Posts filed under 'Arabic poetry'

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…

Loss, Subversion and Womanhood: An Interview with Sara Elkamel, Translator of I Will Not Fold These Maps by Mona Kareem

September 27, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Ali Al-Jamri

I really admire Mona’s ability to find harmonious, synchronous threads across eras and geographies.

On the UK tour of I Will Not Fold These Maps by Mona Kareem, translated by Sara Elkamel, Sara met with poet and translator Ali Al-Jamri to dig deep into her process rendering Mona’s work into English. They began by comparing their individual translations of the book’s opening poem, “Perdition,” and what followed was an in-depth discussion of Sara’s process and Mona’s themes as they discuss threads of loss, subversion and womanhood in the works. Both translations of “Perdition” appear at the end of this interview. Elkamel’s translation was originally published as part of her translation of Kareem’s I Will Not Fold These Maps, available in the Poetry Translation Centre’s online store and in all good bookshops!

Ali Al-Jamri (AAJ): This first part of the interview is an experiment—but let’s see if it works? I am very interested in hearing you explain your process and the granular decision-making required in translation. By way of starting this conversation, I’ve attempted my own translation of the opening poem هلاك and I’ve shared my draft with you. I find that contrasts often help us define ourselves, and so my hope is that the contrasts between our translations will clarify your process. I’m interested in any reflections you have.

Sara Elkamel (SE): I found it fascinating to go through your (beautiful) translation attempts. Usually, when I reflect on a translation of mine, I experience a sinking feeling associated with the opportunities I missed out on, as well as a sense of (dare I call it) admiration for some of the choices made—as though they were made by someone else. Looking at your translation of “Perdition” has definitely inspired those two reactions within me.

For instance, you and I have translated the third stanza very differently, and that gap helps me think through my choices. What you translated as “Another ship / short of breath / struggles on the ocean’s throat,” I rendered as “Another ship / asphyxiates / the ocean’s larynx.” I realize now that I have entirely omitted the “shortness of breath” that appears in the original. Instead, I leaned on the sound of the word “asphyxiates” to mimic that breathlessness. I’ve always thought the “x” in that word was like a noose placed in its center.

I think you and I also came to different conclusions about the body running out of breath; you interpreted it as the ship, and I as the ocean. In my reading, I felt that this poem had the tendency to give human bodies to natural phenomena; the sky has a breast, the night wears a choker of stars around its neck, and the ocean has a larynx. I realize now that the fourth stanza, “The moon spills a cloud / into the sky’s breast” was a stretch on my part. The original text does not contain the action of “spilling”—but I think I was keen on extending the poem’s tendency to set up an anthropoid actor, an action, and a subject. For better or for worse, I was trying to stay true to the poem’s intentions—or what I perceived to be the poem’s intentions—not necessarily the language itself. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 11, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Carol Khoury, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Palestine, Kenya, and the Philippines!

This week, our Editors-at-Large offer a fond remembrance of a recently-departed literary icon, and report on book fairs and BTS. From books on boats and boy bands to the changing texture of Ramallah mornings, read on to find out more.

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

Early mornings in Ramallah are varied, except for one scene: an older man, back almost fully straight, all-white head lowered, walking slowly towards one specific coffee house in the old city. A serene smile below a deep gaze, the man would sit in his friends’ company, not for long—just enough to empty his coffee cup, and his head from the thoughts that weighed him down on his way.

Since last week, the beloved older man has not appeared in the streets. Zakaria Mohammed, a celebrated poet and a Palestinian literary icon, now resides in his admirers’ hearts. At the age of seventy-three, Zakaria’s body was lowered to rest, but his soul will continue to visit Ramallah, reminding everyone that:

There is no death
There is only a tiny cloud that passes and covers your eyes
Like a friend who comes from behind and blindfolds you with his hands
There is no death
There is a black goat and a tattooed hand milking an udder
White milk fills your mouth and flows in your eyes
Again, there is no death
There is a Raspberry tree
It holds your shoulder and hurts you
because it wants to open the way for turtles
There is no death
There isn’t
at all

Read more of Zakaria’s poems, translated here by Sinan Anton.

Zakaria Mohammed - Apr 2023 - photo by Ahmad Odeh READ MORE…

The Air Itself Becomes Lead: On Mona Kareem’s I Will Not Fold These Maps

August 10, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

Are these scenes, these stanzas, dreams, memories, or prophecies? Or are they metaphors?

