Posts filed under 'moroccan 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. 

READ MORE…

On Translating Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine: An Interview with Conor Bracken and Jake Syersak

September 7, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Khalid Lyamlahy

Khaïr-Eddine is not ready to be relegated to the annals of history. He still has history to make.

In recent years, the work of Moroccan poet and writer Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941–1995) has received increasing attention, both in Morocco and abroad. One of the cofounders of Souffles/Anfas, the influential journal of culture and politics established in 1966, Khaïr-Eddine played a major role in the renewal of Moroccan and North African literature. His practice of what he called “linguistic guerrilla warfare” is based on the distortion of French language and the use of unconventional and subversive imagery. Some major features of Khaïr-Eddine’s unruly prose and poetry are generic hybridity, acerbic political critique, anti-authoritarian spirit, and the celebration of his native Amazigh (or Berber) land and culture. Most of his works, published with Editions du Seuil in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, have long been out of print.

The recent (and long-awaited) surge of interest in Khaïr-Eddine’s oeuvre is due in large part to the work of dedicated and passionate translators, including Conor Bracken and Jake Syersak. The former translated Khaïr-Eddine’s first poetry collection Scorpionic Sun (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019). The latter co-translated with Pierre Joris Khaïr-Eddine’s masterpiece Agadir (Lavender Ink / Diálogos, 2020) and translated three of his other works: I, Caustic (Litmus Press, 2022), Resurrection of Wild Flowers (OOMPH! Press, 2022) and Proximal Morocco—  (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). The following interview explores their relationship with Khaïr-Eddine’s work and illuminates the context, process, and challenges of their translations. It also addresses their most recent and future translation projects. 

Khalid Lyamlahy (KL): What was your first exposure to Khaïr-Eddine’s work and why did you decide to translate it?

Conor Bracken (CB): I first encountered Khaïr-Eddine’s work in 2015, in Poems for the New Millenium IV: The University of California Book of North African Literature (2013). Pierre Joris recommended I look through it when I asked him where I might find francophone poetry to translate, and when I read the poems of Khaïr-Eddine’s in there, I felt an unmistakable urgency, a fierce need not just to get out whatever was inside the mind behind these poems but to communicate with someone. It was like I’d been grabbed and shaken. Up to that moment I hadn’t found that in francophone or French poetry, which felt stately or methodical or cerebral, but this struck me. Not like an idea flashing in the mind’s sky, but like I was a door that needed to be opened. I wanted to translate that sensation.

Jake Syersak (JS): I first discovered Khaïr-Eddine’s work through the few translations that Pierre Joris had included in the same volume. At the time, I was a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. It was 2016 and looking more and more likely that the extreme right was going to successfully worm its way into the United States presidency. It was distressing, to say the least. I remember sitting in the library there, thumbing through volumes of contemporary French poetry, searching for a translation project that I could make part of my exams. All of them seemed to me like such white noise in the current political climate. I wanted to find a meaningful project—one that might, in whatever meager way, contribute to the struggle against the rising tide of GOP-fueled populist xenophobia.

Khaïr-Eddine’s poems were exactly what I needed in that moment: laced with vitriol, unwilling to compromise, fiercely anti-authoritarian, and stretching the utopian limits of imagination. Everything clicked into place from there. I had spent the bulk of my academic career up to that point studying avant garde and experimental poetics, with an emphasis on Surrealism and its revolutionary potential. Khaïr-Eddine’s work opened me up to a whole new class of writers who saw that potential and applied it with all their strength.

KL: What was your level of familiarity with Moroccan/Maghrebi literature and politics before embarking on the translation? Did you use any resources to help you prepare the translation?

JS: Very close to zero. I think I had read some Abdellatif Laâbi here and there. And of course I knew of the Négritude poets, to whom Khaïr-Eddine and others of his ilk are indebted. Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio’s Souffles-Anfas anthology (Stanford University Press, 2016) was essential to a speedy contextual education.

