The Latest

This is the story of the protests that broke out in Jerusalem’s Old City on June 5, 1968, marking the one year anniversary of the Six-Day War.

I Am at Your Door was written as a last resort for survival, as another form of life. In its pages, we read: “Is there anything more beautiful than writing while you are being exterminated? And here, I mean the ugly meaning of beauty.”

Over the next six weeks, we will be publishing installments of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman. 

Refaat Al Areer had set the scene, declaring, “If I must die,” and Alaa Al Qatarawi’s sorrow metamorphosed into a butterfly that perseveres. She writes, “If I die, my butterfly does not die.”

The people named in this poem are the writers, painters, and musicians martyred in the genocide. They are only a few of the many artists who were martyred in the past two years of war against Gaza.

“Hold me before the game ends. / Like everything else, / grief needs time / to become a language.”

Algerian novelist Said Khatibi talks with us about his latest novel, and the conversation turns to organ theft, the global shifts in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and what he hopes to illuminate with crime novels: not the whodunit, but the why.

Will Tamplin has devoted much of his work in translation to sharing the literary world of the exceptionally complex Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. In this interview, Tamplin explores his motivation behind this continuous dedication to Jabra’s work, as he dives into his experience translating The Other Rooms.

In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Zia Ahmed discuss approaching Arabic translation via English and Urdu, the layers of “outsider-ness” in translation, and the boom of narrative fiction in Oman.

” Jaziri wrote poetry with one set of alphabets which at that time were used in four languages: Kurdish, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. Sometimes, he used the four languages in one couplet. His poems are still recited and sung by Kurds. That coexistence of languages was quite natural, the alluring music was convincing, although I sometimes understood almost nothing.”

“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.”