Owl is controlled and precise.

It's good that Bakhtin popularized the term "camivalization," since without that term we would be even more disoriented. A voice like a village storyteller starts telling a story about a cannon (it's real) which played a part in history. He tells the history through a fantasy account of colonization. Something in it reminds me of Rabelais, or perhaps Naked Lunch or Finnegans Wake.

My frequent collaborator Adnan Haydar and I looked at Adonis's Al-Kitab when it first came out, and declared it untranslatable. We meant something very specific, that an English version may be impossible which made visible why it was a poem. Al-Ma'arri's Luzum ma la yalzam may be the great example. The footnotes would overwhelm the book, but still they might have their own aesthetic beauty. Al-Kitab, with the right apparatus, might be a beautiful project. But the right apparatus would be a big order.

I think a lot about translatability. We could all make our lists. I would have thought al-Hariri's Maqamat untranslatable, but there's a translation from the 19th century (1867--I looked it up) by Thomas Chenery which tells the readers a lot of what we want to know. If the notes have to pile up to take up half the page or more, there are times I want to read just such a book. Any Urdu, Turkish, or Persian ghazal is a dilemma, if only because the constraints of the form are so forbidding. And yet every difficult text has a way to be approached. There's a French translation of passages from Finnegans Wake. It's remarkable. Joyce helped with part of it. If George Perec's Disparition, the novel in which the letter E does not occur, can be translated into English (freely and sensitively, by Gilbert Adair), also without an E, who knows what is possible. (The title was Avoid.)

Ferial Ghazoul: Your contribution to Arabic literary studies through critical essays and translations cover classical and modern literature (Abu Nuwas as well as Adonis and Khalil Hawi). Your scholarly output covers canonical authors as well as rebellious poets (Naguib Mahfouz as well as Sargon Boulos and Muzaffar alNawwab). By extending yourself this way, are you trying to capture the diversity of literary discourse in Arabic --that is, the traditional and the modern; the mainstream and the marginal? Or do you see modernity in Abu Nuwas and classical echoes in Adonis and Hawi; rebelliousness in Mahfouz as well as subaltern canonization of Boulos and al-Nawwab?

Michael Beard: I'm glad you noticed this. I feel less anxiety dealing with a 20th-century writer, in part because my most extensive scholarship has dealt with an Iranian modernist, in part because I feel I have contextual resources to understand contemporary writing which I do not have when I read a classical figure. (Modernism, I suspect, requires a generalist.) Sometimes, too, I choose to go outside what I feel I know just to see if I can.

As for canonical versus counter-cultural writers, it is for me a profound question. I'm not always sure I can differentiate which of the two appeals to me. Muzaffar al-Nawwab is a good example. When I heard there was a poet out there who at that time couldn't be published anywhere in the Arab world, who was known only in pirated tape cassettes, I knew I'd have to learn more. Al-Nawwab was a marginal figure, but there are many ways to be marginal. In his case, it was as if he were too powerful to be anything but marginal. The poetry was obscene and uncompromising: This could have been true of indifferent poetry, too, but in his case it was rhetorically elegant and moving.

This is probably the moment to say something about taste. I don't know as well as I should where I distinguish between my tastes and my judgments. Kant's distinction between the two is no longer viable to most of us, but we are doomed to strive to feel we are not simply validating our own private desires. Part of aesthetics is attempting to trace back where our opinions come from. I often tell students that we start with subjective responses; if we are honest, we then try to figure out where they come from. I am not above that irrational jealousy where one resents another person with the same interests. ("I want to own that subject.") I think I have avoided that phenomenon where we like a thing because we think we ought to.

Ferial Ghazoul: You have taught James Joyce, published a monograph on Eugenio Monatale, and translated philosophically inclined poets such as Abbas Kiarostami and Fuad Rifqa. How can you possibly move from interest in the profundity of these giant authors to a study of Disney comics as you did in your essay "Passage to Duckburg"?

Michael Beard: The adage is that there is no accounting for taste. We might add that there is no accounting for our own taste. Sometimes I think I know what drew me to Joyce, or later to Wallace Stevens, or in Persian what drew me to the 17th/18th-century poet Bidel, whom I know less well but can't put down once I pick him up.

