Two Palestinian Books Chosen for ‘PEN Translates’ Awards

Nathalie Handal writes, of Mohammad Al-As’ad and Children of the Dew:

Mohammad al-Assad is a Palestinian poet, novelist, literary critic and researcher. He is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, including Singing in Deep Vaults (Baghdad, 1974), and the author of six novels: the best-selling Children of the Dew (1990), translated into French, Portuguese, Greek, and Hebrew, and republished in Jerusalem by Dar al-Fil in 2013, The Refugee Text (1999), The Lover’s Gardens (2001), The Tree of Pleasures (2004), Sounds of Silence (2009) and Umm al-Zeinat Under the Carob Trees (2009).

And translator maia tabet said of the book, in conversation with Yasmeen Hanoosh:

I finished working on a short and very beautiful text by the late poet, essayist, and journalist Mohammad al-As‘ad entitled أطفال الندى a few months ago. While the book bills itself as a  رواية, which immediately suggests the word “novel” in English, for me, the word that comes to mind is what we call in French “un récit,” literally a “telling” or “recounting” and not a roman. It is a genre-bending text, part poetry, part prose, part historical fiction, and part magical realism. It doesn’t have the sort of arc that a novel might, with a beginning, middle, and end, main characters who develop, or a denouement at the end. Of course, I’m describing classic novel structure here and understand that a lot of modern novel-writing that is experimental in no way follows such a structure. The text is a poetic meditation on the Nakba as experienced by a four- or five-year old child, who tries to reconstruct what happened from the vantage-point of his adulthood, coming of age as a refugee in Baghdad. The segues from Umm al-Zenat (the child’s village of origin) to Baghdad, and from there to locales in Arab folk tales and The Thousand and One Nights, with references throughout to UN resolutions and conventional histories, are masterful. And Al-As‘ad’s language is gorgeous.

And Comma Press has billed Palestine Minus One as “a prequel to Comma’s award-winning Palestine + 100 science fiction project.” The anthology “asks ten Palestinian authors to re-imagine the build-up to the catastrophe of 1948 as well as its immediate and long-term repercussions, using fantastical, supernatural and speculative tropes.”

The other winning titles are:

• Chilco by Daniela Catrileo (Chile), translated from the Spanish by Jacob Edelstein (Charco Press)
• The Backstreet of Memory by Conceição Evaristo (Brazil), translated from the Portuguese by Annie McDermott (And Other Stories)
• Jacaranda by Gaël Faye (Rwanda/France), translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone (Chatto & Windus)
• The History of Vertebrates by Mar García Puig (Spain), translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (Peninsula Press)
• Across the Ice by Peter Kurzeck (Germany), translated from the German by Imogen Taylor (And Other Stories)
• On Earth as it is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia (Brazil), translated from the Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan (Charco Press)
• Lamento by Madame Neilsen (Denmark), translated from the Danish by Gaye Kynoch (Prototype Publishing)
• Disappearing Acts by Maria Stepanova (Russia), translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
• Take Six: Six Ukrainian Women (Ukraine), translated from the Ukrainian by Stephen Komarnyckyj (Dedalus Books)
• La Lucha: Latin American Feminism Today, translated from Spanish, Portuguese, Mapuche and Quechua (Charco Press)