During the middle days of the Egyptian revolution, a group of 137 Bahraini writers, artists, and intellectuals issued a statement in solidarity with the Egyptians’ struggle for freedom and dignity.
One of the signatories, according to Bahrain’s Gulf Daily News, was celebrated Bahraini poet Qassim Haddad.
As recently as a few days ago, there seemed to be a possibility that the 43rd Cairo International Book Fair might yet open this month. The fair was originally scheduled to begin on Jan. 26 at the Cairo International Conference Center, and then was postponed to the 29th following organizational difficulties.
Modern Arabic theater has been graced with some excellent playwrights: Tawfiq al-Hakim, of course, who is credited with founding modern Arabic drama, and who perhaps would have won the 1988 “Arab” Nobel for Literature had he not died the year before it was awarded. Sa’adallah Wannus. Alfred Faraj. Yusuf Idris, who was also on the “shortlist” for the ’88 Nobel. (Roger Allen names many more.)
Yet little Arabic theatrical work has been translated into English.
Apparently, Magdy al-Shafee put together a short illustrated tract on the revolution that he made available in Tahrir.
When scholars battle (in a bottle) over the world’s first “novel,” some point to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Others tip their hats to Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Hayy [Alive], son of Yaqzan [Awake]), which was translated into Latin and English in the latter half of the 17th century and served as an inspiration for Defoe’s 1719 adventure novel.
The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998) was one of the most popular Arabic-language poets of the twentieth century, well-known for his focus on eroticism and love. As Bassam Frangieh notes in his introduction to Arabian Love Poems, a collection of Qabbani’s work he co-translated with Clementina Brown, “To say that Kabbani was the most popular and famous of contemporary Arab poets is not to claim that he was the most skilled.”
Five Egyptian novels on revolution in Tahrir Square.
Algerian literature—both in its French and Arabic flowerings—is a rich one. Francophone Algerian literature has had a significant impact in France and other French-speaking nations; Arabic literature from Algeria has not been as regionally influential, although there are individual exceptions. In any case, both French and Arabic Algerian writing has been under-appreciated by English-language readers.
Ziad Suidan, PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is translating eighteen poems by Mahmoud Darwish as part of his dissertation. Sofia Samatar, a doctoral student in UW’s Department of African Languages and Literature, talked to him about the project.
