{"id":282266,"date":"2011-02-15T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-15T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/02\/15\/touch-why-this-book-should-win-the-btba\/"},"modified":"2018-05-04T15:25:46","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T15:25:46","slug":"touch-why-this-book-should-win-the-btba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/02\/15\/touch-why-this-book-should-win-the-btba\/","title":{"rendered":"Touch [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Similar to years past, we\u2019re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA<\/span> Fiction Longlist<\/a> over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we\u2019re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as \u201cwhy this book should win.\u201d Some of these entries will be absurd, some more serious, some very funny, a lot written by people who normally don\u2019t contribute to Three Percent. Overall, the point is to have some fun and give you a bunch of reasons as to why you should read at least a few of the BTBA<\/span> titles.<\/em><\/p>\n

Click here<\/a> for all past and future posts.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Touch<\/em><\/b> by Adania Shibli, translated by Paula Haydar<\/p>\n

Language:<\/b> Arabic
\nCountry:<\/b> Palestine
\nPublisher:<\/b> Clockroot
\nPages:<\/b> 72<\/p>\n

Why This Book Should Win:<\/b> Only book translated from the Arabic on the list; Clockroot Books deserves more attention and praise; she is \u201cThe Most-Talked-About Writer on the West Bank.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today we finally get another publisher involved, as Hilary Plum of Clockroot wrote this post.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2008 when Pam and I were starting Clockroot\u2014a new imprint of Interlink Publishing for literature in translation\u2014we readied ourselves for questions such as: how do you decide what translations to publish? What works to translate? I don\u2019t know if we expected anyone out in the world to ask us this, or whether we were really asking ourselves. In any case, we had our answer prepared, having stolen it from Adania Shibli, who when asked by the Guardian<\/em> what Arabic writers should be translated into English replied:<\/p>\n

I remember a story from four years ago in Ramallah. One night the Israeli army stormed a building in which somebody I knew lived. Everyone was told to get out. After a few hours, the army announced it wanted to blow up the building and gave the inhabitants 20 minutes to go up to their rooms and retrieve what they could. When my friend went up he didn\u2019t know what to take; he had all of his life there, he was totally lost. He finally went to the washing machine, emptied it and went out with the washing, leaving everything else behind to be blown up a few minutes later.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the same way, I could never say which text to have translated from Arabic into English; if I did, it might be the least important.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s the better story to say that on reading this we decided that the texts we should translate should be Adania Shibli\u2019s. In some way this must be true\u2014we signed on both of Adania\u2019s novels without being able to either in full, relying on tantalizing pieces that had been published in translation in magazines, and a stunning essay translated and introduced by Anton Shammas in the 2007 Words Without Borders<\/em> anthology.<\/p>\n

As publishers, we have to do what we can for our books, let our hands get dirtied in \u201cthe market,\u201d or maybe we should just call it the world. A few years ago Ahdaf Soueif wrote an article in which she hailed Adania as \u201cthe most talked-about writer in the West Bank\u201d\u2014a phrase we of course used in publicity, and which several reviews noted as ultimately maybe regrettable hype. Of course it\u2019s hype, we replied, but we would like people to read her books\u2014actually, of course, we didn\u2019t reply, how could we? Which is no doubt why I am doing so here. The point is, on behalf of our authors sometimes we must deny ourselves the freedom and rigor of expression that we value in our authors. (In a recent interview, when asked \u201cDo you feel that you represent the new generation of Palestinian authors?\u201d Adania answered, \u201cNo. (In fact I hardly represent myself and most often fail to do so.)\u201d and proceeded to discuss exile in the internet age, the late work of Darwish, Palestinian literature as \u201cthe literature of the last breath that never ends.\u201d)<\/p>\n

