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The Image, the Icon, and the Covenant, by Sahar Khalifeh, trans. Aida Bamia. Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2008. 260 pages. Translator's Note to p. 262. Glossary to p. 264. $15.00 paper.

In awarding Sahar Khalifeh's Sura wa ayquna wa ‘ahdun qadim (2002) the American University in Cairo's 2006 Naguib Mahfouz Medal, the jury aptly lauded this "narrative of loss par excellence . . . [as] simultaneously historiciz[ing] for the current Palestinian struggle while summoning a whole array of the symbolic." From its very title, The Image, the Icon, and the Covenant divulges its biblical symbolism, which will be made to bear here further layers of political allusion. Ostensibly the story of a doomed love and the desperate pursuit of its traces decades later, this is a novel of "national allegory," as in Fredric Jameson's formulation.

Tracing from the eve of the 1967 war to the second intifada of 2000, the novel is lyrically narrated by Ibrahim, who begins by recalling how as a younger man, nurturing dreams of becoming a writer, he had moved from his native Jerusalem to a nearby village, where he met and fell in love with Mariam/Mary, an enigmatic Palestinian who grew up in Brazil and resettled in the West Bank.

After 1967, and what with the difference in religion, Ibrahim abandons Mariam, pregnant with his child, as well as his literary and political aspirations, becoming an exiled entrepreneur who provides stones and labor from the West Bank to oil-rich Arab countries and eventually supplies the American army during the Gulf War. Returning to Jerusalem after Oslo, he longs to find a Mariam who has metamorphosed, in his mind, into an emblem of Jerusalem-"Jerusalem to me was Mariam" (p. 1)-and to search for his child and heir.

He eventually tracks down his son, Michael, who, raised as an orphan in a monastery, has established himself as a faith healer and practitioner of alternative medicine in a village where he is revered as a seer. Ibrahim later finds Mariam living as a nun in a convent. As with Michael, who will not acknowledge Ibrahim as his father, Mariam affords him no deliverance and no revelation.

The search introduces Ibrahim to Jamileh, a stalwart older woman who belongs among a host of similar Palestinian women in other Khalifeh novels, including Zakiyya in Bab al-saha (1990) and Umm Su‘ad in Rabi‘ harr (Hot Spring; 2004); indeed, the novelist's feminism has been her hallmark since her first novel, Lam na‘ud jawari lakum (We Are No Longer Your Slave Girls; 1974). Jamileh, who had sheltered Mariam in her Jerusalem house, has preserved traces from that time in her attic and is the custodian of Mariam's house in the village, serving as a keeper of a plundered archive. In an additional layer of national allegory, two New York Jews have claimed ownership of Jamileh's ancestral house, leaving her to wage a legal battle. The novel symbolically closes with Ibrahim and Jamileh walking off together in their mutual dispossession.

In his introduction to the Arabic original, Faysal Darraj comments on the reversals of the religious symbolism coded in the names Ibrahim and Mariam, as well as in their child born out of wedlock, in this case "a prophet without prophesy." He cogently observes that the novel's concern with the corrupt age stretching between Oslo and the new millennium "divests the story of its primary aura of prophesy and swathes it in tawdry garb."

Aida Bamia, the translator, is no newcomer to Khalifeh's texts, having previously translated her novel Al-Mirath (1997) under the title The Inheritance (2005). Here, she provides a short translator's note where she discloses her credo: "chas[ing] the Image was a constant exercise in stoic determination to bring the work to fruition with the utmost fidelity, which is every translator's goal" (p. 262).

Setting aside the generalization about the much-debated task of the translator, one may well ask: Fidelity to what? One challenge facing the translator of Sura into English is rendering its lyricism without lapsing into sentimentality or triteness. In the case of Image, however, "fidelity" appears to have been construed as closeness to the denotative signification of the words. If it is the imperative of this fidelity that yields unidiomatic phrases such as Ibrahim being described as a "protector" rather than "patron" of the arts (p. 92), there are also odd-sounding appeals to American slang coupled with traditional idioms, as when a woman, lamenting the killing of her husband in the intifada, addresses his corpse thus: "‘. . . Hey Mahmoud, you are the crown of my head'" (p. 256). Otherwise, the specificity of Arabic diglossia has not received much attention in the translation.

If the editing of literary translations from Arabic, beyond this specific text, remains a problem, such is the abiding power of Khalifeh's narrative that Image is slated to meet with the favorable English-reading audience it deserves.