CB: My level of familiarity with the literature at that point was low, though I had some familiarity with the political and cultural history of Morocco and the Maghreb writ large—my family lived in Rabat for a few years, and I visited and traveled several times, so had some experience with Moroccan places, landscapes, people, and culture. While I worked on Khaïr-Eddine’s book Scorpionic Sun, I read up on him as much as possible. I also delved more deeply into “les années de plomb”/King Hassan II’s rule, and read a lot about Souffles/Anfas, the journal founded by Abdellatif Laâbi that, coupled with various political actions and protests, led to the exile of Khaïr-Eddine, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and others, as well as to Laâbi’s long imprisonment. An invaluable resource was the critical anthology, edited by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio, on Souffles/Anfas.

KL: Conor, what was the translation process of Khaïr-Eddine’s 1969 poetry collection Soleil arachnide like? Did you work on each poem separately and/or move back and forth between the poems?

CB: Though the poems in Soleil arachnide aren’t what anyone would call straightforward, the process of translating it generally was. First I transcribed it into a Word doc, in part to be able to ctrl-F my way through it, but also to get a feel for the poems themselves—how they moved on their own, how they gained power and definition when placed side by side. Once I finished that, I translated linearly, working until a poem felt like it was in a good place before moving to the next. I repeated this process five more times, going front to back each time, over three years. Doing it this way gave me clear boundaries about where to start and where to stop, though translating longer poems like “Le roi” (“The King”) or “Soleil arachnide” (“Scorpionic Sun”) was challenging. If we think of translating as a kind of reconstruction, dismantling a building to rebuild it on different land, then doing that for these poems was like rebuilding a whole town. But it was valuable, as a translator, to feel the poems’ relentlessness, the incredible ferocious vigor that erected them and somehow had them balancing in the precarious air through sheer force. READ MORE…

Shunning Stereotypes: Emma Ramadan on Translating Meryem Alaoui’s Straight From the Horse’s Mouth

October 22, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

It’s about Morocco, but not the cliched version . . . It’s a wild Morocco that is both more devastating and more fun than anyone might expect.

In her recent review of our fabulous September Book Club selection, Editor-at-Large Allison Braden praised the book’s candor, humor, and heart, as well as its fresh take on Moroccan culture. Below, she revisits these and other topics in conversation with award-winning translator and former Asymptote member Emma Ramadan. Straight From The Horse’s Mouth, they agree, defies our preconceptions of Morocco, its women, and the makings of great literature in translation.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Allison Braden: I want to start by asking how you found this book. What attracted you to the story?

Emma Ramadan: Other Press came to me and asked if I wanted to translate the book, and I read it through and loved it. What I really like about it, and what I have tried to look for in other translation projects I’ve pitched, is that it’s by a Moroccan writer and it’s about Morocco, but not the cliched version of Morocco that can get neatly packaged to American readers. This happens with a lot of countries where there aren’t that many English translations already in existence: there’s an expectation that they will read a certain way, or that they will educate us about a certain aspect of that country or culture, as if that were the only thing those literatures were supposed to do. I like that this book doesn’t really provide the view of Morocco that English-language readers might have in mind, or that publishers might want to sell to them. It’s a wild Morocco that is both more devastating and more fun than anyone might expect. I love Jmiaa’s story, and I love her voice, and I love that she’s allowed to have a painful existence as a sex worker but also a radical transformation into a famous movie star. It’s a really fun book, and we don’t get a lot of those from certain countries.

AB: I noticed on Twitter that you said you often wish for more fun and funny books in translation. I’m curious about why you think there aren’t as many of those.

ER: I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I’ll sum them up by saying that I think there’s a certain pressure when you’re pitching a translation, or when publishers are acquiring a translation, for it to be a big, important, prize-worthy book; it’s very expensive to do translations, and there’s this idea that they don’t sell very well, so to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth, there needs to be some important hook or payoff in the form of big reviews or awards. These more fun, funny, light books that have a lot to say—that definitely have their readers and an importance of their own—may not seem as appealing or worthy in that way, but I would really disagree. Sometimes you just want to translate a book because it’s really good, and good doesn’t necessarily mean heavy and political and invested with all this cultural capital about what it means to live in a specific place. Sometimes it can just be a great book. And that should be, and is, enough.

