من عند مثل القزم ببطء ببطء نحو الأسطورة

Like a Dwarf Inching Toward Legend is a cycle of thirty-five poems by Algerian writer Lamis Saidi. Taking Algiers as its protagonist, the collection explores the city’s topographies and forgotten places in an attempt to grapple with the exile and estrangement inherent in a postcolonial consciousness. As the poet sketches out the landscape of Algiers, we are confronted by its history and the lingering traces of the colonists’ presence that characterize the modern city.

Adopting a cinematographic approach, the poet surveys the physical, architectural legacy of the colonial encounter. Algiers, with its crumbling kasbah rising above wide colonial boulevards (now rebaptized after Algerian revolutionaries), is emblematic of the postcolonial city. Using vivid imagery and an Algerian-inflected Arabic, Like a Dwarf Inching Toward Legend offers the reader a series of evocative snapshots of everyday life that develop into a wider reflection on what it means to be Algerian today.

Also integral to Like a Dwarf Inching Toward Legend is a preoccupation with the process of naming and of the role language plays in creating (or re-creating) realities. Algiers’s many names—al-Jazaa’ir, Dzayir, Aldji—point to the conflicting understandings of collective memory that each designation seeks to stake out. Which register can speak for the city—Classical Arabic, Darija, or French? Sometimes the inability to name a thing, such as the civil war (which Algerians often refer to cryptically as “the Black Decade”) can even serve to deny reality, foreclosing any possibility of expressing the resulting traumas and distortions, as the poet underscores in the collection’s opening lines.

Although Algeria embarked upon a process of Arabization following its independence in 1962, the vast majority of literary work from the Maghreb available in English has been translated from the French; while many major literary figures of the early post-colonial era did write in French—Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, or Mohammed Dib, just to name a few—Arabic accounts for nearly eighty percent of the region’s contemporary literary production. As a result, Anglophone readers have tended to have a skewed perception of Maghrebi literature—and we see our translations of these poems as our modest contribution to rectifying this imbalance and providing a glimpse into the rich and varied work of contemporary writing from the Maghreb.