The Translator’s Voice is a column from editor Ian J. Battaglia, dedicated to global literature and the translators who work tirelessly and too often thanklessly to bring these books to the English-reading audience. Subscribe to his newsletter to get notified of new editions as well as other notes on writing, art, and more.
None of us asked to be born. When we come into being, it’s into circumstances beyond our control, yet it’s still us who’s most responsible for the trajectory of our lives. So is this pain we feel, the hardships we endure our fault, or our parents? Who is responsible for the joys in our lives?
In Rosa Mistika, Euphrase Kezilahabi’s first novel, and the first novel translation from Jay Boss Rubin, the eponymous primary character is looking for more from life than her rural Tanzanian village can offer. Seeking an escape from a father who drinks to excess and a life boxed in by tradition, she sees education as her path to a better future—but through the lingering traumas from her family, her school administrators, and various men in her life, nothing goes quite as planned.
I spoke with Jay Boss Rubin via Zoom about finding your own path, learning by doing, and letting a hat be a hat.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ian J. Battaglia
Tell me a little bit about how you first learned about Rosa Mistika. What brought you to this book?
Jay Boss Rubin
Rosa Mistika was my first exposure to literary Swahili.
I was introduced to the text 24 years ago as an undergraduate Swahili student at Boston University; I believe it was in our second year of instruction. We’d been working mostly from a language learning textbook, and then the instructor, who was Professor F.E.M.K. Senkoro, introduced us to this novel.
It was definitely a struggle and a stretch for us to understand as students. But it also really imprinted on me a certain kind of feeling or experience via the rhythm and cadences of the opening sentences, and the opening passage as a whole.
As we started to wade through those initial chapters as language-learning students, I came to learn that Kezilahabi (he was still alive at that time) was a friend of the instructor, and they worked closely together at the Swahili Department of the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania.
My professor at the time: I viewed him very warmly, but I didn’t know all that much about his career, so I thought of him primarily as a foreign language instructor. But he was a major scholar of Swahili literature who was in the United States doing research for a different project and happened to pick up a teaching section.
So my initial exposure to Rosa Mistika and Kezilahabi and to Swahili literature was through this figure who was very invested in and very connected to all of those subjects. And as we got further and further into the text, he would talk about imagery, like Kezilahabi’s uses of circles. And then much later I realized that this was connected to some of his scholarly and critical writing about the text, and about those kinds of features in Swahili literature more in general.
So I have a really long timeline with the text. It’s something that I would go back to and read the opening passage of, over and over again, and at some point the opening sentence lodged in me. I don’t carry around the opening sentences of that many novels in my head, but this is one of them. I can compare it to, both in terms of its length and how it sets up some of the undergirding themes of the text, the opening sentences of One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez.
It wasn’t until 2020 that I really started to get involved in literary translation. I had all this background as a Swahili speaker doing different things with the language; teaching it, doing non-literary translation and interpretation, and maintaining relationships with people in Swahili for two decades already, and then also having a creative writing practice in English. But I hadn’t really merged the two directly until fairly recently. That’s when I returned to the text of Rosa Mistika as a literary translator, almost 20 years after first being introduced to it as a very young person learning Swahili as a foreign language.
Ian J. Battaglia
I think that really shows in just the level of care put into the sentences. You talked about how much they lodged into you, the early sentences, and I got that sense while reading it. The kind of care and effort specifically on the sentence and the cadence level.
Jay Boss Rubin
I really appreciate that. That’s wonderful to hear.
I should note that Kezilahabi, while he was my first exposure to the feeling and the sound of literary Swahili [is] also an unusual figure in Swahili literature. You could describe him as an innovator, renovator, or disruptor, depending on how you want to talk about him. It’s not that he’s a stand-in for Swahili literature in general. He’s actually both very unusual and very accessible in a way, which is part of what makes him such a unique author. He wrote in a very everyday register, everyday language—the sound of ordinary people speaking and talking to one another. But also he’s exploring all these very complex kinds of philosophical and existentialist ideas using that kind of everyday speech.
