For someone as obsessed as I am with how to render “insha’allah,” “masha’allah” and other religious sayings in English (I once wrote a whole, indignant piece about the word madrassa), it does seem a bit strange that I missed Joseph Massad’s talk at the AUC.
On the heels of Banipal 38: Arab American Authors (although he doesn’t mention the collection), the HuffPost’s Anis Shivani asked 10 Arab American writers: “What is distinctive about Arab-American writing today?”
This is after bookmaker Ladbrokes came out with their odds for the 2010 prize, placing Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer square at the top.
According to the AFP, Kuwait’s information ministry said in a statement Tuesday that its censorship committee has “banned only 25 titles out of 24,000 books for abusing God, prophets and other religious figures, books on pornography and others undermining Kuwait.”
I don’t, as a rule, object to “foreign” words in English-language texts. Would Beckman call Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart an ethnic glossary? And yet it’s full of untranslated terms, and not just the Big Three: flora, food, and dress. Many of the italicized terms, in Things Fall Apart, force the reader to try to see Igbo culture on its own terms instead of “in translation.”
The more interesting news, I think, is that submissions from female writers were up, with works by female writers forming 29% of the overall total. That’s up from 16% last year and 14% the year before.
If there is a first family of Arabic literature, it might well be Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour, Palestinian poet/memoirist Mourid Barghouti, and their poet-son Tamim Al-Barghouti.
The Israeli Education Ministry apparently has decided that the various book bannings I wrote about Saturday were insufficient. The Education Ministry summoned the principal of a Sderot area high school for consultations after the school was found to be using a banned textbook that includes material on the Palestinian narrative of the Israel-Arab conflict.
Now and then, I get a note from an emerging translator who wonders where she or he might submit a short story (or stories, or novel excerpts or poems) translated from the Arabic.