AB: You’ve also translated some very serious Moroccan literature—I’m thinking of Ahmed Bouanani’s The Shutters. Did translating that inform your translation of Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, even though it’s such a different tone and genre?

ER: It did inform my translation insomuch as I got to know Morocco very well through that project, living there as I was working on it. So then, in translating this other book that’s very much set there, I was able to say, “Okay, they’re going to this town, I know what that town looks like.” It was deeply informative in that way, even if it’s a very different kind of book. There are other comparisons to be made, too: Bouanani uses some language that resists being translated, and in Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, Meryem Alaoui uses Arabic words in her French text that I left in Arabic, so both authors are writing from a culture that uses multiple languages. The challenge for me there was letting all those voices come through and not forcing them into some kind of neat English. READ MORE…

Announcing our September Book Club Selection: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth by Meryem Alaoui

October 1, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden

By immersing us in Jmiaa’s world, Alaoui successfully avoids stereotype.

Humour and courage infuse debut author Meryem Alaoui’s Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, a brazen and lucid portrait of a sex worker who moves through her city of Casablanca with a scrupulous gaze and an aptitude for colourful description. As our Book Club selection for September 2020, the novel enchants with its surprising and exacting prose as equally as with its deft navigation of human experience and emotional spectrums, building a fully populated world that seems to have always been there, waiting for one to visit.  

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth by Meryem Alaoui, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Other Press, 2020

The title of Meryem Alaoui’s debut novel, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, suggests a direct, candid style—and that’s exactly what we get. Alaoui’s charming and at times profane protagonist, Jmiaa Bent Larbi, shares her harrowing story with unflinching clarity: after being pressured into an early marriage, Jmiaa and her new husband Hamid move to Casablanca, where their lusty honeymoon phase soon gives way to a much more sinister relationship. Hamid sees start-up capital in his young wife’s body and pimps her out to fund his get-rich-quick schemes. The only plot that ends up working out, however, is a passage to Spain, where he finds a new wife and a raft of financial troubles. Jmiaa tells us all about the turns her life takes from there, and Alaoui infuses the seemingly casual narration with careful observations of Moroccan life, tracing the fault lines where the country’s social classes collide.

In Casa, as Jmiaa calls the seaside city, she builds a life among a rich milieu: her fellow sex workers, who tease and joke and squabble like sisters; her young daughter, Samia, who Jmiaa fears will soon unravel the true nature of her work; and her mother, who must grapple with various aspects of her daughter’s unusual life. The women here aren’t sketches or stereotypes, but fully drawn characters with a complex set of motivations and relationships. The men vary in their own way. In one haunting passage, Jmiaa describes those who seek her services:

You straddle all of them. The loser, the frustrated guy, the lonely guy, the son of a whore, the one just passing through.

The one who blames the warmth of your hand for his weak, sterile joy.

And the one for whom no hole satisfies his hatred. Who is not appeased until he hears the ripping sound of a brown and bloody stain.

And the one who pumps his useless sweat into your stomach. He has been cursed never to eat his fill, so he bites your flesh. So that his teeth—today at least—serve some purpose. And in the wheeze of his sulfur breath, he spurts his bitterness onto your cheek and your tangled hair.

It’s no wonder, then, that Jmiaa often loses herself in television. Whether they’re set in Morocco or Mexico, the stories that unfold onscreen offer an escape from the familiar pattern of her days. Like Jmiaa’s drinking habits, her TV binges initially provoke concern, but as the novel progresses, those movies and shows unexpectedly offer a path to a different kind of escape. (At the risk of spoiling the plot, I won’t elaborate.) READ MORE…

Of Loneliness and Disillusion: Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying

September 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada

While each narrative voice is unique, they all share a sense of loss. [The novel] draws its strength from its haunting air of solitude.

