Harvard academic lands top prize for translation of ‘remarkable’ Arabic bestseller
Winning a prestigious award for translating an Arabic novel is the pinnacle of Luke Leafgren’s exceptional career, the Harvard academic says.
He picked up the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his work on Mister N, the novel by Lebanese writer Najwa Barakat. Leafgren, who is an assistant dean at the renowned American university and has won the award before, says this year’s success is at the top of his list of achievements.
“Winning the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2018 meant more to me than any other achievement in my life, and that special feeling is echoed now,” Leafgren said after the announcement. “This prize is also for Najwa Barakat, whose creativity is a gift to readers, and whose remarkable novel rewarded all the hours I spent reading, drafting, revising and editing since the day she sent me two sections of the manuscript in 2018.”
American academic Leafgren, who won £3,000 ($3,800) as part of the prize, has published seven translations of contemporary Arabic novels. They include Shalash the Iraqi, created by the anonymous blogger Shalash, and The President’s Gardens, originally written by Iraqi author Muhsin Al-Ramli. He won the 2018 award for the latter.
Mister N is a dark tragicomic that follows the story of a former novelist, known as Mr N, who returns to writing in an attempt to expel disturbing memories from his past. However, as Mr N sits in his hotel room, he struggles to disentangle fiction from reality.
Mr N’s memories are fragmented and he falls into disillusionment, unable to differentiate between the tumultuous relationships he has had with family members and the characters he has created in his novels. Time, place and his inner dialogue reflect the damaged city outside his hotel room, a chaos that he cannot understand or put back together.
The novel’s author Barakat has written seven other books, as well as being the Arabic translator of French philosopher Albert Camus’s notebooks.
“In addition to being a powerful work of literature, this book is a testament to the capacious history of Beirut and to that great city’s resilience and promise through past and current tragedies,” Leafgren added.
The prize aims to raise the profile of Arabic literature, as well as honour translators who bring the works to the attention of the wider world.
Mister N was one of six shortlisted works from 20 entries, comprising 18 novels, a poetry anthology and a collection of testimonies. The works were written by 18 authors, eight women and 10 men, and translated by 18 professionals – nine women and nine men.
The judges noted that while the shortlisted works differed in genre and style, they all appeared “to be seeking a kind of method in the madness of the upheavals of today, from the southernmost tip to the northernmost point of the Arabian Peninsula”. Leafgren will be given the award at a ceremony hosted by the Society of Authors at the British Library, London, next month.
The prize aims to raise the profile of Arabic literature, as well as honour translators