Posts filed under 'arabic literature'

Towards a Greater Social Consciousness: Persa Koumoutsi on Translating Arabic Literature Into Greek

November 4, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Persa Koumoutsi

If a text is written simply to express our personal wants or concerns, it is not literature, in my view, but a form of self-centered expression.

Born and raised in Cairo, Persa Koumoutsi is a literary translator and a writer. Having returned to Greece after completing her studies at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, she began focusing solely on translating Arabic literature into Greek in 1993. She has since worked on the works of many distinguished authors, including fourteen novels by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, as well many Arab poets. Her bibliography includes the first Anthology of Contemporary Arabic Poetry in Greek, for which she received the First Prize of the Hellenic Society of Literary Translators in 2017. Among her other works, the Αnthology of Modern Arabic Female Poetry was also widely lauded in 2022. She has also published the Αnthology of Palestinian Poetry and the Anthology of Egyptian Poetry.

In this interview, originally conducted in Greek, I spoke with Persa about the renewed interest in Palestinian literature in times of genocide, the importance of translation as a means to make struggles known and build solidarities beyond human borders and language barriers, prison literature, as well as the future of Arabic translation in Greece. The latter concerns not solely translation for the sake of itself, but as a powerful tool to bring forth voices of those marginalized.

Christina Chatzitheodoru (CC): Since October 7 and the ongoing genocide, several young Arab writers and poets have been translated into Greek, including your recent translation of Najwan Darwish. There is a renewed interest in Palestinian literature in particular. Can you tell us more about this?

Persa Koumoutsi (PK): Of course there is a renewed interest, not only in Greece but all over the world, especially in Europe. The tragic events in Gaza have brought to the fore an unspeakable tragedy, and thus many of my colleagues and translators around the world—and in Greece—have devoted themselves to translating works that highlight this problem and its dimensions, as well as its impact on our collective and individual consciousnesses—especially those of whom are concerned with contemporary Arabic culture and its literature. One such work is a collection by the renowned Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish entitled, in Greek, I Kourasi ton Kremasmenon (Exhausted on the Cross), which, as the title suggests, alludes to the enduring pains of the Palestinian people, the irredeemable trauma, and the grievous injustice they have been inflicted upon them. Poetry, in my opinion, is the most powerful literary genre in these cases, since everything can be said and highlighted through the condensed word of poetry. . .

CC: The Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani once stated: “My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case, and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.” How does this view relate to your own approach to translation? READ MORE…

A Gazan Woman’s Voice: Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah on translating Asmaa Alatawna’s A Long Walk from Gaza

October 23, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

. . . even in the face of oppression, Arab women . . . take a role in constructing their realities, demonstrating agency despite what they endure.

When it was first published in 2019, A Long Walk from Gaza resounded with Asmaa Alatawna’s evocative descriptions of girlhood, migration, and life under occupation, gathered in an acute testament against the societal and political repressions of a woman’s liberties. Today, in light of the events over the last year, it also preserves a city that has since been overwritten with violence, layering the streets, neighbourhoods, and homes of memory over the present map of destruction. In this following interview, translators Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah discuss their process in translating this nuanced portrait of Palestinian life, the element of double marginalisation within the narrative, and the emotionality of working with a story that evokes the now-gone.

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): How did you come across A Long Walk from Gaza?

Michelle Hartman (MH): I have a relationship with Interlink Publishing. It’s a smallish, independent publisher based in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the only Palestinian-owned publisher in the United States. It’s committed to doing many different things, particularly bringing fiction written in Arabic to English readers—and it’s been doing this for a very long time. There’s a significant list of Arab writers whom the publisher wants to bring to life in English. They occasionally send me novels, and A Long Walk from Gaza was one of them. As Caline and I were working on another project at the time, I sent this book to her for her opinion.

