Trails and Translation

In Oman, I indulged my usual preoccupations in a new landscape. I was drawn to lines representing journeys; built structures that penetrate wilderness. How could I resist, with so much space, with textures of sand and rock and sea.

A single set of footprints left in Wahabi Desert dunes – an archive of a journey that was almost eradicated overnight by the reorganising wind.

Animal prints sunk into wet wadi mud, then fired by the sun into a textured ceramic tile.

This deep, corrugated trail, testament of a 90 million year impulse, left overnight on beach sand by a green turtle. She heaves herself ashore to lay her eggs, returning to the surf and her elegant sea-creature self as the sun rises.

Two months later all 100 young turtles hatch, take three days or so to swim up to the light through sand, and make these confused, energetic trails as they search for the horizon, water, light.

But the trails I followed in Oman were also less visible: faded imprints of history, geography and culture that have paced to and fro along the coast of North Africa to medieval Spain leaving the legacy of Al Andalus; the curving sails of dhows that caught trade winds seasonally north and south along the coast of East Africa, trailing the scent of cloves, and laden with dark cargoes, empire and slavery. As I expected, my first experience in the Arab world brought echoes and chimes from my previous travels, and raised the rounded heads of question marks.

The historical links between Zanzibar and Oman reverberate on in the Swahili language spoken widely in Muscat; cardamom-flavoured coffee served in the streets of both places in small white porcelain cups, with dates; the charm and courtesy offered to strangers; men in floor-length white dishdashas and women in black; the portioning out of the day by calls to prayer in mournful echoes between walls and mountains; the slow shuffle of sandals along darkened lanes.

Southern Spain echoed there too, in arches and architecture, in open throated singing, in the parchment dry ravines and jagged fins of mountain that must have seemed familiar to the first Umayyad settlers in Spain. And in the systems of falaj and aquecia, when the mysterious skills of surveying and a democracy of sharing, brought arteries, veins and capillaries of running water to the last date palm, the centre of the most remote village to redeem the dust.

falaj in Wadi Shab, Oman

I re-trod my previous thought-steps, taken when I was in Spain walking Mozarabic trails in 2007. I thought again of Al Andalus and the value placed on the word, on translation, on books and libraries as a way of sharing intellectual curiosity across cultures of the world. And I thought on the religious tolerance that existed, however briefly, in that same period.

As the Arab world rocks, and our cultures and religions seem in danger of further polarising, might it not be time to turn to the values of this period, and in particular to put more value on translation?

It's well accepted that reading builds empathy. But so little Arab literature finds its way into English, it almost seems that we in the west are being wilfully ignorant. In the view of Farouk Mustafa, translator and professor at Chicago University, Arabic literature can transform impressions of people who might otherwise remain misunderstood. "Whether you think it's going to be a 'clash' or a 'dialogue' of civilisations," he says, "we have to know what the rest of the world is doing and thinking, and nothing expresses that better than literature."

When the longlist for the Best Translated Book award was announced this week, it included very few works from non-European languages, and only one from Arabic. Orhan Pamuk also complained this week about this marginalisation: "When I write about love, the critics in the US and Britain say that this Turkish writer writes very interesting things about Turkish love. Why can't love be general? I am always resentful and angry of this attempt to narrow me and my capacity to experience this humanity."

By being monolithic, are we reinforcing cultural barriers rather than allowing free-flowing fraternisation, an awareness of our common humanity? It seems now more urgent than ever to reinvigorate translation. Arabia Books and other projects stimulating developments in this area, are to be applauded, but so much more is needed.

Some of the books on my current reading list (both specific to Oman and more general to my understanding of the Arab world) are:

The Dark Side of Love, by Rafik Schami – a Syrian epic novel, already underway with this one – splendid!

Touch, by Adania Shibli

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science, by Jim al Khalili

The Tenth Parallel, by Eliza Griswold

From the Holy Mountain, William Dalrymple

Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger

stairway to heaven?

Because I am fascinated by paths, walk them and ponder over their origins, the desires that have scoured them into the land, and the time and skills invested in their making, the Valle de Laguart in south-eastern Spain had drawn me to it in pilgrimage. Not for nothing has it been coined ‘la catedral de senderismo’ – the cathedral of path-ism. The irony of the cathedral metaphor is that the system of paths that criss-cross the gorges of this valley, including a crossing of the notorious ‘barranco de infierno’ or ravine of hell, are attributed to the ‘Mozarabs’or ‘would-be Arabs’, who were Christians under Islamic rule but became entirely Arabised, and had clearly acquired the Islamic engineering skills needed for enduring and artful mountain paths.

Stepped zig-zags led me up the side of the ravine through grey-green shade, under a towering white cliff on the north-facing wall behind which lurked the sun. When I reached the eastern edge of the cliff, the path screwed itself into a series of steep tight stairways. It was like walking a series of terraces except that the turn at each end was perfectly graded for a pedestrian, almost disguising the effort of the climb. As I got higher, the sun inched over the cliff’s crest. It illuminated the white rocks that bordered the pathway, and the luxuriant grass between the edging stones of each step. Each time I turned to walk west, the sun, diffused through tree and rock, created a dazzling white incandescence high above the steps.

I reached a white knobbly crag sitting proud of the wall of the ravine, 500 metres above the river-bottom. The land from here would start to roll back, become less steep and lead to an escarpment, where road travel was possible again. The crag invited me to sit. I looked towards the Mediterranean through interleaving spurs of the ravine, growing incrementally paler as they became more distant. It was as if they were the measures of some kind of scale of distance, the striped detail of rock and foliage becoming less distinct, the colour more subtle. And before the drop to the Mediterranean plateau, there was peak where Al-Azraq’s castle had been, and with it a sense of his blue eyes watching since the 13th Century. He had perhaps bequeathed to this valley the fine engineering which made this walk through a ferocious landscape so graceful and calm, so redolent of an ancient inheritance that still marks the land and invites human journeying. If books can be considered a mark of civilisation, then perhaps fine paths stepped into steep land should be too.

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