The Latest

“So you are still determined to sell the three mules?”

“The Wall,” by the massively popular Ahmed Khaled Tawfik (1962-2008) is from his collection “Now I Understand.”

“It was ridiculous, the way the battle of tuk-tuks and microbuses began.”

“The city wakes up in obituaries.”

“I want to step out on my balcony and hang my laughter out on the clothesline, so that passersby can catch hold of it, scale the wall to the fourth floor, and laugh with me.”

“Who am I? / I am not myself.”

Tracing the Ether Contemporary Poetry from Saudi Arabia, ed. Moneera Al-Ghadeer, came out late last year from Syracuse University Press. The anthology brings together 26 poets responding to — and writing a new future for — a rapidly changing Saudi Arabia. Moneera answered a few questions about the collection.

Translator-scholar Jonas Elbousty talks with Roger Allen about his journey in the field of Arabic Studies.

In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Elliott Colla look into two dimensions of translation, which Colla calls the solidaristic and the hegemonic, and the particular role translation has played in the US military.

“The word eib rings in my head, it is eib to love, to sing, to get sick, to divorce, to show your emotions…and.…and. I felt these social chains were burdening me with fear, despair, and confusion, and I almost abandoned work on the book, but when I looked at the materials that I had collected, I knew that if I didn’t publish it now, it would never be published.”

Your love has taught me… how to be sad.
And I have needed, for ages
A woman to make me sad
A woman in whose arms I could weep
Like a sparrow,