“I think I went into the translation business naively. I thought it was going to be easy but this has been a real learning process for me.”
So admits Ghassan Fergiani, the managing director of Darf Publishers, the London-based imprint dedicated to publishing Arabic fiction and books about Libya and the wider Middle East in English translation.
“Every book is a learning process but that means that every book is also very costly. At the moment Darf is not a commercial success and I don’t know how long we can continue,” he says.
“My problem with publishing so far is that we are not known as a publishing company and neither are our authors. We are starting to become noticed amongst readers but we have a long way to go yet before we become established as a publisher of fiction in translation.”
In many ways, Ghassan’s initial optimism is easy to understand. One of four male heirs to a bookselling, distribution and publishing dynasty whose history spans two continents and almost seven decades, the 54-year-old bookseller can justifiably claim that books and literature are in his blood.
Not only does Ghassan own two bookshops in London but his three brothers, Hisham, Usama and Samir, also own and operate three bookshops in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, as well as Darf’s parent publishing company, Dar Al Fergiani, which was established in the 1950s by their father, Mohammed Bashir.
The first Fergiani bookshop opened in Tripoli in 1952-53 and, like Bloomsbury in London, or Alfred A Knopf in New York, the name Fergiani soon became something of a household name in Libyan literary circles, earning a reputation that has survived exile, dictatorship, revolution and civil war.
“When I meet Libyans and I say my name is Fergiani they still say, ‘Oh, the bookshop?’,” the head of Darf explains. “The name became synonymous with books, especially in Tripoli.”
If the challenges that face Ghassan and Darf are similar to those experienced by independent publishers and booksellers throughout the world – the rise of e-books, the power of Amazon, and the power of the larger publishing houses – his brothers also have to deal with the additional issues thrown up by Libya’s ongoing conflict.
“I consider myself as living in the Green Zone, but things aren’t exactly normal,” explains Usama Fergiani, 58, who runs a bookshop in the wealthy Tripoli suburb of Hay Al Andalus.
“Sometimes we have power failures for 10 or 12 hours and you can’t work in this situation but I stay in the shop and I try to read a book. In the day it’s OK but at night I have to rely on candlelight.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Libyan revolution in 2011, Usama and his brothers in Tripoli were optimistic about the future. Not only did their business continue, but to a certain extent it also boomed thanks to the changed political situation that allowed them to publish new and very different titles.
"After the revolution we started publishing books about the revolution as well as books that we couldn't have published during the [Muammar] Qadaffi era," Usama says, explaining that in the two years following the revolution, Dar Al Fergiani translated and republished nine books in Arabic, such as Jean-Christophe Notin's French-language The Truth About Our War In Libya, that met a demand for texts that dealt with the country's recent history and the ongoing situation.
“For one or two years after the revolution there was a lot of demand for books that explained what had happened,” Usama explains. “And when I started publishing these books I would print 5,000 copies, but now I print 1,000. People aren’t interested anymore because of what has happened. They no longer care.”
Usama describes his customers as young and mostly female, with an appetite for Arabic fiction and young adult novels, written by popular English language authors such as James Dashner, John Green and Judith Roth.
Despite the frequent lack of power, Usama sees Libya’s current isolation and the weakness of its currency as among the most serious threats to his and his brothers’ trade.
“If I want to get books from outside Libya it’s very difficult to get them to Tripoli now because there are no airlines,” he says. “The currency is also a problem. The cost of the dollar is getting higher and higher and that makes books more expensive, but it’s very difficult to explain this to my customers. They don’t understand why a book that cost $10 last month should cost $20 now.”
Despite the difference in their daily situations, the ideals and objectives that keep the Fergiani brothers in business are the joint values and ambitions they inherited from their dad.
In London, Ghassan describes what he is doing with Darf as an attempt “to change the conventional narrative about Libya”.
“When I went to school in America I was represented in people’s minds by Qaddafi and all of the news associated with my country was negative. It didn’t make me feel proud and now I want to change that, for my children and for the younger generation in Libya.
“Whenever people talk about the Middle East they start in Egypt and head east. When they talk about North Africa they start in Tunisia and go west. But what about Libya?” he says.
“In comparison to other Arab countries like Egypt or Morocco, there aren’t that many books about Libya so I want to increase the amount of information and the number of books that are available.”
“What keeps us going?” asks Ghassan’s older brother, Usama, in Tripoli. “Well we really love books and we don’t really do this to make a profit, it’s more like a hobby, like raising horses.
“Printing books about Libyan history is our first goal because there are a lot of bright moments in Libyan history and not a lot of people know about them. Our father started publishing books about Libya and we are still doing the same thing.”
As Ghassan explains, his father first fell in love with the world of books at a very early age.
“He was the first person in his family to get some kind of education and he was the first person to get involved in books, and I believe they chose my father. They certainly changed his life.”
Mohammed Bashir Fergiani was born in the Jebel Nafusa mountains of western Libya at some point after the country’s invasion and occupation by the Italians in 1911. He moved to Tripoli with his parents at the age of two or three to Al Dhahra, one of the poorer suburbs of Tripoli.
