Always Coca-Cola by Alexandra Chreiteh

Author:Alexandra Chreiteh [Chreiteh,Alexandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566568432
Publisher: Interlink Books
Published: 2012-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

Translator’s Afterword

The translator’s confession: when the author of Da’iman Coca-Cola read the first version of its translation into Always Coca-Cola, she hated it. After a late-night Skype phone call, in which we both were politely frustrated with the other’s opinion, Alexandra Chreiteh sent me an email, “Please don’t hate me but...” that crossed in cyberspace with mine, “I think that we can work out our differences but...”

And so our conversations about the translation of this short novel began, leading to a long process of discussion about not only the specifics of this text but also translation theory, politics, and practice from our different and overlapping positions—as author and translator, teachers, students, readers, writers—between Lebanon, the United States, and Canada. I will not detail all of the intricacies of our conversations about the translation process that created Always Coca-Cola, this English-language version of Alexandra’s Arabic-language novel. I would instead like to use this afterword to outline several of the major issues that were a part of these conversations.

The purpose of this translator’s afterword is not to offer the reader an explanation or analysis of the novel. Rather, I hope in these few pages to reveal some of the processes that affected its move from Arabic into English. My work here is informed by a keen awareness that all translations are mere readings and interpretations, offered by someone who has worked carefully and extensively with the text, of course, but nonetheless always subjective and never definitive. My goal in creating Always Coca-Cola has been to try to convey to the reader the sense of the narrative and story of this novel, while also giving a flavor of how it works in the Arabic and the kinds of linguistic play Chreiteh uses. I want to allow Always Coca-Cola to live and grow in its English-language incarnation and to have the kind of English-language “afterlife” that translation theorists like to talk about.

One of the elements that makes Always Coca-Cola so difficult to translate is its deceptive simplicity and familiarity. At first glance, it might seem easy to translate a work with a straightforward plot, a great deal of description of familiar things, and that draws upon so many referents and concepts that are well-known globally. From the title itself—a marketing slogan for Coca-Cola, perhaps the ultimate expression of globalization—to the characters’ preferred café, Starbucks, to their conversations about boys and sex, dating and marriage, tampons and gender roles, this novel resonates with the current issues and concerns of young women and men all around the world. Its edgy and cynical humor of twenty-something college students is recognizable across languages, cultures, and geography.

Several challenges are posed by this “familiarity,” by the novel’s global resonance and recognition. Firstly, the surface similarity on display in Always Coca-Cola in fact masks larger differences. One of the elements that I find so brilliant within this novel is that it is not a story that simply could be taking place anywhere—the very specific and particular bourgeois West Beirut milieu of young women at the Lebanese American University (LAU) is constantly being invoked and satirized.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.