Over spring recess, my copy of “I Found Myself: The Last Dreams” kept me company. It was  particularly kind to me on long and restless nights, when I struggled to put myself to bed and enter my own dreamscape. In their stead, I entered Naguib Mahfouz’s dreams: evocative vignettes of cosmic longing, imagined utopias, and blissful freedom. Mahfouz’s dreams were translated and collated in “I Found Myself,” by the Libyan-American-British author, writer, and Pulitzer Prize winner Hisham Matar. The dreams rest in dialogue with photographs of Cairo, taken by the American photographer Diana Matar. 

 

I flip through the pages and am awe-inspired by Mahfouz’s simple diligence—his records of his dreams revealing patterns of characters and localities, signaling towards what may consume his subconscious mind, what he does not directly reveal to us through his published fiction. We all experience dreams in a distant state, and emerge out of them with a bereft and hazy memory. We may put pen to paper in an attempt to record-keep, but the hues and details of our dream world can never be recorded in their exactitude. What we are left with, then, is a translation. Mahfouz translates his dreams onto his journal in Arabic, and Hisham Matar translates them into English. I, in turn, translate too—from words on the page to images and interpretations in my mind. 

 

I first encountered Professor Matar as a student in his Comparative Literature course at Barnard College titled The Arabic Novel, where Professor Matar guided us through Mahfouz’s The Palace Walk among other carefully selected novels and readings. Our seminars were almost always gentle and introspective, an extension of Professor Matar’s own temperament. His reflections throughout our conversation follow that same sensibility. 

 

Matar likens translating Naguib Mahfouz’s dreams to going on a long walk with him. In this conversation, I invite you to take a long walk with Hisham Matar. 

 

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Reading through “I Found Myself,” I am cognizant of a two-fold interpretative process in realizing the words on the page: first, Mahfouz’s interpretation and recollection of his own dreams, and then, second, your own interpretative process through translation. Of course, there is a third interpretative arena, that of the reader. Nevertheless, do you find that Mahfouz’s dreams breathe a new life or meaning in English? Tangentially, how do you perceive or understand translated works, in comparison to the original, source material? 

 

No, I didn't feel that the poems here—I keep calling them poems, I always make that mistake. But I think it's an important mistake, because they do function a bit like poems. They have that sort of brevity and mobility of a good poem, even though they're clearly prose. I'm not sure if the [dreams] have gained anything by being translated into English. Of course, once you translate something, something is lost. I'm not sure what is gained, apart from the obvious: that it's available in a different language and therefore to different readers, but I'm much more cognizant of what was lost.

 

What do you think was lost? 

 

Color. Certain Arabic words that mean something very living in the context that he's describing, some platitudes or common sayings that when you translate them, they become a bit stiff, particularly religious things. For example, he has a wonderful dream that the world is a just world with no borders, and people can move anywhere and work anywhere. He travels, and finds good employment and pleasurable companions. But then he misses Cairo, and he comes back, and his friends welcome him warmly, and they want to hear about his adventures. [In dream 222,] he says, let's go to Al Hussain Mosque, may God be content with him (رضى الله عنه): the Arabic worship. 

 

[When you say the worship in Arabic,] you don't even think about it. It's something said so often that it doesn't feel so deliberate. Little things like that [are lost]. 

 

But on the second part of your question—about how I feel about the process of translation in general—I feel as a reader and as a writer that I am so indebted to translation. Some of the writers that have affected me most I’ve read in translation. I don't read French; Proust is very important to me. English writers are very important to me too, but also somebody like Conrad, who himself is writing in his third language. And of course, all the Russians. I am such a beneficiary of translation that I cannot but have the deepest admiration and gratitude for it. 

 

As a writer, I am translated very well in certain languages that are very close to those translators, and I can't but be amazed by their generosity. A great translator puts themselves to one side and lends their voice to something else. It is an art; they're not just decoding something, they're really embodying it and recreating it. So I have deep enthusiasm for the enterprise, and I hope that I contributed to it in a small way. But when you do it [yourself], you always notice what you haven't done right, or what was almost impossible to do. 

 

How do you reconcile those losses as a translator? Do you accept them as part of the process?