Caline Nasrallah (CN): As Michelle said, we have already worked on several things together, so we have this relationship of her sending me books to read. I’ll then go through these books and decide if we could continue working on them. Once she sent me Asmaa’s novel, I was so taken by it, and I thought it was an important project we had to work on. I felt a duty. I read it, then we discussed it more, and we went ahead.

IF: That’s great. As a literary translator, I usually read a book and find something that speaks to me, motivating me to translate it. What drew you to this book? What are the elements that convinced you to spend much time with it?

CN: Asmaa’s novel is a must-read because of the way it describes life under occupation and all of the hardships that come along with that, specifically in Gaza. There’s little that comes out of Gaza because of the situation on the ground, so the book felt like a lens into something we had never really seen before—that made it feel more relevant. Asmaa reveals this double layer of life under occupation, tracing life as a girl and a woman under occupation, the reality of occupation and internal issues impacting the society in which she lived. While united within a cause, women were also affected by society’s actions. It’s imperative to recognise this aspect, even though it’s often overlooked in literature focusing on a common enemy. Calling out injustice wherever it exists is essential.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 22, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and Charlie Ng

The latest in literary updates from Palestine and Hong Kong!

With a slight delay due to technical issues, in this week of dispatches from around the world our Editors-at-Large introduce the most impactful releases from their regions as of late. From Palestinian poetry that “transcends mere expression” in its beauty and purpose, to a number of works that promote public engagement with literature in Hong Kong, read on to learn more.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

Ibrahim Nasrallah, the acclaimed Palestinian poet and novelist, has recently released a poignant collection of four new poems. The collection is now translated from Arabic by Huda J. Fakhreddine and will be published by World Poetry. Written in the shadow of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, these verses serve as a powerful indictment of global indifference towards the Palestinian plight, echoing the enduring tragedy of the Nakba that began in 1948. 

“I write now so that I do not die,” Nasrallah asserts, emphasizing the urgency of his message. He believes that with each attempt to erase their existence, Palestinians become more defined, more visible. These poems, dedicated to Gaza—a small yet symbolically vast territory—transform its struggle into a universal fight against darkness and tyranny. As Pierre Joris notes, Nasrallah’s work transcends mere expression; it embodies a visceral scream of the body, mind, and spirit, affirming the existence of Palestinians while mourning the losses of those killed and the land that remains elusive.

READ MORE…

Palestinian Poetry is Poetry for All Time: An Interview with Huda J. Fakhreddine 

April 3, 2024  |  in All Eyes on Palestine, Interviews  |  by Sebastián Sánchez

Palestinian poetry is not only poetry for times of crisis. It is not breaking news or soundbites for the media. It is poetry for all time . . .

From our Winter 2024 issue, Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People”, translated by Huda J. Fakhreddine, was voted the number one piece by our internal team. It’s easy to understand why—not only is the poem a stunning work that aligns its vivid, rhythmic language with the devastations and violences of our present moment, it is also translated with great sensitivity and emotionality into an English that corresponds with a tremendous inherited archive, and all the individuals who are keeping it—and the landscape—alive. In the following interview, Fakhreddine speaks to us about how this poem moves from hopelessness to resistance, from the great wound of war to the intimate determinations of the Palestinian people.

Sebastián Sánchez (SS): Reading your translation of Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People” is striking, as one gets the sense that this is the closest we might get to putting into words the unspeakable horror that is occurring currently in Gaza. What led you to decide to translate this poem in particular? What was your relationship with Hawwash’s work before you decided to translate “My People”?

Huda J. Fakhreddine (HJF): I have been unable to do anything other than follow the news from Gaza and try my best to stay afloat in these dark times, especially when I, and others like me in American institutions, are facing pressures and intimidation for merely protesting this ongoing genocide. Since last fall, we have been threatened and exposed to vicious campaigns for merely celebrating Palestinian literature and studying Arabic culture with integrity. If we accept the fact that we are expected to be silent when more than 30,000 Palestinians are genocidally murdered, and accept the false claim that this does not necessarily fall within the purview of our intellectual interests, we are nothing but hypocrites and opportunists.

