Posts filed under 'Egyptian literature'

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. 

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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.

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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…

A Self Remaindered: On Iman Mersal’s Traces of Enayat

September 4, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Mersal reveals that writing can embody the rougher textures of real life in its enmeshment with troubled, even buried, pasts.

Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger, And Other Stories, 2023

Since the ninth century, Cairo’s City of the Dead has served as the final resting place for Egypt’s caliphs, saints, poets and heroes. Their reprieve was disturbed a few months ago, however, when the Egyptian government began razing tombs in the necropolis to build a new highway. It’s a familiar trope: the uprooting of entire genealogies, the clearing away of accreting dust, all in the name of an ever-accelerated infrastructural modernity. Yet it isn’t only the dead who will be uprooted; many impoverished communities, working as morticians or caretakers, have built lives amid the deceased. Perhaps the cruellest irony is that the living, too, will be displaced in one fell swoop, sacrificed to what one writer has called “asphalt fever”.

She might not have known it then, but Iman Mersal’s perambulations through the City of the Dead in 2015, recorded in her sublimely digressive and moving Traces of Enayat, now read like premonitions of its disappearance. Primarily known for her poetry (her collection The Threshold was published in English translation by Robyn Creswell last year), Mersal is associated with Cairo’s nineties generation—a literary movement loosely characterised by a mistrust of totalising ideologies and an attentiveness to fractures in personal identity. One of her enduring themes have been to examine how exactly, if at all, the individual can be conjugated with the collective—the untraversable chasms that divide a self from another. It would not be too far a leap to connect Mersal’s quest to excavate hidden lives to Cairo’s penchant for hiding away—and obliterating—everything it deems trivial enough to forget.

Traces of Enayat resembles a biography, but is more so a catalogue of absence, a profound meditation on the limits and contingencies of the archive. Just as “there are no signs to mark boundaries in the City of the Dead”, Mersal’s hybrid work refuses the rigidity of genre. Winner of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, it approximates the baggy shape of what she herself terms “jins jaami, a catch-all for every literary form and approach”. Julian Barnes’s famous comparison of biography to a “trawling net” is here overturned: rather than the thrashing fish hauled on shore, Mersal cares more about what has slipped away through the crevices—wanting, in fact, to document the constitution of the net itself as a “collection of holes tied together with string”. The result is a text in which theory, memoir, fiction, urban legend, and photography jostle against interleaved histories of psychiatric hospitals, marital law, golden-age cinema, orientalist Egyptology, and contested literary legacies.

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Dipped One in Dusk: Mai Serhan on the Diasporic Memoir and Translating Lyrics and Letters

July 5, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I had a lot I needed to clarify, plenty of stereotypes to debunk, a narrative that was screaming at me to rewrite. . .

Short story writer, poet, memoirist, and translator Mai Serhan was born to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother, and raised between the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. Going on to study between Cairo, New York, and Oxford and work in Cairo, Dubai, and China, this mapping of her personal cartography and her transnational lineage transcends the borders of postcolonial nation-states—and so does her forthcoming memoir, Return is a Thing of Amber, which touches among national histories, letters, and the personal essay.

In this interview, I asked Serhan about her book in the landscape of the larger Arab memoir from the diaspora; the languages and genders that thrive in the liminalities of modern Egyptian literature; state censorship in publishing and the consequent rise of the literary blog; and translating the songs of Egyptian composer Sayyed Darwish as well as the letters of Palestinian activist Ali Shaath. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The language of contemporary Egyptian literature, de facto, is Modern Standard Arabic—but there are writers who write in colloquial Egyptian Arabic and Ṣaʽīdi Arabic, echoing the lived reality of Egyptians in a gamut of dialects. Can you tell us the lingual milieu you write from—and how your decision to write in English come in? 

