Zain Youssef
Photography by Mahmoud Raouf
To shed light on all the productions of the novelist Absent Tohme Farman, a seminar entitled “Absent and Translation” was held on the grounds of the Iraq International Book Fair, in which Dr. Jabbar Hashem and Dr. Bassem Saleh participated, and was moderated by Dr. Haitham Al-Jubouri.
Hashem spoke at the beginning of the symposium about the non-spread of absent Tohme Farman globally, saying, “It is still unknown at the global level, although there are critical and literary convictions that the literary works of the absent are comparable to the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, Abdul Rahman Munif, Tayeb Saleh and many giants of the Arabic novel, in fact the reasons are very many and this is unfortunate for an Iraqi writer who may be unknown even for the Iraqi reader, some of the reasons are personal for the writer absent himself, and I can say through many readings that He was not looking for fame on the level of self, and I personally call him the writer of the last row, he is always looking to be in the last row, he did not look for fame and did not look for any opportunity to shed light in addition to his great suffering.”
He added, “If we look at a quick look at his novels, you see the novel of the decades of the forties, fifties, sixties and seventies, and the man was lost between homeland and alienation and most of his works were written in exile and also material poverty was one of the basic aspects, he picked up an expression of one of his close friends, who lived with an absent for nearly twenty years in Moscow as a translator, Dr. Yusuf Abu Bakr, who is one of the very close and has a phrase that summarizes a lot for the recipient says about the absent that you find in the absence the sweetness of Iraqi dates and the sadness of palms, this The phrase summarizes the absent person and the novelist’s absence, in his life he was a shy personality and a little mixed, but he was very lovable characterized by a smile and kindness that is proverbial, on the other level the sadness of the palm was inside him. A strange sadness, which represents sadness for the absentee is the homeland, specifically Baghdad with its streets, alleys and people.”
And about the bad relationship absent Tohme Farman power and whether it has to do with the lack of global spread spoke on behalf of Saleh, saying, “The fact of Farman’s relationship with power is a bad relationship, as you know, that the man is a leftist and is rebellious and unwelcome has been stripped of Iraqi citizenship days Nuri Saeed, this matter made him first expatriate and live more than thirty years in the former Soviet Union and ironically that his death coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, he lived the golden period of the Soviet Union from the sixties to its collapse, And his bad relationship with the local authority made him turn to exile and had to work as a translator as an official work and was assigned books unrelated to literature, he translated for famous Russian literature Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov and many names in Russian classical literature, but at the same time he translated books that have nothing to do with literature, translated from the power station, for example, also translated a tour of the Soviet Union, astronomy, comic books and a series of children’s books.
He pointed out that “this matter affected him greatly in the lack of literary output, he has two collections of stories and only eight novels, if there was an institution sponsored by him would have been one of the most important writers in Arabic literature, and the other reason is the absence of the choice of the local dialect in the dialogues specifically in his novels made the Arab recipient confused in the meanings of these vocabulary, as well as the translator, the translator avoids such difficult language, for example in the novel The Palm and the Neighbors, “Al-Quraj” Khatuna Al-Mahalla, who knows This is the language of a social group and a vivid depiction of the language of society.”
And about the reasons that prevented the presentation of absent Tohme Farman to other languages after all these years, Dr. Jabbar Hashem said, “I think that this matter has general cultural shortcomings and academic shortcomings, and I think that most of the writers who spread globally started from the academic institution, there are theses in master’s and doctorate, and also it is okay to hold seminars in English or in French until they reach others, we also have rigidity in the curriculum, the curricula remain and no one thinks about changing the curriculum, I personally studied doctoral students and introduced world literature and we entered into the curriculum a book other than English, Chinese and Korean writers, and it is okay to offer as happened with Ghassan Kanafani and Ghada Samman, who arrived quickly, and even Naguib Mahfouz, who was close to the absent Tohme Farman, but he arrived faster while Abdul Rahman Munif married between classical and colloquial and I repeat that the colloquial language is one of the reasons and the weakness of the academic institution.
Returning to Dr. Bassem Saleh, he talked about the extent to which Tohme Farman was creatively affected by the experience of exile, saying, “Farman acknowledges that he was influenced by Pushkin, Tolstoy and even Benguib Mahfouz, but it seems to me that he wronged himself in this matter, he is the son of the Iraqi environment and the son of the history of the Iraqi narrative, he has a purely local character and does not feel that he was alienated one day, the novel is a Western art in all its details, but the cultural, social, psychological and political mobiles are purely local, do not feel that he was influenced by Pushkin or Tolstoy, but rather his local Such as the locality of Naguib Mahfouz, which launched him to the world, but the problem of Farman is that in a society can not raise the intellectual to the world, in addition to the reasons are many, the most important of which are political, weak management and lack of awareness, when an exceptional personality like Farman appears that cannot be embraced, raised and delivered to the world.