I find a selfish consolation amid all this in translating poems from and about Gaza. I need these poems. They don’t need me. Samer shared this poem with me before he published it in Arabic, and it arrested me. It so simply and directly contends with the unspeakable, with the horrifying facts of the Palestinian experience. Samer confronts the unspeakable head on and spells it out as a matter of fact. This paradox of a reality that is at once unimaginable and a matter of fact is what makes this poem. Samer achieves poetry with a simple, unpretentious language like a clear pane of glass that frames a scene, arranges it, and transparently lets it speak for itself.

READ MORE…

Scream of Freedom: Samar Yazbek and Leri Price on Where the Wind Calls Home

March 21, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

I love the world in Arabic, so I started to write it as my personal space.

Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home is a poetic rumination that shifts through the land of the dead and of the living, between thinking and intuiting, and from the vast destructions of war to its intimate, embodied experience. In taking us to the “other” side—that of the military—in Syria’s unsparing civil war, Yazbek offers a method of understanding pain’s blind immensity, as well as the metaphysical phenomenon of life at the precipice of death. With the incredible work of translator Leri Price, whom Yazbek calls here her “voice in English”, Where the Wind Calls Home arrives to us with all the weight of contemporary tragedy, and all the light of a spiritual encounter. Here, Yazbek and Price speak to us on the recurring motifs of the text, the fluidity of the prose, and how writing can reveal to us our own secrets.

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. 

Alex Tan (AT): Samar, in your previous novel, Planet of Clay, we follow the perspective of a mute girl from Damascus, caught in the middle of the Syrian Civil War. For Where the Wind Calls Home, why did you select a dying soldier as your protagonist?

Samar Yazbek (SY): First of all, we’re not sure if he will die—what will happen to him, and with his life. Actually, it was a challenge in my own life, because I was in exile from myself, and I had stopped writing literature. I came back with Planet of Clay, to literature, but when I decided to write this novel, I started writing it as poetry. I tried something different. It’s a very personal thing.

Ten or twelve years ago, I decided for the first time to speak about the victims who are living on the other side of the Assad regime. It was a very difficult choice for me. There’s a perception that the soldiers on the side of the regime are not victims, but the problem is that this has been a long war, and everyone is a victim. And what we’ve got to remember is that there’s a class element; we have to remember the poor. A fundamental part of literature, in my opinion, is that we learn to look at things from an alternate point of view, and to have empathy with others. Without that, it’s absolutely certain that things won’t change.

AT: The figure of the tree plays such a central role in the novel—it becomes this recurring motif, with Ali crawling towards it in the narrative present, and thinking back to all the trees that have shielded him, including the one next to the maqam. Did you have any specific personal, religious, cultural, or literary motivations in opting for the tree as the essential anchor of the text?

SY: There are lots of reasons. First, every maqam in the mountains has trees. They’re all surrounded by trees, and these trees are huge and ancient, hundreds of years old. Second, the tree acts as refuge for Ali. It represents a shelter from daily violence—from the sort of physical violence that he encounters in the village.

The most important thing is that trees are silent. Trees die standing, silently, without speaking the language of humans—and in this death they have dignity. Ali is able to communicate with the tree, together in their silences. Silence is Ali’s language, his way of resisting against the violence in his society, so he invents a new language with the trees, with the sky, with the wind. It’s like he builds a bridge between himself and all the elements of nature. Trees are part of his world.

I’m also talking about myself and my vision; I believe we need to be like a tree sometimes.

AT: I want to pick up on what you said about the language of the trees being Ali’s language in the novel. I’m also thinking of what you said earlier, that the novel began as poetry. Could you tell us how it evolved from poetry into the novel, and whether you think the novel becomes a good channel for this silence? READ MORE…

‘Lost and Found in Maps of Wandering’: A Review of Bothayna Al-Essa’s Lost in Mecca

March 18, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Lost in Mecca is not a one-dimensional story; it is paradoxical, repelling readers while captivating them.

