Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin

Birth Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin

Birth, an introduction By Anne BourrelBirth is a collection of texts that Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin and I selected among his short stories, micro-fictions and plays. The texts have been translated from Arabic into English by different professionals and what strikes me most is that no matter who did the work, from one text to another, the power of the prose remains the same. Baraka's literature crosses the boundaries of languages as a rocket the wall of sound. It is tremendously powerful. The Arabic, its vast vocabulary and the way Baraka exactly writes, making connections, alliterations and using rhythm as a poet, a musician, a lover of words is difficult to keep in a translation. Translation is treason as we have well understood it since Walter Benjamin brilliantly explained. But translation is also a way to make words travel from one place to another -translating is travelling- to bring it somewhere else, taking the gifts of the text from one culture and incorporate it into another so it belongs as much to the original spring than to the second river. When I read Tolstoy, I am as Russian as he suddenly becomes French or South Sudanese or Hungarian. When I read Yoko Ogawa, I am Japanese and so are you. Translation widens the boundaries that literature let open. The movement is an endless blossom of words and visions. The local issues become mine. The tissue of the text is woven with my soul and mind, with what I know and what I don't know. My eyesight enlarges, my heart is bigger. What seems the most valuable when I read (any story, translated or not) may not be the text itself but the echo that the text is able to produce once the book is closed, and the story forgotten. Long after the reading, what should remain is a strong taste, a strong emotion or an image printed forever in my mind.