A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Seven Stories, 2020

A Country for Dying is more about atmosphere than plot. It is a brief, taut work that digs deep into the margins of society to demonstrate the many ways in which colonialism pollutes our notions of love and self. Over the course of three parts and six chapters, Abdellah Taïa introduces us to the inner lives of four immigrants in Paris, as they contend with their present realities, the pasts they are trying to flee, and the dreams they still hope to indulge.

Their stories read like monologues, and talk toward each other more than they ever intersect. In this they mimic the characters, who are largely confined to their individual apartments; even the city that holds them all is, in a way, isolating—a refuge that can never quite be home (as a Moroccan living in Paris, Taïa himself writes from a place of exile). Thus, while each narrative voice is unique, they all share a sense of loss. A Country for Dying draws its strength from its haunting air of solitude.

If there’s anything like a connective tissue between the stories, it is Zahira: a forty-year-old Moroccan sex worker who has moved to Paris to escape the trauma of her father’s suicide when she was a girl. She struggles with the guilt of having “abandoned” him when he fell ill and was confined to the second floor of their house. “I didn’t think my father was going to die,” she reflects, “[b]ut I accepted, just like everyone else, that I wouldn’t see him again . . . The weight of his heavy footsteps echoes in my ear.” Grief-stricken, Zahira struggles to rewrite his story and heal her pain. Much of the chapter devoted to it is written in the second person as she addresses her father directly, updating him on his family’s lives after his death; in practice, however, it feels like she is addressing the reader, telling us her story on her own terms, to great emotional effect.

There is a direct through line between Zahira’s trauma and her instinct to take care of Mojtaba, a gay Iranian exile, when she finds him collapsed on the street. Looking after him over Ramadan helps her cope with her father’s death: “He was also tender, sweet, melancholic. That was obvious immediately. Something in him was similar to me, familiar.” For a moment, the quiet intimacy that forms between them brings them the peace they so badly deserve. Their bond never ceases to feel fragile, though, and it is clear that it will not last. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

March 6, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Hodna Nuernberg, and Rachel Allen

This week's literary news from Morocco, Albania, and the United States!

This week our reporters bring you news of Morocco’s publishing industry—including reports of a plagiarism scandal—the release of Albanian LGBT activist Kristi Pinderi’s memoir, and a series of events celebrating global literary publication and design in New York. Read on to find out more!

Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco 

The King Abdul-Aziz Al Saoud Foundation, a Casablanca-based non-profit organization that provides rare and rigorous documentation about Morocco’s publishing industry, released its fifth annual report in February to coincide with the Casablanca International Book Fair.

According to the report, some 4,219 titles were published in Morocco last year, representing a steady growth of the publishing industry’s output. In 1987, by comparison, Morocco published 850 titles. But this increased production is served by an increasingly fragile distribution network: whereas Casablanca was home to 65 bookstores in 1987, only 15 remain today. Kenza Sefrioui, author of the meticulously researched (if disheartening) Le livre à l’épreuve, estimates that there is no more than one bookstore per 86,000 inhabitants and 84.5 percent of Moroccans do not have a library card.

The trend towards the Arabization of Morocco’s publishing industry continued in 2019, with Arabic accounting for 78 percent of literary works; French comprised 18 percent, and Tamazight just over 1 percent. Of these literary works, poetry is the dominant genre with the novel coming in a close second. And while 11.5 percent of literary works published last year were translations, nearly half of these translations were from the French (and almost a quarter from the English).

Moroccan books are, on average, the least expensive books in the Maghreb. The average price of a book published in Morocco is 72.74 dirhams, or about the cost of 10 liters of milk. In neighboring Algeria, the average price is 85.93 dirhams, while in Tunisia it’s 90.81. But in a country where a majority of people earn less than 2,500 dirhams a month, 72.74 dirhams can seem a prohibitive price.

The report ends with a sobering statistic: in Morocco in 2019, a whopping 83 percent of published works were written by men. READ MORE…