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    The Translator
    The Translator
    The Translator
    Ebook251 pages4 hours

    The Translator

    By Leila Aboulela

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A New York Times Notable Book: “Aboulela’s lovely, brief story encompasses worlds of melancholy and gulfs between cultures” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
     
    American readers were introduced to the award-winning Sudanese author Leila Aboulela with Minaret, a delicate tale of a privileged young African Muslim woman adjusting to her new life as a maid in London. Now, for the first time in North America, we step back to her extraordinarily assured debut about a widowed Muslim mother living in Aberdeen who falls in love with a Scottish secular academic.
     
    Sammar is a Sudanese widow working as an Arabic translator at a Scottish university. Since the sudden death of her husband, her young son has gone to live with family in Khartoum, leaving Sammar alone in cold, gray Aberdeen, grieving and isolated. But when she begins to translate for Rae, a Scottish Islamic scholar, the two develop a deep friendship that awakens in Sammar all the longing for life she has repressed. As Rae and Sammar fall in love, she knows they will have to address his lack of faith in all that Sammar holds sacred. An exquisitely crafted meditation on love, both human and divine, The Translator is ultimately the story of one woman’s courage to stay true to her beliefs, herself, and her newfound love.
     
    “A story of love and faith all the more moving for the restraint with which it is written.” —J. M. Coetzee
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9781555848408
    The Translator
    Author

    Leila Aboulela

    Leila Aboulela was born in Cairo, grew up in Khartoum and moved to Aberdeen in her mid-twenties. She is the author of five novels, Bird Summons, The Translator, a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year, The Kindness of Enemies, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. She was the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, and her short story collection, Elsewhere, Home, won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages and she was longlisted three times for the Orange Prize for Fiction (now the Women’s Prize). Her plays The Insider, The Mystic Life and others were broadcast on BBC Radio, and her fiction included in publications such as Freeman’s, Granta and Harper’s Magazine.

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    Reviews for The Translator

