Marilyn Booth’s Translation of Jan Dost’s ‘Safe Corridor’ Wins Inaugural Bait AlGhasham DarArab Translation Prize
FEBRUARY 26, 2024 — Organizers today announced that the first-ever Bait AlGhasham DarArab Translation Prize, an international award for the translation of Arabic literature into English, goes to Marilyn Booth’s translation of Syrian Kurdish author Jan Dost’s novel Safe Corridor.
The award’s other category, for an unpublished manuscript, went to the Iraqi poet Yas al-Sa’eedi for his collection موجز أنباء الهواجس .
The award was announced at a translation conference, which is taking place on the sidelines of this year’s Muscat International Book Fair. This year’s judges were William Hutchins, Michelle Hartman, and Khalid Mohammed Al Balushi.
According to organizers, a £2,000 prize goes to the translator and £2,000 to the rights-holder; the novel will then be published by Dar Arab.
In a reflection published in the journal Absinthe, Booth wrote of the novel:
Safe Corridor draws attention to the terrible impacts of war, visible and invisible, on children. The protagonist and narrator, Kamiran, is a young boy about 13 years of age, who, as a result of the terrible war-like situation and painful family events, wets himself regularly at night. His father has been captured by Daesh/ISIS in Manbij, the village where they live. Then, his five-year-old sister is killed by a bomb. These traumatic events have left his mother mute— literally speechless. Kamiran’s voice frames the narrative. Now unable to attend school, Kamiran tells the details of life in Manbij, Aleppo, and Afrin, the tragedies he has witnessed, the path of internal displacement. Who is his listener? A piece of commercial pale-yellow chalk, taken from his school, which he treasures and protects.
An excerpt is available online, and it begins:
On the evening when young Kamiran discovered that he was turning into a lump of chalk, the rain was bucketing down. The sound the drops splattering onto the tent walls made was exactly the same sound he had heard in Afrin— volleys of bullets, raining down two days before the town fell to occupation.
Marilyn Booth is Emerita Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Oxford University. In addition to her academic publications, she has translated many works of fiction from the Arabic. She is a winner of the International Booker and her translation of Jokha al-Harthi’s Silken Gazelles is forthcoming this year from Catapult. Jan Dost is a Syrian Kurdish novelist, poet and translator who lives in Germany. Dost was born in Kobani in 1965. He writes poetry, short stories and novels in Arabic and Kurdish, and won many awards, including the Kurdish Short Story Award in 1993 and the Kurdish Poetry Award in 2012. You can read a few of his poems in translation on ArabLit.