 

Writing actually trains you well for it, it turns out, because when you write, there's also a form of translation. In my case, a book arrives in a sort of shapeless, wordless way. It doesn't arrive to me in language. It arrives often in sensibility or feeling or a way of being. It's a temperament. It has an attitude and a temperament and a voice before you find its voice. 

 

I used to think that you write when you have all the words, [but] you don't. You write exactly when you don't have the words, [when] you're trying to find the right words to allow for that book to rise up to the surface. And even then, what you're doing is finding the words that would summon the silence of the book. It’s [still] an uncertain process; you're always aware that there's a distance between the thing itself and whatever language you find. Of course, you're trying to bridge that distance in the most interesting way and most truthful way, but you're also really aware of the shortcomings and the weaknesses and the fact that to write is always to fail. But as Beckett says, fail again and fail better. Translation is a form of that.

 

In your introduction, you recount a remarkable encounter with Mahfouz where you’d asked about the positionality of Arab writers who write in English, speaking on behalf of yourself. In response he says, “You belong to the language you write in.” What about the languages you translate in, from, and through? Do they belong to you, or you to them? Or is it a different kind of belonging? 

 

The question I asked Mahfouz was specifically to do with the language that you write in, and the writer in me belongs to that language. But the person, I have a very powerful relationship to Arabic, and I belong to it in different ways. I belong to it as a man, and I'm not entirely divorced from it as a writer, but I don't belong to it in that way as a writer. And then whenever I get glimpses of somebody belonging to it—you can read it in the work of Arabic writers that we admire—it really moves me. I feel that a great big distance has collapsed. My position is not an easy one, because if I am to be honest, I'm neither consoled by a conclusion that says: no, actually, writing in a different language makes me a better writer, it makes things interesting. I'm translating, I'm in the in-between. I'm always a guest, and that's fascinating. I'm not convinced entirely by that, nor am I completely convinced that what I should do is write in Arabic. 

 

I've come to a place that has really surprised me, because when I was a young writer—meaning with my first book—these questions weighed very heavily. And now I'm not troubled by them. I'm curious about them, fascinated by them, but I'm not troubled by them. What I have learned is that there's a distance between the man, the writer who is not writing, and the writer who is writing. When I'm not writing, when I'm sitting with you here, I can think about these things and worry about them, but in the morning (I always write in the morning), these questions are not even remotely relevant. All I'm thinking about is the sentence arising. More and more, I’ve grown to have confidence in their practice, in the doing of writing.

 

And strangely, given how personal my writing is in particular, what I discovered is that I should get myself out of the way when I'm writing. That is when things start to proceed. The more that I make it about myself, the more it feels wrong. Which is oxymoronic: I’ve written two memoirs and my novels feed off things very close to my experiences, to my heart.  It's strange, but it really isn't about you. You're creating something, and that thing—if it has any worth—becomes independent.

 

What you're saying right now certainly feels oxymoronic, but it also sounds like following your intuition, like a kind of surrender in your writing practice. Reading your introduction to “I Found Myself,” you similarly describe the translation process as really intuitive, like a tide pulling you in. Were there parts that felt less intuitive? Are there times when writing also kind of feels less intuitive?

 

No, the translation was really easy. Writing is not always easy. Writing is a really wonderful thing. I'm not one of those who complains about it; it's where I have my most serious fun. But translation was a real joy. It was easy. It was genuine. It felt like a very natural marriage between his voice and my voice. I felt I was walking behind him, enjoying the pleasure of it. On a personal level, I felt I was in close companionship with a writer that I really appreciate and a man that I really, really liked. Mahfouz was an unusual writer for being supremely talented and supremely kind, qualities that don’t always go together, and he had a lovely temperament in the way he conducted himself in public affairs. It was just nice to be with him. It was a form of companionship. 

 

Whereas with writing, the energy then comes from the work itself. That's where the work, the energy, comes from. When I'm writing a book, I am implicated by its demands, its preoccupations, its mentality, its interests, its tastes. Sometimes they're yours, sometimes they're not, and I love that. I feel fully employed. It's unusual to be doing something where you are totally employed in every aspect of you: your intellect, your emotional life, your experiences, your esthetics, even your body. Writing a novel does and needs that kind of physical energy and strength. 

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Did translating Mahfouz’s dreams—and sitting so intimately within his dreamscape and companionship—impact your own dreams, if at all? Were there any moments when the boundaries blurred? 

