When a Text Moves Between Two Languages to Find Its Resting Place

Yemenat 

Mohammed Al–Mekhalfi  

When the draft of the play (She and He) by the Yemeni writer Hamid Oqabi, who resides in France, reached me, I found myself facing a text small in size yet vast enough to make me reconsider the meaning of exile and the ways we try to understand ourselves when besieged by circumstances beyond our control.

I read the text in Arabic repeatedly, each time sensing that its sentences pointed to something beyond their apparent meaning, as if they were waiting for another language to help them settle.

 Therefore, when I began the translation, I was less concerned with transferring the words literally and more focused on preserving the subtle quietude flowing between the lines.

The publication of the text in a bilingual book by Dar Mutoon Al-Muthaqaf clarified the experience. The presence of Arabic and English in the same book felt like two mirrors facing each other, each language reflecting the other, with each reading adding a new layer to the text. 

The English version opens with an introduction by the American artist Brian Carlsen, to whom the play is dedicated. In his introduction, he described his personal relationship with the play and expressed the idea that exile is not merely a distant place but a state that continues to haunt a person wherever they go. This notion accompanied me throughout the translation.

The play’s events take place in a strange room with a floor of artificial grass, plastic trees, and dim lighting that neither reveals much nor allows for rest. A man and a woman awaken in this space without explanation, each trying to understand their own existence before understanding the other. 

Oqabi’s text offers no answers, and perhaps this is what brings the play close to our daily lives. We live through many moments whose beginnings and ends we do not understand, content merely to move through them as the two characters do.

While translating, I was struck by the presence of a phone, breaking the silence between the two characters with meaningless messages and advertisements. 

The phone seemed to symbolize an external world that does not listen, a world that adds noise to the characters’ lives rather than providing an escape. These small details made the text more realistic despite the strangeness of the setting.

As the events progress, the characters’ feelings shift from wariness to something resembling acknowledgment. Fear does not disappear, but it becomes less acute. In the end, when they find paintings signed by Brian Carlsen, the text quietly transforms into another revelation, suggesting that the man is Brian himself and that the woman is a reflection of a dream, a memory, or an old fear.

What I loved about this text is that it does not pretend to be profound rather, it achieves profundity through simplicity. 

As a translator, the experience felt like walking through a tranquil space, attempting to maintain the work’s balance between two languages and two spirits. Perhaps for this reason, I see (She and He) as a text worth reading, as it reminds the reader that exile is not always a distance but a feeling that may accompany us even in the place we call home.