Place: Lebanon

What’s New with the Crew? (Feb 2022)

What do Asymptote staff get up to when they're not seeking out the best in world literature? Answer: Quite a lot!

Senior Copy Editor Anna Aresi recently translated a selection of Laura Corraducci’s poems for The Antonym.

Various Wanted. An (almost) missing original and five—literary, computational and visual—translations, the latest collection by Chris Tanasescu, aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, co-authored with Steve Rushton and Taner Murat, has recently been described by Servanne Monjour at the Sorbonne as “a pioneering translation using topic modeling for the very first time.“

Editor-at-Large for Sweden Eva Wissting was longlisted for ROOM Magazine’s annual poetry contest. She has also had essays published in Nordic literary journal Kritiker, issue #61-62, and Finland-based cultural journal Horisont, issue #2021:3.

Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska recently published a book review of Nastassja Martin’s In The Eye of the Wild at the KGB Bar Lit Mag.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has new essays in Minor Literature[s] and the Cincinnati Review.

Copy Editor Nadiyah Abdullatif recently published a short extract of her English co-translation, with Anam Zafar, of Lebanese author Lena Merhej’s hit graphic novel Mrabba wa Laban at The Markaz Review. READ MORE…

Ambrosial Wafts: An Interview with A.J. Naddaff

I believe literature is the conduit to the deepest understanding of society.

The first time I corresponded with A.J. Naddaff was after I had read an early issue of his excellent newsletter Untranslatable, devoted to extensive conversations with Arabic-to-English literary translators about their craft. Startled by the sharpness, intimacy, and candour of each interview, I emailed him merely to convey my appreciation for the work he was doing and how fortuitous it seemed to me that he had begun this initiative at the time that I found myself falling in love with the limitless depths of classical Arabic literature. He wrote back, expressing genuine curiosity about my interests, saying: “Connecting with people who share this love makes the world feel a bit smaller and kinder.” That told me all I needed to know about how A.J. makes space for his interlocutors to arrive at such acute insights as “Every poem is a linguistic event which reimagines its entire tradition” (Huda Fakhreddine) and “That joy and pleasure of someone having it on with you is the very pleasure of literature. You know it and yet you still fall for it” (Maurice Pomerantz).

Besides being a gracious person and a master’s student in Arabic Literature at the American University of Beirut, A.J. wears many other hats: he is an award-winning multimedia journalist, translator, and social science researcher. He’s met and reported on people of diverse stripes, from Sufi intellectuals to ISIS extremists, co-translated Hassan Samy Youssef’s Threshold of Pain with Rebecca Joubin and Nick Lobo, and is currently working on a thesis regarding the translation of the pre-Islamic mu’allaqat into English. I was excited to encounter someone with his feelers in so many different worlds and to hear his meditations on the translatability of Arabic literature, the meanings of home, the in-betweenness of negotiating both the journalistic and the literary, and the state of contemporary Lebanese art in the aftermath of trauma.

Alex Tan (AT): In one of the first issues of your Untranslatable newsletter, you quote the brilliant Moroccan literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito, who wrote of how in the classical Arabic literary tradition, the ancients “endeavoured to make their works untranslatable.” What does untranslatability signify in classical Arabic literature? Why did you decide to name your newsletter after a quality that appears to defy the possibility of translation?

A.J. Naddaff (AJN): In my opinion, and this is up for debate, the idea of untranslatability is the wrong framing for understanding tensions that exist when translating Arabic. Alexander Key has proposed that the idea of untranslatability is a modern idea—that the ancients thought mental content (maʿnā) was always transferable between languages, from Persian to Arabic. So untranslatability was birthed out of early modern European notions, and we should push ourselves—as many translators are doing—to reimagine limits when translating Arabic into English.

Shawkat Toorawa takes it even further and believes that it’s possible to translate something sublime, like the Qur’an, into another language and to still convey the cadence, movement, and the beauty of the original, which I’m totally on board with.

AT: Most of the scholars you’ve chosen to interview so far are translators of pre-modern Arabic literature and contributors to the NYU Library of Arabic Literature series. I’d like to ask about your thoughts on the relationship between the pre-modern and the modern in Arabic writing. You work on the Mu’allaqat (hanging odes), but you’re also interested in contemporary Levantine literary production. How do you position yourself between these two worlds? Does your knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms haunt your approach to the modern?

