Winter Solstice: A Hope for the Return of the Light, and the Story of an Elusive Darwish Translator

It's a small world, until it isn't.

Tonight is the solstice, an occasion to experience the year’s longest darkness and to reflect on what light we can bring into the world. I’ve been thinking about an Ursula K. Le Guin quote that crossed my screen last week. It is from her essay on being a woman and a writer, “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter”:

“Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life: but no artist can work well against daily, personal, vengeful resistance.”

It takes so much spiritual endurance to keep writing, to keep standing up after many rejections, to protect whatever truths you won’t compromise. As I struggle with some particularly big rejections lately, and with the general horror of what’s happening in Palestine, I am hanging on to faith in what I’ve always believed: that every one of us comes into the world with a chance to transcend our uniquely impossible circumstances, and to practice bringing light instead of darkness.

Frankly, I don’t know how anyone can be okay right now. If this message meets you in the same place, hello—and I hope it’s okay to acknowledge these feelings and that we aren’t having them alone. I opened an online store on my website where all profits go to Anera, an NGO providing humanitarian aid in Gaza. Their daily reports offer an insight into what helpers are doing in the face of so much suffering. If you know someone who particularly loved The Skin and Its Girl, I’d be happy to personalize a book or bookplate, send it out, and donate the money—or you can just do that directly here.

Because this is a Substack about publishing, I will share a brief story I’ve held on to for a while: it’s about asking permission to use other people’s poems or lyrics in your writing, but also about how to disappear.

Lyrics, Poems, Epigraphs, and the Case of the Untrackable Translator

Here’s the bottom line up front: if you are publishing a book and quote anything someone else wrote, you need to get formal permission from the rights-holder to use it. This effort happens between getting the book deal and going to print; this is plenty of time, but you should be prepared to cut the material from your book if you can’t get permission or don’t want to pay for it. The price is arbitrary and ranges from free to exorbitant. Basically, you click around until you find the writer or publisher, send a polite request with the exact material you want to use, including your publisher’s name and likely print run, and then collect a signature and instructions for how to acknowledge the rights-holder on the copyright page of your book. Sometimes, this is easy. Other times, you prefer to do things the hard way and contrive to use an obscure translation of a poem found in an out-of-print book whose translator doesn’t have any digital footprint at all.

For almost as long as I was writing The Skin and Its Girl, a novel about a Palestinian family keeping their history alive through stories, I’ve admired Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “We Travel Like Other People.” It has been translated many times, and an excerpt has lived at the top of almost every draft of my novel—first as a beacon, then as an epigraph. I won’t share the full poem here, out of respect for electronic distribution privileges I don’t have, but here are some varying translations of an excerpt:

The original, by Mahmoud Darwish:

              ...نُسافِرُ كَالنَّاسِ، لَكنَّنا لاَ نَعُودُ إلَى أي شيْءِ

         !لَنَا بَلَدٌ مِنْ كَلاَمٍ تَكَلِّمْ تَكلَّمْ لِنَعْرفَ حَدّاً لِهذَا السَّفَرْ

Translation by Munir Akash and Caroline Forché as “We Travel Like All People” in Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (2003):

We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing…

Ours is a country of words: Talk. Talk. Let me see an end to this journey.

Translation by Abdullah al-Udhari as “We Travel Like Other People” in Modern Poetry of the Arab World (1986):

We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere…

We have a country of words. Speak speak so that we may know the end of this travel.

You get the idea: small variations, worlds of difference, at least if you are a writer. I felt the al-Udhari translation came closest to the feeling that inspired my fictional Rummani family: the tragedy of forcibly living in the diaspora, i.e., that there is nowhere to return to when your home has been destroyed or taken from you, such that only the story of the place survives in memory.

While I was making revisions for my editor, I consulted editorial assistant Sydney Collins on how to get permission to use this translation. Beginning in autumn 2021, Sydney worked alongside the Penguin Random House legal department and laid out what we thought should be a straightforward if somewhat arduous process. The poem was a translation, so I’d need to first get permission from the Mahmoud Darwish Foundation in Palestine (which holds the rights to his work in Arabic), and then get permission to use the English version either from Adbdullah al-Udhari himself or his publisher; which, in 1986, was the UK branch of Penguin. If you know anything about publishing, it’s that publishers and their imprints merge, change, splinter, or go out of business as often as every few years. Almost 40 years had passed since the poem’s translation came out, so it was anyone’s guess who still had the rights.

The folks at the Mahmoud Darwish Foundation were friendly and speedily granted permission. They sent me a scan of the stamped, signed instruction form. Check. All I needed was to make contact with the translator, who’d published something as recently as a few years ago with the well-known publisher of SWANA literature, Saqi Books, in the UK.

Was he on Twitter? He was not. Did he have a personal website? Alas, no. Any social media profiles whatsoever? I am a skilled Google-stalker, but after a week of searching, I came up blank. Although the original English-language anthology was now out of print, I thought maybe the publisher could at least tell me who held the rights, so I submitted an online request to the UK branch of Penguin Random House. The dismal form reply said essentially, We get a lot of requests. Wait two months for a reply and don’t follow up. While Sydney began some internal research at PRH to find an actual human, I wrote to Saqi Books in hopes that his most recent publisher might know how to contact him.

A brief light: the Saqi editor referred me to the editor-in-chief and also requested to read The Skin and Its Girl for a possible UK edition. (Spoiler: I would sell no foreign rights. This still stings a bit.) For privacy reasons, the EIC advised that I send the request letter and permission form directly to her at Saqi, and she would forward it to Abdullah al-Udhari’s address on file.