    3.5/5

    93 ratings13 reviews

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    • 5/5
      It was rich and enchanting.
    • 4/5
      Sammar is a Sudanese woman, working at a university in Aberdeen as an Arabic translator. She is tormented with grief over her husband's tragic death four years ago, and the manner in which she was subsequently ostracized by her mother-in-law. Her young son, Amir, remained in Khartoum and is being raised by her mother-in-law and other relatives. Sammar lives in a spartan apartment; she has not decorated, nor has she bought any new clothing, since becoming a widow. She struggles to cope with the Scottish customs and weather, and her only social contact is with her university colleagues.Most of her translation work is done for Rae, an Islamic scholar and department head at the university. Rae is divorced and lonely, and it seems almost inevitable that Rae and Sammar become close. Yet the customs of Sammar's culture, and of the Islamic religion, do not make it easy to express her feelings. She does so in small gestures, which seem bold to her: visiting him in hospital, and meticulously making soup to help him heal. Rae does not practice any particular religion, and Sammar knows the only way their relationship can be sanctioned is if he were to convert to Islam. This is not a subject the pair can discuss openly, yet Sammar hold fast to her beliefs.Rae arranges for Sammar to travel to Egypt for some translation work, and she then goes to Khartoum for an extended stay with family and a reunion with her son. There is much to comfort her here, but her relationship with her mother-in-law is still strained. While she is in Africa, Rae experiences a journey of his own; one of faith, which he describes, "... it didn't have anything to do with how much I've read or how many facts I've learned about Islam. Knowledge is necessary, that's true. But faith, it comes direct from Allah."Leila Aboulela's prose is dreamy and wonderful. This was a short book, and yet I found myself setting it down every 50 pages or so, just to reflect on the text and allow it to wash over me.
    • 5/5
      'It's a lonely thing,' he said, 'you can't avoid it.''What?''The spiritual path. Everyone is on his own in this.'-From The Translator, page 202-Sammar, a Sudanese widow who has left her child in the care of her aunt and moved to Scotland to become an Arabic translator, narrates this poetic novel of love and faith.I have read some critical reviews of this book which condemn it as "only a love story." The Translator is, in fact, a love story - but it is also much more. Aboulela is a controlled, meditative writer who weaves a deeper meaning into her novel. The gapping maw between cultures and religions are exposed in this simple story with a subtleness I appreciated. The author explores grief, and moving on, and clinging to one's faith - all anchored in an exquisite atmosphere of place.Aboulela has a finely tuned sense of what it means to love. In one scene, Sammar is cooking soup for Rae, a man who Sammar loves and who has been ill. In this uncomplicated act, Aboulela reveals something about Sammar's character which anyone who has loved another can relate to.'She made soup for him. She cut up courgettes, celery and onion. Her feelings were in the soup. The froth that rose to the surface of the water when she boiled the chicken, the softened, shapeless tomatoes. Pasta shaped into the smallest stars. Spice that she had to search for, the name unknown in English, not in any of the Arabic-English dictionaries that she had.' -From The Translator, page 97-The Translator transports the reader to another culture, offering glimpses into what it means to have faith and how difficult it is to abide by one's beliefs. It is not a complicated novel; but it left me contemplating the larger issues of life.Recommended.
    • 4/5
      Sammar, (I believe it was pronounced 'Summer'), is a young widow working as an Arabic translator at a university in Aberdeen, Scotland. She has been grieving for several years over the loss of her husband who was killed in a car accident. She has a little boy but feels she is unable to care for him and leaves him with her mother-in-law in Sudan.Faith plays an important part in Sammar's life, so when she starts to fall for Rae, her boss, she realizes it could never be. That is, unless he converts to Islam. Their relationship starts off slowly, just by talking on the telephone. I found this to be very real and touching. Many of my best conversations with my husband have been on the phone, and this was the first time (that I could recall, anyway), that I had found it portrayed in such a way in a book. The progression of the relationship and the issues of faith and belief are explored in the rest of the novel.I really enjoyed Aboulela's writing. It was very tender and poignant. I found it easy to feel Sammar's grief. There were a few things I did dislike about Sammar's character, though. I really cannot imagine leaving a child behind like that for such an extended period of time. A few weeks perhaps, but not a few years! The writing was beautiful. However, in the last few pages of the book there were a few too many sentence fragments for my taste. I don't mind some, but it seemed a little excessive. I would definitely read another book by this author, though.This is the author's first novel and was first published in the UK in 1999.
    • 4/5
      Very well-written book about Sammar, an Arabic translator at a Scottish university, and Rae, a Muslim scholar and professor who works with Sammar, and their relationship over the course of a year. Interesting insider's look at Sudan and its customs and the Islam religion.
    • 5/5
      Rarely do I give a book 5 stars, but I was entranced by this one. Aboulela's writing reads like poetry.
    • 3/5