Lost in Mecca by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated from the Arabic by Nada Faris, Dar Arab, 2024

Best-selling Kuwaiti author Bothayna al-Essa’s Lost in Mecca —first published in Arabic in 2015 as Maps of Wandering/خرائط التيه—is more than just a literary crime thriller; it’s a journey through Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, as well as into the minds of its protagonists. Al-Essa moves from a mere personal incident to a human plight and the global crisis that is human organ trafficking, resulting in an expansive narrative and a much welcome addition to the growing list of modern Arabic fiction available in English.

Lost in Mecca opens with the ordeal of a couple on Haj. As a flood of pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba, al-Essa focuses on a Kuwaiti woman, Sumaya, holding the hand of her seven-year-old son, Mishari—who she has brought along even though it’s not obligatory for children to participate in this annual journey. Sumaya’s husband, Faisal, is also performing the same ritual nearby. All of a sudden, a group of Africans rushes forward, holding onto each other, and in the chaos, Mishari’s hand slips away from Sumaya’s. In this human flood, Mishari is lost.

The spiritual scene soon fades away, and the flooded square transforms into an empty place filled with the echoing cries of a grieving mother, repeating, “Mishari! Oh God! My son!”, over and over again. The bodies diminish, the crowd thins, the distances shorten, the gaps decrease, and Mecca itself becomes a maze. How could a child possibly vanish in all this confusion?

From that point onward, the tragedy truly begins with the search for Mishari, a pursuit that transcends the boundaries of pages to become a terrifying nightmare. The ensuing chapters chronicle Mishari’s wanderings between the 7th and 29th of Dhu al-Hijjah, continually being confronted by the ‘forgotten’ worlds and stories of human negligence taking place across the Middle East. Al-Essa stretches out his challenging storyline from Mecca to ‘Asir, Jazan, and the Red Sea coast. Eventually, Mishari’s parents will even cross the sea towards Sinai through restricted maritime routes. The narration covers the Sinai desert and its vast expanses, up to the borders of Al-‘Arish in the north. It also highlights the geographical boundaries of occupied Palestine, and sheds light on what the Western media has reported regarding human organ trafficking, and secret deals involving Israeli and Egyptian officials.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 23, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bella Creel, Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from Japan, Egypt, and Kenya!

This week, our team from around the world brings news of literary award shortlists and winners! From the launch of the inaugural issue of Debunk Quarterly, to the winners of the Sawiris Cultural Awards, to the recent closure of a historical bookstore in Tokyo, read on to learn more!

Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan

Where are Japan’s bookstores going? In the last two decades, the number of bookstores in Japan has nearly halved, dropping to only 11,495 in 2023. The figure speaks to the many locally-owned bookstores that have had to close over the years, unable to keep customers in a rapidly digitizing era. Some of these closures have garnered international and domestic attention, the latest of which was the historical “Bookshop 書楽” (Shogaku) in Tokyo’s Suginami ward. 

Owned by Mitsuru Ishida, Bookshop Shogaku has a long history in its small corner of Tokyo, located just outside of Asagaya Station for the past 43 years. The area of Asagaya itself—dubbed 文士の街, or “Literati Town”—has been a hub for creatives for well over a century, lined with jazz clubs, Showa-era coffee shops, and of course, bookstores. While famous literary figures such as Dazai Osamu and Masuji Ibuse once frequented the street and its many shelves, playing shogi and drinking as the “Asagaya Club,” over time Bookshop Shogaku became the last bookstore selling new titles in the area, until it closed as well. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 2, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, and Miranda Mazariegos

Literary news from Palestine, Egypt, and Latin America!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us news of a “literary cartography” of Palestine, the most recent literary fairs and festivals in Egypt, and censorship of Latin American authors in Florida. Read on to learn more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

Despite the burgeoning array of literary endeavors in support of Gaza, this dispatch aims to shed light on a profoundly comprehensive initiative. Back in July 2023, when we unveiled our coverage of the podcast entitled “Country of Words,” conceived and orchestrated by Refqa Abu-Remaileh, little did we fathom the vastness of Refqa’s overarching vision under the same title.

