Letters Across The Mountains – The Stinging Fly

August 15th marks five years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. During this time the rights of Afghan women have been systematically restricted — they have been banned from secondary and higher education, excluded from the workplace, and prevented from accessing public spaces.

Despite living under this oppressive regime, a group of aspiring women writers, known as the Paranda Network, has continued to connect with one another and to write. They meet each week via a secure messaging app: developing their craft, sharing work, and engaging with international editors and translators. The Paranda Network is facilitated by Untold Narratives, a writer development programme based in the UK.

Last December, Untold invited Booker-shortlisted Somali British novelist Nadifa Mohamed to begin an exchange of letters with Maryam Mahjoba (pen name), a young Afghan fiction writer, living in Kabul. Three sets of letters have been exchanged thus far, with Maryam’s letters being translated for Nadifa — and now for us — from Dari into English by Abdul Bacet Khurram.

As the world around them changes, through the seasons, and through political and social changes, they discuss gardens, drought, and shifting landscapes as symbols of personal history and cultural erosion. They also share the hope that they will meet in person one day.

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Untold’s work with the women in the Paranda Network is supported by KfW Stiftung.

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How We Measure Time

‘The amount of time it takes for the sadness to pass defines the period. The seasons change around me: my fig and quince trees grow green, then fade to yellow as their leaves fall. But the real seasons are in the heart.’

A Taut String Between Us

‘I felt something of my grandmother’s spirit in that garden, how she had tried to nurture life and nourishment from the sandy soil and how war had made it a scene of neglect and destruction.’

Bliss in Moments Like These

‘On afternoons when I sit on the patio facing the quince, fig and pomegranate trees, the call to prayer echoes gently through the yard while a breeze rustles between the trees. I find bliss in moments like these.’

Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa, Somaliland, and moved to Britain at the age of four. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, won the Betty Trask Prize; it was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award. Her second novel, Orchard of Lost Souls, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Prix Albert Bernard. The Fortune Men was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award.

Maryam Mahjoba (pen name) is a member of Paranda, a global network of Afghan women writers, and her short stories have been published in My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women (2022), Words Without Borders, Aeon and The Markaz Review. She is a contributing writer to the collective diary My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of an Afghan Women’s Writing Group (2024) and is currently working on two novels.

Abdul Bacet Khurram is a reporter, interpreter and literary translator working in Dari, Pashto, and English. He studied Chinese Literature at university in Beijing. He returned to Afghanistan where he worked as a news editor and translator for a local news channel and edited content in English, Pashto, and Dari. Abdul has been working as a translator and interpreter in Pashto and Dari with Untold Narratives since the start of 2024 while continuing his work as a news reporter.

About The Translations: Translating these letters between two highly talented writers felt to me like listening to a deeply meaningful conversation. I coughed when Maryam wrote about Kabul’s pollution. I was moved by the story of the lost garden in Hargeisa, and I was inspired by the tales of mystics and adventurers.

Maryam’s and Nadifa’s words crossed language barriers, physical borders, and the six-thousand-kilometre distance between them with remarkable ease. While translating, I felt as though I were sitting in a café on a rainy afternoon, listening to two old friends. Their dialogue lingered in my mind long after I had finished reading.

As I translated these letters, my goal was to convey, as faithfully as possible, the emotional weight and nuance of the sender’s words for the recipient. However, since I have not written many letters in my life, either in Dari or English, I initially found translating this correspondence somewhat challenging. To deepen my knowledge of the form, I read Franz Kafka’s letters in English and Forough Farrokhzad’s letters in Persian. Reading these impressed upon me the unique power of the act of exchanging letters, and the sincerity and vulnerability that they can carry.

This project was deeply moving for me. Facilitating this exchange between these two writers from different cultures and different parts of the world through the art of translation was a deeply rewarding experience.
— ABK

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