Mai Serhan (MS): Let me first map my geo-genealogical gamut. I was born to a Palestinian father and Egyptian mother, and carried a Lebanese passport for most of my life, since it is where my father’s family moved after 1948, and Egyptian mothers did not have the right to pass their nationality down to their children until 2009. When the Lebanese Civil War broke in 1975, my paternal grandparents moved to Cyprus where they waited for the war to end for fourteen years. It is there that I spent all my summers and Christmases as a child and teenager. The rest of my Palestinian family would fly into Limassol from all corners of the world—Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, the UK, and the US—and I spent all my formative years exposed to these different registers around me. After university, I joined my father in China where he worked in the export business, and I got to help him until the final year of his life. We travelled far and wide there, meeting with many of his Arab clients. After his death, I moved to Lebanon briefly, then Dubai where I worked as an English copywriter, then to New York where I studied screenwriting at New York University, eventually ending up in Oxford for my Creative Writing degree. All these places have deeply informed my upbringing—which is quite an international one.

I write in English because I went to a private British school, then to American and British universities. It’s the language I have been formally trained in all my life, both academically and professionally. I know how to express myself very well in Arabic, but the written word is definitely more present to me in English; it’s the language that has housed my scholarly and creative pursuits the most. That said, I am able to slip between Arabic and English with total ease and I am the bicultural product of both the East and West—and pretty much everything in between as well.

If we were to speak of my memoir, Return is a Thing of Amber, specifically, I would say the choice to write in English was a political one first and foremost; I wanted to address the English-speaking world, to debunk its many myths about land and people, and to promote awareness, compassion and understanding when it comes to Palestine and Palestinians. READ MORE…

Ambrosial Wafts: An Interview with A.J. Naddaff

February 10, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

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.”

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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.

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Translation Tuesday: “Berliner Maqama, or The Hitchhiker from Heidelberg” by Haytham El-Wardany

March 30, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Katharine Halls

The bald man didn’t talk much but he was a big smoker, and he kept rolling spliffs, one after another

The maqama is a trickster tale genre from the classical Arabic tradition. In the Maqamat of Badi’ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani—from whose ‘Maqama of the Blind’ the verses at the end of this text are taken—the itinerant narrator reports from towns and cities across the Middle East and Central Asia, encountering the mysterious rogue Abu al-Fath in a different guise each time. The challenge of evoking this intertextuality and the stylistic specifics of the maqama (which is traditionally written in rhymed prose, a feature that El-Wardany gently plays with here, and like premodern Arabic writing more generally, is not punctuated) offered the opportunity to experiment with visual presentation and stylistic eclecticism in the English translation.

—Katharine Halls, translator

Having travelled a great distance we stopped for a break, took refuge in a petrol station where we filled up the tank and emptied our bladders and stretched our stiff muscles until, refreshed, we got back in the car, determined to cover what distance remained  My wife took the wheel, it being her turn, and before she started the engine she said, Let us roll a spliff, which we did, but then as she turned the key to start the ignition a man appeared, I don’t know where from, bald and clean-shaven and wearing a jacket, and flagged us down, Are you going to Berlin? and we were, we said, so begging our kindness he asked for a lift        I looked at my wife and my wife looked at me, and then, decided, we looked back, Jump in—as long as you’re not a highwayman, God forbid, so he fetched two huge bags from the verge, loaded up, and sat down beside them and then we set off.

The air in the car took a turn for the cagey, for here we were all of a sudden with a stranger          We didn’t know who he was or where he was going, he just sat in the back seat not saying a word, and but for the eyes of the oncoming cars which flashed past like ghosts, it was silent and dark            Then when I glanced across at my wife, I saw she was lighting the spliff we’d just rolled, and it surprised me to see she’d decided to impose this habit of ours on the car as a whole, but no sooner had we taken a puff or two than our bald companion leant forward and plucked it from our hands, saying Man! What a friend for the road. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Don’t Cry” by Mohamed M. Farrag

October 15, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Essam M. Al-Jassim

“Men don’t cry, whatever happens.” And then he wiped my tears.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Mohamed M. Farrag. The prose is short, succinct, and hits like a hammer—much like the vision of masculinity embodied in the story. Enigmatic messages, the codes that construct subjects along certain lines, flow freely between a boy and his grandfather. These messages transport generational models of masculine repression as they are passed down; in just a few lines, Farrag aptly demonstrates the ways in which the social codes that dictate behavior are transferred. However, the end of the story leaves us with a question: can the script of behavior be broken by reflection and release? Or is this too a planned movement, derived from what came before? Regardless, the emotions captured here are delivered with an uncanny availability: the rhythms that the translator pulls from the original present an ordinary scene that makes one feel as if the answer to some pressing, universal question is close at hand. But the true answer is only a choice: to show or to hide.