I Will Not Fold These Maps by Mona Kareem, translated from the Arabic by Sara Elkamel, Poetry Translation Centre, 2023

In 1986, just one year before the poet Mona Kareem was born, the stateless Arab population of Kuwait, who had been denied citizenship when Kuwait declared its independence in 1961, became categorized as illegal residents. Despite enjoying relatively equal status to Kuwaiti nationals until then, approximately 250,000 people were stripped of their access to free education, housing, and healthcare. Following the Iraqi invasion and the subsequent war of 1991, many of the Bidoon community, including Kareem’s mother’s family, were expelled from their positions or deported outside of Kuwait, accused of collaborating with the enemy. Forced to flee their homes, they became internal refugees when they arrived at Kuwait’s border with Iraq. For Kareem, memories of such scenes from childhood bleed into the present moment, where she is exiled in the US and denied the opportunity to visit the country in which she was born, as well as the members of her family who still reside there. I Will Not Fold These Maps, translated by Sara Elkamel, is a curated collection of poems covering twenty years of Kareem’s poetry, both previously published and new. It is a collection marred by exile, war, and the fraught relationships and ruins they leave in their wake.

Kareem’s poems are replete with unique images—they paint scenes in language that mirror the chaos of memory, the fragmentation of exile, and the mutilation of war. As Elkamel points out in her introduction, it seems that everything in Kareem’s poems has a body—one that bears the brunt of individual and collective traumas. At the same time, the poet is at a loss regarding what to do with her own body, as she tells us in her poem “My Body, My Vehicle” (Jasadī Markabatī). Her vehicle of a body is not one she can park or abandon just anywhere, for

When I go shopping, my wheels shatter
the glossy ceramic floors
and when I go to the beach
she sinks into the sand

small and dark, completed and broke
her windows are an almanac of winds
and her voice falters at rush hour.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2022

October 10, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ah-reum Han, Alex Tan, and Eva Wissting

New work from the Arabic, the Korean, and the Ojibwe language!

In this month’s round-up of the latest in world literature, our editors bring vital texts addressing faith, (false) mythologies, desire, migration, and Indigenous culture to the forefront: a collection of penetrating, prismatic poems from the lauded Egyptian poet Iman Mersal; from South Korea’s Lee Geum-yi, a fiction that tells the long-silenced stories of women crossing the seas to be wed to strangers; and a new collection of poetry, documenting Ojibwe lives, by eminent writer Linda LeGarde Grover. Read on to find out more!

threshold

The Threshold by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022

Review by Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor

Perhaps it begins with a search. The Egyptian poet Iman Mersal returns to her homeland in hopes of procuring a book by Saniya Saleh, an elusive writer no one seems to have heard of. Instead she finds a table, piled with the canonized words of men; nowhere in sight is the person she seeks: a wife, sister, and mother, who can only secondarily be a writer in her own right. “I don’t know how she likes to see herself,” she laments in a wandering essay. Left with the “wasted potential” of what survives, she can imagine only a voice of muted cadence, “a whispered song of mourning which slips through to me amid the din of revolutionaries’ rabble-rousing slogans, of warriors intent on victory, of those broken by defeat angrily denouncing state, dictator and society.”

A similar quality of whispering, of slipping through, inhabits Iman Mersal’s angular The Threshold, a collection of poetry translated delicately by Robyn Creswell in conversation with the poet herself. In the titular piece, a collective biography of sorts charts a path through the streets and labyrinthine hypocrisies of Cairo in the nineties: “one long-serving intellectual screamed at his friend / When I’m talking about democracy / you shut the hell up.” Elsewhere a speaker ventures, “Let’s assume the people isn’t a dirty word and that we know the meaning of en masse.” Yet this momentary compact reveals its own fragility; language with all its alibis and forms of subterfuge seems a poor vessel, too riddled with holes to hold “all the wasted days” and the “nights / of walking with hands stretched out / and the visions that crept over the walls.”

Mersal’s work is unafraid of its own promontories and edges. Often, the writing advances a crepuscular view of the self, ever-partial and shrouded in semi-obscurity, divided from its figurations. The opening poem dryly declares, “I’m pretty sure / my self-exposures / are for me to hide behind.” Her name, which contains the Arabic for “faith” and “messenger,” is too “musical” for “a body like my body / and lungs like these—growing raspier / by the day.” On what map might we locate the trembling contours of that occluded life, “whose existence I’ve never been sure of,” and which appears to “have neither past nor future” in an encounter with a stranger, on whose shoulder she accidentally falls asleep? How unwieldy it feels in its bulk, how relentlessly it has been anatomized, in spite of its wispy resistance to measurement:

This is the life into which more than one father stuffed his ambitions, more than one mother her scissors, more than one doctor his pills, more than one activist his sword, more than one institution its stupidity, and more than one school of poetry its poetics.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2022

May 16, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor, Sabrina Parker Greene, and Samantha Siefert

New writings translated from Arabic, Croatian, and Italian!