All publishers know: when the world calls for hype, you hype. But how do we get the taste of all this hype out of our mouths, how do we get to talk again about literature, about falling in love? And\u2014because, after all, our own feelings should not be that important\u2014how do we shield our writers from all this hype, all this world? How do we hold a space open for Adania and her writing in English translation, under the weight of such labels as \u201cthe new generation of Palestinian writers,\u201d a \u201cPalestinian woman writer\u201d (picture here all the tired stereotypes of \u201cMuslim women speaking out,\u201d that sort of thing\u2014these will be lingering in the shadows, in the US of 2011 we can\u2019t be free of them, they\u2019re there). Let\u2019s try to answer all these questions at once, for Touch<\/em>. Because the answer isn\u2019t so hard\u2014_Touch_ holds open its own space, and luminously:<\/p>\n

Everyone managed to find black outfits to wear, except the little girl. The search for a black outfit for her, followed by an attempt to improvise one, nearly made the family forget their grief, so it was decided that this task should be left to her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The closet door was always half open, because no one fixed it or showed any interest in fixing it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The girl removed all the clothes from the closet and placed them in the small space between the closet on one side and the beds on the other. The pile of clothes remained multicolored, despite what the constantly angry art teacher said, that all colors mixed together would make white.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A pair of dark blue velvet pants and a wool sweater that had in addition to the dark blue other little colors won the almost-black outfit contest. After she put them on, she found a hole in the pants near the left knee.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the way to the mosque, she bought a bottle of cola with a red ribbon on it. The liquid inside it was black, or closer to black than to any other color around her. She continued on her way, holding the bottle in her right hand and hiding the hole in her pants with her left.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She was the last to arrive at the square of the mosque. When she got there, she found that the mother had fainted and had been taken to an ambulance parked out back, so she headed in that direction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The back door of the ambulance was open, but she could not get to it, because a huge crowd of women in black created an immense wall between her and the door. She could not even get a glimpse of the mother\u2019s shoes. As the crowd of women in black got bigger and bigger, she, in her dark blue clothes, got pushed further and further back, unable to resist. Her right hand was holding the bottle and her left was covering the hole. She could not remove her hand, or everyone would see the hole.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The pushing became harder and harsher, and each time it would force her hand away from the hole, so she would press on it harder and harder, using all her strength, including that in her right hand. That hand now had weakened its hold on the bottle, and a little black liquid leaked out with each step she was pushed backward.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the end of the square, the wall of the mosque rose behind the girl, keeping her from getting pushed back any further. She stood there looking toward the ambulance, which had no white left, after the black drape of women wrapped it. But above, on top of the ambulance, the red light kept spinning inside itself, not veiled by anything, switching regularly from dark red to light red. She waited for its regular return to dark red, so that it would look like the red label on the empty bottle in her hand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Translated from the Arabic by Paula Haydar<\/em><\/p>\n

In years of reading literature in translation, of reading Arabic fiction\u2014really just in years of reading\u2014Pam and I had never read anything quite like Touch<\/em>. Its spare, idiosyncratic beauty, the slow pace of the girl\u2019s encounter with the world, so slow as to be merciless, to break your heart, but no, you must go on steadily, as she does. When I think of the novel, I don\u2019t remember particular phrases so much as a feeling, something like: the side of a fist rubbing away the breath fogged within a car windshield\u2014outside, it\u2019s just night. Can I say that this is a book like that? And then add that, also, it\u2019s not\u2014if as publishers we can only offer so much, it\u2019s nice to remember that at least we\u2019ve offered each book the chance to go out and speak for itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Similar to years past, we\u2019re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we\u2019re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as \u201cwhy this book should win.\u201d Some of these entries will be absurd, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[38356,336,37866,37856,30696,38386,38376,38366,1646,38346,37876],"class_list":["post-282266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-adania-shibli","tag-arabic-literature","tag-best-translated-book","tag-btba-2011","tag-clockroot-books","tag-hilary-plum","tag-palestinian-literature","tag-paula-haydar","tag-review","tag-touch","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282266"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397532,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282266\/revisions\/397532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}