Translating Libya: The Modern Libyan Short Story Review

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Translating Libya: The Modern Libyan Short Story ReviewIt is rare to find diplomats posted to Libya culturally engaged with the country. On most occasions members of the various embassies in Tripoli spend their time complaining about the lack of amenities and commenting on what appears to them a shallow and culture-less country. Hidden by their tainted glass cars, they are chauffeured around the city from reception to party to national celebrations held in each other's embassies.
The same cannot be said of former US commercial attaché to Libya, Ethan Chorin, who spent his free time in Tripoli collecting Libyan short stories that he translated and now published. "Translating Libya" is an excellent collection of modern Libyan short stories, a genre that has characterized the country's literary production since its independence. The book does not aim to be a comprehensive analysis of the Libyan short story but rather a showcase of this little-known country through its literary production.
Local literature is an excellent apolitical vehicle through which to give a foreign audience a sense of the place, so the author set out to choose stories that would take the reader along a journey through the country's cities, green mountains and desert landscapes. Attempting to find reference to actual places was not always an easy task. As Chorin himself states, reading through the modest body of work that is the modern Libyan short fiction, rarely does one encounter mention, let alone description of actual places. As if to shelter themselves from the country's contingent political reality, most of Libyan authors write in an abstract or highly philosophical style, as the publications of the country's most well-know author abroad Ibrahim Al-Koni, who did not make it into Chorin's selction, attests to.
Thanks to the help of his Libyan colleagues, through friends and acquaintances, with the collaboration of booksellers in Tripoli and Benghazi, and after scavenging through old newspapers, literary magazines and online cultural forums, Chorin selected of 16 stories that take the reader on a journey from the shores of Cyrenaica to Roman sites of Tripolitania, passing through locust-invaded Fezzan. Well known authors as Sadeq Nayhoum, Wahbi Bouri, Ahmed Ibrahim Fagih and Ali Mustafa Misrati are found alongside new names that the foreign reader will not know such as Abdullah Ali Al-Ghazal and Meftah Genaw. Chorin's comments on how he went about searching for these stories and his descriptions of places mentioned by their authors accompany every story. I was glad to see that Chorin also included a few Libyan female writers, although I wished he had chosen a story by my friend Asma al-Usta, whose highly descriptive accounts of the Tripoli of her childhood would have fitted well in this collection.
The book is praiseworthy in itself, as it fills a gap in our knowledge of the rarely translated Libyan literature. This endeavor, however, is even more laudable given that its compiler is a US diplomat who served in Libya between the summer of 2004 and 2006, when the US was stuggling to keep its diplomatic mission in Tripoli staffed. It was a busy and difficult time for US diplomats who at the time lived and operated out of Tripoli's only luxury hotel, as a proper US Embassy in Tripoli did not exist yet. From his hotel room, which also doubled as an office, Chorin used his late evenings to compile day after day good, solid translations of Libyan short stories.
If only all diplomats could be so resourceful and humble as Chorin.
Translating Libya: The Modern Libyan Short Story OverviewPart anthology and part travelogue, Translating Libya presents the country through the eyes of sixteen Libyan short story writers and one American diplomat. Intrigued by the apparent absence of 'place' in modern Libyan short fiction, Ethan Chorin resolved to track down and translate stories that specifically mention cities and landmarks in Libya. The stories trace the influence of the ancient Romans, the later Italian occupation and the current influx of foreign workers from Africa and further afield. The authors open a window on today's Libya - a rapidly urbanizing country with rich oil reserves, recently renewed diplomatic relations with the West and a nascent tourist industry based on its well-preserved ancient cities. This is a unique introduction to a country that has for some time been 'off the beaten path'.


Ethan Chorin served from 2004-6 as the first US Commercial/Economic Attache stationed in Libya since 1980.




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