So my first impression of literary Swahili is Kezilahabi, and then he’s also, you could say, a provocateur within Swahili literature.
Ian J. Battaglia
I wanted to ask more about that. My understanding is that this book has had a tumultuous history; having been banned, and also returning to prominence more recently.
Jay Boss Rubin
I can definitely talk about that. Part of what I have to say is that some of the exact details around the book’s banning and then the lifting of that ban have been difficult for me to get the exact dates and stated reasons for, but even back when I was a Swahili student, that was part of how we were introduced to the text: as [one] that was banned for some time.
Now this is where it gets a little bit trickier; I think my initial assumption was that it was banned for some of the subjects it deals with: premarital sex, sex with multiple partners, abortion, varying attitudes around abortion, and then its treatment of many different types of authority figures: school administrators, priests, parents.
There’s a Swahili Studies scholar named Roberto Gaudioso, who’s based out of University of Naples “L’Orientale.” In a memorial to Kezilahabi that appeared in the scholarly journal Swahili Forum, shortly after Kezilahabi’s passing, Gaudioso wrote: “a few months after its publication, the government banned Rosa Mistika due to its content which was considered controversial, especially by officials of the Catholic Church.” But in his monograph on Kezilahabi, The Voice of the Text and its Body, Gaudioso suggests an additional layer to what made the novel so controversial. “The fundamental problem, according to [Kezilahabi’s] detractors,” he writes, “is that the narrator does not judge the protagonist, otherwise the novel would have been accepted easily.”
They’re two different ideas, really. One is the content, and the other is the narrator’s point of view, which is really about leaving it to the reader to consider and ultimately judge whether characters have behaved morally or immorally, and who’s at fault and who’s to blame. And that question of ‘who’s at fault, who’s to blame’ goes all the way through the text to the ending, where it’s presented back to the reader by the highest possible authority figure.
Ian J. Battaglia
That’s something that comes up in the English-speaking literary world now too: how we approach characters who are behaving badly, by whatever societal standards. You see a lot of situations where readers of books will assume that an author is advocating for these stances or something like that.
It even bothers me a little bit to see people quoting characters from books as the author; they wrote that, but they’re not saying that, exactly. I think that gap is really interesting. But the idea of a book being banned for that, I’d like to say it’s unbelievable, but I think in this world it’s becoming more and more believable.
Jay Boss Rubin
It could be that the stated reasons for the ban were these simpler, more cut-and-dried reasons related to subject matter—but then the underlying reasons why government and church officials felt the need for a ban had to do more with the lack of authorial judgment around those issues.
With Kezilahabi and Rosa Mistika, there’s all these different levels of interpretation, and getting inside of what different characters think about different subjects. With subjects such as abortion, there’s definitely a variety of different opinions voiced by different characters.
And then zooming out from there, there’s the idea of what the authorial or what the narrator’s point of view might be, which is usually very open to various interpretations and leaves a lot of space for the reader. And then there are a few, I’d say a half dozen-ish passages in the book, where a more opinionated, authorial voice steps forward. That’s where there might be some distance between the narrator’s perspective and what you could assume the author’s perspective would be. And then beyond that, there’s the reader’s perspective, too.
So in a way, just like how in the novel’s opening there’s this household within a village, village within an island, and island within a lake, there are all these different kinds of telescoping points of views. And at each level there’s room for different kinds of interpretations.
Ian J. Battaglia
That distance between the narrator and the characters I thought was really interesting, and how it rises and falls at different points.
I think it contributes to this kind of feeling almost of a fable or something, where there’s times [in the book] where the future or the effect of an outcome is presented to the reader directly. I found those moments really interesting, and then there’s plenty of times where that’s certainly not present and I’m wondering, ‘Hey, what’s gonna happen here?’
Would you talk a little bit about how you came to Swahili in general, what brought you to the language?
