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.
According to the publisher:
This poetry by a prominent Tunisian writer is, in part, an exile’s nostalgic evocation of his birthplace and childhood. In both form and content it suggests the Arabic of pre-Islamic poetry. It is a re-imagining of a particular form—the ancient odes to the desert. Along with this it is something very new: imagery, muscular and bright, that indicts radical, violent Islamists. Their perversion of Islam is reflected in the image of a sullied and suffering desert—the desert at dusk.
You can read a sample of this bilingual collection on the publisher’s website.
From the publisher:
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.
Includes work by prominent authors Mazen Maarouf and Anwar Hamed, among others.
From the publisher:
Bearing witness to the realities of the Palestinian genocide, You Must Live is a bilingual anthology of recent poetry from Gaza and the West Bank. Translated from Arabic and edited by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, this collection gathers the voices of poets currently living in Palestinian territory, most of whom have never left. Yet the poems in You Must Live refuse to cast their speakers as perpetual victims. Diverse voices and styles shine throughout—powerful, prayerful, theatrical, and even humorous—as poets write love letters to the landscape, elegies for martyrs and homes, and proclamations for the future. Negotiating the interplay between aesthetics and politics, the individual and the collective, You Must Live sounds as an urgent call to the global community.
On the publisher’s website, find a poem from the collection by Waleed al-Aqqad, “I have never seen a corpse intact.”
From the publisher:
Bedouin Poets of the Nafūd Desert features poetry from three poets of the Ibn Rashīd dynasty—the highwater mark of Bedouin culture in the nineteenth century. Khalaf Abū Zwayyid, ʿAdwān al-Hirbīd, and ʿAjlān ibn Rmāl belonged to tribes based around the area of Jabal Shammar in northern Arabia. A cultural and political center for the region, Jabal Shammar attracted caravans of traders and pilgrims, tribal shaykhs, European travelers (including T.E. Lawrence), illiterate Bedouin poets, and learned Arabs. All three poets lived at the inception of or during modernity’s accelerating encroachment. New inventions and firearms spread throughout the region, and these poets captured Bedouin life in changing times. Their poems and the accompanying narratives showcase the beauty and complexity of Bedouin culture, while also grappling with the upheaval brought about by the rise of the House of Saud and Wahhabism.
The poems featured in Bedouin Poets of the Nafūd Desert are often humorous and witty, yet also sentimental, wistful, and romantic. They vividly describe journeys on camelback, stories of family and marriage, thrilling raids, and beautiful nature scenes, offering a window into Bedouin culture and society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.