Paratranslating Iraqi women writers‘ stories twice: with reference to Alia Mamdouh’s novel حبات نفتالين (1986/2000), Mothballs (1995) and Naphtalene: A Novel of Baghdad (2005)

Iraqi women writers have worked for decades to make Iraqi women and Iraqis visible and heard, including via pathways of translation. The pathways of their stories into English are nuanced and varied, as are the politics of literary expression interweaving them. In this chapter, I focus on Alia Mamdouh’s novel حبات نفتالين [Mothballs] (1986/2000), the first novel by an Iraq woman writer to be published twice in English translation. The first version, Mothballs (1995) translated by Peter Theroux, was published in the UK as part of the Arab Women’s Writer Series, edited by Fadia Faqir. The second version was published by New York Feminist Press (NYFP) in 2005 as: Naphtalene: A Novel of Baghdad: still Peter Theroux’ translation but with dramatically different paratexts in terms of blurb, foreword and afterword. The changing representations of Mamdouh’s story in English (para) translation raises questions on what may have impacted on how this story came to be re-packaged twice: whose voices creating the story appear to be foregrounded in each version’s paratexts, that is the materials surrounding the story? Which voices do we have to work harder to see or hear? How are the politics of this novel re-presented in each English-language version? To guide my exploration of such questions, I draw on the notion of feminist paratranslation, an analytical framework of feminist translation which focuses on paratexts while interrogating the geopolitical scope of doing so. I also show how we can revisit the nuances of Mamdouh’s iconic novel and why it still calls to be read, in whichever language or version that we find it.