‘Summer with the Enemy’ by Syrian novelist Shahla Ujayli is a searing summer read

Wherever you spend your summer time, enable your self to be transported to Syria and immerse your self on the earth of Shahla Ujayli’s sweeping historic novel Summer time with the Enemy.

The continued devastation of the conflict that started in 2011 has introduced Syria to the world’s consideration. Studying a Syrian novel is a technique to expertise its deep and wealthy tradition, historical past and literature past the headlines.

Summer time with the Enemy was a finalist for the distinguished the Worldwide Prize for Arab Fiction, typically generally known as the “Arab Booker Prize.” It was written in Arabic by Ujayli, one of many nation’s most outstanding ladies writers; I translated it into English one yr later.

Metropolis of Raqqa

Ujayli’s evocative storytelling conjures up the town of Raqqa, from its previous as a dusty provincial city starting within the Twenties, via the twentieth century, and its subsequent occupation and 2017 siege by Islamic State militants (ISIS). In Summer time with the Enemy, the primary characters finally should go away Raqqa behind for a brand new life in Germany.

An in depth and complicated portrait of three generations of 1 household on this northern Syrian city, Summer time with the Enemy combines historic fiction with a romance and a coming-of-age story full with an story of old flame. The characters problem western stereotypes about Arab Muslim ladies — that they should be “saved” from oppressive realities — via depictions of their energetic, numerous and sophisticated lives.

The city of Raqqa is so essential to the story that one critic claims it’s truly a personality within the novel.

Household drama, old flame

It’s laborious to not really feel compelled by the Raqqa of the previous, with its tightly knit, multi-ethnic neighborhood, stuffed with native conflicts and household drama.

Every story the grandmother tells has the youthful generations on the sting of their seats, ready to listen to a few scandal, a bootleg affair, a failed love match or an unique journey overseas. She at all times leaves her viewers wanting extra when she rises mid-sentence to stir the espresso on the range, rigidity constructing.

Through the summer time of the title, a while within the ‘80s, the protagonist, Lamees, rides horses alongside the Euphrates, an expansive desert surrounding her, and desires of an equestrian future.

Horses means she will keep away from her mom. Their relationship had develop into tense, after Lamees’s father left Syria, by no means to return. Lamees resents her mom’s incipient love affair with a visiting German professor, Nicolas, the enemy of the e-book’s title. The daughter acts as an area information to Nicolas, who leaves when his analysis is finished. The ladies name upon Nicolas later to search out passage to Germany after the autumn of their beloved metropolis.

Revisiting reminiscences of Raqqa

About 10 years after the fictional Lamees was residing in Raqqa, experiencing the Assad authorities’s belt-tightening insurance policies, I embarked upon the lengthy journey there from Damascus with a college pal. In summer time 1995, my go to revealed a Raqqa very similar to the one Lamees confirmed to her German enemy.

However after I was in Raqqa within the ’90s, I had no concept that greater than 20 years later I’d be video-chatting with a well-known Syrian writer from the city. Ujayli was giving me a form of interview earlier than I translated her novel. Amongst different questions, she requested me: “Have you ever ever been to Raqqa?”

I used to be happy to have the ability to reply sure — I had visited lengthy earlier than most individuals exterior of Syria had ever heard of Raqqa. I ready to translate this novel by revisiting that journey via speaking to Ujayli and by trying again over previous images, revisiting reminiscences of the place.

Translating Arabic into English

In an interview about my translation course of, an interviewer requested me the identical query.

Translating Arab ladies writers from Arabic into English has a troublesome historical past: Many translations have been so modified as to be unrecognizable.

As students have proven, your complete thrust of a e-book can change with translations creating new titles, sections edited and censored, narrative voices voices altered and full characterizations modified.

I labored with Ujayli to convey the main points of the textual content precisely, whereas additionally discovering phrases to offer the brand new English textual content as a lot life because the Arabic authentic.

In the summertime of 2019, I translated the novel in a Lebanese mountain village. Simply throughout the border, Syria was seen on a transparent day. That summer time we may hear the echoes of bombs being dropped throughout the valley.

Targeted on conveying the main points and complexities of of the e-book, I felt the stress between the e-book’s lovely depiction of the previous and Ujayli’s searing depiction of life below ISIS occupation, fierce battles in Raqqa and Lamees’s subsequent escape to Germany.

Classes in empathy

The utter destruction of Raqqa between 2013 and 2017 and any semblance of the earlier lives lived there felt so actual.

Lebanon is a rustic nonetheless bearing the scars of its personal lengthy civil conflict (1975-90). The reverberations of the bombs we heard that summer time in Lebanon had an unmistakable influence on the interpretation. The phrases a translator chooses to translate are at all times impacted by their environment.

Ujayli’s novels provide “classes in empathy,” as famous by Marcia Lynx Qualey, founding editor of the web site ArabLit.

Full of humour, drama, romance and 100 years of historical past, Summer time with the Enemy places ladies centre stage, will take readers to the guts of 1 lady’s coming of age in Syria — and provide insights into its previous and current.