I find myself still shaped by the enthusiasms which defined me as a kid. This means discovering the Dr. Doolittle series at the children's library, hearing Little Richard for the first time, buying Walt Disney comics at the pharmacy. The easy answer is that I'm fascinated to ask what appealed to me then. Another would be to argue that they were in themselves legitimate art. A harder answer would explain why, in general, popular culture started to gain influence in academic studies.

The essay on Disney comics was an attempt not to write academically, but also an attempt to avoid simply validating my own interests. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart had just written an attack on the Disney comics as apologists for imperialism; they had a point, but I wanted to explore why I still liked them so much, why particular moments in them were resistant to moral judgment.

I think it was E. R. Curtius who suggested that Aristotle and Longinus were the two options for a critic. Maybe I was discovering that for me Longinus was the man.

I was once cornered by a very observant class (this was in Grand Forks) to say what literature was. No one had tried to define it for them, I suspect, certainly not me. I had thought about the question on my own from time to time, but, as with translation, I knew it only as a series of unconnected judgments. (For some reason, I like book X, not book Y.) I scrambled through my resources and found two answers. Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces speaks of moments when he thought "This is really happening." One of Blake's proverbs in Hell (in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell") is "Exuberance is beauty." It wouldn't do for a proper theory of aesthetics, but they're what I ended up with.

Amy Motlagh: Your first book, Sadeq Hedayat's The Blind Owl as a Western Novel, is a landmark in literary criticism and remains one of the most nuanced investigations of the complicated relationship between Persian literature and its Western interlocutors. In this work, you primarily consider Hedayat in terms of Western influences, an idea which you later revisit in an article entitled "Influence as Debt: The Blind Owl in the Literary Marketplace." How has your thinking about the relationship between different literary traditions--particularly between ones where a "debt" of influence is perceived--changed over time?

Michael Beard: Traditionally, the first response to this kind of question is to suggest that your thinking hasn't changed at all. That's my first instinct anyway. In truth, I still agree with the individual details of the argument in that book, but I'm also more aware of what I took for granted: unstated assumptions or unanticipated implications in my argument. I considered myself at that time a feminist in the style of Margot Norris or Jane Gallop. (I considered my psychoanalytic interest to be feminist. It almost certainly doesn't seem that way now.) I knew national identity was an issue, but not that it would become a bigger one. I knew that "influence" was a problematic term, but I didn't pursue it.

While I was writing "Influence as Debt" thirteen years after the book, it became increasingly clear to me that we simply don't have a good vocabulary to discuss the processes we want to understand. "Influence" has all sorts of semantic baggage. It implies cause and effect (one entity influences another). But the question is a serious one (even after Bakhtin's citationality): Who is the agent--the predecessor or the one who "chooses," "borrows," "alters," or improves what is borrowed. (And why do we say "borrowed" instead of simply "taken" or "appropriated"? Neither term, "borrowing" or "appropriation," acknowledges that the predecessor hasn't lost anything.) Then there's the desire to make the etymology relevant: something flows into something else; there's that term "influenza." None of it seems to describe what I see. Is influence always marked by resemblance? Harold Bloom's brilliant and pretentious, beautiful and self-serving redefinition suggests that a writer denies the influences which matter most. This, in turn, means that influence is evidenced by absences: The interpreter who spots the unstated influence is the hero of the piece. When we raise the stakes by making influence a collective issue of influences between cultures, it doesn't become more complex; it becomes simpler, and this to me is a bigger problem. Certainly one culture can overwhelm another; you can see it, but it's too big to quantify or even to see properly.

It has become much clearer to me that the two entities, influence from outside and influence from inside (The Blind Owl as a Western novel or an Iranian one), aren't symmetrical. Only one "influence" can be made visible in a meaningful way. They are not commensurate phenomena. A reader would certainly say that Amos Tuotola's Palm-Wine Drunkard is less a Western novel than Achebe's Things Fall Apart, but is one more Nigerian than the other?

