Posts featuring Marilyn Hacker

A Country Grey with Sunlight: Samira Negrouche on Francophone and Arabophone Algerian Poetry

We are part of a country, a region, a language, sometimes of a generation or an aesthetic, but as authors we also try to bring a singularity.

Labelled by scholar Ana Paula Coutinho as one of the most gifted writers of the new Maghrebian literary movement, poet and translator Dr. Samira Negrouche sails across Algerian French, Tamazight, and Algerian Arabic languages. She is part of a group of Algerian writers collectively known as The October Generation, and her poetic vision (as sketched by one of her Spanish translators, the Argentine-born French author Carlos Alvarado-Larroucau) is in the same league as Stéphane Mallarmé and Alejandra Pizarnik. Resembling the Mediterranean Sea plainly visible from her Algiers apartment, her artistry and activism are fluid and expansive—crusading for the spirited interchange of literary and cultural thought across languages, artistic mediums, landscapes, and aesthetic style. ‘More literally than many poets, Negrouche has had her fingers on the pulse of Algiers’, Jill Jarvis summarises in Decolonizing Memory: Algeria & the Politics of Testimony (2021).

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Negrouche on her body of work as a poet and translator; the current Algerian poetry and literary translation scene in the Francophone, Arabophone, and beyond; and the milieu that informs her philosophy and practise as a writer and cultural worker.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You translate Algerian writers working in Arabic and Tamazight into French, and in turn, your works have been recast into several European languages. I’m interested in the ethnolinguistic milieu you come (and write) from—and write against. 

Samira Negrouche (SN): I was born in Algiers, a city that has always been multilingual. Growing up in this city, I have been surrounded by these three languages that I like to call my mother tongues (although there is a traumatic history behind it). I am lucky to be part of a Berber-speaking family that has kept our ancestral language, and it is a language I keep using every day. There is Kabyle, the local daily language we use in my family, and also is the standard Tamazight, used and taught by a much larger group.

As a citizen of Algiers, I use our common daily Arabic that is often mixed with words from other languages—mainly Berber and French. This language has its own music and images. It has a lot in common with languages used in other parts of Algeria, but retains certain specificities. Finally, the Arabic we use in newspapers and universities is more standard.

French is still the main language for scientific studies in local universities, and it is also used in many other fields. It is a vivid language, especially in urban spaces. Additionally, English is starting to gain more attention among the youngest generations. READ MORE…

Leave From or Arrive There: A Conversation with Rima Rantisi

Form offers freedom, but also creativity, another layer through which to see, and ultimately create.

Biography, The University of Hawaii Press’s quarterly academic journal, surveys the contemporary landscape of Lebanese and Arab women’s memoirs. In this, they have named Rima Rantisi as among the champions of “highly intimate personal narratives,” whose work portray their own “constructions of home.” As an essayist, Rantisi inhabits interiorities, taking time in its own tracts, but also incites reexaminations of how we think of (and therefore, how we read and write) the external—places we dwell in all our lives and have always felt ourselves to know. As an editor, she is a nonbeliever of geographic boundaries, welcoming works of art and literature from the ‘Arab-adjacent’ regions. How does she write about home, something ideally stable, when it happens to be a city that is ever-changing and fluid, a mere construct?

In this interview, I asked Rantisi about Rusted Radishes, the Beirut-based multilingual and interdisciplinary journal of art and literature she co-founded; framing the memoir as a genre within place-based writing; and contemporary Arabic and Anglophone literatures written from Lebanon and its diaspora.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): There is a point in your essay “Waiting” where you write about O’Hare Airport: “Each time I leave from or arrive there, I am away—from people I love, from other homes. I am reaching, always.” Can you speak more about this metaphorical always being away, always on the move

Rima Rantisi (RR): Home is one of those subjects that Lebanese writers and artists are intimately familiar with, and sometimes in ways they prefer not to be. But because of the country’s modern history of war and migration, complex conceptions of home are inevitable. For me, I was raised by Lebanese immigrants in the United States, in the small town of Peoria, Illinois. Later, I made a new home where I went to college in Chicago. And then I moved across the world to Beirut. The move to Beirut is when the ever-present awareness of place began to take form. Not only because it was so different from where I had come from, but also Lebanon now became a new lens to see the world through—including my parents, world politics, my past and future. One place that brings these places together is O’Hare Airport. It had always been exciting for me to travel from there as a Midwesterner, but now it gives me a deeper sense of distance between who I was in the United States, and who I am now in Lebanon. In this sense, “I am away” both physically and metaphorically. One thing we don’t talk about as much is how place changes us; not only does it affect us emotionally, but it changes our perception of the world, and the language we use to communicate it. 

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Lebanon, the Vietnamese diaspora, and France!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Lebanon, the Vietnamese diaspora, and France. In Lebanon, Jadaliyya has published an essay on the late Lebanese poet Iliya Abu Madi and Lebanese author Nasri Atallah has been included in a new anthology, Haramcy; in the Vietnamese diaspora, December 6 marks the 183th birthday of Petrus Ký, a prominent Vietnamese scholar who helped to improve the cultural understanding between French-colonized Vietnam and Europe; and in France, whilst bookshops have suffered from national lockdowns, a new translation of poems by contemporary poet Claire Malroux has been released. Read on to find out more! 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Arab sci-fi lovers rejoice! An Arabic translation of the late American science fiction author Octavia Butler’s Kindred is coming out with Takween Publishing. Dr. Mona Kareem Kareem, a writer, literary scholar, and Arabic-English literary translator, worked on the Arabic manuscript during her residency at Princeton University. She will be holding an online talk, “To Translate Octavia Butler: Race, History, and Sci-Fi,” on December 7. Tune in as you wait for the manuscript with sci-fi jitters! In other translation news, Kevin Michael Smith, a scholar and translator of global modernist poetry, translated two poems by Saadi Youssef for Jadaliyya. Yousef is a prolific writer, poet, and political activist from Iraq and we are delighted to see more of his work profiled in English. Also on Jadaliyya is this beautiful rumination on the late Lebanese poet Iliya Abu Madi and his political imagination. Abu Madi wrote spellbinding poetry and was part of the twentieth-century Mahjar movement in the United States, which included the renowned Lebanese author, Gibran Khalil Gibran.

In publishing news, Bodour Al-Qasimi, founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, an Emirati publishing house for Arabic books, has been announced as the president of the International Publishers Association! Al-Qasimi has tirelessly worked on expanding the scope of the Arab publishing industry and we are happy to see her achieve this feat. Award-winning artist and cultural entrepreneur, Zahed Sultan, is seeking to release Haramcy, an anthology with twelve writers from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, including Lebanese author Nasri Atallah. It is set to be published with Unbound Books and the anthology addresses pertinent themes of love, invisibility, and belonging. In the spirit of the holidays, if you are feeling generous and capable of donating, then consider contributing to the Haramcy Fund.

We know the holidays are upon us and you are looking forward to cozying up with a book or two (or five in our case!). We have some new Arabic literature in translation for you to read during the holidays! The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize shortlist has been announced! Another shortlist we are excited about is the Warwick Women in Translation Prize, which features Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Sudanese author, Rania Mamoun, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette.

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora

December 6, 2020 marks the 183th birthday of Petrus Ký, also called Trương Vĩnh Ký, whose prolific achievements as scholar, translator, and publisher helped broaden the cultural understanding between French-colonized Vietnam and Europe. His vanguard efforts popularized chữ quốc ngữ, or modern Romanized script—leading to its official adoption as Vietnam’s national language in the early twentieth century. READ MORE…