Language: Arabic

The Four Colours of Blood: An Interview with Norah Alkharashi and Yasmine Haj on the Arabic Poetry of Love and War

January 7, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

The more we bridge our languages, the more effective our collective resistance can be.

In Arabic, the word for ‘love’ (حب) is nearly identical to the word for ‘war’ (حرب), differing by just one letter. The nearness and linguistic kinship between these two words is a felicitous metaphor for the tropes examined in the poetry anthology Arabic, between Love and War, published by Tkaronto, Canada-based trace press.

Arabic, Between Love and War assembles important voices from across the Arabophone world, such as Nour Balousha of Palestine, Najlaa Osman Eltom of Sudan, Rana Issa of Lebanon, Qasim Saudi of Iraq, as well as diasporic Arab poets in Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the United States. Edited by Palestinian poet-filmmaker Yasmine Haj and Saudi translator-scholar Norah Alkharashi, the anthology features poems translated from Arabic into English and vice versa, a number of which have garnered accolades such as the Lambda Literary Award, Atheer Poetry Prize, Arab American Book Award, and appeared in poetry collections published in Damascus, Beirut, Juba, California, Basrah, Algiers, and beyond.

In this interview, I spoke with both Haj (in Paris, France) and Alkharashi (in Ottawa, Canada) about the anthology and the ways in which the poetry of love and poetry of war converge.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Congratulations to both of you on this riveting anthology, Arabic, between Love and War! How did this book come to be, and how is it particularly relevant and urgent today?

Yasmine Haj (YH): Thank you, Sam. This book is the epilogue to a workshop organised by trace press, ‘translating [x]’, in which Norah and I co-facilitated six online sessions on literary translation from Arabic. As we structured the workshop, we were drawn to the aesthetic of the words love and war in Arabic, and how the removal of one letter throws one word into its apparent opposite. We discussed the idea with the participants, some of which mentioned how tired they were of our world being discussed through the prism of war. This was in late 2022, early 2023, before Zionism heightened its genocide of Gaza and any reminder of indigeneity. We had no idea we would be editing this volume, with all its submissions, as we watched Palestine oscillate between those very two words, and other genocided lands fluctuate right along with it. Love of land, of people, and war waged upon that very existence, have been ongoing for more than a century, adding to the six hundred years of imperial annihilation and substitution. READ MORE…

Announcing Our December Book Club Selection: The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer by Belal Fadl

December 31, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Here, language tells the truth without mitigation, even when that truth is ugly.

Upon the premiere of Youssef Chahine’s Cairo at Cannes, the Egyptian critics in attendance resented its unflinching portrayal of the city’s poverty and density, claiming it as a derogatory and inciting the film’s eventual ban. In The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer, author and screenwriter Belal Fadl takes a similarly undaunted look at the capital: its swarming underbelly, its suffocating divides, and its unrelenting pressures that bloom both tragedy and absurdity. Written in a captivating style that listens carefully to the city’s manifold ranges, Fadl is determined to pull back the curtains, putting a middle finger up to politeness or grandeur, and drawing instead on chaos, comedy, and linguistic richness to portrait a Cairo full of adrenaline, be it from laughter, thrill, or the sheer will to survive.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer by Belal Fadl, translated from the Arabic by Osama Hammad, DarArab, 2025

Belal Fadl’s The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer announces itself with a provocation and never retreats from it: “Whenever I tell my story, I say that what led me to live with Um Mimi were two Polish breasts with unparalleled nipples.” From this opening confession, the novel signals that nothing sacred will be protected from language, and nothing obscene will be softened for the reader’s comfort. But this is not bravado for its own sake—Fadl’s novel is built on a wager: that obscenity, vulgarity, and excess are not moral failures of language, but its most truthful registers when class humiliation, bodily precarity, and institutional contempt are the subject. To read The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi (or to be more accurate, to read it in translation) is therefore to confront an ethical question: how does a translator render a voice whose truth depends on its refusal to be clean?

The novel’s narrative arc is deceptively simple (almost cliché). It’s 1991, and a young man from Alexandria arrives in Cairo to study media at Cairo University, determined to escape an abusive father and a suffocating household. His grades win him admission, but his finances dictate his fate. Having endured a humiliating stay in a flat with “decent, pious, and religious young men who knew God and had learned the Quran by heart,” he is evicted for attending an R-rated film, and ends up renting a room in the ground-floor flat of Um Mimi, a retired madam, on a nameless lane known only as “the street behind Casino Isis.” READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #9 When I looked into the face of my torturer . . . I recognized my old school-friend by Bassam Yousuf

December 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

This evocative piece blends warm and melancholic notes that linger long after reading.