AJN: Coming into my master’s at the American University of Beirut, I carried this notion that bifurcated “old” or classical Arabic literature from “modern.” I remember distinctly telling my teacher Bilal Orfali that I was excited to read old Arabic literature and he politely cut me off and encouraged me to think of literature more as a continuum. I think this is probably how we should think of literature in all traditions, but especially in Arabic.

So now, I position one foot in each world with no problem. I’m not haunted by my knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms besides by how little I know. Salim Barakat, one of the most celebrated modern Arabic authors, claims he only reads pre-modern works. Rachid el Daif’s novels are full of references to “pre-modern” literature: One Thousand and One Nights, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyei, the Kitab al-Aghani, al-Jahiz, Majnun and Layla, and Pre-Islamic (Jahili) poetry all make appearances. Mahmoud Darwish has a famous poem where he draws on elements from the sixth century poet-king Imru’ al-Qays’s final trip to Constantinople to allegorically critique the Oslo Accords. As T.S. Eliot said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

From Scheherazade to Avicii, the literary news of the week spans new looks at pivotal figures.

From book fairs to bestsellers, the world of international letters knows no rest. In Qatar, the 31st Doha International Book Fair has launched with an in-person schedule. In Japan, a new project aiming to promote Southeast Asian and Indian literature has published an impressive roster of short fiction, and in Sweden, two beloved figures are immortalized in text. Read on to find out more!

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Happy New Year from the world of Arabic literature! With Omicron, media frenzies, and restrictions around the world, we could all use some escape. Travel might be limited, but how about an escape to the fantasy world of Arabian Nights? The iconic collection that has inspired countless others around the world, from the Brothers Grimm to Naguib Mafhouz, has received a fresh new translation by Yasmine Seale—known for her riveting new translation of Aladdin. Enter the world of ghouls, mystics, and enchantresses, and enjoy your COVID-free time travel (it has some brilliant images!).

The theme of time travel continues with the launch of the Winter issue of Arab Lit Quarterly! Responding to the theme of folk and featuring great writers such as Palestinian author Sonia Nimr, this issue promises to “cover stories, songs, and poetry from the last millennium, from Andalusia to Yemen, with stops across the cities in between!” You can get your copy here.

That being said, the world is not entirely being relegated to the virtual, as Qatar launches the 31st Doha International Book Fair for the year of 2022, under the theme of “light is knowledge.” Finally, we will visit our first in-person book fair in years, which will host renowned Arabic book distributors such as Samarkand Books from Qatar and Antoine Cachet from Lebanon! READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2021

New work this month from Lebanon and India!

The speed by which text travels is both a great fortune and a conundrum of our present days. As information and knowledge are transmitted in unthinkable immediacy, our capacity for receiving and comprehending worldly events is continuously challenged and reconstituted. It is, then, a great privilege to be able to sit down with a book that coherently and absorbingly sorts through the things that have happened. This month, we bring you two works that deal with the events of history with both clarity and intimacy. One a compelling, diaristic account of the devastating Beirut explosion of last year, and one a sensitive, sensual novel that delves into a woman’s life as she carries the trauma of Indian Partition. Read on to find out more.

beirut

Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani, translated from French by Ruth Diver, Other Press, 2021

Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor

There’s a peculiar whiplash that comes from seeing the words “social distancing” in a newly published book, even if—as in the case of Charif Majdalani’s Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse—the reader is primed from the outset to anticipate an account of the pandemic’s devastations. For anyone to claim the discernment of hindsight feels all too premature—wrong, even, when there isn’t yet an aftermath to speak from.

But Majdalani’s testimony of disintegration, a compelling mélange of memoir and historical reckoning in Ruth Diver’s clear-eyed English translation, contains no such pretension. In the collective memory of 2020 as experienced by those in Beirut, Lebanon, the COVID-19 pandemic serves merely as stage lighting. It casts its eerie glow on the far deeper fractures within a country riven by “untrammelled liberalism” and “the endemic corruption of the ruling classes.”

Majdalani is great at conjuring an atmosphere of unease, the sense that something is about to give. And something, indeed, does; on August 4, 2020, a massive explosion of ammonium nitrate at the Port of Beirut shattered the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. A whole city collapsed, Majdalani repeatedly emphasises, in all of five seconds.

