“She’d drowned herself in anti-depressants that left her a breathing corpse until, one day of July, Mariam found herself walking coldly into the kitchen and turning the knob on the cooker on so the gas would flow freely into the house. Minutes later, she turned it off quietly and opened the kitchen window as if to clear the house off the smell of potato frying.”
The National Translation Awards, now in their nineteenth year, promise to be “the only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction that includes a rigorous examination of both the source text and its relation to the finished English work.”
There seems to have an general uptick in Arabic poetry forthcoming in English translation. These are the six (correction, SEVEN) on ArabLit’s radar.
“Excerpts from longer works are welcome and preference will be given to contemporary work published within the last fifty years.”
Once you’ve read ‘The City Always Wins,’ five more Egypt books about feminism, revolution, and history.
Her poetry appeared in the premier magazines of her time, particularly Shi’r and Mawaqif, but remained in the shadow of work by her husband, the poet Muhammad al-Maghout.
And yet now Al-Barghouti — who is something of a poet-celebrity, with a viral poem in 2011 and a major 2007 appearance on the Prince of Poets TV show — has his first collection of work in English.
“I suspect he’s taking poetry that had a lively humor, and he’s strong-arming it into his argument. We can still get echoes of the original context sometimes, but it can be very difficult.”
“In their pictures they draw you drowning.
They put you in their museums and applaud.”
Over at Qantara, there is an interview with Dubai-based Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck. Or, if you prefer a podcast, you can listen to Hashem Beck talk about her most recent collections with David Turner on Lunar Poetry Broadcasts: The… Read More ›
“But there is also a leitmotif of poetry, with Malika Booker hosting a widely varied group of poets: Golan Haji, Mona Kareem, Dunya Mikhail, and al-Saddiq al-Raddi.”
Whether dystopian or utopian, fictional or fact-based, we would like you to answer the following question “how do you see your the Maghreb in the next 30 years?”