Jay Boss Rubin
I’m 42 years old now and I began learning Swahili when I was 18. It’s been part of my life for well over half my life now. So it’s a recurring question, ’Why Swahili? How did you come to it?’
One answer is that it’s a language I stumbled into without knowing anything about it after some false starts with other languages. I’ve always been drawn to multilingual spaces. There was a Greek-American family that I spent a lot of time with growing up. I was always drawn to the switching back and forth between Greek and English in that household. I was a fairly proficient high school Spanish student. But when I got to college and there was a foreign language requirement, I bombed the Spanish test and ended up in a more remedial level of the class than perhaps I should have been in.
So I wanted to have a fresh start learning a different language. I signed up for Italian, which was frustrating for different reasons because it seemed very familiar, because of the shared grammar and some of the cognates with Spanish, but I couldn’t actually communicate in it.
So then I picked something that I was sure I knew nothing about, which was Swahili. And by good fortune, I ended up in this very small, intimate course with Mwalimu Senkoro—that’s “mwalimu,” how you say teacher. Mwalimu Senkoro was the perfect person to introduce me to a language and a culture, and also a literature.
I could also answer that I took two years of Swahili at university, then went and studied the language in an intensive summer course at the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania, when I was 20. And I think the combination of learning the language in a more intensive way and my exposure to both—you could call it Tanzanian culture, Swahili culture, and then also the culture of the city of Dar es Salaam, which is a big, bustling, fascinating city—the two went very well together, because it’s a very social and interactive linguistic culture. The exchange of, “Hey, how are you? How’re things at home? How’s your family?” that in and of itself goes on and on. I’m sure it was somewhat naively, but as a young person in Dar es Salaam, that distance between strangers and friends that I was used to from the United States, it collapsed dramatically.
One of the nicknames for Dar es Salaam is Bongo, which is Swahili for “brains.” It is like a nerve center for the country, but it’s more based on this saying: “If you want to live in Bongo, you have to use your bongo—your brains—to survive.”
In a way, it’s where I learned—not to describe myself as particularly street smart—but it’s where I learned street smarts in conjunction with learning this language that was not a language I was born with. And all of it was very interactive and experiential.
I had an enormous appetite for both the social interactions and the language learning, and they really went hand in hand. I’d spend the morning in a classroom, learning the grammar, and then I’d just be out in this city.
Ian J. Battaglia
How did you go from “I’ll just sign up for this class on a whim” to, “I’m gonna go study in Dar es Salaam?”
Did you intend to study language from the start? When did it hook you?
Jay Boss Rubin
I think I was looking for something dramatically different from the relatively privileged and also sheltered experience I grew up with: going straight from high school to university, then beginning in some kind of a profession.
I think I saw Swahili in a way as a path to something different. I spent much of my twenties and into my early thirties doing a lot of unconventional things involving Swahili. For four years, I taught Swahili in the lobby of a doughnut shop. For five years, I organized an annual event in Portland where people swam across the Willamette River to raise funds for a project a friend had started in Tanzania, and I would go back and forth between Portland and Dar es Salaam without any organizational support. It was all very energetic, but also very naive, and in some cases, reckless.
It’s been a very long and in some ways circular journey for me, with a lot of these things. And then to come back to Rosa Mistika, this text that I was introduced to so long ago, and to really try to treat the entire project with care and respect, consulting with scholars and peers and going over the text again and again, and trying to find the kind of sweet spot between all these different factors—it has not been a direct path, in terms of how I came to Swahili literature and literary translation.
Ian J. Battaglia
Jumping off of your point of education as a pathway, this idea plays a big role in the novel. There are a lot of different views of education in the novel, and a lot of different perspectives that are presented, but I guess quite simply, education is presented as a way towards something different in Rosa Mistika.
That could be out of poverty, but it’s also away from tradition and traditional values and into modernity in a way. How do you think this part of the book has evolved in the time since it was first published or how has its importance changed?