In this month of new releases from literatures around the world, we present a poignant and transcendental collection of poems from Palestinian writer Maya Abun Al-Hayyat, a mesmerizing journey through Latin American from Croatian author Marko Pogačar, and a stunning psychological novel of detachment from Erica Mou, in her Anglophone debut. Read on to find out more!

leaf

You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah, Milkweed Editions, 2022

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Managing Editor

To raise one’s pen is a political act. As I write these words, it’s been less than forty-eight hours since journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was fatally shot in Jenin. Having acted politically, having written politically, her death is now being used for political means. Words within and about war function as powerful political weapons, bandages, sirens, and songs, all in one. This is what Maya Abu Al-Hayyat shares with us through her incisive verse, as translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah.

Lovers Swap Language

the way enemies exchanges stabs:
he takes a word from her lexicon
and she takes one from his book.
That’s how poems are made
and also bigoted speeches

And when lovers and enemies sleep,
the ether carries a hot hum
the universe digests
unaffected.

Words weaponize, the world marches on, but Abu Al-Hayyat rests between breaths, demonstrating through a brilliant puzzle of verbal turns the ways in which trauma has distorted our time. This collection, You Can Be the Last Leaf, brings together verses from multiple times and tomes, holding them in conversation, exchanging the writer’s lexicons and books through the years, and digesting the whole in the face of an indifferent universe.

In his brilliant introduction, Joudah describes Abu Al-Hayyat’s place both as an individual soul but also as someone writing to the collective trauma of the Palestinian people. “The multifarious Palestinian voice lives on in Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s words, ordinary as grief and daily as laughter.” In the vein of the kitchen table, many of her poems do indeed touch on the quotidian, the life of motherhood and of aging, of love and family. “Mothers Arrange Their Aches at Night,” for example, opens “Joint pain, high sugar, / rheumatic ailments, / a boy who missed school because of a cold”. Quickly, however, the shade of the larger region—of that political conflict—ghosts over the next lines. “mothers feel sadness for mysterious reasons, / like sadness over other mothers / who stand in public streets / holding photos of their sons’ / well-groomed faces / with sideburns and mustaches, / waiting for the camera to capture them / and their chapped hands.” Like Abu Akleh’s reporting, Abu Al-Hayyat’s verse is a camera, and what it captures, what it turns toward, is not only the violence but also the aftermath, the void left by time cut short.

In “Mahmoud,” for example, Abu Al-Hayyat imagines a different future for herself and her lover, who was killed by a bullet from Israeli forces on the first day of the second intifada, as Joudah tells us in his introduction. The poem opens in the hypothetical. “Mahmoud could have been our son. / I’d have objected to the name / and, for family reasons, you’d have insisted on it.” Midway through the poem though, other temporal modes wriggle in. “You’d have forgiven him, / you’re kind like that. He’d only smoked in secret. / But the first rock he’d have thrown / at soldiers at the checkpoint, / to raise his heroic stock in Mana’s eyes, / would have declared war in our house / biting followed by flying slippers.” Mahmoud is forgiven in another timeline, but the lover is kind even now. Mahmoud smoked, but he only hypothetically threw the rock. The poem ends with a slap, the same slap which never landed on Mahmoud’s cheek. READ MORE…

Spring 2022: Highlights from the Team

May 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by AM Ringwalt, Amaryllis Gacioppo, Andriana Hamas, Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, José García Escobar, and Liam Sprod

Still don’t know where to start with our latest edition? Here are some more entry points, courtesy of our generous multicontinental team!

I felt that the Spring Asymptote was an incredibly timely and unsettling issue and I hope that broader readers can use it as a lens to think about ongoing dynamics of imperialism, capitalism, and more. I was drawn immediately to Kim Hyesoon’s poems from The Hell of That Star (tr. Cindy Juyoung Ok), with its overwhelming and abundant female presence that kept mutating. In Signe Gjessing’s poems from Tractatus (tr. Denise Newman), I really enjoyed the tension between the abstract and the material—for example, the fact that shampoo is able to exist alongside transcendence. The voice of Nina Yargekov’s “The Obedient Little Girl” (tr. Charles Lee) was immediately disarming! I was delighted by the emphasis on disobedience at the end. Last but not least, I enjoyed reading Agnieszka Taborska’s The World Has Gone Mad: A Surrealist Handbook How to Survive (tr. Soren Gauger). Leonora Carrington is my favorite artist and writer (I actually have a tattoo of one of her paintings); it was exciting to see her mentioned at the conclusion. I also enjoyed the automatic writing components. This is a text I do need to spend more time with and I am so glad that it was included in this issue.