That cataclysmic event structures the diary’s chronology. Regardless of how much one knows of Lebanon’s troubled past, the succession of dates gathers an ominous velocity, hurtling toward its doomed end. Yet the text’s desultory form, delivering in poignant fragments day by elastic day, hour by ordinary hour, preserves an essential uncertainty—perhaps even a hope that the future might yet be otherwise.

Like the diary-writer, we intimate that the centre cannot hold, but cannot pinpoint exactly where or how. It is customary, in Lebanon, for things to be falling apart. Majdalani directs paranoia at opaque machinations first designated as mechanisms of “chance,” and later diagnosed as the “excessive factionalism” of a “caste of oligarchs in power.” Elsewhere, he christens them “warlords.” The two are practically synonymous in the book’s moral universe. Indeed, Beirut 2020’s lexicon frequently relies, for figures of powerlessness and governmental conspiracy, on a pantheon of supernatural beings. Soothsayers, Homeric gods, djinn, and ghosts make cameos in its metaphorical phantasmagoria. In the face of the indifferent quasi-divine, Lebanon’s lesser inhabitants can only speculate endlessly about the “shameless lies and pantomimes” produced with impunity. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2021)

In addition to editing your favorite literary journal, Asymptote staff are publishing books and winning awards!

After organizing a #GraphPoem computational poetry event that attracted hundreds of participants and thousands of viewers at DHSI 2021, Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, is in the process of collaboratively starting a Digital Literature Lab at the Royal Library of Belgium on a FED-tWIN grant involving Université catholique de Louvain.

Chinese Social Media Manager Jiaoyang Li has received a China-Scotland Digital Collaboration Grant from the British Council and the City Artist Corps Grant from New York Foundation for the Arts to work on a series of community based literary events and workshops.

Assistant Director of Outreach Ka Man Chung’s English translation of Over the Left Bank of the River by Chung Wenyin has been awarded a translation and publication grant by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture. The work is expected to be released by Serenity International in 2022.

Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska’s new book Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature has just been published this month by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new short craft essay on the retrospective narration in J.D. Salinger’s “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” up at Fiction Writers Review.

Assistant Editor (Poetry) M.L. Martin’s collection of ekphrastic prose poems, Theater of No Mistakes, won the 2021 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award, and will be published later this year with Anhinga Press (USA). In addition, her anti-translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem by the anonymous, pre-10th c. proto-feminist, Wulf & Eadwacer, was named a finalist for CSU’s 2021 Lighthouse Poetry Series (USA). READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2021

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Summer 2021 issue!

The brand-new Summer 2021 edition of Asymptote is barely ten days old and we are still enjoying the diverse offerings from thirty-five countries gathered therein. Last week, blog editors Xiao Yue Shan, Allison Braden, and Shawn Hoo shared their favorites. Today, section editors Lee Yew Leong, Bassam Sidiki, and Caridad Svich distill their highlights for us:

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, Special Features, and Interview Editor:

Why do so few men read fiction by women? lamented MA Sieghart as recently as seventeen days ago in The Guardian. With female authors taking five out of six slots, the Summer fiction lineup, published just in time for #WomeninTranslation month, offers parochial-minded readers a taste of what they are missing out on. These stories are also deeply centered on the female experience: Gabriel Payares and Maša Kolanović deliver unsettling takes on pregnancy and new motherhood, while the aging protagonists of Kathrin Schmidt’s and Can Xue’s stories go on mushroom-fueled head trips that seem to set the universe right again. A third set explores the corrosive effects of work on identity (in particular, Joanna Chen’s superb translation of mechanical engineer Tehila Hakimi’s Company recalled for me Amelie Nothomb’s masterpiece Fear and Trembling).

When you don’t go by a Judeo-Christian name, the constant bracing against mispronunciation can result in estrangement from your own identity, as Xiao Yue Shan explored in her recent essay on linguistic exile. I can relate. That’s why I found the ending of Abdushukur Muhammet’s “My Name” deeply moving. Translator Munawwar Abdulla not only does an excellent job nailing Muhammet’s melancholic voice, but also provides much needed contextualization in her translator’s note that imbues the poem with a sharp political layer. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest from Japan, Taiwan, and Lebanon!