Jay Boss Rubin
In the text, Kezilahabi—or the narrator, I should say—is often critical of education in the institutional sense: in terms of the role of authority figures in education, and learning to pass a test and that kind of thing. But at the same time, Rosa Mistika very much endorses a spirit of inquiry, and thinking for oneself.
One of my favorite passages in the novel is the one that compares the life of a human to the life of a tree, and how if a tree is deprived of certain things, it will reach higher to compensate. Then at the end of that passage, there’s a line that says, “Ours is not a world to be told about, as in, ‘The world is like this and like that.’ Ours is a world go out into, as in see, decide, act.” In that sense, I feel Kezilahabi can both be somewhat critical of institutional education and also very encouraging of intellectual inquiry, experimentation.
The education system was also a big part of how Kezilahabi and many others in his generation and subsequent generations went out into the wider world. He was from the same village on the same island as Rosa Mistika, as the protagonist of the first novel [is]. He went to secondary school at a seminary on the mainland, not far from the Mwanza Region. He taught at secondary schools, just like characters in his novel, right up until he got his initial position at the University of Dar es Salaam.
So the way that he moved about the country and moved about society, both geographically and in terms of his profession, was through education, and public education specifically, especially after he came into the university system.
In terms of how it applies today, I think there’s still this tension in Tanzania between educational progress—in terms of continuing onto the next level, having a high enough test score, progressing from Ordinary Level to Advanced Level, the sheer utility of it—versus education in terms of critical thinking skills and thinking as an unending process.
How these things are presented in the novel is another kind of dichotomy, but the conclusion is not drawn for the reader. But it’s true that it’s Rosa’s journey through the school system, and then becoming a teacher herself, that’s the infrastructure of the plot, in a way.
Ian J. Battaglia
What are some of the particulars of Swahili compared to English?
Jay Boss Rubin
As a Swahili language student, especially early on, I was really fascinated by its noun-class system.
Different types of people, places, and things behave differently, in a grammatical sense, based on what other nouns they are related to, both sonically and conceptually. I was familiar with masculine and feminine nouns from Romance languages. Compared to that rather strict binary, there’s a whole universe of different noun classes, or noun families, or genders, in Swahili. Living creatures and the names of different kinds of jobs and professions are in one category.
These are things that a two-year-old would pick up on and use correctly as a native speaker of Swahili, but as a foreign language student, you learn about them in a different way. You learn about the category of long, skinny objects, such as rivers, mountains, pillows, or candles. You learn about the noun class of round objects, or fruit-like objects, and that’s where you would find eggs, eyeballs, stones; then you have utilitarian things like chairs, books, shoes; then a kind of potpourri category where you find a lot of words derived from Arabic, Portuguese, and English; and then a category of conceptual things like “beauty” and “unity.” Depending on which category a noun is in, that will determine the verb start, the adjectival prefix and so on. So you get these different harmonies across sentences related to the type of noun that is the subject of the sentence.
The internal interconnectedness of the language is very, very rich, and very… I could say musical, but that’s vague and I don’t want to suggest it’s sing-songy. My Swahili teacher from the University of Dar es Salaam, Fokas Nchimbi, who’s been a good friend for many years, says that Swahili is a very sweet language.
Ian J. Battaglia
You said that you had done some non-literary translations before, but that this is your first novel translation, so I was curious, was there anything you learned from doing the non-literary side that you were able to carry over?
Jay Boss Rubin
It was the best training in a way, because in all of these non-literary types of translation I was doing, I was always trying to be a literary translator and get across the essence of what people were saying, or the feeling of it, or adding cultural context when the protocol for all of those other kinds of translation is to not do that. So I found myself rubbing up against these different limitations.
I tried every different kind of translation and interpretation, from legal to medical and professional. And I have this lifelong interest in creative writing. But it didn’t occur to me for a very long time, that where those two worlds meet and where there’s not only room for, but a requirement for subjectivity, is literary translation.
