An adult Arabic tale that became a beloved children’s story in English has gone full circle with another literary translation.
Inspired by the verses of renowned Bahraini poet Mullah Atiyya bin Ali, the latest version will now enlighten more young minds.
The bilingual book, Alfa’ru wa Rubban Alsafeena (The Rat and the Ship’s Captain), offers valuable lessons in greed, contentment and mutual coexistence, and at the same time highlights Bahrain’s rich pearling trade and maritime tradition.
The translation by Bahraini linguist from Ramli, Hussain Khalil, is based on former resident and British national Clive Holes’ story, written in the late 1990s, based on the translated verses of a popular ‘debate poem’, originally published in 1955.
Common in many cultures including Middle Eastern, a debate poem is designed as a conversation between two people who represent different perspectives.
“When we started working together, Clive was confused about my interest in translating his story, as the original poem itself is in Arabic. The original poem is for adults. I found his story interesting and wanted to create something for children too,” teacher and author of several children and young adult books Mr Khalil told the GDN.
The captain in the story is based on Ahmed bin Ghanem, a renowned Bahraini seafarer from ‘back in the day’, believes Mr Khalil. “It is said that during a pearl diving trip, he dived into the depths of the sea and an oyster or sea creature closed around his finger, so he was forced to cut it off before climbing back on to the boat,” he added.
In the story, Captain Ahmed receives a complaint about a rat that has damaged his boat and decides to warn it. Both human and rodent put forth their views. However, the latter refuses to leave the ship. Eventually, Ahmed orders that the vessel be capsized, drowning the ‘unwelcomed guest’.
“This was a real practice, because you need to expand the wood in the planking (strips of wood attached together to build the boat) so there are no leaks. So, the way the rat dies is exactly how rats would have died in reality,” Mr Holes explained.
“A jalboot was one of the common boats in Bahrain built out of wood. I don’t know whether they exist anymore. When I was in Bahrain in the 1960s, they did because there was a boat yard directly opposite Naim School where I taught.
“The whole story is based on the old pearling trade and getting the boats ready for the season. When the rat is found, he claims that he is the boss because he’d been there guarding the ship through the winter time when the ships used to not go out – the pearling season was from May to September but in the winter, there was no pearl diving so, they would be sitting on sheer legs, as they call them. Mayadeef is their word in Arabic.”
The lecturer and professor from the English West Midlands city of Wolverhampton first arrived in Bahrain in 1969 for two years as a United Nations Association volunteer teacher at Na’im Preparatory School. He learnt Arabic purely ‘by chance’.
“I started with French and German but I got fed up and switched to Arabic and Turkish,” the Cambridge University graduate, who has 30 years’ experience teaching English and Arabic at various universities in the UK, said.
He returned to Bahrain eight years later to do research for his PhD and investigate the dialects of Bahrain and an interested in poetry was instigated. On a visit to Manama Suq, he bought a book, which featured the original poem.
“I got the book but I didn’t look at it really for about 20 years,” he added. “I got my PhD and then I became an academic and I started to get interested in it in the late 1990s.
“My wife, Deidre, worked for an educational charity called the Hamilton Trust, based in Oxford, which publishes learning materials for children in British primary schools in various subjects.
“She thought it would be a good idea to turn this poem into a story for children,” the former Gudaibiya resident revealed, adding that he translated the verse to allow it to be adapted into story form.
“It was incredibly popular with thousands of children using it in literacy classes, and also to learn a little bit about the Middle East, which maybe they didn’t know about.
“Originally, I translated it into dialectal English. I chose the north of England where I used to work – Lancashire. There were a lot of colloquial and idiomatic expressions in there, which were really quite difficult to understand like where the rat says, ‘I didn’t chew the fat’. If you ‘chew the fat’, it means you ‘talk’ or ‘gossip’.
“The rat is saying, ‘I was lonely. I had nobody to talk to while I was guarding the ship’. But we found that a lot of the children couldn’t understand it so we changed it,” he revealed, adding that this particular phrase, however, was retained.
Speaking of the moral, the 76-year-old explained: “The rat had a good life in the boat, but it got too big for its boots. It’s like the saying, ‘if your friend tastes sweet, don’t eat him all in one go’.”
melissa@gdnmedia.bh
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