In April 2013, the Lebanese anti-censorship organization “March” announced that they would be staging a play “Bto2ta3 aw ma Bto2ta2?” (“Is It Permitted or Not?”) Last August, they found it wasn’t permitted. Now playwright Lucein Bourjeily is up for an award for the play, and an excerpt has been translated into English.
Youssef Hussein Hamdan looks at Shukri Madi’s “Mahmoud Darwish: Ideology of Politics and Ideology of Poetry” (2013), which follows as “Darwish turns from the poet of resistance to the poet of freedom.”
Yasmina Jraissaiti and M Lynx Qualey — with the extraordinary help of a cadre of award-winning translators — have put together an issue of contemporary Lebanese writing for “The Missing Slate.” Most of the poetry and fiction within is appearing here for the first time.
Yasir Suleiman, chairman of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF)’s board of trustees, spoke in Jordan as part of the recent shortlist events. 7iber’s Sara Obeidat was there.
Topics range from subtitling and dubbing to “translation as mourning” to gender and visual translations
There are plenty of poems out there this February for the lover or recovering lover. But for the one who is not yet in recovery — or doesn’t want to be — excerpts from Lebanese poet Yehia Jaber’s “How I Became a Suicide Bomber,” translated for the first time by Thoraya El-Rayyes.
On March 13 — the day in 1941 on which Mahmoud Darwish was born — organizations in eleven Italian cities will stage readings “against the oblivion.”
When the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) shortlist was announced on February 10 in Amman, Jordan, the identities of the five judges were just as much a part of the surprise as the identities of the six novels. Here, we look at the IPAF judges, who — with the exception of Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, hospitalized at the time of the announcement — were interviewed by 7iber staff.
7iber’s Siwar Masannat was present at the February 10 shortlist announcement for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. She writes about the possibilities and im-possibilities of “judging” novels and the relationship between identity and writing style.