As certain places are heating up with a flurry of events, others are remaining cautious and mindful. Still, the good thing about the page is that it remains steadfast, and our work remains something that we can always turn to, celebrate, and share in. This week, our editors are once again bringing you the latest in world literature news, with a new Japanese literary translation workshop centering on heritage speakers and people of colour, a newly virtual Taipei Literature Festival, and a new winner of the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award. 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Poet and academic Iman Mersal has won the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award! Her creative non-fiction work, In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat, is part journalistic excellence, part poetic elegy, all while maintaining the sensibility of writing in the life of a complex character. It traces chronicles the late Egyptian writer Enayat Al Zayat, her struggles with mental illness, and her tragic death in the 1960s.

What’s new in Arabic literature? Banipal Magazine’s Spring issue is out, and it’s dedicated to Jerusalem and the acclaimed Palestinian auteur, Mahmoud Shukair, who has penned over forty-five books and six television series. This comes at a time when the Arab literary scene has overwhelmingly expressed its solidarity with the Palestinian people. Also on the subject of Palestinethis spring, I interviewed Palestinian-French writer and researcher, Karim Kattan, over here at Asymptote where we discussed belonging, the craft of writing, and other curious things. Also, Palestinian-Chilean writer Lina Meruane has a new novel out; Nervous System, translated into English by Megan McDowell, deals with the daunting specter of writer’s block. Read a review of the acclaimed work right here on the Asymptote blog!

How about some Arab cabaret? Well-read academic and translator Raphael Cormack’s Midnight in Cairo: The Female Stars of Egypt’s Roaring 20’s is an engrossing retelling of vagabonds, feminists, and performers as they defied gender norms, transgressed class lines, and created iconic productions. Another beautiful and timely publication by Saqi Books is We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers. Edited by British-Palestinian writer, Selma Dabbagh, the anthology celebrates and examines the tradition of erotic writing in Arabic literature and its many women pioneers. Lastly, yours truly has a short story out with The Bombay Review, dealing with censorship and artificial intelligence. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Goodbye, Lebanon” by May Ziadeh

Egypt called in a serious voice, / and already my boat’s rocking

While better known for her correspondences with Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese-Palestinian writer May Ziadeh was a leading figure in the early-twentieth-century Arab literary world and feminist movement in her own right, whose work inspired generations of writers including the Egyptian writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi. Despite her lasting influence, no full-length work of Ziadeh’s—neither her French nor her Arabic writing—is available in English translation and she remains relatively unread in the Anglophone world. This week, we are pleased to feature one of Ziadeh’s earliest French poems, “Goodbye, Lebanon”—with its elegiac adieus for her landscape-lover homeland as she looks back from her new home in Cairo—rendered in Rose DeMaris’ creative translation that revives Ziadeh’s Romantic sensibility and revisits that exilic feeling which knows that, in separation, “grief goes on”; a poem which will resonate across time with the contemporary moment.

Goodbye, Lebanon

Goodbye, Lebanese mountains.

I’m going far
from your pink rose garlands,
your bright red satin strawberries.

Egypt called in a serious voice,
and already my boat’s rocking
bears new fruit—

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Hong Kong, Lebanon, and Taiwan!

This week, our writers bring you news from Hong Kong, Lebanon, and Taiwan. In Hong Kong, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine is publishing a special section on Myanmar writing; in Lebanon, poet Zeina Hashem Beck’s second poetry collection will be published by Penguin; and in Taiwan, the 2021 Taipei Literary Festival has kicked off. Read on to find out more! 

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

In a show of solidarity to the resistance efforts in Myanmar, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine is publishing an English-language section on Myanmar, to be edited by poet, writer, and academic Tammy Lai-Ming Ho. The magazine will accept submissions until March 30 and has already announced that it will include some works in translation. So far, Thiri Zune’s translation of Nay Thit’s “With the Teeth of a Mad Flower” and Ko Ko Thett’s translation of Aung Khin Myint’s poem “Spring” will be in the upcoming issue. Both are timely responses to the military coup which has killed well over 200 people, including poets Myint Myint Zin and K Za Win, and has caused countrywide Internet blackout and crackdowns on the media. While international condemnation of Myanmar’s military leaders is escalating, many in Hong Kong identify with the resistance from the onset, especially with the fresh memory of the city’s own protests.