“Country or Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature” was inaugurated by Stanford University in the last weeks of 2023. Rooted in the constellation paradigm within literature, this digital-born project aspires to retrace and remap the global narrative of Palestinian literature throughout the twentieth century, traversing the Arab world, Europe, North America, and Latin America. Nestled at the confluence of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, “Country of Words” establishes a networked locus for the data and narrative fragments of a literature in constant motion, harmonizing porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into a resilient, open-ended literary chronicle.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

December 15, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas and Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed

The latest literary news from Bulgaria and Egypt!

This week, our editors-at-large report from Bulgaria and Egypt, taking us to book fairs and prize ceremonies. From the passing of a giant of Egyptian children’s literature to the arrival of literary stars in Bulgaria, read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the Sofia International Book Fair graced the beginning of December. It took place over five days in the National Palace of Culture and saw the participation of approximately 160 publishing houses. Its motto was, quite fittingly, “We create stories. We create history.”

In an interview for the Nova News channel, Veselin Todorov, former longtime chairman of the Bulgarian Book Association revealed some intriguing details about the fair’s conception: “We began this tradition fifty-five years ago. However, we are celebrating our golden jubilee only now because on several occasions during socialist times, it was decided for the fair to be held every other year instead of every year. It all started back in 1968, in the Universiada Hall. Todor Zhivkov [former de facto leader of Bulgaria] inaugurated the event—a pompous and noisy affair. He even claimed it was one of the biggest such fairs in Eastern Europe.”

Literary critic Amelia Licheva also commented on the festival in her opening-day interview for the independent media platform Toest: “The boldest ambition of the team in charge of the cultural program (both Daria Karapetkova and I are part of it this year) is to attract real stars. Bulgaria is a small market with a bad image abroad and it is rather difficult, but we do not give up easily. Actually, our efforts finally paid off. The Bulgarian public will be able to meet with Franco Moretti, Leïla Slimani, Dacia Maraini, Stefan Hertmans, Ia Genberg, and Agustina Bazterrica. We are hoping to cultivate a taste in the audience for the issues of global importance and get more people to attend these discussions. This would mean a success not only for the festival but also for the role of literature in the present day.”

What better way to end 2023 than with hope for the literary future of 2024?

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt READ MORE…

The Amman International Book Fair: Translation Across Languages and Periods of Civilization

October 11, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Bridget Peak

How can you capture rhyme and rhythm, the cadence of a work in another language? If you can, should you?

Picture1

In its 22nd edition, The Amman International Book Fair ran from September 21–30 this year and featured over 400 publishing houses from 22 countries, offering a full calendar of literary activities from a reading marathon to calligraphy classes. The Union of Jordanian Publishers, established in 1989 to elevate the standing of publishing houses in Jordan, organizes the event each year under the recurrent theme “Jerusalem: Capital of Palestine”, and marks the start of book fair season across the region. The state of Qatar was recognized as the esteemed guest of honor of the fair in a symposium attended by Dr. Khalid bin Ibrahim Al Sulaiti, the General Manager of the Katara Cultural Village of Qatar (the foundation responsible for the Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel) and historian Dr. Hind Abu Al-Shaar was recognized for her contributions as a writer and academic within Jordan’s literary landscape as this year’s ‘key personality’. 

