Speaking in Many Tongues - Multilingualism as an Aesthetic

This BCLT Research Seminar took place online on Wednesday 8th May 2024.

Nariman Youssef - 'This talks presents a snapshot of a work-in-progress reflecting on what multilingualism – used here to connote a porous, non-hierarchical relationship to one’s languages – means for literary translators. The long-held precept that translation is conducted exclusively into one’s mother tongue has been challenged time and time again, both by the work of researchers questioning the assumptions behind it and by the sheer existence of translators with a diverse array of language ties and directionalities. Far from being an incidental detail, or a shortcoming I have to define myself against, my own linguistic in-betweenness has been integral to my work as a translator; to the reasons I do it, to my enjoyment of it, and – in ways I’m still endeavouring to articulate – to my translation process and my stylistic approaches. I set out here to tease out the ways, some subtler than others, in which ‘multilingualism’ shows up in my own work, and to develop a few questions that I hope will be relevant beyond it.'

Nariman Youssef is a Cairo-born literary translator and translation consultant based in London. Her literary translations include Mo(a)t: Stories from Arabic (UEAP, 2021), Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter (new edition, Interlink, 2020), Donia Kamal's Cigarette No. 7 (Hoopoe, 2018), and contributions to publications like The Common, Arab Lit Quarterly, and Words Without Borders. In recent years, she has managed an in-house translation team at the British Library, and led and curated translation workshops with Shadow Heroes, the Poetry Translation Centre, Shubbak Festival and Africa Writes. Nariman holds a master’s degree in Translation Studies from the University of Edinburgh and is currently Translator in Residence at BCLT (Feb-May 2024).