Forthcoming July 2025: Autobiography, Writing on Translation, Daring Short Stories

As publication dates often slip — and new books surface — we try to have a glance at what’s really (to the best of our knowledge) coming in translation from Arabic at the start of each month. If you have more books to add, please let us know.

The Iron Grasshopper: A Childhood Autobiography, by Salim Barakat, tr. Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy (Seagull Books, July 6)

Seagull writes:

Through vivid vignettes and lyrical prose, The Iron Grasshopper transcends memoir, immersing readers in the poignant and turbulent realities of a Kurdish childhood in mid-twentieth-century Syria. 

Kurdish-Syrian poet and novelist Salim Barakat, one of the most distinctive writers in contemporary Arabic literature, has mesmerized the Arab literary scene since his first volume of poetry appeared in 1972. Now, his unique memoir—first published in 1980—is finally available in English translation.

In The Iron Grasshopper, Barakat offers a poignant and evocative portrayal of his childhood. Set against the backdrop of the mid-twentieth century, Barakat’s memoir recounts his formative years in a small town near the Taurus Mountains. Through a series of vivid and often unsettling vignettes, he captures the turbulence and wonder of growing up in a landscape marked by political upheaval, cultural conflicts, and personal discovery. Barakat’s story intertwines childhood innocence with the harsh realities of violence and discrimination against Kurds, shaping his relationship with his homeland, the Arabic language, and his identity as a writer. The memoir’s rich prose and lyrical reflections invite readers into Barakat’s inner world, where the boundaries between past and present blur, and the simplicity of childhood is juxtaposed with profound existential musings.

Writings on Translation, by Abdessalam Benabdelali, tr. Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, with introductions by Brahim El Guabli and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Seagull Books, July 15)

Seagull writes:

Abdessalam Benabdelali is a revered Moroccan philosopher and translator whose work maps an invaluable history of the status of translation in contemporary Arabic thought and language. Bringing together essays from two linked Arabic works by Benabdelali—On Translation and Hosting the Stranger—this volume represents one of the first extended philosophical explorations of translation by a contemporary Arab philosopher. These works reframe Arabic and European cultural histories around translation to counter hegemonic discourses and celebrate translation as a form of philosophical thought and practice, one that both preserves and proliferates difference.

Whether discussing eighteenth-century European perceptions of Arabic culture, classical Arabic literature and its express intent to resist all translation, or contemporary Arabic authors who write in anticipation of translation, Writings on Translation nimbly outlines the key philosophical questions at stake in translation. It concludes with an impassioned argument for translations that “host the stranger” and allow texts to “lift off and migrate.”

From the River to the Sea: and other poems, by Samer Abu Hawwash, translated by Robin Moger (Banipal Books, July 21)

Banipal writes:

This new collection by Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash was published in its original Arabic in the summer of 2024. The 24 poems are an intrepid literary journey into the genocide in Gaza, linking with Palestine’s long years of existential trauma, and documenting the universal human questions that so many are asking in today’s world. Living, since he was born, in a diaspora crowded with fellow Palestinians, the poet shares with readers the depths of his turmoil and anguish, searing their attention to human pain from the first poem, “The Ruins”, with the image of a girl’s hand jutting up from cracks in the rubble, to the last, “The Scream” – the roaring voice of dust consuming all.  In the poem, “Sitting in front of a TV screen, I watch the genocide”, the words he wants to say are torn from him, “language has become a torment” and he cannot say what he wants to say; senses are upturned, stupified, suspended, muffled, in a maze.

How to possibly describe the deadly scenes, surreal visions, the revelations, nightmares, sounds, one after the other, except by reliving them?  And thus the poet brings to his poems what one critic has called a “dictionary of war”, a lexicon that expresses a graphic poetic sensibility set in the midst of a war that is exterminating a people. Alongside the lexicon, a way of “seeing” anew the unspeakable horrors through the gazes, the glances, the closed, open, dead eyes of famished families, of fragmented little corpses, children whose gazes are frozen, stunned, dead, scornful, fixed, dazed.

This is a poetry collection so necessary for humanity today, in a perceptive and passionate translation by Robin Moger. Read more at the Banipal website.

Palestine – 1 Stories from the eve of the Nakba, ed. Basma Ghalayini (Comma Press, July 31)

Comma writes:

Palestine – 1 is a daring response to the events of the last year, and the ongoing genocide taking place in Gaza, with an unexpected approach to the event that underpins the entire Middle East conflict: the Nakba of 1948. Instead of taking a semi-realist, autobiographical or non-fictional response to this event – all of which have been done many times before – this anthology asks 10 Palestinian writers, all of whose grandparents were forcibly displaced by the events of 1948, to re-imagine Palestine the year before this catastrophe, and to explore the events leading up to it, on a village-by-village basis. Every writer has been allocated a specific village to write about, and challenged to explore the atmosphere of this moment through fantastical, supernatural and speculative fiction devices. Rather like its counterpart anthology, Palestine + 100, it uses genre tropes to re-examine this experience, much as Guillermo Del Torro used horror to explore the Spanish Civil War in films like Pan’s Labyrinth, or Godzilla offered an SF metaphor for the trauma (and retriggered traumas) or nuclear warfare and arms testing in the 1940s and 50s.