Picture1

The Amman International Book Fair is an immense organizational feat, a forum not only dedicated to the sale of books in the Arabic language but also an accessible discussion of literature’s role in Jordan historically and today. Inevitably, the topic of translation asserts itself, demanding rumination on grappling with meaning in a foreign alphabet and the challenges and opportunities implicit therein. When speaking with representatives of publishing houses of the broader region, the question of the quality of translations was ever-present and reflected in the events hosted by the fair and its partners. READ MORE…

From Silly to Deadly: On Shalash the Iraqi by Shalash

June 21, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

. . .key to the humourist’s arsenal is none other than language itself—its malleability, its capacity for aggrandisement and diminishment alike.

Shalash the Iraqi by Shalash, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, And Other Stories, 2023

Anonymity fascinates and seduces. Endless speculations have circled invasively around who Elena Ferrante “truly” is; Catherine Lacey’s recent Biography of X reckons with erasing a layered past with a single letter of the alphabet; the first season of Bridgerton, the hit Regency-era romance on Netflix, has its narrative engine propelled by the question of Lady Whistledown’s real identity. These instances from the Global North exemplify the allure of mystery, but they fail to account for the stakes of remaining nameless in a political climate where to unveil oneself might be to threaten one’s own safety.

One might, in a moment of facetiousness, think of the eponymous chronicler of Shalash the Iraqi as the Lady Whistledown of Iraq’s Sadr City (or Thawra City, as it is lovingly christened by Shalash). Both issued frequent dispatches from within the epicentre of social disarray, guaranteeing the pleasure of gossip. More importantly, their pseudonymous veneers facilitated a lurid candour that might not otherwise have been possible.

There the similarities end. The respectable circles of upper-crust London did not live in the penumbra of foreign occupation. Nor were they plagued with the constant risk of spectacular sectarian violence, or hampered by a corrupt government that has “thieves, cheats, swindlers, traders in conspiracies” for politicians. It was against such chaos that Shalash released his explosive, timely blog posts, garnering a rapidly expanding local readership despite patchy Internet access in the country. The academic Kanan Makiya tells us, in his introduction, that people were printing out the posts, “copying them longhand,” “bombarding Shalash with questions and opinions.” Even high-ranking cadres could not resist partaking in the fanfare: one official expressed admiration while entreating Shalash not to mock him, for fear of his children’s potential disappointment. Another claimed that upon reading the daily communiqués, he would fall off his chair laughing.

Laughter, perhaps, can always be counted on to forge an affinity, if not a unity, beyond fractures of sect, status, and ethnic affiliation. Iraqis would “drop everything for a good laugh”; they gather in bars and down glasses of arak to immerse themselves in a “great, communal, and nondenominational drunkenness.” Shalash knows this, and abundantly turns it to his advantage. Nothing and no one is spared from the crosshairs of his ridicule, populated by a variegated cast that encompasses sermonisers, soldiers, suicide bombers, and donkeys. A vice-president’s verbal pomposity sounds like “he just ate a few expensive dictionaries and is about to lose his lunch.” A woman about to be married off to an Australian cousin is told, should her fiancé divorce her, “just tell everyone that he’s a terrorist and you’ll have nothing to worry about.” An odious neighbour, eager to save a spot for himself in paradise, proselytises the necessity of voting in the referendum for Iraq’s new constitution: “Don’t you know the going rate for rewards in heaven for helping ratify the constitution? It’s worth a hundred visits to the shrine of the Eighth Imam, and that’s on the far side of Iran!” When the narrator casually uses Google Earth, he is accused of lecherously spying on the women of his residence, sparking off a widespread hysteria—and court case—about the “violation of the morals of the block.” Each instance of mockery is a shard in a wider mirror of collective trauma.

READ MORE…

A Small Darkening Sky: Huda J. Fakhreddine on the qaṣīdat al-nathr, the Arabic Prose Poem

June 19, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Every great poem is a rebellion. . .