One day, as I was undergoing yet another round of torture from the secret police in the infamous Palestine Branch, I cried out: “Abdullah al-Daliyah!” Abdullah al-Daliyah is one of our Alawite ancestors, a saint whose name the men from my village invoke to this day when they’re in dire straits. The man torturing me suddenly stopped and yanked off my blindfold. With a wild-eyed stare, he demanded: “Who are you?”

I kept quiet, since in the opposition we were strictly forbidden ever to disclose our names. He shouted in agitation: “Say something! Are you Bassam?”

I nodded. Turning away, he marched around the interrogation room, then closed the door and continued pacing up and down without looking at me. Finally he wheeled around and asked, his eyes full of tears: “Don’t you know me?”

I shook my head. After ten years, he was unrecognizable. With a sigh, he bowed his head. “I’m Abdullah . . . ”

Occasionally, one comes across circumstances so unbelievable they can only be engineered by fate. Coming in at No. 9 in our countdown of the most-read articles of 2025, this poignant piece of nonfiction follows Syrian political activist Bassam Yousuf (tr. Katherine Van de Vate) as he reflects on his relationship with a childhood friend, Abdullah. In this essay featured in our Summer 2025 issue, Yousuf traces their parallel paths as he sides with the political opposition, and Abdullah with the Assad regime—a choice that culminates in their bitter reunion. The title gives it away: “When I looked into the face of my torturer . . . I recognized my old school-friend.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 5, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bethlehem Attfield and Shatha Abdellatif

The latest from Nigeria and Palestine!

In this week’s round-up of global literary news, our editors report on the winners of the Palestine Book Awards and a worrying change of policy in Nigerian language education. Read on for more.

Shatha Abdellatif, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Palestine

On November 15, the Palestine Book Awards announced this year’s winners in Central London, honouring “the spirit of Palestine” amidst a critically transformative period. Hosted by the Middle East Monitor (MEMO), the Palestine Book Awards welcomes nominations for writing on Palestine in English from publishers and authors, with no restrictions on their geographic or national backgrounds—thus worldling the literature of/on Palestine onto the global map of literary production.

Among the supremely intelligent works from this year’s winning titles was Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims, making him a two-time winner of the PBA after Against Erasure took home the award in the creative category last year. Nasser Abourahme’s The Time Beneath the Concrete—an unflinching, rigorous monograph that positions refugee camps as the key to fathom the larger question of Palestine, and by extension, the spatio-temporal struggle in the larger context of Zionism’s settler colonial project in Palestine—won in the academic category.  Abourahme astutely writes in his introduction: “All [Palestinians] live in the permanent temporariness of camptime, with varying degrees of extraterritorial dislocation and extralegal vulnerability.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 28, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Linnea Gradin, and Zohra Salih

The latest literary news from Palestine, India, and Sweden!

This week, our editors-at-large report on the rise of audiobooks, a festival spotlighting indigenous Indian literature, and an award-winning Palestinian memoir. From visions of Paris from a prison cell to a whistling naming tradition, read on to find out more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

Palestinian author Nasser Abu Srour, recently released from Israeli imprisonment, has won the prestigious 2025 Prix de la littérature arabe for his powerful prison memoir, Je suis ma liberté, translated into the French by Stéphanie Dujols. The award ceremony was held at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris on November 18, coinciding with PEN International’s Day of the Imprisoned Writer. His memoir, written over 33 years inside Israeli prisons and smuggled out piece by piece, chronicles his experiences behind bars and his resilience in the face of oppression. It originally appeared in Arabic in 2022 titled Hikaayet Jidaar (the story of a wall) and translated into the English as The Tale of a Wall by Luke Leafgren. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 21, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alejandra Camila Quintana Arocho and Amal Sarhan

The latest in literary updates from Bahrain and Puerto Rico!

This week, we are proud to introduce one of our newest Editors-at-Large, Amal Sarhan, for Bahrain, alongside first-time contributor Alejandra Camila Quintana Arocho, who gives us a dispatch from Puerto Rico. From a long-delayed book fair and ongoing discursive panels in Bahrain to the launch of a new book festival in Puerto Rico, read on to find out more!

