Syngamy

Syngamy takes its title from the biological term for the fusion of two cells that initiates the formation of a new organism. The work considers translation as a comparable act of encounter: one in which two linguistic systems meet, but where meaning is never transferred intact.

The work begins with a small coincidence between Arabic and English. Although the two languages share approximately twenty phonemes, the sounds represented by “S” and “س” are the only ones located on the same key on a standard Arabic-English keyboard. This shared position becomes the conceptual hinge of the work: a point at which two otherwise different linguistic systems momentarily occupy the same physical space.

Syngamy uses the short story Aluminium by Lebanese writer Hasan Dawood, which recounts the events surrounding a British aircraft that crash-lands between two villages in Lebanon. Among the story’s characters, the translator is the only figure who remains unnamed, identified solely through his profession.

The text was translated from Arabic into English and back again five times by different certified translators. With each passage between languages, the story shifted: details disappeared, meanings accumulated, and new ambiguities entered the narrative. After the final translation, every occurrence of the letter “S” was removed from the text.

By erasing the one phonetic and spatial point apparently shared by the two languages, Syngamy removes their most literal point of contact. What remains is a narrative progressively transformed by translation and then further destabilised by deliberate absence—a text in which the possibility of mutual understanding is both constructed and undone.