“Seven minutes before its natural end the play stopped. Its rhythm had been sped up, the performance turned into something resembling the dull recitation of a classical poem, or a school text learned by rote.”
Summer is a season for reading the new, enjoyable, and unexpected. And yet not all books are best enjoyed at a beach.
The blocking of 21 news websites and the trial of Khaled Ali are not very good birthday presents for Egyptian novelist, scholar, translator, teacher, and activist Radwa Ashour (May 25, 1946-2014). So we remember her, instead, with a fond tribute… Read More ›
As the name of the competition indicates, it celebrates: “the Earth, eco-living, environmental awareness, agriculture and love of greenery.”
Davies’ translation was also adapted to the stage at Golden Thread Theatre, in 2006, by director Hafiz Karmali.
Choosing ten was too difficult, so here are eleven, with eleven photographs, courtesy of Denys and his wife Paola Crocian.
If modern Arabic literature in English translation had a patron saint, it was Denys Johnson-Davies.
Surely this blend of gloriously geeky scholarship (about half of each page is footnotes) combined with the several hundred whimsical, hilarious, gorily descriptive and downright bizarre names for the lion, collected by Ibn Khalawayh and translated and explicated by Larsen with such aplomb, should be a bestseller?
Khaled Ali, a lawyer in Naji’s defense team, told Al Masry Al Youm that the verdict demonstrates Naji spent long months in jail despite his innocence, and that “he did nothing but offer excellent work.”
Creative translation “includes found poems, erasure poems, other genres of found or erasure work, creative mis/translation, homophonic translation, and related works. “
For instance: “a state of non-action” (judge Tahia Abdel Nasser) and “slow, meticulous, stagnant narration” (Rasheed El-Enany) and “a stagnation” (also Rasheed El-Enany), which makes the book sound a bit like having x-rays done at the dentist: a mildly discomfiting process that seems as though it will never, ever end.
“It thought: that which wished to be a white butterfly was a fool and that which wished to be a cherry blossom was a fool.”
