Faiza Mustafa, a Sudanese translator residing in Saudi Arabia. She is among the rare translators from the Spanish language, but, to the extent of my humble knowledge, her translations have not been published in books yet, which is what we expect from her. Among them, which she chooses to translate into Arabic, and publishes on her electronic accounts, whether by poets or writers from Spain itself, or from Latin American countries that speak, in the overwhelming majority, in this language.
And I loved your participation, and before I delved into what I am about to deal with, the last translated text of my poetry that I read to her, by his writer Facundo Cabral, says: “She was very beautiful, as much as I am ugly / She was very rich, as much as I am poor / As if this was not enough / I was shy too!/ but/ when she passed by me/ one day/ I took courage…/ I told her slowly and almost cowardly
“I love you”/ She paused/ Then she turned to me/ And she said/ “I love you too”/ Then…/ I lost control of the balloons I was selling in the square; She flew out of my hands! / And the sky on Saturday was filled with color.
Fayza Mustafa, and by virtue of her relationship with translation, was among those who commented on my article in which I dealt with the writer’s relationship with two languages, and it was dealt with from a slightly different angle, when she indicated that the Portuguese novelist José Saramago, and after his marriage to his second wife, the Spanish journalist, Pilar del Rio Maria, A tradition arose between them to translate what he wrote in his mother tongue, Portuguese, into Spanish, and the wife did not wait for her husband to finish completing his novel, but as soon as Saramago wrote three or four pages and left them on the table, the wife began to Translating it directly into Spanish, of course under his scrutiny and supervision, and with the participation of the two spouses in introducing amendments to the text, so it was that “his novels in Spanish came out of the same furnace, and at the same time with his novels in Portuguese” in the words of Faiza Mustafa, who saw in that another type of writing in two languages. .
This aroused my curiosity to know the story of the Saramago and Pilar couple, so I read that after 26 years of his association with his first wife, from whom he apparently had his only daughter, he met the Spanish journalist who admired him and his manners, and they got married in 1988, and she was no longer only the lover and wife, but his translator. into the Spanish language, and about him he says: «Pilar is my home. It is the most important thing in my life, maybe even more important than my job. I see that our love story is the love story that does not need to be written.
madanbahrain@gmail.com