He sat beside his dying grandfather; a man known for his cruel heart. He’d never seen him cry. ‎Gently, the grandfather caught his grandson’s hand. “Do you know, son, what my father ‎told me when he saw me crying on the day of my mother’s death?”‎

“No.” The young boy shrugged.

He said, “Men don’t cry, whatever happens.” And then he wiped my tears. “When my wife died your ‎mother was still young. Her death stung me, but I didn’t cry in front of her. I didn’t want her to fall apart. I ‎kept my tears inside.” READ MORE…

Intricacies Through Imagination: The Book of Cairo in Review

July 10, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Poupeh Missaghi

The Book of Cairo invites us to this very complex city without committing the crime of exoticizing it.

book of cairo

The Book of Cairo, A City in Short Fiction, edited by Raph Cormack, translated from the Arabic by multiple translators, Comma Press, 2019

The Book of Cairo, A City in Short Fiction, edited by Raph Cormack, is the newest addition to the “Reading the City” series published by Comma Press (Manchester, UK), collecting stories by local authors from cities around the world. Each story in the book (like those of the other books in the series) is translated into English by a different translator, which makes the book even more multi-vocal, introducing readers to not only writers, but also to translators working from a particular language into English, in this case Arabic.

The stories (except for one) were originally published between 2013 and 2018, making them of the present time and place, and giving us access into the current literary scene of Cairo. The authors are all born in the late 1970s and the ’80s, which makes them part of the young, hopeful generation who took part in the Tahrir Square protests, who made the Arab Spring possible, and who imagined a different future for their country. And it is through the diverse, imagined worlds in the present collection that they investigate the present moment of a city mutually rooted in history and moving toward the future.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

May 12, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jessie Stoolman, Omar El Adl, and Reverie Powell

Presenting literary news from Egypt, USA, Morocco, and Qatar!

We are back with your weekly dose of literary news from around the world. Our very own Jessie Stoolman takes you on a journey through the cultural landscape of Morocco and Qatar. Following, our editor-at-large on the ground Omar El Adl writes about the latest goings-on in Egypt, and last but not least, Reverie Powell brings you the latest from the buzzing literary scene in Texas.

Jessie Stoolman, Editor-at-Large from Morocco, reports from Morocco and Qatar:

The 21st Annual Salon International de Tanger des Livres et des Arts just wrapped up on May 7 after four days of roundtables, workshops, concerts (including the iconic Moroccan rock band, Hoba Hoba Spirit), and appearances from world-renowned authors like Mohamed Kacimi (featured in our latest issue), Sapho, and Tahar Ben Jelloun (Prix Goncourt winner).  In conjunction with the book fair, Darna Theater’s Dakirat al Mostakbal – Memoires d’Avenir presented “Nous Sommes”, a piece outlining the lives of two young Moroccans that asks “[s]ommes-nous condamnés à n’être que ce que l’on nous sommes d’être?” Darna Theater is a local non-profit situated outside Tangier’s old city that provides community members opportunities in drama education. “Nous Sommes” was presented in both French and Darija (Moroccan Arabic.)

Don’t fret if you weren’t able to attend the book fair because there is still a chance to see Abdellah Taïa at the Librairie des Colonnes in Tangier on May 9, where he will present a brand-new translation of his novel, Un pays pour mourir, into Arabic (بلد للموت).  At the book fair, Taïa gave a conference about his writing and the difficulties facing society today which was structured as a conversation between him and young Tangerines. Taïa’s letter “Homosexuality Explained to My Mother” and an interview with the author appeared in Asymptote’s July 2012 issue.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

October 14, 2016  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Janani Ganesan, Julia Leverone, Naheed Patel, and Omar El Adl

This week's literary news from Egypt, Bangladesh, the ALTA conference and on the recent Nobel Prize list.

Welcome to this edition of Asymptote’s weekly update, a hop, step, and jump tour de force bringing you the latest from three continents of literature in translation. To kick off, our Egyptian Editor-at-Large Omar El Adi sends us his bulletin, including news on literary prizes and an upcoming event in London. We then zoom in on Bangladesh, where Editor-at-Large for India Naheed Patel reports on recent festivals and the passing of Bangla authors. Also, US-based Assistant Editor Julia Leverone visited the ALTA conference so you didn’t have to. And finally Assistant Managing Editor Janani Ganesan gives us the round-up from the literary world on the Nobel Prize in Literature being awarded to Bob Dylan. 