Working within the vast world of Arabic poetry, writer, translator, and professor Huda J. Fakhreddine has done much to elucidate the movements of literary forms throughout history, the necessity of constantly interacting with tradition, and the inner universe of poems as they communicate and exchange with one another. Through her extensive knowledge and sensitivity to the capacities of poetic language, Fakhreddine has demonstrated powerfully that, as in a piece by her father that she translated: “Poetry is the deepest sea, distant yet more urgent than surf breaking on rocks.” Here, in this wide-ranging interview, Alton Melvar M Dapanas speaks to her on the importance of form and meter, the necessity of removing Arabic poetry from reductive study, the ongoing engagement of reading and translation, and the intimate way she came to love and feel safe in the world of a poem.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Certain paradoxes and ironies made an impression in me after reading your latest book, The Arabic Prose Poem (2021): that the Arabic free verse, or the qasīdat al-tafīla, is not “free” in the way  of its Anglophone (free verse) and Francophone (vers libre) counterparts, and that Arabic free verse poets like Nāzik al-Malāʾika and later on, Ahmad ʿAbd al-Muʿtī Hijāzī, are, surprisingly, the fiercest opponents of the prose poem. 

Huda J. Fakhreddine (HJF): Meter is the marker of poetry in the Arabic tradition, even if symbolically and not fundamentally. It is the fence that separates poetry from other forms—even those that have strong claims to the poetic. The modernist movement of the 20th century was the first organized and theorized effort to jump the fence of meter; this doesn’t mean that the fence was not jumped before, only that it was not done so in such a collective and deliberate manner. The Arabic free verse poem was the result of that formal experimentation or innovation. 

But a more accurate label than “free verse” is qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla. The tafʿīla is the single foot or metrical unit, and a pattern of tafʿīlas makes up a meter in classical prosody. The modern poets no longer committed to the meters in their full patterns, but simplified them or reduced them to their building units (the individual tafʿīla), and often in qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla, the poem is built on a single metrical unit and its variations. The term free verse (al-shiʿr al- ḥurr) is thus confusing and not very accurate, since such poems still adhere to metrical considerations. The use of the term free verse is a testament to the influence of translation in the formative years of the Arabic modernist movement—though, as I argue in the book, translation was not that most decisive influence. I think the conversation with the Arabic poetic tradition, even when antagonistic and fraught, is really at the core of that movement, and is the real springboard to its most significant contributions. This is also why the term qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla is the most reflective of the movement’s intervention in form and its thinking about the role of meter. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 28, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Carol Khoury, and MARGENTO

The latest in literature from Spain, Mexico, Palestine, and the USA!

This week, we find the world celebrating the voices of both writers and translators. In New York City, a live reading event features the ongoing work of Latin American writers, while in Mexico City, a Chicanx poetry reading tour is inaugurated. In Palestine, the nation mourns the loss of poet and translator Salma Khadra Jayyusi, a brilliant mind who never ceased to advocate for Arabic literature and its translation. Meanwhile, in Madrid, Romanian writing sees the spotlight, and in Barcelona, the literary community proudly reminds the world to name the translator. 

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States and Mexico

April has seen many phenomenal community initiatives championing diverse and outstanding writers, both in the U.S. and Mexico.

On Saturday, April 15, I travelled to Queens in New York City to attend a reading at the independent Hispanic bookstore, Librería barco de papel. Aptly held in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood known for its extraordinary cultural diversity, the event featured the most recent work-in-progress of established and emerging Latin American writers. The lineup was a diverse assembly of nationalities, genres, and visions. It included Ruy Feben (Mexico), Margarita Drago (Argentina), Sara Malagón Llano (Colombia), and Nilton Maa (Perú). Their readings touched on pressing topics such as cultural memory and migration, sexuality and friendship, exile and language, and technology and heritage. I found them especially moving as someone from Mexico who has lived abroad for so many years. The atmosphere was joyful and engaging, vitalized by the effervescent hospitality of the event’s organizer and host: Argentinian writer, professor, and community leader Guillermo Severiche. Supported by many institutions, he runs En Construcción, a series of readings and workshops aimed at promoting New York-based Latinx and Latin American writers working in Spanish, Portuguese, Creole, Quechua, or any other languages from the continent. Severiche’s initiative has been celebrated and sponsored by several organizations, among them the magazine Poets & Writers, the Feria Internacional del Libro de la Ciudad de Nueva York, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, which recently awarded him a grant for his upcoming writing project, about birds in New York.

