This week our reporters bring you news of Morocco’s publishing industry—including reports of a plagiarism scandal—the release of Albanian LGBT activist Kristi Pinderi’s memoir, and a series of events celebrating global literary publication and design in New York. Read on to find out more!
Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco
The King Abdul-Aziz Al Saoud Foundation, a Casablanca-based non-profit organization that provides rare and rigorous documentation about Morocco’s publishing industry, released its fifth annual report in February to coincide with the Casablanca International Book Fair.
According to the report, some 4,219 titles were published in Morocco last year, representing a steady growth of the publishing industry’s output. In 1987, by comparison, Morocco published 850 titles. But this increased production is served by an increasingly fragile distribution network: whereas Casablanca was home to 65 bookstores in 1987, only 15 remain today. Kenza Sefrioui, author of the meticulously researched (if disheartening) Le livre à l’épreuve, estimates that there is no more than one bookstore per 86,000 inhabitants and 84.5 percent of Moroccans do not have a library card.
The trend towards the Arabization of Morocco’s publishing industry continued in 2019, with Arabic accounting for 78 percent of literary works; French comprised 18 percent, and Tamazight just over 1 percent. Of these literary works, poetry is the dominant genre with the novel coming in a close second. And while 11.5 percent of literary works published last year were translations, nearly half of these translations were from the French (and almost a quarter from the English).
Moroccan books are, on average, the least expensive books in the Maghreb. The average price of a book published in Morocco is 72.74 dirhams, or about the cost of 10 liters of milk. In neighboring Algeria, the average price is 85.93 dirhams, while in Tunisia it’s 90.81. But in a country where a majority of people earn less than 2,500 dirhams a month, 72.74 dirhams can seem a prohibitive price.
The report ends with a sobering statistic: in Morocco in 2019, a whopping 83 percent of published works were written by men.
Meanwhile, two Moroccan literary translators, Driss Jebrouni and Mohamed Elkadi—retired professors both—have found themselves at the center of a plagiarism scandal. It all started when the Tangier-based publishing house Litograf began scooping up grants from Spain’s Dirección General del Libro for the translation and publication of classics from the Spanish canon. Over the past ten years, Morocco has been the single largest beneficiary of said grants, all of which were awarded to Litograf to support Jebrouni and Elkadi’s work.
Yet it all seems to have been a sham: The pair of translators were found to have plagiarized existing Arabic-language translations wholescale, going so far as to faithfully reproduce the original translators’ footnotes and endnotes. The stolen texts—including Mariana Pineda by Federico García Lorca, El sentimiento trágico de la vida by Miguel de Unamuno, La Estrella de Sevilla by Lope de Vega, and many more—had been previously published in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. Spain’s Ministry of Culture has opened an investigation and is demanding the restitution of the grant monies in full. But there’s still no word on whether or not the ministry plans to employ anyone who can read Arabic in the future.
Barbara Halla, Assistant Editor, reporting from Albania
Unless you’re Hilary Mantel, in which case the London Tower itself will be lit up to celebrate the publication of your latest book, it may feel strange to dedicate almost an entire dispatch to the release of one title, but there are several reason why my focus will be on Kristi Pinderi’s memoir 1997 which was published this February in Albania. Although ‘published’ might not be the right word for a book shunned by local publishers and made available for free only after the financial backing of EU programs. But if you know anything the extent of homophobia in Albania, there is nothing particularly surprising about how this unfolded.
Let me start from the beginning: Kristi Pinderi is a writer and activist and for more than a decade he has been a key figure for Albania’s LGBT movement. Together with Xheni Karaj, they were among the first to advocate for LGBT rights in Albania, setting up two organizations focused on LGBT issues, organizing the first ever (and subsequent) Pride events in the country, as well as the first LGBT shelter, Streha. On February 14, Pinderi published 1997, a memoir ten years in the making, a double, intertwining coming-of-age story: the story of Pinderi’s teenage years in the Southern city of Pogradec and his coming to terms with his identity as a young adult in the capital. An essay on how Pinderi came to become an activist who started an entire movement bookends the short volume.
Pinderi was forced to flee Albania in 2017 amid concerns for his safety and that of his partner. He now lives in Canada which is why he was unable to attend his own book launch. Karaj, his close friend and collaborator, introduced the work, emphasizing the importance this book had for her and the LGBT community, for the kids who might recognize themselves in its pages. Through a pre-recorded message Pinderi spoke about his own hopes for the book, that it be not simply a personal achievement, but also an inspiration for protest and revolt.
Rachel Allen, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from the United States
This month, New York sees a series of events and exhibitions on global literary publication and design, starting with Arabic Type: Between Heritage & Modernity at the Center for Book Arts. The conference, curated by Lebanese type designer and scholar Nadine Chahine, is divided into three distinct seminars (held March 5, 7, and 19) and aims at articulating some of the history and dynamism in the relationships between tradition and technology in Arabic script. Chahine is among the world’s most prominent Arabic type designers; her work, especially Neue Helvetica Arabic, has prompted debate over the appropriateness of Latin geometries to Arabic letterforms.
Further downtown, at Poets House, Participating Witness: The Poetics of Granary Books opens March 10 with a conversation between publisher Steve Clay and archivist and editor Mary Catherine Kinniburgh. Granary has always been, at once, an artistic poetry operation and a poetic arts apparatus. (Collaborators have been associated with, variously, Black Mountain, the New York School, Ethnopoetics, concrete poetry, book arts, and Fluxus.) The exhibition, which takes its title from a recent Johanna Drucker essay, will feature “materials related to preparation and publication,” including limited-edition artists’ books, some on display for the first time.
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Read more dispatches on the Asymptote blog: