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‘Athra’ … A Saudi e-Platform for Translation

Rashad Hassan.
Rashad Hassan.
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‘Athra’ … A Saudi e-Platform for Translation

Rashad Hassan.
Rashad Hassan.

“Athra,” is a Saudi e-platform dedicated to translation. It hires translators to translate articles and books under the supervision of senior experts in linguistics and translation.

So far, the e-platform has published over 150 translated books and articles, and plans to show 12 books in this year’s edition of the Riyadh International Book fair.

Rashad Hassan, a Saudi writer and translator who co-founded “Athra” said: “Translators are the cornerstone of this platform overseen by senior translation experts and practitioners. The platform does not only require the translator to translate a book or an article, but it brings him the material, trains and qualifies him, and then helps him translate and overcome the obstacles that he could face during his work.”

The platform recently announced the launch of the second edition of the Athra Project, an interactive translation project that allows translators to translate a book, and distribute it across libraries and e-book stores, as well as take part in fairs and events dedicated to books and translation.

According to Hassan, the Athra Project focuses on book translation, and “involves translators who have majored and practiced translation, and have former experience in this field.” The project consists old, contemporary and children’s books.

The Athra platform has acquired the exclusive translation rights from prominent global publishing and academic institutions, such as the universities of Harvard, Chicago, and Princeton.

“In this project, our main goal is to empower translators, and to enrich the Arabic translated content. The program passes through many phases, and offers translation training courses approved by the US board, along with regular discussion sessions that gather translators partaking in the program. It also reviews and evaluates their works regularly, and edits, proofreads, and finally publishes the translated books and articles,” he said.

The Athra Platform translates and publishes one to three articles each week in all fields of human science, in collaboration with international publishing institutions, explained Hassan. He also noted that 12 translated books on different topics will be displayed at the Riyadh International Book Fair.

“The translation team working with the platform includes 10 translation experts majored in translation. Anyone can translate and publish with Athra, on its official website or by taking part in its book projects. We offer opportunities for all translators, and select those who show the seriousness, enthusiasm, and will to work and learn,” he stated.

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Three Rivers, One Bridge: Mahfouz’s Last Dreams Revisited

By using black and white, Matar sought to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s Cairo. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)
By using black and white, Matar sought to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s Cairo. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)
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20
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Three Rivers, One Bridge: Mahfouz’s Last Dreams Revisited

By using black and white, Matar sought to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s Cairo. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)
By using black and white, Matar sought to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s Cairo. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)

With refreshing honesty, the Libyan British novelist Hisham Matar begins his translation of Naguib Mahfouz’s last dreams with a confession.

During their only meeting in the 1990s, Matar asked Mahfouz how he viewed writers who write in a language other than their mother tongue. The question reflected the concerns of a young writer born in America, raised partly in Cairo, and later sent to a British boarding school under a false identity to evade persecution by Gaddafi’s regime, which had disappeared his dissident father.

Naguib Mahfouz on the balcony of his café overlooking Tahrir Square in Cairo, 1988. (AFP)

Mahfouz’s reply was as concise and sharp as his prose: "You belong to the language you write in."

Yet Matar admits that, in later recollections of this exchange, he often caught himself embellishing Mahfouz’s words, adding an unspoken elaboration: "Every language is its own river, with its own terrain and ecology, its own banks and tides, its own source and destinations where it empties, and therefore, every writer who writes in that language must swim in its river."

In this sense, I Found Myself... The Last Dreams, published by Penguin's Viking last week, attempts to be a bridge between three rivers: the Arabic in which Mahfouz wrote his original text, the English into which Matar translated it, and the visual language of the American photographer Diana Matar; the translator’s wife whose images of Cairo are interspersed throughout the book.

No easy task. Mahfouz’s translations have often sparked debate—whether over inaccuracies, neglected context, or occasional editorial interference.

A touch of this affects Matar’s attempt without ruining it. For instance, in translating Dream 211, where Mahfouz finds himself facing Saad Zaghloul, leader of the 1919 revolution, alongside "Umm al-Masriyyin" (Mother of the Egyptians)—a title referring to Zaghloul’s wife, Safiya—Matar misinterprets the epithet as a symbolic allusion to Egypt itself, rendering it "Mother Egypt."

Beyond this, however, the first published translation by Pulitzer-winning Matar flows smoothly, matching the simplicity of his project’s origin story: it began one morning over coffee at the kitchen table, where he translated a few dreams for his wife, only to find himself having done dozens—eventually deciding to publish them as his first major translation.

The images complement the dreamlike atmosphere without attempting to directly translate any of them. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)

Perhaps the concise, economical language of Mahfouz’s final dreams made the task easier.

Between dreams, Diana Matar’s photographs of Cairo—Mahfouz’s city and muse—appear shrouded in shadows, dust, and fleeting impressions, sometimes ghostly in detail, complementing the dreamscapes without directly illustrating them. Here, she joins Mahfouz in her love for Cairo, which became her "muse" after accompanying her husband to that summer meeting with the Arab world’s sole Nobel laureate in literature. Relying on black-and-white imagery and abstraction where possible, Diana seems to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s.

Diana Matar took most of the book's photographs between the late 1990s and early 2000s. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)

In his introduction’s closing lines, Hisham Matar imagines Mahfouz flipping through the translation and remarking, in his trademark brevity: "Of course." But perhaps closer to the truth is that he would repeat his original verdict: "You belong to the language you write in."

Perhaps we must accept that translation—not just of this book, but in general—is a bridge, not a mirror. And that is enough.