Translation as a Medium in the War on Palestine

This fall, in the middle of a Palestinian literature class and a translation workshop, I decided to create a project that could make commentary on the war on Palestine, at the same time highlighting the importance of translation and the role it plays in international conflict. I ended up making what I would call a “warped” translation, essentially a translation created not for accessibility nor accuracy, but instead to make a point. To shed light on how the power a translator has to change a literary narrative is reflective of the power that Isreal has, in the war on Palestine, to change the global narrative. I hoped that this translation, read in tandem with either the original text or with a more traditional translation, would give the reader some insight into this conflict and the power translation has when dealing with international literature.

This project aims to show what a text might look like translated with the intent to erase someone else’s side of the story, or more specifically, translated with an Israeli bias. This warped translation will show a more exaggerated version of what biased translating typically looks like. Most biased translation goes unnoticed; because of the language barrier, it’s more difficult to uncover misleading differences between an original text and its translation. The version you will read here aims to bring these differences to light and show how translating with bias can be harmful in a time of war or international conflict. I convey this in my project by choosing a Palestinian poem and translating it in a way that makes it significantly less so, stripping it of its Palestinian themes and changing the narrative to reflect Israeli ideals.

The text I chose to translate for this project is the famous poem موطني by Palestinian poet, Ibrahim Tuqan. This poem resonates deeply with Arab people and was even adopted as a national anthem, first by Palestine and later by Iraq. I chose this poem because it is undeniably Palestinian, which is ideal for this project so that the changes made to make the translation “less Palestinian” can easily be identified by the reader. In this poem, we see many of the same themes that can be found in other works of Palestinian literature, such as connection to the land, resistance to occupation, and writing as a form of resistance. These themes are something I tried to eradicate from my warped translation since they directly go against not only Israeli assertions about Palestinians, but also their claim to land – or rather their claim that the Palestinian people have no claim over their land.

Since this poem is well known and has existing translations, one like this would certainly never get published. Concerning its content, it is unlikely that an Israeli translator, with bad intentions, would ever choose to translate a poem whose focus is to convey the Palestinian experience and fight for independence. What readers must do with this piece is to set reality to the side and take my translation as a more extreme case of what biased translation can look like. Then consider how biased translations in the real world can spread misinformation in this way and influence their readers. This can be very damaging, especially when dealing with texts that speak on a specific conflict and group of people since many readers may be using these translations as their main source of information on the subject or their only access point to literature coming from an underrepresented population.

When I began translating this poem, I started by translating it from Arabic to English as I would with any other translation. After I had a base translation, I marked any spot that felt “too Palestinian” and retranslated those phrases to fit the new voice of the poem. This part was particularly hard to execute, trying to create an acceptable translation, while completely erasing the Palestinian voice from it. What helped me the most was identifying the big themes in the poem and finding ways to eliminate those themes in my retranslation. The biggest of these themes was the author’s connection to the land, to Palestine. Since this poem talks so personally about the land, taking away those intimacies made a big change in tone and helped this new, impersonal voice come to life. The goal was to take this from a poem that talks specifically about Palestinian resistance and their fight for independence and make it a story of the growing Israeli nation and the fight for security in their newfound home.

Starting at the beginning of the poem, with the famous lines “my homeland, my homeland”, I made the decision to change it to “Homeland, our homeland” to give the impression that it is indeed someone’s homeland, though not originally their own - the “our” here referring to the Israeli population. While it makes sense that a Palestinian author would have a deep personal connection to this land, it doesn’t historically make sense for an Israeli individual to feel the same, so this instead expresses a connection to the Israeli population and community that now lives together on this land instead of to the land itself. To further break this connection between author and land, I took away any moments where the author refers to the land in second person, such as “in your air” or “will I see you”. This distances the author even further and takes away the land’s importance as a personified, living thing, and returns it to its position as an inanimate, conquerable territory and nothing more.

One of the bigger changes I made in this translation was the “the youths will never tire until your independence” line, since the independence of Palestine is not something the state of Israel wants nor wants people to talk about. I decided to change this line to “the youths will never tire until our people are safe”, this statement evokes a similar kind of determination that the original does, yet for a different goal. This displays the Israeli attitude towards Palestinians as a dangerous population that poses a threat to their nation. The idea of youths in this new context of national security suggests youths, such as the ones employed in Israel’s army, who feel great pride in protecting their state, in opposition to the original which references the young Palestinian generation that continues to fight for their independence.

In the same vein, towards the end of the poem, I had to change the line “victorious, victorious, over oppressive enemies”, since oppressive enemies is directly referring to Isreal and calling them an oppressive force. I changed the latter part of this line to “over those who wish us misfortune” as an attempt to call out Israel’s own enemy, which is not Palestine itself, but instead outside nations that attempt to condemn Israel and their actions. This works well to reflect Israeli arrogance on the matter, presenting themselves as so powerful that they have no one enemy, but rather oppose the world at large.

The changes presented in my warped translation of موطني are intended to give the reader a glimpse into the process of twisting the truth to fit the Israeli narrative, something that has unfortunately become commonplace in today’s world. The changes I have made shows how easy it can be to erase the Palestinian voice and create new history out of existing Palestinian literature. Demonstrating this thought through translation shows just how important and dangerous translation can be, and stresses how much power translators themselves hold. Translation as a practice and as a profession is often overlooked, but it really must not be, as translation is the facilitator of international communication and the role it plays in a war will have lasting effects on the world, people, and cultures.