Tayeb Salih’s world-literary classic Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shimāl (1966) has served World Literature as the preeminent text of postcolonialism, touching on issues of identity, nationality, culture, hybridity, literature, language, gender, sexuality, historiography, and migration. It has been less understood as a product of translation. This paper looks at Denys Johnson-Davies’ English translation Season of Migration to The North (1969) and the dialogue it produces with Salih’s Arabic text. The paper argues that Arabic cannot be read as the novel’s “original” language and English as secondary. Rather, both English and Arabic are the co-originary languages of the novel, and this play within and across languages embeds Salih’s dramatization of the restless migration between variegated dichotomies that the work explores.