The Cairo Book Fair and a Lost Classic Returned Through Translation

March 13, 2025 | in Dispatches | by Susan Curtis

It’s almost impossible to decipher the Arabic publishing market without the help of professionals and enthusiasts. . .

Since its inauguration in 1969, The Cairo Book Fair has become a central hub of Middle Eastern publishing and cultural exchange, drawing millions of attendees from dozens of countries to the Egyptian capital each January. This year, the edition’s theme was ‘Read. . . In the beginning was the word’, emphasising the importance of early texts and the evolution of language. Here, Susan Curtis reports from the event and its varied offerings—which includes the announcement of a pivotal title in Egyptology and its first translation into Arabic.

In January of this year, I attended the Cairo Book Fair, one of the biggest fairs in the world and a hub for international exchange and the celebration of Arab literature. The fair exceeded all expectations with over 5.5 million visitors—more than eight hundred thousand attending on the busiest day—marking a record-breaking attendance in the fifty-six years of the fair’s history. This year’s edition took place over a period of twelve full days from 23 January to 5 February, with dedicated event spaces for panels, discounted books, and poetry evenings. Amongst the wide-ranging discussions, one announcement made this year’s event truly stand out: the launch of the first Arabic translation of The Age and Purpose of the Pyramids, as Indicated by Sirius by Mahmoud Bey, an essential text in Egyptology first written in French, then translated into English by Tessa Dickinson in 2023, and finally, in 2025, brought back to Egypt in its first Arabic translation by Youssef El Sherif from Al-Arabi.

I attended the fair as the director of my company, Istros Books, joining the ‘Cairo Calling’ publishers fellowship programme, which, together with a group of thirty-five publishers from a diverse array of countries, offers a unique opportunity for global collaboration. Attendees engage in personalized, one-on-one meetings with publishers from across the Arab world, with the support of a dedicated team of ‘angels’—student volunteers from the Translation & Languages faculty of Badr University, keen to practise their linguistic skills and to promote Egyptian culture. In a city whose infrastructure and customs can sometimes be surprising, challenging but also charming, their devoted duty to our care was both touching and most welcome. The angel initiative is one aspect that makes the Cairo Calling Fellowship programme a unique experience and brings the participants in closer contact with Egyptian society, beyond the usual rights meetings. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Susan Curtis

Language:

Arabic

Place:

Egypt

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Honoring the Art of Translation: Paper Republic

September 24, 2020 | in Essays | by Dylan Levi King, Emily Jones, Eric Abrahamsen, Jack Hargreaves, Nicky Harman, Yao Lirong, and Yvette Zhu

Read Paper Republic is one of the most important things we can do . . . to deliver on our mission of getting more people reading Chinese literature

In the preface of the formidable Narrative Poem, Yang Lian wrote: “Long must be identical with deep, and we have to make it new for a depth never before expressed.” This maxim is Yang’s contemporary grasp of the enormously, incomparably complex world of contemporary Chinese letters, which threads tradition with novelty, comprehension with inquiry, intelligence with intuition, and is profuse with dislocations, disruptions, oppressions, and erasures. Diving into this amassment—either as reader or translator—is often an overwhelming endeavour, so it is both a relief and a source of joy that such a thing like Paper Republic exists, an online hub that serves as a platform for new Chinese writing, a resource for Chinese-English translators, an extensive database, and the base of a vibrant community eager to share dialogue and talents. In our second feature for National Translation Month, we’re proud to shed a spotlight on their impressive accomplishments with a text written cumulatively by their brilliant team.

“Paper Republic began very simply as a group blog, run by translators of Chinese literature into English,” writes founding member Eric Abrahamsen. “It was 2007, four or five of us had found each other in Beijing, and we formed a sort of mutual support group/social club.”