—AM Ringwalt, Educational Arm Assistant

I have a love for Nordic literature in general, there is something about its directness and its simplicity, and yet at the same time its ability to confront existential issues through the details of the everyday. As I live in Sweden and yet am not Swedish, I see literature as a way into understanding the place and society where I am. I was struck by how so many of the pieces in the Swedish special feature confronted the deep hypocrisy that is there in Sweden’s self-presentation as a tolerant, progressive, consensual, and equal society: The uncovering of misogyny and violence against women in the Kristina Lugn (tr. Zach Maher), Lina Hagelbäck (tr. Freke Räihä) and Hanna Nordenhök (tr. Saskia Vogel) (there is a reason that the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor [Men Who Hate Women]); or history of institutionalized homophobia in the Jonas Gardell (tr. Elizabeth Clark Wessel); and racism in the Majgull Axelsson (tr. Kathy Saranpa). These all show that there is something deeply troubling in the supposedly comfortable Swedish society that people here live in. And yet, for all this social awareness, these texts are not themselves sanctimonious or worthy. There is a distinct existential edge in each of them, they show how these social issues penetrate deep down into the world of the characters affected by them. Oppression is not an accident or mistake that can be simply rectified or remedied, it is a constitutive fact of the world as it exists and is revealed and experienced: violence, oppression, and torment penetrate and persist right through the world, into each blade of grass, bunch of flowers, childhood memory, or everyday action, and all this writing captures something of that pain and its penetration. This is the world. And it needs to be shown and seen again, recognized for what it is, as it is in this writing; and through the seeing again that this writing provides, it can also be recreated as other than it is.

—Liam Sprod, Copy Editor

Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s As Bombs Fall (tr. Matthew Hyde) made me cry. This account of daily life in Kharkiv made me think of my grandmother living in Rome under Nazi occupation—the immediacy of daily life while the world crumbles around you. Accounts such as this allow us a window into the individual human impact of war that newspaper reportage does not. Johannes Lilleøre’s My Sick Friend (tr. Sharon E. Rhodes) read like prose poetry. I love the way it plays with time: we move through a life, and then once illness strikes, time slows down. The taut, matter-of-fact sentences, with their seemingly throwaway observations and details, evoke not just the immediacy created by bodily illness and suffering, but also convey the pain and helplessness of the narrator. Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins discusses so many vital questions, for example: what responsibility do we children of the diaspora have to our homelands? How much is our image of homeland shaped by the trauma of our parents and grandparents?

—Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Letters of Hiragy al-Qot by Abdel Rahman El-Abnudi

August 24, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Mariam Moustafa

If this letter were a boat, / I would sail down the Nile to reach you.

When Nasser commissioned the construction of the Aswan High Dam—a project pivotal to his legacy of modernising Egypt—most of the migrant builders who came from Upper Egypt were farmers who were unfamiliar with industrial machinery and faced hazardous work conditions. This week’s Translation Tuesday features a set of epistolary poems that relate the story of this historic project through the correspondences of a migrant worker Hiragy and his wife Fatma. These poems, drawn from the start of Abdel Rahman El-Abnudi’s The Letters of Hiragy al-Qot, were written when the poet lived amongst the labourers in Aswan who came from his village of Abnoud. One of the Arab world’s most respected vernacular writers—a true poet of the people—El-Abnudi’s works are social documents that chronicle the history of Egypt. In Mariam Moustafa’s translation, the emerging language of technological modernity is conjured with sensitivity, and the various registers of labour and longing are given emotional resonance. We are thrilled also to feature an audio clip of El-Abnudi himself reading the first two letters in Arabic—for our readers to appreciate why he too is known as “the sound of Egypt.”

“Abdel Rahman El-Abnudi always emphasized that his poems were meant to be listened to, not just read, and recorded most of his poems. I grew up listening to El-Abnudi reciting The Letters of Hiragy al-Qot, and was unsure how to convey the profound emotions that I hear in his voice to an English-speaking audience. A translator can communicate the meaning of sentences, expressions, and even untranslatable words to their target audience, but how can the emotions heard through the heart and soul be translated? In translating and revising this piece, I wanted English readers to feel and hear his voice, and asked constantly: “If El-Abnudi wrote these poems in English, what would they sound like?” This translation is my way of expressing gratitude to the poet, whose voice attracted me as a kid, enlightened me as a teenager, and kept me connected to my roots as a young woman.” 

