Books Forthcoming in Translation This Month: Time Traveling Children, Palestinian Memoir, Emirati Poetry, & More
This month, we launch a new feature. At the start of each month, we’ll profile the literature forthcoming in translation that month.
If you know of other works forthcoming this month, please add them in the comments or email us at info@arablit.org.
The Men Who Swallowed the Sun : A Novel, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, tr. Humphrey Davies (Hoopoe)
From the publisher: “Abu Golayyel’s gritty tale of two men’s ill-conceived quest for a better life via the deserts of the Middle East and the cities of Europe is pure storytelling.”
Read an extract from the novel at Hoopoe’s website.
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Love, Death, Fame: Poetry and Lore from the Emirati Oral Tradition by al-Māyidī ibn Ẓāhir, edited and translated by Marcel Kurpershoek (Library of Arabic Literature)
From the publisher: “Love, Death, Fame features the poetry of al-Māyidī ibn Ẓāhir, who has been embraced as the earliest poet in what would later become the United Arab Emirates. Although little is known about his life, he is the subject of a sizeable body of folk legend and is thought to have lived in the seventeenth century, in the area now called the Emirates. The tales included in Love, Death, Fame portray him as a witty, resourceful, scruffy poet, at times combative and at times kindhearted.”
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Thunderbird: Book One, by Sonia Nimr. tr. M Lynx Qualey (University of Texas Press)
From the publisher of this novel for young readers, 8+: “The Thunderbird trilogy is a fast-paced time-traveling fantasy adventure centered on Noor, a young orphaned Palestinian girl who starts in the present and must go back in time to get four magical bird feathers and save the world. Aided by a djinn cat and girls who look identical to Noor and who each have one of the bird’s powers, in this initial volume Noor begins her journey through different historical periods, striving to keep the wall between worlds intact.”
Listen to an excerpt from Thunderbird being read aloud.
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Among the Almond Trees, by Hussein Barghouti, tr. Ibrahim Muhawi (Seagull Books)
From the publisher: “A poetically written and bitterly sweet memoir about nature, death, life in Palestine, and the universal concept of home.”
Read an excerpt on the Seagull Books website.
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Also, in case you missed it, from the final day of February:
Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi, by translator-poets Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger (Tenement Press)
The publisher writes: “Agitated Air is a correspondence in poems between Istanbul and Cape Town, following the wake of The Interpreter of Desires. Collaborating at a distance, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger work in close counterpoint, making separate translations of each poem, exchanging them, then writing new poems in response to what they receive. The process continues until they are exhausted, and then a new chain begins. Translated and retranslated, these poems fray and eddy and, their themes of intimacy across distance made various, sing back and forth, circling and never landing.”