Amal Sarhan, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bahrain

Bahrain is a quiet country to many. Dotted with date palms, surrounded by sea, and appearing as a mere speck of dust on the world map, it is natural for locals to feel an air of insignificance, including with regards to its literary scene. While the bellows of the recent launch of the 20th Sheikh Zayed Book Award, the Riyadh International Book Fair in October, and the ongoing Sharjah International Book Fair reverberate far into the Arabian Sea, the Bahraini equivalent has been delayed for years, our dismay at which has been cleverly captured in this very poignant caricature by the famed Bahraini artist Khalid Al Hashimi.

READ MORE…

Poetry’s Combinations and Doublings of Reality: An Interview with Peter Cole

November 17, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Daniel Yadin

To translate is to listen past the statue and the slogans, until the poem’s raw anxiety and unexpected sympathy finally speak.

Peter Cole, a MacArthur Fellow and a Professor in the Practice at Yale, is a poet and a translator from Hebrew and Arabic. His past translation projects include the Hebrew poetry of Muslim and Christian Spain, the poetry of Kabbalah, and the works of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali. In October, New York Review Books brought out On the Slaughter, Cole’s translated selection of poems by Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), the Ukrainian-born Jew who became not only the pre-eminent Hebrew poet of his time, but also the major cultural figure of both the Jewish diaspora and the nascent Jewish community in Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. Bialik is still regarded as something of the patron saint of modern Hebrew literature.

Recently, I paid Cole a visit in New Haven. Walking along the harbor, sitting over tea and dried apricots at his table, and, later, conversing over email, we discussed the mists surrounding the complex and contested figure of Bialik; October 7 and its genocidal aftermath in Gaza; how translation fits into the matrix of history, poetry, and ideology; and more.

Daniel Yadin (DY): I’d imagine that many of our readers are hearing about Bialik for the first time, though he’s an institution in the Jewish world. Bialik is the poet of modern Hebrew—at least, the granddad of the bunch. In your introduction to On the Slaughter, you talk about the ways in which you present a counter-reading of the poet. I agree you’re reading against the grain here. Would you say you’re also translating against the grain?

Peter Cole (PC): At the most basic level I’d say I was actually translating with the grain of the poetry—and certainly its granularity, since translation as I know and love it entails the slippery business of trying to give an honest, if fabricated, account of one’s readings and what Blake calls their minute particulars. That’s “fabricated” as in constructed or woven, a made thing.

DY: Almost tactile.

PC: Almost and then some. I’m trying to bring a compound of literary and historical alertness to my encounter with these poems. At the same time, I’m also translating against the grain of the received version of Bialik, who—as you note—was a titan of Hebrew poetry in a public way that may be hard for Americans to wrap their minds around. Some 100,000 people attended his 1934 funeral in Tel Aviv—which is to say, half of the Jewish population of British Mandatory Palestine.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2025

November 10, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Henry Gifford, Jason Gordy Walker, Liliana Torpey, and Nichole Gleisner

New work from India, Serbia, France, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Iran, Spain, Lithuania, Palestine, and the Vietnamese diaspora!

This month, we’re bringing reviews of eleven different titles from eleven different regions, from a trilingual text of experimental fiction that veers between Vietnamese and English, a visceral and psychically frenetic portrait of a marriage gone wrong, a rich collection from a master Iranian poet that gestures towards his remarkable life, and the latest metafiction from a Spanish literary giant. 

dog

Dog Star by Nabarun Bhattacharya, translated from the Bengali by Subha Prasad Sanyal, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jason Gordy Walker

Something’s rotten in the city of Kolkata. A corrupt managerial class—within which mad scientists and war-mongers play a major role—has conspired with local authorities to capture, confine, and starve as many canines as possible. While the city’s “dead serf-servants and healthful, cellphone-carrying ever-connected mummies and balloons” stagger through their dystopia, the dogs have disappeared from the urban bustle, and no one cares. Animal rights groups have been eliminated, and in the way of Nazi death camps, the system targets even newborn pups. What’s a dog to do in these last dog days? “Bark! Bark!” replies the snappy refrain of Dog Star, the lyrical, subversive, and highly re-readable novella by Bengali writer and poet Nabarun Bhattacharya, delivered in a kinetic English by Subha Prasad Sanyal, who has doubtlessly advanced this innovative author’s reputation in world literature.