I think part of the reason it took me a long time to get there is that I was very committed to this idea that I was gonna publish my own writing about my experiences in Tanzania, as it changed genres from travel writing to essays to memoir, and then to fiction and even genre fiction. I was always very committed to those projects, and thought that they needed to be my creative writing priority.
So then it was a tremendous relief to realize that through literary translation, I can be involved in this collaborative process with other authors, other texts, and still have this very satisfying engagement with the practice of creative writing, while also bringing texts into English that readers wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
Ian J. Battaglia
How do you think about this balance now? How has literary translation integrated into your own personal, creative writing practice?
Jay Boss Rubin
It’s definitely at the center of it, at the heart of it, and it’s where most of my creative writing energy and time is.
I also really enjoy the translatory writing around translating texts. Whether those are translator’s notes or process papers or essays, or even getting into some more memoiristic writing, but using relationships with a text to frame that.
I have a forever-growing pile of notes about how I might revise my own fiction writing through a literary translation lens, at some point, if I ever get to it.
Rosa Mistika is the first novel I’ve translated, and I sometimes worry that might land a little cavalierly, because it’s such a classic Swahili text. Another way I’ve come to think of it is that it’s the novel through which I learned to be a literary translator. And this happened over a longer arc, while revising my translation over and over again. And this period also includes two years in the Queens College MFA program, which has a literary translation track.
At Queens College, I was very fortunate to have as my instructor and advisor Annmarie Drury, a textual scholar and translator from Swahili who actually translated Kezilahabi’s poetry, and got to work with him directly while he was still alive.
Ian J. Battaglia
What a great resource.
Jay Boss Rubin
Yeah, I’ve been very lucky in terms of mentors and instructors.
While I’ve been working on it, I’ve had two other full-length translation projects come into being. One is a collection of really fascinating short stories by contemporary Tanzanian author Esther Karin Mngodo, which is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press. The other is an award-winning spy novel by contemporary Tanzanian author Halfani Sudy, which is still down the road a bit, but forthcoming from University of Georgia Press. But it was through translating Rosa Mistika, and really through the process of revision, that I feel I’ve gained the skills I needed to be a literary translator.
Ian J. Battaglia
I might say that’s where all writing is done; in revision.
Jay Boss Rubin
Definitely!
Ian J. Battaglia
Were there any specific challenges with this book in particular?
Jay Boss Rubin
I would say the sparseness of Kezilahabi’s voice on the page. Maybe just from this brief conversation you might be able to tell that’s not one of my own qualities in my communication.
In my earlier passes, I was always adding and adding. I think a lot of translators experience this. “This [phrase] could mean this or that.” And then instead of choosing, you kind of tack them on, and I would fill in more details, and that was an anti-Kezilahabian thing to be doing.
So it took feedback and time and revision for me to find a way to figure out how to channel his voice, and then to feel confident and secure that it was coming across, and coming across better, in fact, without all that additional baggage.
There’s one word that was particularly instructive for me to think about, and it’s the very general word for hat in Swahili: kofia. There’s a character named Deogratias who uses a kofia to disguise things about himself, so he can enter into certain worlds. In my early passes of the novel, I would kind of mess with the hat, and make it a fedora or give a color to it. Or even more extreme—I didn’t do this on the page, but I would imagine it—you could put a feather in it.
It was really through the advice of Annmarie Drury in her translation workshop that I was able to appreciate the utility and the beauty of Kezilahabi presenting his kofia as just that: a kofia. That allows the reader to engage with the text and imagine their own kofia, and put their own kofia on Deogratias’s head.
That’s a metaphor that I tried to extend to the entire novel in my subsequent revisions. To keep it open, and to resist the urge to always add more. To be secure enough in my translation, so the reader can have all those spaces to engage with.
FICTION
Rosa Mistika
By Euphrase Kezilahabi, translated by Jay Boss Rubin
Yale University Press
June 17, 2025