      This is the story of Sammar, a young Sudanese widow working as a translator in an Aberdeen university. When her husband, Tariq (who was also her cousin), a medical student at the university, was killed in an accident several years earlier, Sammar was so devastated that she left their son with her mother-in-law. (It's hard to empathize with a mother who says to her toddler, "Why couldn't it have been you?") She returned to Aberdeen, where she has lived a lonely life.But things are changing all at once. Sammar has been selected as translator for a two-year project that will take her back to Africa. She has decided to visit her aunt/mother-in-law and to bring her son Amir back Scotland with her. One snag in the plan is that Sammar has fallen in love with Rae, her supervisor, a professor and expert in Islam. If he asks her to marry him, Sammar won't leave. The catch is that she won't marry Rae unless he converts to Islam--not only converts but sincerely accept her faith.As others have said, the novel becomes more of a romance than a study of faith and culture at this point. I did not find any of the characters very appealing. In fact, I found Sammar's passive-aggressive personality downright irritating. Rae was a bit of a stereotype as well: the intellectualizing academic, once burned in love, forever hesitant, his answer to whether or not he believes in the tenets of Islam is "I don't know." In other words, a lot of wishy-washy people who think they know what they want but aren't certain enough to go for it. And the conclusion, yes, is just too pat.I've read better novels by Abouleleh, but she hasn't stunned me yet. I'm willing to give her another try . . . but not for awhile.
    • 3/5
      Based on the blurbs, I expected more. It was well written but failed to engage me. I was annoyed with all the characters for their fecklessness and the author didn't develop them in such a way that you empathized with them.
    • 4/5
      Sammar is a Sudanese widow who falls in love with the Scottish secular Islamic scholar she works with. Interesting insight into Islamic and Sudanese culture. Motivation for romance and its development a bit weak, but perhaps that's the Sudanese/Muslim perspective.
    • 5/5
      Sammar is a Sudanese widow living in Scotland. In the four years since her husband's death, she has lived in a tiny one room apartment, indifferent to her threadbare clothing, her poverty and even the mold on her cheese. But as she gradually falls for Rae, her Scottish employer and Islamic scholar, she wakes up to the world around her. Rae is gifted with the ability to make her feel at home in a strange country, but their differences in faith seem almost impossible to negotiate. Finding out if they'll be able to resolve these conflicts creates suspense in the novel.Reading this book reminded me of eating the extra-creamy milk chocolate bar my boyfriend bought me: it's undeniably good, but so heavy it's hard to take in more than a little at a time. With only 200 pages of text, writer Leila Aboulela clearly hasn't gone overboard with descriptive writing. Yet, every page of the novel is drenched with atmosphere. Reading just five pages sometimes made me feel so full I had to put the book down. This is probably why it took me a long time to get into the story. But, once the novel caught hold of me, I was fully absorbed. As I neared the home stretch, I could see dozens of possible ways for the book to end. What the writer chose surprised me a little, but I feel she chose the best possible ending: one that tied up enough loose ends to leave you feeling satisfied, but with plenty left over for your imagination. There's a "solution" for each one of the characters, but none are without complications.I enjoyed this book as both an example of Muslim women's writing and as a document of the immigrant experience. Unlike a lot of Muslim women in the media these days, Sammar, the main character, doesn't feel oppressed by her religion. Fulfilling the requirements of her faith demands self-discipline and difficult decisions, but she never doubts it's a positive force in her life. Because we see only through her eyes, we get an authentic perspective on both Islam and the experience of an immigrant in Scotland. She's not trying to explain her faith to a Western audience; she simply lives it and lets us see it. I savored the small culture shocks of her adopted country, like seeing women walking huge dogs that seem capable of eating babies. Little moments like these brought home her outsider status far more effectively than long monologues on isolation.Recommended: for people who are curious about the world and don't mind a small book that takes a long time to read.
    • 3/5
      Aboulela's writing is what most caught my eye.
    • 4/5
      A lot of the reviews on the cover of this book refer to the “restraint” with which it is written, and I would have to say that restraint was the main impression it left me with. It was like watching TV through a veil. The central idea was really interesting – the relationship between a Muslim woman and her boss, a Scottish academic who is an expert on Islam but not a convert. To be honest, I couldn’t hear enough about this particular conundrum, but there seemed a determination not to overcook it, to step back and consider other matters. Heck, why not leave the country altogether.Undeniably, the writing was elegant, and I liked the way the author helped us to see the UK through foreign eyes. There was poetry in every line, and somehow with only a scraping of backstory, it managed to paint a rounded picture of the characters’ lives. On the other hand, I really wanted a clearer understanding of what led to the story’s ultimate resolution. It was a bit like going to one of those really posh restaurants where everything is cooked to perfection but there is very little of it.
    • 4/5
      Aboulela's writing soothes and enchants. She captures the environment of both Scotland and Sudan as only one who has lived there can. In Sammar, Aboulela creates a sympathetic, sensitive Muslim woman who experiences overwhelming loss and yet gradually climbs out of her grief and welcomes life. While I loved the language of this book and the positive portrayal of Sammar’s faith, I found the conclusion too contrived and not in keeping with the way Rae’s character had been portrayed in the book. Still, the book is certainly well-written and worth reading.

    Book preview

    The Translator - Leila Aboulela

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