Forthcoming Nov 2024: Classics, New and Old
In November 2024, two deceased giants of Arabic literature — Elias Khoury and Radwa Ashour — have new English translations of their work. In Ashour’s case, her classic Granada is finally getting a complete translation, rather than only the first book in the trilogy; in Khoury’s, his Children of the Ghetto is a posthumous translation of a posthumous novel, as translator Humphrey Davies has also left us.
And two brilliant poetry collections: hunting poems by Abū Nuwās, edited and translated by James Montgomery, and Darwish’s No One Will Know You Tomorrow, a soon-to-be classic, selected among his works from the last decade.
As always, if you know of more books forthcoming this month in translation from Arabic, please post in the comments or let us know at info@arablit.org.
Granada: The Complete Trilogy, by Radwa Ashour, tr. Kay Heikkinen (Hoopoe Fiction: November 5, 2024)
From the publisher:
It is 1492, and the keys to Granada, the last Muslim state in the Spanish Peninsula, have been handed over to the Christian king and queen: the final vestiges of this Arab kingdom in Europe are swept away.
As the triumphant new masters of Granada burn books, Abu Jaafar, a bookseller by trade, quietly moves his rich library out of town. The tangled lives of Abu Jaafar’s family, his descendants, and his community bear witness to the vanquishing of Muslim life: confiscations, forced conversions, and expulsions.
Radwa Ashour’s sweeping trilogy, set over one hundred years against the backdrop of the great historical events of sixteenth-century Europe, tells the story of those who remained in Andalusia, of the individuals who struggled to maintain faith and hope in a possible future. It narrates a community’s effort to comprehend what has happened to them, of their valiant but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to resist the destruction of their identity.
Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea, by Elias Khoury, translated by by Humphrey Davies (Archipelago: November 12, 2024)
From the publisher:
Adam Dannoun’s story is one of beginnings. Born in a war-torn Israel, within the confines of the Lydda ghetto, Adam dreams of becoming a writer. He is just an infant when Jewish forces uproot and massacre thousands of Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba, including his own father. Adam’s mother, crumbling with loss, takes her son to Haifa and remarries. Soon she feels stifled by her new husband. Adam flees this lifeless home and writes himself a second beginning. With nothing but his father’s will and the image of his mother at the doorway, Adam is born again into the streets of Haifa. It is there he meets an auto-shop owner, Gabriel, who helps him spin a new life. Adam Dannoun shapeshifts into Adam Danon, an Israeli born into the Warsaw ghetto, and Gabriel’s younger brother. There are limits to this charade, tenuous lines he’s forbidden to cross—and when he falls in love with Gabriel’s only daughter he steps, unawares, into a third life. We follow Adam through his studies in Haifa and into his New York exile, bearing witness as he confronts the horrors of the past that continually assert themselves in the present. Following My Name Is Adam, Star of the Sea is the second installment of a brilliant trilogy—an epic tale of love, survival, and ongoing devastation. Khoury weaves personal and cultural memory into a tale that humanizes the complex Palestinian experience, and traces the careful contours of the unspeakable.
A Demon Spirit: Arabic Hunting Poems, by Abū Nuwās, edited and translated by James E. Montgomery (Library of Arabic Literature: November 19, 2024)
From the publisher:
Arguably the greatest poet of the Arabic language, Abū Nuwās was renowned for his innovations in poetic genre and style and was a larger-than-life figure even among his contemporaries in Abbasid Baghdad. In A Demon Spirit, acclaimed translator and scholar James E. Montgomery renders this literary giant’s hunting poetry, or ṭardiyyāt, translated for the first time in vivid English.
Abū Nuwās’s poems radiate brilliance, ingenuity, and lyrical attentiveness to both nature and body. These hunting poems convey the crackling energy of ruthless predators and wily prey, the worryingly uncertain outcome of perilous pursuits, and the mythic perfection of warriors both human and animal—all the while overturning genre structures and power dynamics with unforgettable imagery expressed in smooth, natural language.
by Najwan Darwish, tr. Kareem James Abu-Zeid (Yale / Margellos: November 26, 2024)
From the publisher:
Born in Jerusalem in 1978, Najwan Darwish is one of the most important poets of the Arabic-speaking world. This definitive collection, which draws from five volumes published in Arabic as well as new unpublished work, brings to English-language readers a sweeping trove of Darwish’s most powerful and urgent poetry of the last decade.
In spare lyric verse, Darwish testifies to the brutal and intimate traumas of war, the anguished fatigue of waking up each morning in an occupied land, and the immeasurable toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While anchored in the geography of Palestine, his poetry also explores the rich artistic inheritance of the Arabic-speaking world, moving between regions, landscapes, and eras, from the glories of medieval Granada to the rippling shores of contemporary Haifa. In dialogue with poets, philosophers, and seekers from many different traditions, Darwish’s verse pulses with spiritual longing and a sense of battered, disoriented wonder—a witness to both the atrocities we visit upon one another and the miracle that we are here at all.
No One Will Know You Tomorrow is a tribute to the indomitability of the human spirit: its sensitive attunement to beauty and its endurance in the face of unspeakable tragedy.