A self-proclaimed fable, Dog Star leads the reader through dark alleys where street dogs—“nerikuttas”—hide from “pincers,” form alliances, trade information about current dangers, and strategize escape plans, looking to the constellation “Lubdhok, aka Dogstar, aka Sirius aka Alpha Canis Majoris” for liberation. These survivors, along with their unlikely feline allies, are anthropomorphized in their emotions and dialogues, and their plight, although set in West Bengal, is familiar enough to seem representative of any place under political (dis)order. The Netanyahu regime’s genocide against Gaza comes to mind, for example, as do the active “detention centers” in the US: “They’ll yank and drag you by your neck with the pincers to the caged car. Then throw you in.” Bhattacharya does not avoid visceral descriptions of animal torture, but he balances its brutality with astute irony, giving the murderers absurd lines like: “We must pay heed that there aren’t ridiculous expenses.” READ MORE…

Baptism by Fire: An Interview with Mayada Ibrahim on Arabophone Africa in Translation

November 6, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I’m interested in Black subjectivity, in works that challenge and problematise the hegemony of Arabic. . .

The translations of Mayada Ibrahim are essential acts of cultural mediation. Moving between Arabic and English, she brings a nuanced, discerning sensitivity to champion voices from Arabophone Africa, from co-translating award-winning novels like Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin’s Samahani (Foundry Editions, 2024) to inaugurating the Anglophone debut of Najlaa Eltom. Rooted in her Sudanese heritage and diasporic experience, Ibrahim’s work has consistently centred Black subjectivity. In doing so, she has contributed to expanding the range of Arabic writings available in the Anglosphere, illustrating a resolute commitment to bringing the philosophical and political heft of voices like Eltom, Sakin, and Stella Gaitano to the forefront.

Ibrahim sees translation not as a duty to educate, but as a creative responsibility to honour the original text and its culture. ‘I try to resist the notion that educating the reader is my responsibility, as it’s harmful to treat readers as passive, disengaged consumers hungry for entertainment dressed up as instruction,’ she confesses. Thus, she navigates through difficult ethical terrains, from interpreting the Sufism in Eltom’s work for a Western gaze, to maintaining the sharp wit in Sakin’s narratives of enslavement. 

In this interview, I spoke with Ibrahim on her corpus as translator, the ethical tightrope of rendering politically charged texts for an Anglophone audience, and what she envisions for an Arabophone African literary canon.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Trace Press is set to publish your book-length translation of prose and poetry by Sudanese translator and poet Najlaa Eltom. Could you tell us a little of how this book came to be? Is this selected from her earlier Arabic-language collections – منزلة الرمق (The Doctrine of Thinness, 2007), الجريمة الخالدة ذات الأقراط (The Immortal Felony with Earrings, 2019), and ألحان السرعة (Melodies of Speed, 2021)—or does it feature entirely new material?

Mayada Ibrahim (MI): In 2023, I took a free workshop offered by Trace Press, to which I brought one of Najlaa’s poems. The workshop later culminated in the anthology Arabic, between Love and War, published earlier this year, and in the process, I was fortunate enough to meet the publisher Nuzhat Abbas, who showed interest in Najlaa’s work. Later we decided to collaborate on Najlaa’s collection, her first into English, which will be the first part of an ‘active archive’ on Sudan. READ MORE…

Fall 2025: Highlights from the Team

November 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Find out what our very own team members have to say about our bountiful Fall issue!

I found that Nay Thit’s “The Language I Don’t Speak,” translated from the Burmese by Thiri Zune, was the perfect way to begin exploring the new edition. Like it, the rest of the poetry section is provocative and urgently alive—especially Olivia Elias’s verse about Gaza in Jérémy Victor Robert’s translation from the French. Moving from her work to that of Faruk Šehić, translated from the Bosnian by Ena Selimović, in “Who Came Back,” takes us from the action of war to the scars of postwar life. Then on to prison, with Başak Çandar and David Gramling’s translation from the Turkish of Kemal Varol’s “Dark Mist.” I found this piece unexpectedly amusing. Jen Calleja’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear), is a delight, full of thought-provoking reflections on what we do as translators. There are so many other translations shining in this issue—I wish I could list them all.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

Pablo Palacio’s “The Cannibal” (tr. José Darío Martínez from the Spanish) is my favorite piece from the new issue—fast-paced, vividly written, and replete with gruesome physical detail and haunting character psychology. As someone who likes to write about cannibalism, I found it both a wonderful point of reference and an object lesson in how obscene desire can be rendered in literature.

In “Vassal of the Sun” (tr. Tobias Ryan from the French), I was overjoyed by Patrick Autréaux’s descriptions of the natural world and his evident love for Melville.

