If language constantly signifies something “quite other than what it says” as Jacques Lacan suggests, then translation is also perpetually mediated between the ‘translatable’ and ‘untranslatable.’ This Lacanian idea is on display in Somaya Ramadan’s novel Awr?q al-narjis, where language is an ambiguous power that dominates the protagonist Kimi, cloistering her within a claustrophobic, interior world. The constant tension between the ambiguity and fluency of language is reflected within Awr?q al-narjis and is the driving force behind its narrative. Kimi herself oscillates between feeling utterly betrayed by language and completely dependent on it to save her from her tormentors. Constructed primarily as an interior narrative/monologue, the novel centers on Kimi’s preoccupation with language’s unpredictability—its potential to give life and its ability to take it away simultaneously. This paper develops a reading of Ramadan’s text that attempts to locate the connections, relations and tensions engendered between the Arabic and the English language in the narrative’s meditations on linguistic and translational duality. My analysis will consider translation as an equally dualistic process and will operate on two levels. The first is to locate moments in the text where Ramadan meditates on the failure of language to capture dualisms. For example, Ramadan assigns the word rahma (mercy) to the concept of ‘izraïl (angel of death) where this linguistic and conceptual double is usually lacking (i.e. in Arabic, ‘izraïl has no linguistic counterpart). The second level is to then analyze moments in the text where translation tensions appear by studying Ramadan’s text alongside Marilyn Booth’s translation, Leaves of Narcissus. This analysis of translation as an internal process to the text (Ramadan) and also external to it (Booth) will be investigated through Lacan’s concept of the inherent ambiguity of language. Reading these texts side-by-side will allow me to locate the interplay between the communicative and non-communicative aspects of language as important sites of conflict in the text. In conclusion, I will attempt to theorize how translation mediates sites of conflict by unsettling the illusion of coherence between languages and the presumption that a principle of equivalence underwrites acts of translation.

This paper will explore the translatability of resistence in the language, themes, and aesthetics in Palestinian films of the last decade. I call these the films of the “Palestinian New Wave” to identify a discrete group of works that have emerged since the Second Intifada in tandem with a digital filmmaking revolution. They are defined by resistence, a self-conscious rejection of occupation, acknowledgement of neocolonialism, a national aspiration, and narratives set in the present day. My paper will propose that due to the absence of a Palestinian national film industry and funding bodies, films of the New Wave are largely European funded and thus typically have narratives edited for European festival-going audiences. This raises the question: how does resistance in films of the Palestinian New Wave, translate to largely European audiences? The theoretical framework of this paper is grounded in Emile Durkheim’s theory of “social facts” which provides a way to understand the problematic nature of the English and French subtitles of these films. For example, if the Arabic language and the Palestinian dialect are social facts key to understanding the collective consciousness of Palestinian resistance, resistance must be understood within this language of the collective. But as these films are translated into European languages, rather than dismiss films of the New Wave as “untranslateable” or as “less authentic”, I will explore how they use aesthetics to engage the four 'social facts' that are characteristic to films of the New Wave: (1) key historical events; (2) the resistance; (3) trauma; and (4) statelessness/longing for the return to Palestine. The paper will argue the aesthetic of resistance in films of the New Wave has been cinematically reduced to symbols, icons, and gestures. Examples include recurring images of the Palestinian flag, maps of 1948 Palestine, kuffiyah, land/olives, images of Yasser Arafat, rock-throwing, and dabke. For example, Elia Suleiman's films contain little dialogue, and rely on visual storytelling to express the Palestinian experience as what he describes as a “microcosm of a human experience.” Using films such as Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2001) and The Time That Remains (2009); Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now (2006); and Annemarie Jacir's Salt of This Sea (2009), I will propose that although a narrative of resistance through language may be “untranslatable,” resistance can be aesthetically encoded and translatable through symbols, icons and gestures to both Arab and non-Arab audiences.

"ana my language always broken all ways lost ana my language wa i miss my people" --suheir hammad, breaking poems, 51 "ana all this time translating waves into language bas missing what i had wanted to say" (Hammad, 45) If "translatio" is a bearing across, a passage, then what is borne forth and at what peril? What breaks down in the passage? What remains enfolded within the abyss of the break? In Suheir Hammad’s Breaking Poems (2008), poetry itself surges as translation, of the unsayable into a new language, of another’s poetry into a continuation of poetry. A break, which is an « instrumental passage in … music, » recalls poetry’s affinity with translation. Hammad’s poems propose that breaking is the very possibility of language and of poetry. In the poems where Arabic words are constitutive of the very English she forms, the rhythms of Arabic link the breaks of the lines; the untranslatability is the very thing that allows for the poem, not as an essential difference between languages, but as a tie that complicates where one language begins and another ends. Arabic left mostly without translation in the poems emerges as infinitely translatable, as it flows in the rhythms that announce unspeakable breaks. In a syntax that fractures, the Arabic ‘wa’ of conjunction continues one language into another, into one poetic language. Her poems are at the limits of a monolingual reading. The poem that reconstructs shows the fractures already there in any language. The break emerges as the natural rhythm of language, and of poetry, a link of history and of poetry, an innovative aesthetic that speaks more forcefully to new realities, the sounds that have not found any cultural accommodation. It is a poetic language that ties and cuts and flows in the face of the fragmentation of a “self,”, the dispersion of a “people,” and the shrinking of a “geography.” Poetry as translation emerges as an encounter, a gathering of languages, of bodies, of voices, of sounds.

This paper will explore the concept of the “untranslatablity” of Arabic through examining three specific translation issues related to "Da’iman Coca Cola" [Always Coca Cola] the first novel by Lebanese author, Alexandra Chreiteh. From its title, a global advertising slogan for the most globalized of all products—Coca Cola—to its use of straightforward fusha and its many references familiar to an English-language reading audience, translating this novel seems at first glance deceptively simple. In practice, however, a number of specific translation challenges are linked to moving a work that is seemingly “familiar” in content and imagery from Arabic into English. This paper will build a theoretical argument about un/translatability by looking at three specific issues. Firstly, it will examine passages, written in standard Arabic but in which the characters are meant to be speaking English. For example, the novel often says, in Arabic, “then she said in English” and proceeds with a sentence written in Arabic. This level of metacommentary that complicates the translation process is under-theorized in translation studies, and absent in studies of Arabic-English translation. The second issue is how best to represent the moves between registers in Arabic in an English translation. "Da’iman Coca Cola" is written almost exclusively in a simplified fusha-- one that often recalls the colloquial language of Lebanon. It is also, however, punctuated at key moments by Lebanese Arabic expressions, many of which rhyme, some of which are funny and all of which are “untranslateable.” The third issue that the paper will take up is the use of English words within the Arabic text itself and how to deal with these in translation. One example is that the title of the book “Da’iman Coca Cola” refers in Arabic to the slogan “Always Coca Cola”. At times within the text, however, the expression in English—Always Coca Cola—is included in Latin letters. In one example, the protagonist uses the English expression to make a pun off of “Always” as a brand of sanitary napkins. How can and should a translation treat words that appear sometimes in English, sometimes in Arabic? Building from this concrete discussion of translation choices and proposing possibilities for how specific passages might be translated, this paper will also draw from current translation theory in order to draw some conclusions about how we can theorize Arabic-English literary translation and “untranslateability.”