Essay · June 2026 · Dr. Fatema Alhalwachi
Between Two Souls: On the Art of Translating Literary Texts
Translation is not a crossing from one language to another. It is a descent — into the writer's world, their silences, their preoccupations — and a long, uncertain climb back up, carrying everything that can be carried, losing as little as possible along the way.
The Illusion of Equivalence
There is a comfortable fiction at the heart of how most people think about translation: that a word in one language has a word in another, and that the translator's task is simply to find the right pairing. In commercial translation, this approximation can be made to work. In literary translation, it is a trap. Words are not counters to be exchanged. They are living things, thick with history, resonance, cultural memory, and emotional charge. The Arabic word غُربة — ghurba — means something like exile or estrangement, but it carries within it a particular weight of longing, of being far from one's people, of a wound that geography opens and time cannot close. No English word contains all of that. The translator must decide not merely which word to use, but how much of the meaning to rescue, and how.
This is why literary translation is not a mechanical act. It is a negotiation — between precision and poetry, between faithfulness and readability, between the world the writer built and the world the reader inhabits.
"The translator does not simply read the text. They must become a temporary inhabitant of it — living in its rhythms, breathing its air, learning the particular way its author sees the world."
Diving into the Writer's Mind
Before a single sentence is rendered into English, there is a period of immersion that most readers never see. The translator must first become a close, almost obsessive reader — not of words, but of a sensibility. What does this writer notice? What do they leave unsaid, and why? Where does their prose slow down, become dense and deliberate, and where does it open out into light? What is the emotional temperature of the text at any given moment, and how does it shift? These are not questions that can be answered by reading a text once. They require re-reading, note-taking, sitting with passages that resist understanding until they yield.
I have sat for hours with a single paragraph, not because the Arabic was beyond me, but because the English was. The writer had found a particular tone — ironic but tender, precise but elusive — and I needed to hold that tone in my mind with enough clarity to reproduce it in a language that carries different affordances, different music, different ways of being ironic or tender or precise.
This is what I mean by diving into the writer's mind. It is not enough to understand what they are saying. The translator must understand how they are thinking — the associative logic beneath the surface, the cultural assumptions so natural to the writer they need not be stated, the emotional undertow that moves through the text like a current beneath still water.
Culture, Mood, and the Hints Between the Lines
Literary texts — and this is especially true of Arabic literature, with its long oral tradition and its deep roots in poetry — are full of allusion. A word or phrase will carry within it the echo of a Quranic verse, a classical poem, a proverb so embedded in the culture that an Arabic reader hears it immediately, without needing it to be named. The translator must decide, case by case, whether to preserve the allusion and trust the English reader to sense something resonant even if they cannot locate it, or to unpack it, or to find an English equivalent that performs the same emotional work even if it comes from a different cultural tradition entirely.
There is no formula for this. There is only judgment — and judgment requires immersion. You cannot make these decisions from the outside. You must have spent enough time in the culture, the language, the history of the text to feel when something is significant and when it is incidental; when the writer is drawing on a well of shared meaning and when they are being purely individual.
Mood is equally untransferable by rule. The rhythm of a sentence creates mood. The length of a paragraph creates mood. The choice of a concrete detail over an abstraction creates mood. All of these things behave differently in Arabic and English — two languages with different grammatical architectures, different relationships between sound and meaning, different traditions of what prose is allowed to do. The translator must rebuild the mood in English using entirely different materials, the way a musician might transcribe a piece for a different instrument: the notes change, but the feeling must remain.
"A machine can transfer information. It cannot transfer longing. It cannot feel the weight of a word chosen in grief, or know why a particular silence on the page is louder than anything said."
What Technology Cannot Do
We live in an age that is understandably dazzled by the capabilities of artificial intelligence, and machine translation has made genuine progress. For practical, transactional texts, it can be genuinely useful. But literary translation reveals the limit of what machines can do — and that limit is not a technical one. It is a human one.
A machine can process language. It cannot inhabit it. It can identify patterns across vast corpora of text, but it cannot feel the difference between a word chosen in precision and a word chosen in grief. It cannot notice when a writer's syntax tightens with anxiety or opens with relief. It cannot sense that a certain passage is significant not because of what it says but because of the particular quality of attention the writer brings to it — an attention that only another human, reading with their whole self, can recognise.
Literary translation is not the transfer of information. It is the transfer of experience. And experience, in all its particularity and weight, is not a data problem. It is a human one.
A Human Connection Across Languages
When I translate a literary text, I am trying to do something that sounds simple and is in fact among the most difficult things I know: to touch the soul of the writer, and then — through language, through all the choices and compromises and moments of grace that translation involves — to transfer that feeling to a reader who may never share the writer's language, their history, or their world.
This is, at its core, an act of love. Not the sentimental kind, but the rigorous kind — the love that attends closely, that asks hard questions, that is willing to be changed by what it encounters. The translator must love the text enough to resist the easy solution, to stay with the difficulty until something true emerges. And they must love the reader enough to make the result genuinely readable — not a monument to the translator's effort, but a living thing in its own right.
The finest translations I have read feel not like documents carrying a text from one place to another, but like a third thing — something born from the encounter between the original and the language it has been brought into. They carry the soul of the source without being enslaved to its letter. They breathe in the target language while never forgetting where they came from.
That is what I aspire to in my own work: not fidelity as mere accuracy, but fidelity as faithfulness — to the writer's intent, to the beauty of the language, to the truth of the human experience the text contains. And to the reader, who deserves, in English, to feel what an Arabic reader felt: that they are in the presence of something alive.
ف
Dr. Fatema Alhalwachi
Applied Linguist · Arabic–English Literary Translator · London