Meanwhile, tick tock. This effort began in August 2021. It was now spring of 2022, and the book was to be released to the printer in a few months. (Word of advice: leave months of extra time for everything when publishing a book.) Our quest was now chronicled in an email chain with Sydney that was dozens of messages long, stacked under the subject line, “Permissions Saga.” Sydney sent an alternative translation, a Plan B version which the legal department said should be easy to get permission for—basically, some dude on the internet had happened to translate it very close to the al-Udhari version, so did I want to use that version of the poem instead? But it felt like the difference between, I don’t know, taxidermy and an actual lion.

I waited for a reply to my letter to Mr. al-Udhari. And waited. Could the book be published without the epigraph? Sure. Did I want the first words in a novel about a Palestinian family to be Mahmoud Darwish’s, that beautiful roar of moral truth and courage? That seemed not only appropriate but required, by my own ethical and aesthetic calculus. I had followed all the instructions, taken my letter to the post office, infused with hope and affixed with a beautiful airmail stamp, and trusted that the world was interconnected enough to find a respected translator in one of its many mind-bogglingly complex but finite professional networks.

Yet something in me was starting to take the hint. I’d also asked the most connected people I knew if they could find this man: these were folks in the Arab lit community who had spent their lives in a global literary world. No one knew where to find Abdullah al-Udhari, who increasingly seemed like a figure from another era, or someone self-possessed enough in his own vocation that he did not need to be findable. Compared to my own self-conscious efforts as a debut author, which would have me slung in a kind of potato-sack race with my digital alter-ego for more than a year, I envied such stillness. He could be anywhere, distracted by his own troubles perhaps, but I projected an inverse on him: a literary life from another age, when writers weren’t expected to be brands or overnight it-girls.

Nine-tenths of maturity is compromise, so I took a deep breath and asked myself what really mattered to me. Mahmoud Darwish’s words? Yes. When you have nothing, you still have your imagination and your language, and this was central to Darwish’s power and also to my main character, Nuha. Did the translation have to be Abdullah al-Udhari’s? His was the translation I had imprinted on, but the poem’s life clearly transcended any one translator. It would be equally meaningful, I realized, to have someone I trusted and respected do their own translation, knowing the story of The Skin and Its Girl.

I approached Nada Sneige Fuleihan, who had worked with me on some of the Arabic-langugage dialogue in the novel (see my post on sensitivity edits). I returned to the Mahmoud Darwish Foundation and asked permission again: this time to grant Nada translation rights to those two lines from the poem. Again they said yes, and Nada was more than happy to work with me on this small but mightily important translation project. The result appears in the published version:

We travel like other people, but do not return to anything. …

We have a country of words. Speak, speak, let us see an end to this journey.

My editor sent the manuscript to the printer. The year moved on, I started this Substack, a winter solstice came and went, and I watched the growing violence in the West Bank with a lead weight on my heart. My novel would be published in April 2023, and I’d spend almost all of winter 2022 preparing what I’d say about the occupation, American complicity in 75 years of oppression, and American indifference. This was at the heart of the novel, so surely readers would ask me about it. Right? What I didn’t know yet is that in over two dozen book events, pretty much no one would ask. An American novelist’s job is so rarely to express an opinion anywhere except coded in fiction. The blended identity of writer and activist is easier and more fluid elsewhere, especially for a poet like Darwish, who devoted his talent to speaking for a dispossessed people. In the US, we live in a country of words, and so many of them are inane; inadequate, even when we want them to mean more.

There is no end to the journey, not for any writer serious about their purpose and craft. As for the letter I’d sent to Abdullah al-Udhari sent to England, it did finally reach a destination: my own mailbox, in March 2023.

I would love to include the photograph of that battered envelope here, but it is so covered with crossed-out forwarding addresses that it would violate a dozen layers of privacy. The postal codes cross London, and only the corner of my pink airmail stamp shows beneath the Royal Mail cancellation marks, gray lines of ink shadowing multiple others. Around the corner of the envelope, where I’d written time-sensitive in red marker, the paper is felted, all its urgency worn to softness. Notes from various postal carriers crowd the margins, ending in a final accented message: DOES NOT LEAVE HERE. RETURN TO SENDER.

My original words saw an end to their travels: and though they remained folded up in an unopened envelope, the paper nonetheless showed that so many people had wanted to help them find their way. Had tried their best, despite the outcome.

Conclusion

I don’t know that there is a moral to this story. Here on the darkest day of the year, I’m aware of having made a lot of efforts in various parts of my writing life that fell flat or never got off the ground. I want to bless these efforts too, because they either taught me to find another way, be resilient enough to try again, be grateful for other successes and help I received, or simply practice the internal discipline to accept failures without getting callous, to learn something and move on.

Obviously I’m talking about more than the search for an elusive translator. Writing holds spiritual lessons. But, oh—here’s a moral after all—when it comes to putting other writer’s work in your book, do not take a fatalistic good-intentions attitude. Cover your (legal) butt with a dozen layers of Kevlar, ask advice from professionals, and get signatures. Besides respecting other writers’ intellectual property as you’d want your own respected, the extra effort will also save you from the sad sight of your book (potentially) being pulped, or (potentially) a lawsuit showing up on your doorstep. These are worst-case scenarios, but they are real.

Now, join me in a hope for the safety of all our loved ones and this entire ailing planet, for a return of the light, and for a gentler season ahead. Thank you for reading my Substack—as always, I am grateful for you. May all your efforts in the coming year come to good.

Even on the coldest days, the great blue heron visits the stream by my house in Northern Virginia. (Image copyright © Sarah Cypher, 2023. All rights reserved.)