In addition to its efforts for Myanmar, Voice & Verse held an event discussing the American poet Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, on World Poetry Day (March 21, 2021). Hosted by writer, poet, and critic Ian Pang in Cantonese, the event discussed Glück’s oeuvre, from her first poetry collection Firstborn (1968) to more recent works.

Works in translation also feature prominently in the forty-fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival, set to take place between April 1 and 12. With over 190 titles from fifty-eight countries and regions, the festival is proceeding in a hybrid format with in-theatre and online screenings as well as director discussions. This year’s showcase includes Wife of a Spy directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades!, which recently won Best Director and the Special Jury Prize respectively at the 2020 Venice International Film Festival; Golden Globes Best Foreign Language Film winner, Minari, by Korean-American director Lee Isaac Chung; and Japanese masterpieces in the event of Shokichu Cinema’s 100th anniversary. These already rich offerings are accompanied by a selection of newly restored classics from world and Chinese-language cinemas, recalling Parasite director Bong Joon-ho’s Golden Globe statement, that once one overcomes the one-inch barrier of subtitles, one gains access to many more amazing films and works of art.

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

2022. Since the start of the pandemic and the global vaccine roll out, a number of hopes, projects, and “return to normal” discourse have been thrown onto that year. However, here at Asymptote, we are excited to hear that acclaimed Lebanese Poet Zeina Hashem Beck will debut a poetry collection with Penguin Books in the summer of 2022! Titled O, the collection will be a meditative reflection on the letter O and its numerous meanings. Hashem Beck previously won the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize for her book Louder than Hearts.

March is usually a generous month to us and we will share this generosity through some exciting Arab literature reading lists! The Arab lit Quarterly Spring issue is out with exciting writings and translations on the theme of “Song.” Guest edited by investigative journalist Karim Zidan, this issue has a far-reaching range from tenth-century poetry by the polymath Kushajim (in translation by Salma Harland) to a journey through Palestinian resistance folk music with Shaimaa Abulebda. Another reading list we are excited about is the Sheikh Zayed Book Award shortlist! Dominated by women authors from the Arab world, the list includes authors from Egyptian Iman Mersal to Lebanese Alawiya Sobh. Happy reading!

In translation highlights, acclaimed Lebanese author Hoda Barakat’s novel, which won the 2019 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, is out now with an English translation and a controversial title! Translated by another acclaimed translator, Marilyn Booth, the title of “Voices of the Lost” is seen by some as reductive to the devastating stories of migrants in the novel. Another work we are enamored with is the collection of short stories A Bed for the King’s Daughter written by Syrian author, Shahla Ujayli, whose past work was long listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. The collection, translated by Sawad Hussain, with an important forward on biases in the literary market, uses surrealism and humor to address many of modernity’s malaises from alienation to the patriarchal gaze. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (February 2021)

From writing columns to publishing translations, we’ve been keeping busy!

Assistant Editor (Fiction) Andreea Scridon will have a poetry pamphlet published in 2022 with Broken Sleep Books; in addition, she will be featured in Art and Letters’ anthology 14 International Younger Poets‚ forthcoming this summer.

Copy Editor Anna Aresi has begun writing a monthly column on children’s literature in translation for Italian kid lit blog Scaffale Basso.

Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki published a poem in Counterlock Journal.

Chamini Kulathunga, Editor-at-Large for Sri Lanka, published her interview with Liyanage Amarakeerthi on Hopscotch Translation on February 9, 2021.

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong, has joined Cicada, a new literary magazine featuring nuanced and inclusive writing; it also welcomes translations.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, has initiated an internationally funded project on digital literacy, DigiLiBeRo, spearheaded together with Ana Iolanda Voda and Roxana Patras.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Lebanon, Taiwan, and France!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Lebanon, Taiwan, and France. In Lebanon, translator Dr. Mona Kareem has won the National Endowment for the Arts Award and the Barjeel Poetry Prize winners have been announced; in Taiwan, the February issue of INK literary magazine presents work by sixteen Taiwanese authors on “A Memo for Literature of the Next Decade”; and in France, Vanessa Springora’s bestselling memoir about sexual abuse will be released in English translation. Read on to find out more! 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

In Lebanon, the cultural world and the literary sphere has been rocked by the news of the assassination of Lokman Slim. Slim was a prolific writer and intellectual, and was an influential member of the cultural and political community, opening his research and documentation practice UMAM in southern Beirut. A celebration of his life and work was held on February 11.