Faruk Šehić’s “Who Came Back” (tr. Ena Selimović from the Bosnian) demonstrates how repetition, properly employed, can become a devastating poetic device. The scarcely varied refrain of “came back” hammers the losses of the Yugoslav Wars into the reader’s mind, while the sparse yet vivid language—“dandelions-cum-parachutes,” “white bark of birch saplings in living rooms”—emphasizes what war takes away, even from those who escape its bullets. It is essential reading for a world drunk on fantasies of righteous violence.

Palacio returns in “The Double and the Singular Woman” (tr. Thomas Taylor from the Spanish), a story that most cheap “twin horror” tales wish they were—though it’s not a horror story at all. Instead, it’s a superbly eerie study of difference and intimacy: how intricately a writer can render lives utterly unlike their own, and how such acts of imagination approach the question of what it means to write across unbridgeable experience. Using the extreme example of twins conjoined for their entire lives, Palacio transforms “monstrosity” into empathy. What a relief, in a world that so often wields that word against the oppressed, to encounter a story that refuses to dehumanize.

Finally, Johanna Drucker’s “Attention as Predation” remains, to my mind, the best framework for thinking about the phenomenon of Trump and other authoritarian figures turned cult icons. It is supremely bleak, but in an era when the democratic counteroffensive has so spectacularly failed, we need such correctives to naïve optimism. Reading Drucker’s essay, I felt a kind of cruel joy—the shock of recognition that comes when one is reminded of the essential brokenness of human beings, their eagerness to become both recipients and agents of predatory attention.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 31, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bethlehem Attfield, Carol Khoury, and Veronica Gisondi

The latest from Nigeria, Palestine, and Italy!

In this week’s round-up of global literary news, our editors cover a progressive writing workshop in Milan, an honouring of a major Palestinian poet, and a celebration of African writing in Lagos. Read on to find out more!

Veronica Gisondi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Italy

When engaging with texts and their authors’ experiences, distance often becomes the instrument through which meaning is managed and subjective responses modulated—whether in reading, writing, criticism, or translation. Through the conflation of the personal with the private (and the classification of the latter as a “non-political” domain), the innermost truths of human experience have largely been excluded from public discourse. Lea Melandri’s scrittura di esperienza (experiential writing) offers a radical alternative to this logic—which stems from the same matrix that historically split mind and body, reason and emotion—by reuniting personal life and social language.

In a one-day workshop hosted by Milan’s Collettivo ZAM (Zona Autonoma Milano), Melandri—a leading Italian feminist thinker, journalist, and writer—introduced a small group of participants to a method born out of her involvement with non-authoritarian pedagogy and feminist movements in the late 1960s and 1970s. In the wake of feminism’s autocoscienza, which first revealed the systemic origins of individual struggle, Melandri treats “the self” as an archive containing “millennia of history,” acknowledging that most of it lies beyond our awareness. “The self has been reduced to the particular experience of an individual,” noted Melandri as she briefed us on the day ahead. “Feminism has taught us that personal lives aren’t history’s waste, but constitute its core.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 17, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from France, Palestine, and Kenya!

This week, our editors report on a busy literary season, filling us in on awards to watch for, considering the politics of prizes, and reporting on exciting literary festivals. Read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

The French literary awards season is upon us! Over the course of the last few weeks, the juries of prizes such as the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis have announced their shortlists and/or laureates. Though the Goncourt is arguably the most well-known and prestigious of France’s literary awards, there are countless others awarded each year, from those awarded by the Académie Française to those given by individual bookshops, each of them celebrating Francophone and world literature in their own way.

Les Deux Magots, a well-renowned Parisian literary café with 140 years of history behind it, awarded its 92nd yearly prize last week to Swiss author Joseph Incardona for his recent novel Le monde est fatigué. The novel follows a young woman who acts as a mermaid at aquariums, but whose fake tail hides a body damaged by a grievous accident for which she is determined to seek revenge. Le monde est fatigué has also been longlisted for the Prix Femina, alongside works by other celebrated Francophone authors such as Jakuta Alikavazovic’s Au grand jamais and Nathacha Appanah’s La nuit au cœur. The prize’s shortlist is set to be announced on October 21st, with the winner announced November 3rd.

The prize that I, personally, am watching most closely is the Prix Décembre, which defines itself as a sort of “anti-Goncourt”. The longlist includes works such as Laura Vazquez’s Les Forces (whose poetry appeared in Asymptote’s October 2022 edition) and the newest novel of Wendy Delorme (whose work was recently translated and featured in one of Asymptote’s Translation Tuesday columns). Last year, the Prix Décembre went to Moroccan author Abdellah Taïa, a past laureate of PEN America’s Literary Translation Award who has also appeared in several of Asymptote’s past issues. The laureate is set to be announced on October 28th.