— Mariam Moustafa

Letter 1

The addressee, the most precious diamond,
The marvelous pearl,
My wife, Fatma Ahmed Abdel Ghafar.
The address, our village of Gabalyat El Far.

This is my first letter to you, my love,
Sent from Aswan where I now work.
If I’d surrendered to the shame of being late,
I wouldn’t have written this letter.
Forgive me, Fatma, for the long wait.
I am sorry, I am ashamed, I am abashed.

It has been two months since you shed your tears.
I still remember how they burned my calming hand.
I promised you then, “Before my train reaches Aswan,
My letter will be in your hands.”
You didn’t believe me, you said:
“You’re such a liar. I know you’ll forget.”

I wish that moment could have lasted longer,
But my friends pulled me inside the train.
Their pull troubled my heart.
A fire raged in my soul as I left you, and our kids, Aziza and Eid.
The train began to move,
My heart plummeted.
I ran to the window and screamed,
“Fatma, take care of Aziza and Eid.”
The train screamed too,
Screeching off as if escaping a fire.
I heard your voice next to me, far away.
“My heart and soul follow you to Aswan, habiby.”
I threw myself inside the train, into the crowd,
And I cried aloud.
Our large village, where we could walk around for a whole day,
Was gone in the blink of an eye.

Forgive me, my love, for being late.
If this letter were a boat,
I would sail down the Nile to reach you.

Finally,
I send to you, to my village, and to my children,
A thousand greetings and salams.

Your husband,
Hiragy.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 9, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and Suhasini Patni

The latest news from Palestine and India!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Palestine and India. In Palestine, the literary community has mourned the passing of the great Palestinian poet Izz al-Din Manasirah, while Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail has been nominated for the 2021 International Man Booker; and in India, feminist poet Dr Anamika has won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award for Hindi poetry for her collection Tokri Mein Digant: Theri Gatha. Read on to find out more! 

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

“I will continue the culture of resistance until my departure, either to the grave or to Palestine.” These are the words of the Palestinian poet, thinker, critic, and academic Izz al-Din Manasirah, who passed away this week in Jordan (aged seventy-five) due to COVID-19. Remaining true to his words and beliefs, he led the kind of life in exile that associated his name with the Palestinian revolution and resistance, earning him the title of “The Revolution’s Poet.”

Manasirah was one of the most prominent poets of the 1960s generation, whose texts expressed the concerns of national liberation, in addition to his critical engagement with the global, Arab, and local literature. He contributed to the development of modern Arabic poetry and the development of methodologies of cultural criticism, and was often referred to as one of the pioneers of the modern poetic movement. The media experience that he presented through cultural programs in Jordan was an important cornerstone in uncovering many talents.

Holder of several literary and academic awards, he is nonetheless best known for his poems sung by Marcel Khalife and others, most famously “Jafra” and “In Green We Coffined Him.”

With the death of Izz al-Din Manasirah, Palestinian poetry bids farewell to the last of the Great Four (along with Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), Samih al-Qasim (1939–2014), and Tawfiq Zayyad (1929–1994)).

Despite such saddening news, the Palestinian literary scene—a truly fertile one—has rather pleasing news to celebrate this week. Booker International organizers announced the 2021 longlist. Unsurprisingly, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, was on the thirteen-book list. In their statement, the jury members praised the book saying: “The first part of this devastatingly powerful book gives a laconic account of a shocking crime. In the second, decades later, a woman sets out to comprehend that crime. Set in disputed ground, this austerely beautiful novel focuses on one incident in the Palestine/Israeli conflict and casts light on ethnic conflicts, and ethnic cleansing, everywhere.” Minor Detail was Asymptote’s choice for May 2020 Book Club. In “Textual Echoes,” Jaquette talks candidly about her translation.

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters, announced its awards for outstanding literary merit for 2020 on March 12. The academy awarded its prizes in twenty languages, rather than the usual twenty-four with the awards for Malayalam, Nepali, Odia, and Rajasthani languages to be announced at a later date. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Samer Abu Hawwash

January 21, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Huda Fakhreddine

But still; / what illusion always makes you / wait for something . . .

For this week’s showcase, we are thrilled to present two surreal, staccato zen koans by contemporary Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash in Huda Fakhreddine’s concise translation. If you admire these spare lines that probe the relationship between appearance and reality, check out a recent profile of the author by translator Fakhreddine in the online portal Jacket2.

Kafka on the Beach

I hear the trees passing behind the window.
One of them, maybe a palm tree, opens the curtain, stares me down, and moves on.
At the corner, there’s a cat yawning, saying to the old man: “So . . . you can speak?!
The old man responds: “But I am not very bright.”

I think I am looking into a mirror. READ MORE…