Amy Motlagh: In recent years, I understand that you have begun to learn Chinese--a language and literature almost never studied in comparison with your major research languages, Persian and Arabic. Is that because there is no connection between them, or is the prospect of learning Chinese simply too daunting to most scholars of the Perso-Arabic tradition? More generally, do you think that language acquisition is the major barrier to the kinds of comparative studies of the Middle East that this issue calls for (with mixed results), or is it attributable to some other factor?

Michael Beard: One pleasure of studying Chinese is that I feel no responsibility to it. Every word I learn, I feel like a child. Its unfamiliarity is not a source of anxiety. When I'm there, I don't represent anything in particular as an outsider. I couldn't be more conspicuous, but I'm different in a neutral way.

When my wife began taking student groups to Shanghai, I came along not knowing what to expect. I discovered that I had an emotional affinity for the culture, its austerity and security in its identity. It would have been fun to have studied it much earlier, but then I wouldn't have been so aware of its virtues.

Halal restaurants are everywhere in China. Every big city has a mosque or two. I would love to know what Uighur culture is like, and, beyond the obvious hostility, how it overlaps with the dominant Chinese. A scholar like Dru Gladney exemplifies the kind of crossover which a person could study to see the roads untaken.

I won't ever know Chinese to a point where I can do research. The best I'm likely to accomplish is to carry on a conversation, write a letter, or read a children's book. When I read classical Chinese poetry (Wang Wei, Du Fu, the Cold Mountain poet) in English and then check the Chinese text, I feel I'm understanding it, but I'm assured by people whose opinion I trust that I'm not really getting it properly, not at all.

And yet Chinese is not intrinsically more difficult than other languages. I'm starting late, and I don't study seriously as I might, but I can see what it would be like to know it well.

Ferial Ghazoul: In his magnum opus, Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Revelations), the medieval Andalusian philosopher and mystic, Ibn 'Arabi, is fascinated by the alphabet and refers to letters as umam (nations, communities). How do you explain your own fascination with letters as attested by your essays "Z is for Saffron," "Ta is for Talisman," and "Ghayn: Divagations on a Letter in Motion"? Are you planning more essays related to the rest of the letters of the alphabet constituting an abecedearian project-in-process? And is it the lure of the sounds of such letters or their visual shape that captivates you? In Middle Eastern cultures, there is a belief that letters have a "magical" power. Do you share such convictions--if not literally, then metaphorically?

Michael Beard: Another very long answer threatens here. On the shelf next to my desk in Grand Forks, I have kept, since the early 1980s the four-volume edition of Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya. I know much too little about it (I have read it only in fragments), and yet, as with so many writings, I put it near me in the hope I might take down one of those volumes more often, in an odd moment, in order to find the passages on the alphabet, or perhaps in the superstitious belief that it generates an influence just sitting there.

Yes, those articles on the alphabet are parts of a book under construction: one essay for every letter, twenty eight plus the four additional Persian letters (devised, tradition says, by the 14th-century mystical philosopher, Fazlallah [Fadlallah] Astarabadi). The projected title is "Arabic Made Difficult." It will be a dilettante's book, probably an infuriating one for readers who know the subject, but it's the book that has been in me, and in me for a long time. At one point, it was meant to be something like a textbook, an introduction to basic vocabulary in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman, any language written in Arabic script, but the essays have become more personal, marbled with gaps of knowledge created by my ignorance or sometimes by conscious, perverse choices. (The models are Alberto Savinio, Roberto Calasso, W. G. Sebald, Robert Burton, possibly al-Jahiz, whose book of animals includes a section "Why the author has nothing to say about fish.")

I worry sometimes that the project is not just eccentric but a little unbalanced. It's only incidentally academic, or specialized, so I will be leaving out the possible cascade of additional letters: I'm mentioning the retroflex letters in Urdu because they're such cunning constructs, but there is a potential sublime overload of new letters in Malayalam, Sorani Kurdish, or Uighur which won't make the cut. If there is a book out there describing those letters, I'll buy it and it will go next to Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya on my desk.