 

Sometimes, in translating [his dreams], I could sense the writer entering the dream and narratively putting a ribbon around it. If anything, it's made me more curious and suspicious about what happens when we retell a dream. What authoring are we involved in? It's also made me much more fascinated by the economy and narrative genius of dreams, that we can very swiftly move from one state to the other, while seeming totally natural and uncanny. I am, in my personal life, very interested in dreams. I'm often very troubled by them. I don't know if that has changed. I don't think so.

 

Do you dream vividly? Do you remember them, or do they kind of fizzle out by the time you wake up?

 

All of it. Some [dreams] stick, some don't. But I have dreams that I will never forget. I have very vivid dreams from years ago [that have returned] recently. They're abiding. 

 

Growing up, my mom used to say that if you have a bad dream, you shouldn't say it out loud lest you’d like it to actualize in your reality. So whenever I woke up and had a really bad dream, my mom would be like— 

 

Keep it to yourself? [Laughs]

 

[Laughing] Yes, keep it to yourself! She would calm me down, but she didn't want me to say it out loud. She didn't want to know. 

 

[Laughing] No, I'm of the opposite view. Well, it depends who we're talking about. It’s very private—sharing a dream—and it has to be with someone you’re very close to. I think the telling of dreams, or even the writing them down, is important. Dreams are constantly searching for interpretation, and one of the fascinating things about them is that—notwithstanding everything that has been invested in studying them from the mystics to the scientists and neurologists—we are none the wiser. They’re not really clear, and something about that is comforting to me. 

 

I don't like questions of utility when it comes to dreams or to the emotional or psychic life. I hate this desire to employ everything. I read that there's some big research in some startup in Silicon Valley that wants to sell advertisement space in dreams. I feel this is the wrong approach to something that is fragile, delicate, and sacred. There’s something sacred about our inner lives that isn't always to do standardized interpretation. 

 

In my childhood, there was a standardized interpretation. All my aunts would say this means this, that means that, tell us your dream! The best way to capture everybody's attention is to say I had a dream. “Tell us what!” Everything stops. As amusing as I found this, they had such certainty. The sea was always trouble. 

 

The spider is always a bad omen. 

 

Yes! But actually, I think that everything in a dream is very private. It's all you or has to do with you.

 

You read Mahfouz, you’ve translated Mahfouz, and you teach Mahfouz in your own classes. In the class I took with you, The Arabic Novel, we read the first book of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy in translation. How does teaching Mahfouz differ from reading him or indeed translating him? Importantly, you teach Mahfouz in translation. Is there a difference in your approaches as a reader, as a translator, as a teacher?

 

In all of the ways that I engage with his work—whether translating it or teaching it or reading it—it's all to do with close reading. It's all to do with discovering different depths and meanings through different registers. As a reader and as a writer, I really believe in books. I don't worry about books. I think books will always find their readers. It's always been a minority sport since time immemorial, and conversation of people worrying about people not reading have always been there. 

 

I've been very encouraged by how students have responded to his work and the engagements they've had with it, and I've been very encouraged by how this little book of ours about dreams has brought new readers to him. We've done events in bookshops, and the bookshops have already reordered his backlist. I'm not worried about Mahfouz. People will find their way to him. 

 

There are some other structural problems to do with how little is read in translation in the English speaking world. But that too is changing. It's particularly changing with your generation. There are studies that show that up to 40 percent of what the under-30s read is in translation. 

 

Mine is probably 60 to 70 percent. 

 

I don't think you're alone there. That’s already having an impact on how much is being translated [into English]. People lament that it was only three percent, and now it's seven percent. That's actually quite a big jump. That's more than a doubling. If it carries on like that, we will hopefully catch up with other places, like French languages. 45% of the books they publish are in translation. Italian, Spanish, German aren't far different from that, and there's no reason why the English language shouldn't be like that. 

 

Mahfouz suffers a bit from this problem, and he suffers from another problem that is to do with cultural and political blind spots. If we want to be generous, we call them blind spots. A writer like Mahfouz is [forced to] serve a purpose to certain English readers, to bring news from an Arab, Muslim country. That really narrows what he does, and I’m also very glad that that's happening less and less. He's such a varied, complex writer and has written so many different kinds of books. There are so many different Mahfouzes to engage with.