Translator’s Note for “Nocturnal Games”

I’ve been translating Muhammad El-Hajj’s work for the eleven years I’ve known him. I’ve translated stories of his that are longer than this one, stories with more complex plots, twists and turns, multiple characters, heavier themes. But I’m not exaggerating when I say this piece has probably been the most challenging.

There is a notoriously singular quality to Egyptian humor, one that has undeniably—among other things—nurtured Muhammad’s sense of comedy. Perhaps there is no clearer acknowledgment of this influence than the passage about Adel Imam in “Nocturnal Games.” Carrying meaning across from one language to another is one thing; translating humor is a different story. It’s one aspect of the job I’ve always shied away from—that, and translating poetry. Comedy, like poetry, has its own internal logic, its own specific cadences, its own time. Yet one rule of comedy is universal, transcending all languages and traditions: to explain a joke is to kill it. And if the way a people joke is the culmination of decades—if not centuries—of highly specific circumstances; if a joke holds the full weight of a heritage within it—how do you deliver it, unscathed, in the language of another people? How do you resist the urge to elaborate?

The humor in this story is not joke-based; it is more fluid, like the blood flowing through a body rather than the regular heartbeat that punctuates its movement. The reason I focus on this particular element in “Nocturnal Games,” however, is that I believe laughter—or rather, people’s ability to laugh in certain situations, and laughter’s uncanny ability to, in turn, disrupt their awareness of their bodies (that is, their very finitude; their mortality)—is the essence of the story. It is about sex, yes; and love; and, to some extent, even faith: the sometimes peculiar ways in which it manifests in our daily lives. But, above all, it illustrates the strange and sublime way this simple, mysterious, involuntary reaction, the fleeting lightness that comes with it, allows us to navigate all of the above. To make love, to cultivate faith, to laugh: each is a distinctly human attempt at rendering the fact of death less powerful, if only for a moment in time. And to evoke this in a three-thousand-word work of fiction that centers on a night of clumsy sex between a married couple is no small feat.