Women in Translation Month 2025:
That ‘Odd, Uneven Time’
“August rain: The best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.” – Sylvia Plath
By Ibtihal Rida Mahmood
Since 2014, the month of August has been celebrated as Women in Translation Month (#WiTMonth). And like the month itself, translation sits in that “odd uneven time,” a liminal space where language and meaning can be negotiated, reclaimed, or even appropriated. When it comes to the women who inhabit this space, as authors and as translators, the liminality of that space feels like a fertile ground for reclaiming language, narrative, and the power of truth-telling.
Translation has always had something of an image problem. In my essay “Arab women translators as agents of change,” forthcoming in Contemporary Arab Women Revolutionaries: Radical Traditions (ed. Raad Khair Allah; Warwick Humanities Series, Routledge), I note that the very act of translation has been referred to using sexist tropes. For example, in 1603, English linguist John Florio called translation a “reputable female”: faithful, modest, passive, and regenerative. That framing has lingered for centuries. And when carried out by women, the devaluation of translation is amplified, echoing the broader cultural pattern of undervaluing most of women’s labor.
This is not to paint a gloomy picture. The landscape is shifting. There have been tangible changes in the last decade, and the views of translation as this passive, neutral activity carried out in the shadows are diminishing. As Marcia Lynx Qualey noted in an essay published in 2021, “one key difference is that Arab women have become a larger force in English-language publishing: as authors, editors, and critics. More complex books by women are receiving positive critical attention.” Our below list of new and forthcoming books by women stands as an overwhelming testimony of all the above.
Throughout August, ArabLit will feature work that expands the conversation around women in translation. We will talk to women authors and translators, who will offer invaluable insights on what they wish publishers understood or did differently when it comes to supporting their work. In another essay, we will spotlight the layered realities of writing and translating while wearing the crown that crushes—motherhood. We will hear from several women writers and translators about all the ways in which motherhood has shaped their creative lives, from their writing routines to their sense of self, their relationship with language, and their views of society and even of life itself.
Stay with us throughout the month—and beyond—as we explore these vital narratives together. The conversation has only just begun.
New in 2025:
A Calamity of Noble Houses, by Amira Ghenim, tr. Miled Faiza and Karen McNeil (Europa Editions, January 14)
“Tunisia, 1930s. Against the backdrop of a country in turmoil, in search of its identity, the lives and destinies of the members of two important upper-class families of Tunis intertwine: the Ennaifer family, with a rigidly conservative and patriarchal mentality, and the Rassaa, open-minded and progressive.”
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The Many Lives of Ibrahim Nagui, by Samia Mehrez, tr. Eleanor Ellis (AUC Press, January 21)
“A multigenerational literary memoir that sheds new light on one of the Arab world’s most renowned Romantic poets, through the eyes of his granddaughter.”
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The Orchards of Basra, by Mansoura Ezz Eldin, tr. Paul Starkey (Interlink, March 18)
“Hisham Al Khattab is Yazid ibn Abih. At least he thinks he is. Some 13 centuries separate the two, but in the despaired mind of Hisham Al Khattab, and through the magical power of dreams, Hisham is Yazid.”
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I Want Golden Eyes, by Maria Dadouch, tr. Sawad Hussain and M Lynx Qualey (University of Texas Press, April 1)
“A girl must save herself and her family after discovering her society’s secrets in this sci-fi novel in translation. I Want Golden Eyes is set on the Comoros Islands at the end of this century in a futuristic city called Quartzia, the home of a genetically privileged minority called the Golden Eyes. The rest of the population, the Limiteds, live in a cavity called the Hive beneath the city. Dalia is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in the Hive but works with her family in Quartzia at Professor Adam’s house, where she cleans, her sister grows organic food in the garden, and her deaf father works as the cook.”
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Empty Cages, by Fatima Qandil, tr. Adam Talib (AUC Press, May 6)
“Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, Empty Cages is an urgent and raw confessional of memory and family and all that is lost and won in one woman’s lifetime The discovery of an old tin of chocolates, its contents long ago devoured, marks the entry into this intimate story that reaches back through a lifetime of memories in search of self and home.”
Don’t miss an online discussion of the book on August 13, 2025.
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48 kg, by Batool Abu Akleen, tr. the author, with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher (Tenement, May 16)
A debut collection from the Palestinian poet—Modern Poetry in Translation’s ‘Poet in Residence,’ 2024—a bilingual assembly of forty-eight poems in which each work accounts for a single kilogram; a body’s mass; a testament to a sieged city; a vivid and visceral voicing of the personal and the public in the midsts of unspeakable violence.
Also listen: An episode of BULAQ with Batool Abu Akleen.
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Mario And Abu Labbas, by Reem Bassiouney, tr. Roger Allen (Dar Arab)
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The Cinderellas of Muscat, by Huda Hamed, translated by Chip Rossetti (Banipal Books, May)
From the publisher:
In her novel Omani author Huda Hamed confronts the challenges that people, particularly women, face as Muscat’s modernisation replaces old ways of living in this enchanting and modern take on the Cinderella tale. A group of women friends become jinn themselves in the guise of Cinderellas.
Also read: A discussion with Huda Hamed and Chip Rossetti.
Ibtihal Rida Mahmood is a contributing editor at ArabLit.