In translation news, Dr. Mona Kareem, translator of Octavia Butler’s Kindred into Arabic, won the National Endowment for the Arts Award. Her award supports the translation from the Arabic of the poetry collection Falcon with Sun Overheard by Ra’ad Abdulqadir, a pioneer of Iraqi poetry. Here is Dr. Kareem’s haunting translation of his poem “A Song for the Lightning Bird.” Interested in learning more about the Arabic prose poem? Then listen to author Huda J. Fakhreddine’s online talk about it at Dartmouth College!

In more thrilling translation news, Sawad Hussain’s translation from the Arabic of A Bed for the King’s Daughter is being published by University of Texas Press. Written by Syrian author Shahla Ujayli, whose past work was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, this collection of short stories is experimental, witty, and loaded with uncanny images dealing with modernity, alienation, and patriarchy.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Lebanon, the Vietnamese diaspora, and France!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Lebanon, the Vietnamese diaspora, and France. In Lebanon, Jadaliyya has published an essay on the late Lebanese poet Iliya Abu Madi and Lebanese author Nasri Atallah has been included in a new anthology, Haramcy; in the Vietnamese diaspora, December 6 marks the 183th birthday of Petrus Ký, a prominent Vietnamese scholar who helped to improve the cultural understanding between French-colonized Vietnam and Europe; and in France, whilst bookshops have suffered from national lockdowns, a new translation of poems by contemporary poet Claire Malroux has been released. Read on to find out more! 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Arab sci-fi lovers rejoice! An Arabic translation of the late American science fiction author Octavia Butler’s Kindred is coming out with Takween Publishing. Dr. Mona Kareem Kareem, a writer, literary scholar, and Arabic-English literary translator, worked on the Arabic manuscript during her residency at Princeton University. She will be holding an online talk, “To Translate Octavia Butler: Race, History, and Sci-Fi,” on December 7. Tune in as you wait for the manuscript with sci-fi jitters! In other translation news, Kevin Michael Smith, a scholar and translator of global modernist poetry, translated two poems by Saadi Youssef for Jadaliyya. Yousef is a prolific writer, poet, and political activist from Iraq and we are delighted to see more of his work profiled in English. Also on Jadaliyya is this beautiful rumination on the late Lebanese poet Iliya Abu Madi and his political imagination. Abu Madi wrote spellbinding poetry and was part of the twentieth-century Mahjar movement in the United States, which included the renowned Lebanese author, Gibran Khalil Gibran.

In publishing news, Bodour Al-Qasimi, founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, an Emirati publishing house for Arabic books, has been announced as the president of the International Publishers Association! Al-Qasimi has tirelessly worked on expanding the scope of the Arab publishing industry and we are happy to see her achieve this feat. Award-winning artist and cultural entrepreneur, Zahed Sultan, is seeking to release Haramcy, an anthology with twelve writers from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, including Lebanese author Nasri Atallah. It is set to be published with Unbound Books and the anthology addresses pertinent themes of love, invisibility, and belonging. In the spirit of the holidays, if you are feeling generous and capable of donating, then consider contributing to the Haramcy Fund.

We know the holidays are upon us and you are looking forward to cozying up with a book or two (or five in our case!). We have some new Arabic literature in translation for you to read during the holidays! The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize shortlist has been announced! Another shortlist we are excited about is the Warwick Women in Translation Prize, which features Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Sudanese author, Rania Mamoun, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette.

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora

December 6, 2020 marks the 183th birthday of Petrus Ký, also called Trương Vĩnh Ký, whose prolific achievements as scholar, translator, and publisher helped broaden the cultural understanding between French-colonized Vietnam and Europe. His vanguard efforts popularized chữ quốc ngữ, or modern Romanized script—leading to its official adoption as Vietnam’s national language in the early twentieth century. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week's latest news from Lebanon, Taiwan, and Sweden!

