Yabaal Whispering Doubts

Whispering Doubts

During a translation workshop at the Lyra Festival in Bristol, we delved into Xasan Ganey’s Yabaal, a song performed by the renowned Khadra Daahir. Immensely popular, it exemplifies the blurred line in Somali culture between song and poem, straddling the two categories.

Our session focused on refining an initial guide translation I prepared, working collaboratively towards a more polished group interpretation. Though we managed to complete only a single verse, the process was thought-provoking. As with most translation exercises, the central challenge lay in balancing fidelity to the ‘literal’ meaning with the creative liberties necessary to preserve the essence of the piece.

We experimented with metre, swapping the quantitative metre of Somali alliterative poetry into the Anglo-Saxon alliterative tradition. This experimentation produced the line, “you sowed the seeds of my complaints.” While the line captured the sentiment, adhered to Somali poetry’s alliterative requirement, and was metred, it leaned towards a looser interpretation rather than a direct word-for-word translation. This raised an important question: what is the most crucial element to translate?

The workshop was set by underlying assumptions of a dichotomy between literal and literary. And this informed much of the conversation. What is to be left out and what is to be let in? This sparked a debate about the ethics of translation. We interrogated the meaning and intent we impose upon the translated text and the ways in which we may be imposing a western cultural lens onto the texts we translate.

• Ibrahim Hirsi, Workshop facilitator