In Arabic, the act of translation is called tarjama (ترجمة). The word carries two meanings that have always coexisted in tension: translation as linguistic transfer, and translation as the writing of a biography — the transmission of a life.

This is not coincidence. Both acts share the same structure: you take what belongs to someone, and you render it in a form that others can receive. The problem is that rendering is never neutral. Something escapes in the passage.

The root of tarjama points toward a more unsettling origin: uncertain speech that has no support, or, in some registers, moral insult. The tourjoumane (ترجمان) — the translator, the biographer — is a master of languages who operates on terrain that has no stable ground. His words are always threatened by subjective lightness. He is authoritative and weightless at once.

This is why translation, politically understood, is an act of Raj'm (رجم) — linguistic stoning. Not out of malice. Without prior intention, the translator throws his projections onto the original text, one by one, until the author's essential intention disappears beneath the accumulated weight of substitutions. What remains is a text that speaks, but speaks in the translator's voice.

The author is not refuted. She is something worse: she is replaced.

This is the epistemic structure that the Arabic linguistic imagination has always known and that Western translation theory has only recently begun to name. Walter Benjamin came close when he described the translator's task as reaching for the original's mode of intention, not its content. But even Benjamin did not say what Arabic etymology already contains: that translation, in its very root, is a speech act with no support. It floats. And what floats carries everything the translator carries — his formation, his assumptions, the epistemological universe that preceded him before he ever opened the source text.

Translation is not a bridge. It is a substitution that calls itself a bridge.

The biography meaning of tarjama clarifies what is at stake. To write a life is also to translate it — to render a singular, resistant existence into a form legible to readers who were not there. The biographer, like the translator, kills the original softly. He gives it a new life that is, structurally, his own reading wearing the original's name.

What this means methodologically: every time a Moroccan concept is rendered into European theoretical language, a tarjama is performed. Each substitution is a stone thrown. The concept survives, but its support — the field of practice, the ethical universe, the relational economy from which it draws its force — is buried under the translation.

The question is not whether to translate. The question is whether to name the stoning when it happens.

Art work : Reza Abedini | 2014 |