Translating Miri’s Ayam al ‘asal wa al junoun (Days of Honey and Madness)‎ : challenges and strategies

Abstract EN

In translating Mirī’s Days of Honey and Madness (2000) from Arabic into English, I felt as if I was designing my way out of an enigma.

The most pressing challenge has to do with the reception of the text since it is a translation of fragmented stories recounted through the perception of a mad man located amidst deranged human beings.

Moreover, the narrator, taken for a lunatic and a psychopath, is at the same time a rational philosopher, and what seems like rumination emanating from an unstable state of mind is intermingled with deep philosophical deliberations.

Furthermore, what called for new and unconventional strategies in translation is the experimental style of the text, with its abrupt flashbacks, constant shifts in time and place, repetitive gaps and lapses, unfinished and disconnected sentences, dense prose and crossgeneric writing, recurrent use of terms and expressions stemming from Iraqi dialect.