Since then, Paper Republic has grown and changed almost beyond recognition; incorporated as a company, we’ve spent a decade making concerted efforts to interest western publishers in Chinese literature, producing book reports, and even dabbling in literary agency. A few years ago, however, we began to focus on readers and translators. We are now a registered charity/non-profit organization, made up of a team of volunteers based in America, UK, China, and Japan. In addition to providing information about Chinese literature to people in English-speaking countries, we promote new Chinese writing in translation, publish free-to-read short fiction and essays online, host an extensive database on Chinese writers and their English translators, mentor Chinese-to-English translators, and provide resources to schools teaching Chinese.

In order to introduce Chinese writers to the world, we started Read Paper Republic back in 2015—sourcing, translating, editing, and publishing one short story every single week for a year, completely free to read. It was a mammoth undertaking, and the fact that we managed to pull it off at all is testament to the generosity of the authors and translators involved. One of the things that is special about Read Paper Republic is that every story, no matter how experienced the translator, is edited by a member of the team, who also checks the text against the Chinese, assuring literary quality as well as accuracy. From the very first series, we had aspiring translators offering their work; our editing process is both beneficial to them, and also fits perfectly with one of our aims as a non-profit: to mentor new translators. READ MORE…

Contributors:

Language:

Chinese

Place:

China

Writers:

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What is Gained in Translation: Sarah Michaels and Jie Park on Teaching with Poetry Inside Out

August 26, 2019 | in Asymptote for Educators, Interviews | by Barbara Thimm

Kids could really learn by doing both poetic, creative work and translation-based language work.

Poetry Inside Out is a cross-cultural literacy program designed to engage students from elementary to high school with collaborative literary translation. It was developed by the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco, California, and is now used in schools across the United States. The process begins when students receive a “poetry package” containing a poem in a foreign language, a picture and biography of the poet (written in English), and a “translator’s glossary” that provides meanings for the words in the poem. Students then split up in pairs to translate the poem “phrase by phrase.” Once they agree on a translation, they meet up with another pair of students to compare translations and to work on it further to “make it flow.” Lastly, all groups share their translations and discuss the similarities and differences across each group’s translation as well as the poem’s possible meaning. I first encountered Poetry Inside Out in a teacher workshop and was struck by the intensity of the process and by the sophisticated thought processes seen in videos of sixth grade students engaging in Poetry Inside Out.

Sarah Michaels and Jie Park, both professors at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, recently received an “Engaging New Audiences” grant to develop a curriculum and a seminar for ESL teachers to learn and use Poetry Inside Out in their classrooms. Both have been observing and documenting the implementation of Poetry Inside Out at Worcester public schools for more than six years.

Barbara Thimm (BT): Poetry and translation are unlikely subjects and skills to be taught in elementary and middle school. When and why did you get interested in Poetry Inside Out?

Sarah Michaels (SM): I first heard about Poetry Inside Out from Marty Rutherford, who was working at the Center for the Art of Translation and really revamped and energized it. We got Marty to come out here and give a workshop to a bunch of us teachers and do a Poetry Inside Out lesson in one of the schools that we collaborate with. I picked it up as part of a first-year intensive seminar with undergraduates: we did Poetry Inside Out in an after-school program at the same school where Marty had done her first lesson. That got undergraduates working with sixth graders.

Then Jie arrived, and she brought it to some teachers she was collaborating with in another school—teacher researchers who taught ESL. Probably the majority of kids at that school who speak English speak a language other than English at home, so there were lots of English learners and lots of bilingual kids in these regular classrooms.

Jie Park (JP): I was introduced to Poetry Inside Out six years ago when I got to Clark, and it really resonated with me as someone who looks at language and literacy with immigrant multilingual youth. But to answer your question: The teachers I work with would all say that translation makes so much intuitive sense when you’re working with multilingual youth because it is something these kids already do at home, for family members, for friends, at school, for classmates, for their teachers. That is, we are building on a tool or practice that they’re already confident and quite familiar with, and they have lots of ideas about the powers of translation but also the responsibilities, the dangers, or the stress. This feeds into what we’re trying to do, which is to build on the assets that kids come into the classroom with, not seeing them as lacking in something but to ask what they already have that we can leverage to help them. That’s why I think translation makes so much sense.