In Mexico City, another marvelous literary event is taking place between April 25-29: the national tour of Mexican and Chicanx poetry, “Speaking in tongues / Hablando en lenguas”, founded, organized, and directed by the internationally acclaimed Mexican poet Minerva Reynosa. The groundbreaking reading series will bring Chicanx poetry to several cities across Mexico, with a lineup including Reynosa and Mexican poet Indira Isel Torres Crux, alongside the Chicanx poets Aideed Medina, Viva Padilla, Josiah Luis Alderete, and Hector Son of Hector. Together they perform a vibrant diversity of styles, perspectives, and languages. Their readings at this momentous festival challenge historical silences (ironically, Latinx poetry is not widely known or read in Mexico) and, crucially, bring people together through joy, community, and the shared passion for poetry. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #2 Borges and the Blind by Abdelfattah Kilito

December 29, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Borges learned Arabic and died or, and perhaps more precisely, he learned Arabic and thus died.

Our second most-read piece of the year is Abdelfattah Kilito’s Borges and the Blind, expertly translated from the Arabic by Ghazouane Arslane (who was also interviewed about this article on the blog by Senior Assistant Editor Alex Tan). A lithe and subtle essay on Borges’ famous short story Averroës’ Search, it glides with a rather un-essayistic lightness that belies how profuse it is with ideas. We’ll limit ourselves to pulling on one of its threads: Borges writes at the threshold between European and Arabic literatures; he is a bridger, and—why not, though Kilito never says so explicitly—a translator of sorts bringing the literature of Arabic to the West. The essay never prescribes and Kilito consciously forswears snobbery; nevertheless, as he unpacks allusions only Arabists could know and Europeans would not deign to scrutinise we find suggestions on how to read Borges’ work—and indeed any work at all rooted in an unfamiliar culture. Dismiss those foreign words and names at your peril. With Borges as with the best translations, a trove of knowledge is resting literally under your nose, if only you think to look for it. It’s a thrilling notion, and there are other ideas that spark similar thoughts throughout Borges and the Blind. Like so many articles in this year’s top ten, it very much bears rereading.

Here’s an excerpt:

One is curious, in this context, about Borges’s relationship with languages, and namely with the Arabic language. He knew, of course, Spanish and English (his grandmother was English) and was proficient in French and German. He lived in four languages, but what about Arabic? In one of his poems, a rare and equivocal verse attracted my attention: “What language / am I doomed to die in?!” This could mean in what language will death strike me, or in what language am I to die, what is the language in which it is my duty to die? Borges partly made up his mind when, wondering, he added: “The Spanish my ancestors used / to call for the charge, or to play truco / The English of the Bible / my grandmother read from / at the edges of the desert?” He mentioned the two languages closest to his heart. What is rather strange, however, is that he would die in neither of them, let alone in French or German. He would die in a fifth language he had not expected or intuited to die in, a new language he was indeed able to acquire. Which language? The Arabic language, which he had started to learn during the last year of his life. Borges learned Arabic and died or, and perhaps more precisely, he learned Arabic and thus died.

If this piece has sparked an interest in Abdelfattah Kilito’s literary criticism, your next stop has to be his Dream of a Baghdad Night, translated from the French by former team member Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg for our Spring 2019 issue. If all this talk of bridge-building inspires you to join us behind the scenes, on the other hand, take note that we’re already advertising our first recruitment call of 2023. From Editor-at-Large to Assistant Blog Editor, check out the newly available positions here and send in your application today!

REVISIT OUR SECOND MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022 READ MORE…