Shatha Abd El Latif, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Palestine READ MORE…

A clear sky so blue two bodies can bathe in sunlight: A Conversation with Hanaa Ahmad Jabr and Jennifer Jean about Where do you live?

October 1, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

I was translating life itself, each poem being written in the raw present, each a reply to another. . .

Where do you live? is a bilingual collection of collaborative epistolary poems between Iraqi poet Dr. Hanaa Ahmad Jabr (writing in Arabic) and American poet Jennifer Jean (writing in English), published earlier this year. Bridging language and borders, the collection begins and ends with the titular question, as two poets living in different countries exchange their “anger / at the way things are when they should be / better” with “one eye open / staring at the ruins of the old city,” while the “other eye is closed / hiding dreadful war scenes.” In this interview, I spoke with both poets on their collaboration, the revelations that come with the letter-writing form, and how literature serves to bridge distances.

Tiffany Troy (TT): The title of this collection is also that of the poems that begin and end the collection, and it is a provocative question because “Where do you live?” is similar yet completely distinct from “Where are you from?”. Here, where one lives becomes the space that one wants to embody. Can you speak to the decision to start the collection with the eponymous poem?

Hanaa Ahmad Jabr (HAJ): Every poem Where do you live? carries (whether directly or indirectly) an answer to that very question. When we chose this title for both my and Jennifer’s poem, it was a poetic decision, but also one that reflected deep reality; poetic, because the question reaches beyond mere geography, asking not only about place but also about the very essence of living—and reality, because between these two poems lies a rich, vivid life: one woven with memories, dreams, longing, exile, homeland, love, war, family, and friends. That’s why the collection had to open with “Where Do You Live?” for the English reader and close with “أين تعيش؟” for the Arabic reader.

Jennifer Jean (JJ): Since every poem appears in both languages, we spoke about the book being read from left to right for English readers, and also from right to left for Arabic readers. We even asked Arrowsmith Press to create two covers, one cover in English and—on what would be “the back” in America—another cover in Arabic. When I was a kid, these things were known as “flip books,” but the press wasn’t able to grant our wish due to technical difficulties. What remains of this wish is the placement of these title poems. The query in the title still opens and closes our “conversation in poems,” no matter the reader’s home language. Now that I think about it, these two poems are the furthest apart, but both explore the hometown of the heart and express the comfort of our conversations. As Hanaa says: “We are the two eyes together . . . forever.”

TT: In the epistolary-poetic tradition, prominent examples include Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, but in those relationships, the correspondence takes the form of letters rather than lyric poems. Can you speak about how you first embarked on the collaborative process, and how the need to translate back and forth added layers to that lyrical discourse? READ MORE…

Living Inside the Text: An Interview with Marilyn Booth on Translating Jan Dost’s Safe Corridor

September 18, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

I do think it’s essential, as a translator, to bring empathy to a text, to make that empathy work in the translation, when it is appropriate.

Syrian writer Jan Dost’s Safe Corridor is a searingly surreal portrait of the physical and psychic wounds that war inflicts on the most vulnerable among us. Narrated with lyrical intensity by thirteen-year-old Kamiran, the novel blends the brutal reality with Kafkaesque metaphor, depicting Syria’s painful conflict and the ways by which its abhorrent violence is processed and internalized. Furthering this work’s poignant impact is its lucid, flowing translation by renowned author and translator Marilyn Booth; in this interview, she speaks to us about remaining faithful to voice, handling stylistic variations, and her much-admired history with Arabic literature.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF):  What first drew you to Safe Corridor and to Jan Dost’s work in particular?

Marilyn Booth (MB): I first met Jan at the Emirates LitFest in Dubai, just before the COVID pandemic. We had a wonderful conversation about literature and life, and I left with a couple of his books. When I read Safe Corridor (ممرّ آمن), I was absolutely blown away. Since then, I’ve read several more of his novels, though not all of them yet.

Jan is not only prolific but remarkably versatile—a poet, a novelist, a memoirist, and he also writes compelling historical fiction. Distinctive narrative voices are what most draw me, as both reader and translator, and that is precisely what I found in Jan’s work. He is a meticulous stylist, with hardly a wasted word. For a translator, that makes the work more demanding, but also deeply rewarding. READ MORE…