After attending school, a rarity for working class Libyan boys at the time, Mohammed trained as a teacher after the Second World War and it was during this time that he turned his childhood passion for books into a business with the opening of his first bookshop in 1952.
The move coincided with something of a golden age in Libya’s modern cultural and intellectual history, in a period that saw a flowering of the country’s literary scene after decades of Italian repression.
Libya’s first secondary school opened in 1947, its first university opened in 1956 and magazines, newspapers and literary journals flourished. It was during this time that Mohammed established his eponymous publishing house, Dar Al Fergiani, as well as a magazine and newspaper distribution business that imported popular titles from Egypt, Lebanon, Europe and the United States to his three bookshops in Tripoli.
“The first books he wanted to publish in the 1950s were antiquarian books about Libya and he commissioned people to translate them because they were books that weren’t available to Arabic readers,” Ghassan remembers.
These early titles included Francesco Coro's Italian language history from 1937, Seventy Years of Turkish Domination in Libya alongside works by young Libyan writers such as Farid Syala, whose romantic novel Towards a Brighter Day to Come explored the situation of women in contemporary Libya.
After decades of literary and commercial success, Mohammed was forced into exile in London in 1980 and it was soon after that he established Darf, whose name is a contraction of Dar Al Fergiani.
But by 1987 he had returned to Tripoli and began to open the shops that are now owned and managed by his sons Hisham, Usama and Samir. However, he continued to remain in London and lived there until his death in 2011.
“By this time Darf had become dormant,” Ghassan explains. “So when my father passed away I had to make a decision about Darf and that’s when I decided that I wanted to introduce writers from Libya to the UK and to translate works from the Arabic.”
Ghassan's first project was the 600-page Maps of the Soul, by the Libyan author Ahmed Fagih, and it was not an auspicious start.
Set during the Italian occupation Libya, it tells the story of a young man who moves from the countryside into the cosmopolitan city of Tripoli.
The book, which took four years to translate and publish, was a commercial failure.
“We finally had the book edited and sent it to the printers to have 3,000 copies made but I hadn’t read the edited version,” Ghassan remembers, ruefully.
“But there were still mistakes in it. I had to pulp all of those copies and have another 1,000 copies printed.”
Since that debacle, Ghassan admits that he has learnt invaluable lessons with each new publication, and this month, Darf added another two titles to its steadily growing list of thought-provoking and timely books about the Middle East that he hopes will help to transform his family company’s fortunes.
The first, Hurma, is a novel by the Yemeni author Ali Al Muqri that exemplifies Darf's commitment to republishing Arabic fiction in English translation.
Originally published in 2008, the novel tells the tale of an unnamed female character growing up in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, in an oppressive atmosphere where she is denied the freedom of expression she desires.
The ill-fated protagonist is simply a ‘hurma’ – a ‘sanctity’ – and as such she is something to be guarded and protected but, in defiance of her upbringing, the young girl escapes to Sudan where she joins a jihadist group before eventually returning to Yemen with disastrous consequences.
Ghassan accepts that the novel is likely to be contentious but insists that his only criteria when selecting new books is the quality of the work and the material they contain.
“Some people have said that this will be a dangerous book but I said, ‘Listen, this book may not be very complimentary to certain sections of Muslim society, but this was a book that was written by a Yemeni writer and it’s been published by a Libyan who is an Arab and a Muslim as well’,” he says.
“I don’t think we should be so sensitive and I think we should be able to be more self-critical because I want people to understand that not all Muslims or Arabs agree with the sad things that are happening at the moment.”
Darf’s second book is also a reprint, but in many ways it comes even closer to the imprint’s long-term goal of educating a wider public about Libya and changing popular perceptions.
Translating Libya: In Search of the Libyan Short Story was originally published by Saqi Books in 2008 but Darf's second edition includes a foreword by Ahmed Fagih, one of Libya's most distinguished authors, a new introduction and an additional short story.
A mixture of reportage, travelogue and memoir that sheds light on the issues that led to the 2011 revolution, the book follows its author, Ethan Chorin, as he travels around the Libya in search of stories that mention the country’s cities and landmarks.
Not only does Chorin translate the tales he discovers but he also visits and describes the locations they contain in a text that is part-travelogue, part-memoir and part-reportage.
A former US diplomat who served in Libya between 2004 and 2006, Chorin was the first US commercial and economic attaché to be stationed in the country since 1980.
After the latest publications, Darf now has plans to release another five books in the coming year.
“Why do I keep going? I’m not sure what it is, it’s something inside. Every time I think that I cannot go on I find myself thinking about a new book that would be good to introduce to English language readers,” Ghassan says.
“There is something important about increasing understanding through fiction, about not lecturing people. Fiction can be a very great medium for helping people to understand about ‘the other’.
“When I was growing up I read so much translated international fiction that when I went to America and when I came to Britain later on, I didn’t have any problems really relating to people or to the values they had, I wasn’t clouded. People have to understand this so that they do not end up judging the Middle East in the wrong way.”
Nick Leech is a features writer at The National.
