When Egyptian author Somaya Ramadan’s Awr?q al-narjis was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature shortly after its publication in 2001, prominent literary critic and poet Mahmud Khayrallah responded that she “does not know how to write Arabic.” The criticism, while certainly reflecting its author’s gendered entitlement to question the abilities of a woman author, also points to the multilingual nature of the book, in which Arabic and English freely mix, functioning as linguistic protagonists whose interplay is integral to the story itself. Translated by Marilyn Booth as Leaves of Narcissus in the same year of its publication, the novel invites us to consider the role of linguistic experimentation and multilingualism in recent Egyptian fiction, on the one hand, and the possibilities and limitations of translating such multilingual texts, on the other. While the question of domestication has predominated scholarship on translation between Arabic and English, this focus has had the effect of turning attention away from the potential of translated texts to resist, rather than absorb, domesticating tendencies. In the case of a multilingual text, the process of translation has typically been viewed as one that flattens the multilingual texture of the original. This paper considers Marilyn Booth’s English translation of Awr?q al-narjis as an example in which the original text “gains” through the process of its translation into English as its multilingual nature, far from being flattened, is brought to the fore. The paper ultimately asks how translation might be mobilized as a process through which a translation can stand alongside, rather than stand in for, the original text, and how authors like Ramadan are engaging—rather than avoiding—the multilingual reality of many Egyptians to interrogate the boundaries both of a text’s “original” language and its intended audience. Maddened by the inadequacy of a single language, Ramadan’s Awr?q al-narjis struggles to find its place in a geopolitically-grounded language like Arabic imposed by Khayrallah.