Transgressive Truths and Flattering Lies

Abstract

Endings as Desert(ed) Starts"I take a long breath, the air of anticipation." 1 This is how Rabih Alameddine's 2013 novel An Unnecessary Woman ends. After Aliya, the fragile and equally eloquent Lebanese character at the center of the novel, has narrated her own tragic life story-the story of a lonely producer of unpublished (hence seemingly useless or at least unnecessary) Arabic literary transferences from English and French translations of works originally written in German, Italian, or Spanish-she decides for the first time to do direct translations of French or English novels into Arabic. No longer allowing the two former colonial languages to allegorically demarcate the limits of her own socio-psychological world, the elderly woman leaves the determination of what her next project will be to chance. The only thing she seems confident about is that she will give up translating from a second-order distance that doubly removes her from the source text. The toss-up regarding her next translational endeavor is between J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) 2 and Marguerite Yourcenar's Mémoires dʼHadrien (1951). 3 It shall be decided by a neighbor's way of stopping at her door: "If she rings my doorbell, my next project will be Hadrian, if she knocks, then it's Barbarians." 4 The reader does not learn what happens next. We are informed neither about the Arabic translator's future nor about her next translation's afterlife. Instead, the ending perpetuates the very moment of beginning a translation. Anticipating the possibility of other postnovelistic beginnings, it stresses the tension between the narrating self and the act of narrating itself. 5 I will elaborate on the particular non-conclusiveness and importance of narrative beginnings in Alameddine's writing in a later chapter, and I shall repeatedly come back to the scandal of unpredictable cross-cultural translations throughout this study when discussing the various Anglophone Arab ways of managing the