Editor-at Large Omar El Adi has the latest literary news from Egypt:

The inaugural annual lecture of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation will be given by Palestinian author Anton Shammas at the British Library in London on 14 October. The jury for this year’s prize includes last year’s winning translator Paul Starkey, professor of Arabic Zahia Smail Salhi, writer and journalist Lucy Popescu, and literary consultant and publisher Bill Swainson. Paul Starkey’s 2015 win came for his translation of Youssef Rakha’s The Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars (2014). An excerpt of Rakha’s third book Paulo (forthcoming in English) was featured in the Spring 2016 issue of Asymptote. The winner of the prize will be announced this December.

In Alexandria, Tara Al-Bahr, an interactive online platform, is launching its second print edition with original essays as well as translations into Arabic on the topics of cultural and artistic practices and urban change in contemporary Alexandria. Tara Al-Bahr launched in May this year, and its second printed edition came out on Thursday, 6 October.

The Facebook group Alexandria Scholars is commencing a series of talks, titled “The City Dialogue Series”, with the support of the Swedish Institute in Alexandria, and curated by the sociologist Amro Ali. The first lecture, “Alexandria and the search for meaning”, was on 10 October and explored solutions to the city’s problems “through the terrain of historical, urban, and philosophical analysis”. Future events involving writers, academics, political figures, and researchers have already been planned for November and December.

In publishing news, Mohamed Rabie’s Otared (2016) was released in English translation in September by AUC Press. The novel was shortlisted for the International Prize in Arabic Fiction in 2016 and is set in a dystopian post-revolutionary Egypt. An excerpt is available here.

Halal If You Hear Me, a forthcoming anthology of writings by Muslims who are queer, women, gender nonconforming or transgender, is calling for submissions. Editors Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo are looking for submissions of up to five poems or two essays, including a cover letter with contact info and a short bio. Those interested should email halalifyouhearme@gmail.com before 1 December, 2016.

Editor-at-Large for India Naheed Patel shares some stories from the neighbouring Bangladesh:

Next month sees Bangladesh’s capital revving up for the annual Dhaka Literary Festival, which runs from November 17-19.  The festival has been held at the historic Bangla Academy since 2012, and is directed and produced by Sadaf Saaz, Ahsan Akbar, and K. Anis Ahmed. In the face of numerous recent Freedom of Expression violations in Bangladesh, the festival marks a resurgence of Bangladeshi literary culture, reaching across a number of different disciplines and genres: from fiction and literary non-fiction to history, politics and society; from poetry and translations to science, mathematics, philosophy and religion. The festival has more than 20,000 attendees and past contributors include Vikram Seth, Tariq Ali, Rosie Boycott, William Dalrymple, Ahdaf Soueif, Shashi Tharoor, Jung Chang, and Pankaj Mishra as well famous writers of Bangla literature like Hasan Azizul Huq, Selina Hossain, Debesh Roy, and Nirmalendu Goon.

In August and September Bangladesh mourned the passing of two prominent Bangla poets. Author, poet, and playwright Syed Shamsul Haq died at the age of 81 in Dhaka on September 27, 2016, and renowned Bangladeshi poet Shaheed Quaderi passed away in New York at the age of 74 on August 28, 2016. Haq was given the Bangla Academy Award in 1966 and the Ekushey Padak, the highest national award of Bangladesh, in 1984. He was also honored with a Swadhinata Padak in 2000 for his contribution to Bangla Literature. Payer Awaj Paoa Jay’ [We Hear the Footsteps] and Nuruldiner Sara Jibon [The Entire Life of Nuruldin], his most popular plays, are considered to be cornerstones of Bangladeshi theatre. Shaheed Quaderi received the Ekushey Padak in the category of Language and Literature in 2011 and was previously awarded the Bangla Academy Award in 1973. Prominent Bengali scholars such as Kabir Chowdhury, Kaiser Haq, and Farida Majid have translated his poems into English.

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