This week, our writers bring you news from Lebanon, Taiwan, and Sweden. In Lebanon, the three-day festival Electronic Literature Day will feature writers including Rabih Alameddine and Raafat Majzoub; in Taiwan, the writer Liu Wu-hsiung, known by his pen name, Qi Deng-sheng, is being mourned after passing away and a recent exhibition has featured the works of the late Taiwanese poets Yang Mu and Lo Fu; and in Sweden, writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri was in line for the National Book Award’s Translated Literature prize. Read on to find out more! 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Fernweh! Or “a longing for far-off places, especially those not yet visited.” I recently learned the meaning of this German word on our newly developed “Untranslatable Words” column on Instagram (yes, that’s right we are on Instagram now!). To remedy this longing, which many of us are grappling with, check out this stellar lineup of writers on Electronic Literature Day, a three-day online literary festival featuring writers, thinkers, and practitioners in dynamic formats (November 24-26). The festival is co-organized by Barakunan, an independent publisher and art collective based in Beirut and Berlin. It will feature some of Lebanon’s finest, from acclaimed author Rabih Alameddine, writer and artist Raafat Majzoub, and cultural and social activist Dayna Ash.

This month, the translation news across the Arab region is abundant! Yasmine Seale won the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for poetry. We’ve previously highlighted Seale’s poetic and engrossing translation of Aladdin that came out with W. W. Norton in 2018. Sawad Hussain sat down with the Anglo-Omani society to discuss translating Arabic literature and the emotional mechanisms involved in bringing the texts “to life” in English. Hussain is the winner of two English PEN Translates awards and in the podcast, she discusses and contextualizes transgender narratives in Oman through the prism of translating The Shadow of Hermaphroditus by Badriyya al-Badri. Here at Asymptote, we are excited about Arabic children’s literature in translation! The English translation of Sonia Nimr’s Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands from Interlink Books will debut on November 24! It is a feminist folktale unfolding through the journeys of a young Palestinian woman by the name of Qamar. Marcia Lynx Qualey, founder of Arablit Quarterly, worked on the translation. She previously gave an interview to Asymptote in 2017. Finally, on November 24 the shortlist for the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation will be announced. This year’s prize saw fourteen entries in fiction and poetry, with excellent nominees such as Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance translated by Iraqi novelist and scholar, Sinan Antoon. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Lebanon, Singapore, and Hong Kong!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Lebanon, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In Lebanon, ArabLit Quarterly’s new issue is brimming with new writing based on the symbol of the cat, whilst the literary world in Beirut has been mourning the loss of pioneering writer and publisher Riyad Al Rayes. In Singapore, the Singapore Writers Festival is featuring workshops, discussions, and an exhibition on three notable Tamil writers. In Hong Kong, this year’s Hong Kong Literary Season has kicked off with a series of events and the International Writers’ Workshop has welcomed prize-winning author Helen Oyeyemi in discussion with PEN Hong Kong president, Tammy Ho Lai-ming. Read on to find out more!

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Purr! A furry week for Arabic literature in translation. ArabLit Quarterly released its Fall 2020 issue dedicated to the inextricable house pet, the cat! In it, the feline creature takes on an amorphous quality and takes on various meanings. In some pages, the cat is the forlorn lover of political writers; in other pages, the cat symbolizes urban misery and violence, such as in Layla Baalbaki’s story. The acclaimed Syrian author Ghada Al-Samman contributed to the issue, contextualizing the cat as an agent of patriarchy. In her short story, “Beheading the Cat,” a man must decapitate a cat in order to prove he is worthy of dominating his wife. Marcia Lynx Qualey, founder of Arablit Quarterly, who gave an interview to Asymptote in 2017, tells us that the inspiration for Al-Samman’s story comes from the Persian maxim “One should kill the cat at the nuptial chamber.” Some of the translators who worked on this issue include award-winning Lebanese journalist Zahra Hankir, who edited Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World—a highly coveted anthology.

In Beirut, the literary world grieves over the loss of Riyad Al Rayes, a formidable writer, publisher, and editor. Al Rayes, a Syrian-Lebanese vagabond, founded the first Arab newspaper in Europe, Al-Manar, which he set up in London. His eponymous publishing house, which he operated out of Beirut, has published over a thousand books and is known for representing new voices in literature and critique. One of his accolades includes publishing the late and acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, which was translated into multiple languages from Arabic.

READ MORE…