The latest addition to my website is Tayib Salih>’s وسم الهجرة إلى الشمال (Season of Migration to the North) . The narrator, a Sudanese man who has been studying in London has returned home to his native village in Sudan where he meets Mustafa, who moved to the village five years ago, has married and bought a farm. He scents something mysterious about him and then Mustafa reveals a complicated backstory. He too had been in London. He had chased British women, with occasionally disastrous results, and then had married and killed his wife and had spent seven years in prison. Mustafa will die shortly afterwards possibly by suicide and the narrator will find out a whole lot more about Mustafa both from other people and then and from documents that Mustafa the left behind. He seems to be highly intelligent but different people have widely different views of him and his behaviour. It goes further wrong when Mustafa’swidow’s father forces her to marry a much older man. It is a complicated and fascinating story with the author criticising British colonialism as well as sexism.
I have discovered this on a booktube channel by this Canadian English lit student called Emmie so I looked for it in the original Arabic and luckily found it in a local bookshop. I remember enjoying it a lot but also being shocked by it? I remember thinking I’ve never read anything similar in Arabic (of that time) like that before. I feel like the original shows this much better because when you read certain things in translation (English mostly) although you understand them, you’re pretty detached from them somehow? but in your native language they hit differently and they’re way ‘heavier’ in a way. I’m not sure if that makes sense. I keep wanting to reread it and I keep putting it off, this may be my sign. I also want to buy his full work at SILA (the yearly international bookfair in Algiers) this month.
you are right that a a translated work can rarely be as good as the original but for those of us who do not read the original language a translation is better than nothing