How did you become interested in translation?

When I was growing up in Egypt, I used to watch American films and television shows on Egyptian state television.  This was before satellite tv.  Like many in my generation, who didn’t understand English, we relied on the subtitles to know what was going on in the film. I was struck by the gap between what I read on the subtitles and what I saw.  Subtitles were written in a high register of Arabic (fusha), but many of the characters were from social groups which it seemed to me would be speaking more colloquially.  This gap between what I saw and what I read made me interested in the authority of text to determine meaning across cultures, and the potential instability of that authority.  I thought about how the “high” translation could be the result of the moral views or aspirations to “linguistic perfection” of the translator – a kind of linguistic aspiration that has all sorts of class and religious dimensions in Egypt. And of course the selection of films, and their translations, were done by a bureau of the authoritarian state. There were two kinds of translation here in this whole process – translation of verbal speech into written text, and translation from one language to another. At the same time, when I used to watch Egyptian films on the state television, I noticed that the soundtrack replaced the role of the visuals when it came to scenes that were presumed to be unaesthetic or immoral.  The sound, rather than the visuals, was used to convey meaning. So this is the source of my interest in the translating relationship between the visual, verbal, and textual. 

How do you conceive of translation in your work today?

Two Performances.ram – the piece in the Tarjama show -- is part of a larger body of work that I started after spending time in the United States.  This experience afforded an opportunity to see the opposite of what I just talked about.  I became interested in how media, people, or politics from the Middle East are translated to American society.  I noticed the strong role that public figures played in this process of translation.  I then started looking at public figures in all societies as translators of all kinds of information and knowledge emanating from different sources.  These people organize, categorize, and break down this flood of information for the public who demands it.  In this sense, they create knowledge, or set the bounds of what is known about a region, culture, or people.  So translation for me is about simplifying concepts and ideas to the public.  In other words, translation works as a form of packaging such ideas from their sources to be consumed by targeted audiences. 

How do you view translation vs. explanation?  Isn’t there an important difference at the experiential level? Like, a good translator can tell a joke in a second language and people will laugh, but no joke explained will get laughs.

Exactly.  Translation is more than an act of explaining.  It claims to create a whole sense of something, an image and feeling of a whole.  In this way, it is much more powerful than the more limited act of explaining a particular situation, viewpoint or piece of information. 

This interest in the power of translation led me to create a piece called Four Scenes in Translation [insert link to this piece on ArteEast website].  In this work, I explored how ideas and linguistic terms and phrases were translated from one context to another, largely within the American setting.  I was interested in how the meanings changed or were reproduced in this process of translation across contexts.  So for example I looked at how religious text, say from the Bible, was translated into an American political or business context.  In a series of video-essays [insert link to these pieces on ArteEast website], I examined different American neo-Orientalists (who might also be categorized as neo-cons), who actually instigate this translation.  So I’m interested both in the translators and in the process of translation itself.

How does the piece in the Tarjama show expand on this body of work?

In my previous work, I concentrated more on the process of translation within the American context.  I was really studying the relationship between different visual, verbal, and textual forms as they are translated across interlinked realms such as the military world, the business world, and the policy world.  I was also concentrating on how knowledge about the Middle East (or “Islamic world”) is created in these different realms. 

In the work presented in this show I tried to juxtapose acts of translation emanating from America and the Middle East by focusing on the American columnist Thomas Friedman and the Egyptian television preacher Amr Khaled.  I analyzed how Islam is translated to Muslims by the preacher and how globalization is translated to Americans by the New York Times columnist.  I am interested in how Amr Khaled presents Islam as a universal concept as a vehicle to promote a rather non-universal Islamic nationalism.  Likewise, we find that Thomas Friedman uses globalization as a universal platform to promote a narrow American nationalism. 

Why did you select two different kinds of public figures?  For example, why not juxtapose an American Christian televangelist with Amr Khaled or an Egyptian newspaper columnist with Thomas Friedman?

The point is the similarity in their acts of translation, not the similarity of the fields they work in.  In this case, it is using universal concepts towards a narrow, targeted agenda. Of course, there are discursive similarities in terms of how they both advance the idea of progress, with America at the top.  And how they both present their audiences as falling backward and needing to progress.  And how they both use capitalist business models in their discourse and in the aesthetics of their presentations.

There’s also a striking visual coincidence between Friedman and Khaled, physically and gesturally.

Much has been made of the moustache that both figures have!  There’s a funny cartoon that is critical of Thomas Friedman called “The Moustache of Understanding,” and there are people who criticize Amr Khaled for having a moustache instead of having an untrimmed Islamic beard. Also, by showing the gestural similarities, I’m revealing how they as translators adopt a superior position towards the audience.

What is the importance for you of showing shots of the audience?  Is it related to this sense of superiority?

Not so much.  I want to show how the audience for Friedman allows him to give a sense of spontaneity, of give and take with the audience and its laughter, even though it is a memorized performance. That’s why I give the title “Rehearsal Tape” to the sequence about Friedman.  As for Khaled, the shots of the audience are direct footage from television broadcasts to highlight the fact that the performance is a television production. 

Many cultural critics and journalists respond to distorted representations of the Middle East with what they purport to be a “corrected version,” a kind of showing how things “really are” in response.  Why do you avoid creating a more “perfect” translation or seamless representation?

In order to investigate their work, I cannot repeat their work.  To enter into their logic of translation would be to lose the critical grip that I need to analyze it.  Juxtaposition reveals the structure.  Creating an alternative representation would just repeat the structure.  Besides, their work is in itself an attempt at correcting distorted representations of the Middle East and Islam.

Yes.  It is also important, I think, that each figure presumes a pre-extant underlying commonality that has simply gotten obfuscated with petty cultural differences. The translator creates that underlying premise in the act of translation.

You are also acting as a translator as an artist.  For example, you translate Amr Khaled into English subtitles and Thomas Friedman into Arabic subtitles.  The work has also been shown in different venues around the world.  So how do you view the concept of the artist as translator?

With these figures, I tried to emphasize their sense of humor and their ability to act as if they are elementary schoolteachers.  I manipulated the visuals and the sound, as well as wrote subtitles, in a way that emphasizes the idea that my translation (of their translation) is a commentary on their projects and how similar they are.  Also, when I translated Amr Khaled into English, I sometimes used vocabulary from Thomas Friedman’s “dictionary” and then I did the opposite when translating Thomas Friedman into Arabic.  And in translating the verbal into the textual, I wasn’t aiming for a perfect translation because such a thing doesn’t exist.  So in part I’m saying that there are always going to be areas that are not understood in any project of cross-cultural translation.

But it seems to me that you’re not only saying that some things cannot get translated.  The work suggests that you are bringing a critical view to the platform of translation in general. How might critical artistic translation projects destabilize authority, or rather, activate its potential instability?

For example, watching the double of Friedman telling his own story twice made me think how authority must be replicable to be effective, and yet, such supposedly intimately acquired knowledge (or even the big, abstract truths) seem to lose their veracity and impact when they are revealed as scripts and not as spontaneous passion.  When Friedman or Khaled are seen to be manipulating a story rather than simply telling one, the translation is no longer about the words but rather about the power relationships that are constructed.

This point about repetition is important, as is your larger point about power relationships.  I think that we need to reveal the instability of the authority of the text, the image, and sound, and the relationship between them.  In this way, we can find new openings through which to destabilize the larger forms of authority that rely on text, image, and sound for their power.