Posts filed under 'Lebanese Civil War'

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…

Finding Salvation: An Interview with Najwa Barakat

June 27, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Reem Joudi

I was among the first authors to tackle the theme of cruelty and violence, long before the Arab world witnessed its various collapses.

In turns spellbinding and labyrinthine, psychological and philosophical, tragic and bright, Najwa Barakat’s Mister N marks the triumphant return of the Lebanese author to writing. Through the story of an aging author who wanders the streets in shifting boundaries and realms, Barakat paints a painful, fearless portrait of contemporary Beirut. We were honored to present this powerful novel as our Book Club selection for May, and in the following interview, Reem Joudi speaks with Barakat about her fifteen-year hiatus, the ghosts and pariahs of Lebanon, and the “beautiful dream” of Beirut.

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 USD15 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.

Reem Joudi (RJ): You wrote Mister N following a fifteen-year break from writing. Could you describe your journey back, and why you chose to return with the story of Mister N?

Najwa Barakat (NB): I cannot say that I was completely cut off from writing during these fifteen years, but my literary activity was suspended for a short while of my own volition—and not because I was struggling with writer’s block. I had reached a certain juncture in my narrative journey and in my writings, which had materialized in the publication of three novels (The Bus, Oh Salaam!, and The Secret Language). These works addressed themes of violence, cruelty, and the ordinary human being’s capacity to commit evil in specific moments or contexts. I wanted to take a “break” to think about my next steps, what the title of my forthcoming literary chapter should be, as well as to focus on my permanent writing workshop, which is dedicated to helping young Arab writers develop their storytelling projects. Thanks to the workshop, twenty-three novels have been published thus far by renowned Arab publishing houses, and some of these works have received distinguished literary awards.

To tell you the truth, I felt an aversion to what was being published, consumed, and promoted as literary works of a high caliber—works which, in reality, are lacking the minimum standards for quality writing. Add to that the horrific changes that my home country, Lebanon, was experiencing, as well as the many wars, tragedies, and revolutions that countries of the Arab region were facing, all of it produced and propagated a dreadful cosmic chaos. Together, these factors presented silence as the best option during turbulent times: choosing silence, observing [what is around me], and attempting to find the meaning and purpose of literature amid all this destruction. Mister N encapsulates this experience in all its dimensions. It describes the labor of writing and the difficulty of belonging to a reality that resembles quicksand, capable of swallowing you whole at any moment. The novel also mends my relationship with Beirut, a city I returned to in 2010 following a long absence in Paris. Since then, I’ve witnessed the transformations and defeats that foreshadowed the city’s current state of collapse and decay.

RJ: There are many ghosts that haunt Mister N’s memory—Luqman, the former warlord and protagonist from one of your earlier novels Oh Salaam!; his mother and father. . . What do these multiple, multifaceted ghosts signify, and which of them do you think has the strongest pull on Mister N’s mind and spirit?

NB: Mister N is a writer with a heavy past and a troubled present. He is battling the ghosts of his childhood and the ghosts of his current tragic reality, where parts of Beirut—namely the neighborhoods he stumbles upon and begins exploring by chance—have transformed into the gutters of society. Luqman’s ghost, as you mentioned, is a person who committed atrocities during the Lebanese civil war; Oh Salaam! takes places in Beirut, in the wake of the war and at the beginning of the so-called transition to peace, and Luqman is killed by his friend’s mother after she discovers the horrors that both men committed against innocent lives. The same Luqman will reappear twenty years after the events of Oh Salaam!, very much alive and running an Internet cafe in one of Beirut’s working-class neighborhoods. A manhunt thereby ensues between him and Mister N, who, while he fears Luqman and seeks to escape him, is also drawn to him by a mysterious and obscure thread.

All this is to say that the people who committed the horrors of war are not dead, but living peacefully among us, a situation that Mister N—a writer who treads the thin line separating reality from fiction and truth from illusion—can neither tolerate nor comprehend. For Mister N, reality turned out to be more tragic than he could have ever imagined—harsher, darker, and more cruel. What could literature do in circumstances such as these, and where does a writer, worn down and defeated by reality, find their salvation? In fact, Mister N’s suffering captures my own struggle vis-à-vis all that was unfolding around me. I was among the first authors to tackle the theme of cruelty and violence [in my novels], long before the Arab world witnessed its various collapses. I intuited them, so to speak, then was terrified to face a reality which shook me to the core—one that heralded even harsher, darker, and more violent truths.  READ MORE…

Where Sunsets & Anguish Collide: Isolation in Lebanese Literature

July 22, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

Despite their preoccupations, be they literary or ideological, they both pause and capture love during calamity.

In the past few months, we’ve been forced to dwell on our place in the world in the light of extraordinary circumstances. As most of us experience a certain degree of forced isolation, we predictably turn to literature, in hopes that its wisdoms will enable us to regard our realities with increased awareness, understanding, and presence. In this following essay, writer MK Harb takes us through the various manifestations of isolation as seen in Lebanese literature, and more specifically via two extraordinary texts by two Lebanese-American authors, Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman and Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose.

“During these unprecedented times . . .”

I have heard and read this line over a thousand times since the pandemic began. In a fortnight, we have entered an echo chamber in which a voice is constantly screaming “unprecedented times” at us. Sometimes this voice comes in the form of an email, other times a news clipping, but mostly, it speaks to us as a marketing gimmick. Countless products remind us that these times are in fact unprecedented as they encourage us to buy sanitization stations, virtual university booths, luxury hazmat suits, and other products that commercialize placebo. Maybe the academic part of myself hates the word unprecedented; I have found that the cynicism of academia manifests in teaching that every time is precedent. From pandemics to famine to injustice, it has all been here before.

What is unprecedented in our current cataclysm is our collective online grief; from Zoom calls to Skype sessions, it has never been more ravenous and visible. However, after a while, one realizes that this excessive online engagement numbs the mind more than reassures it. Instead, resorting to literature has been one of the few escapes out of the confines of my living room to more alluring worlds. From Yasmine Seale’s new translation of Aladdin, to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, I feel the intimacy of reading and caressing a text much more deeply than that of a video call. During these literary excursions, I discovered the omnipresence of isolation as a theme in contemporary Lebanese literature. The irony of this discovery was not lost on me; the isolation of a pandemic led me to isolation in fiction.

As I drew out these conceptual maps of society’s outcasts, I noticed their versatility. Sometimes it manifests in the trials and trepidations of a gay man in Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter, in which the character navigates a war-torn and derelict Beirut from his lonely apartment. Other times this isolation results from the acts of resistance and radicalism, as in Emily Nasrallah’s The Oleander Tree, which takes place during an epoch when the protagonist Rayya resists the feudal and patriarchal roles set for the women of her village. However, two authors in particular were naturally and strongly united in this theme: Rabih Alameddine and Etel Adnan.

READ MORE…