Posts filed under 'Publishers for Palestine'

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from Mexico, North Macedonia, and the Philippines!

In this week’s round-up of literary news from around the world, our editors report on an exciting translation-centric colloquium in Mexico, a prestigious award going to a new translation of one of North Macedonia’s most canonical novels, and the Frankfurt Book Fair’s spotlighting of the Philippines in its 2025 edition—a choice that has met resistance from local publishers due to the fair’s Zionist sympathies.

René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Mexico

They say that no matter what you do, there is always a saint from which you can ask for help. In the case of translators, that is Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin. Following the Council of Trent, his translation became the official Latin Bible in the western hemisphere.

With this in mind, the fourth Coloquio de Traducción Literaria San Jerónimo (Saint Jerome Literary Translation Colloquium) took place last week in Veracruz, Mexico. The event was dedicated to fully immersing participants in the art of translation and fostering discussions on what it truly means to translate. It was organized by the Culture Office of Veracruz and the independent publishing company Aquelarre Ediciones, which also sponsors a prize dedicated to literary translation.

Among the participants were notable figures such as Fabián Espejel, the recent winner of the Bellas Artes Margarita Michelena Literary Translation Award; Mario Murguía, who won the same prize last year; José Miguel Barajas, the translator of Mallarmé into Spanish; and José Luis Rivas, a poet who has translated works by Derek Walcott, John Donne, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare, and T.S. Eliot. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Literary updates from Greece, Palestine, the UK, and Spain!

The week, we bring more updates from writers around the globe as they continue to commemorate, resist, show solidarity, and contemplate our present moment. In Greece, the literary world remembers the historic Athens Polytechnic Uprising; in the UK, the prestigious Warwick Prize for Women in Translation is awarded; in Spain, an exciting young literary festival brings together some of the best names in Spanish-language writing today, to talk about that eternal subject—time; and lastly, our editor from Palestine expresses gratitude for those around the world who have continued to stand up and show support.

Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Greece

The book Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales was recently translated from English into Greek by Dimitris Koufontinas and published by Monopati Editions. In the collection, editors Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana have gathered and selected stories from Palestine that best exemplify the Palestinian Arab folk oral tradition, and the translation represents an important addition for Palestinian and Arab literature in the Greek language.

Recently, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising (1973), Giorgos Perantonakis wrote an article for Book Press, highlighting the continual legacy that this demonstration—and the dictatorship, the Regime of the Colonels (1967-1974), that it protested—has left on Greek literature, citing important works from poetry and novels to personal memoirs. However, Perantonakis omitted one of the most important anti-dictatorial titles: Ta Dekaokto Kimena (The Eighteen Texts), a collective volume of eighteen writers (including Georgios Seferis, Manolis Anagnostakis, and Stratis Tsirkas) and their political works, which was published in July 1970 by Kedros Publications. READ MORE…