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We asked ourselves (and each other) why we wanted to bring May Ziadeh’s Musings of a Young Woman into English. Why May? And why now?
From the Editorial Desk
Dana Al Shahbari (foreword author, translator, concept initiator):
May Ziadeh has accompanied me for many years now. I first worked with her literature during my master’s dissertation, and she remains at the heart of my PhD research at Cambridge.
There is something deeply moving in knowing that we both walked the same road leading to the West Hall auditorium at the American University of Beirut; the hall where Ziadeh was commemorated as the first woman to lecture publicly, and that I, many years later, walked by as a literature student during my undergraduate and master’s years.
Sawanih Fatat [Musings of a Young Woman] holds a special place in my current project. It is a key text through which I continue to think about Ziadeh’s literary voice, especially given its unique genre of musings. Working on this translation with a collective added yet another meaningful layer to the book, which is written by a woman, for women, and now finds a new life in English through the efforts of a collective of women.
A century on, Musings of a Young Woman invites scholars to trace the silenced in the archive and to read anew the poetics and politics of Arab women’s writing in a site of intersecting colonial and patriarchal tensions. It is our hope that this translation will open the way for further engagement with Ziadeh’s works across languages.
Her feminist voice, once heard in the halls of Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut, and whose words circulated through national and international press, deserves renewed recognition and a wider place in the literary world.
M Lynx Qualey (founding editor of ArabLit):
Dana first wrote to ArabLit about publishing a translation of May Ziadeh’s “The Memory of Baalbek’s Temple” in the spring of 2025, as Israeli airstrikes were threatening the historical site of Baalbek. As it happens, at just that moment, Sawad Hussain and I had been discussing how to make a translation of سوانح فتاة possible. The publishing landscape rewards novelty — which usually means living authors — so May Ziadeh was always going to be a hard sell. While she has name recognition, she is known largely as an icon, a sign pointing to something else. And if she was treated dismissively by some men of her own era, she has not gotten much better from us. Her photo makes the rounds, but her ideas are usually not engaged. A book of hers has never been translated to English or, as far as I know, any other language.
I wanted us to work on this because I want it to be shared more widely. But also, at the core, I felt, we owe her. We twenty-first-century types have been using her image, sharing her face and a few quotes and the letters she exchanged with Gibran, but not giving her work its own space. To be honest, I felt it like a bill coming due.
Ibtihal Rida Mahmood (managing editor):
As a daughter of the Palestinian diaspora, when I engage with Ziadeh in English, I am pulling her out of the narrow confines of “regional interest” and placing her at the center of the feminist canon where she perfectly belongs.
May was a woman who spoke many languages and hosted the most brilliant minds of the Nahda, yet she was nearly erased by a patriarchal system that used her own brilliance to pathologize her. To read her now, in the language of our current exile and our current power (or lack thereof), is to ensure that her voice can no longer be silenced or sidelined; it allows us to trace our lineage of resistance back to Nazareth, Beirut, and Cairo, proving that our demand for agency is not a shrink-wrapped Western TV dinner, but a long-standing tabun oven that she helped ignite over a century ago.
May’s work also lands differently in the present American moment. At a time when reproductive rights have been rolled back, when hard-won legal protections are reopened for debate by lawmakers, feminist discourse in the United States carries a renewed sense of precarity. In this climate, May’s writing cuts through the fantasy that women’s emancipation has been a fait accompli in the West before radiating outward to the rest of the world.
Voices from the Collective
Alaa Alqaisi:
Translating May Ziadeh meant meeting a woman who could not be safely contained by her time. I had known her mostly through her letters with Gibran, but in Musings of a Young Woman I found another May: sharper, more ironic, more restless; a woman who looked closely at the world and refused the small place prepared for her within it.
I translated her in Gaza during the genocide, in hours taken from fear, waiting, and the ordinary tasks by which people try to keep a day from falling apart. May did not rescue me from that reality, and I would not want to say that she did.
What she gave me was smaller and more durable, the company of a woman thinking against confinement, measuring the world with a clear eye, and trusting that a sentence, when honestly made, can still keep something human from being wasted.
Working on her with other women translators and editors made the experience feel less private. We were not only moving May into English; we were listening for her together, disagreeing over words, protecting the sharpness of her mind, and making room for one woman’s voice to arrive through the care of many women.
Layla AlAmmar:
I feel a kinship with May that is difficult to put into words. When I first began to read her writings—particularly her letter correspondences with the men and women who were her peers, friends, and loves—I felt as though I had come in contact with a long-lost friend. Here is someone who understands me, I thought, and who I, in turn, felt I understood.
May’s words are important, as relevant now as they were when she wrote them, and I’m very proud to contribute to bringing more of her work into English.
Imane Amraoui:
Translating this chapter made me think of May Ziadeh as both a writer and a presence behind the text, who turned seemingly simple questions about women’s rights, education, and even controversial debates in literature into bold intellectual conversations in her time.
As a woman and literary translator, what resonates with me is her quiet but powerful insistence on being part of knowledge itself, not standing at its margins.
The room in this text, with its portraits, voices, and restless exchange of ideas around literature and thought, feels close to the spirit Ziadeh created in her salon, where women were not just listeners but thinkers, even when history tried to overlook them.
Translating her work feels like continuing that gesture: giving language back to spaces where women have always belonged.
Marilyn Booth:
I’ve been engaged with ‘Mayy’s’ work since my undergraduate days—she was the focus of my undergraduate honours dissertation, and I’m certain that her writing helped me to learn better Arabic.
And, I’ve written about this collection specifically in the context of thinking about women’s autobiographical writing; Sawanih and the entire corpus are dear to my heart. I love the idea of working as part of a collective, and I’m keen to see the outcome! May this be only the start.
Making it possible for anglophone readers to appreciate Ziadeh’s writing is part of a crucial and ongoing effort, by many hands, to highlight the writing and activism of Arab and Ottoman women of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Meriem Essaoudy:
Reading [one of the pieces I translated, Girls’ Responses] for the first time took me straight back to my childhood, to the two-classroom school in my small village, where we were asked the same kinds of questions about our wishes and what we wanted to become. For a moment, I was once again sitting in that classroom, one of the girls searching for an answer.
What touched me most is the way May Ziadeh takes such a simple question and transforms it into a profound reflection on memory, time, and the pull between the comfort of the past and the uncertainty of the future.
It was deeply moving to work on a text that feels so intimate and timeless, and an honor to help bring it into English.
Chloe Bordewich:
Political commentary by Arab women of May Ziadeh’s time has received too little attention in the original Arabic and even less in translation. The essays I translated center on current events that are now (century-)old news, but Ziadeh’s insights into what they tell us about human nature feel surprisingly fresh and timely.
It was a delight for me as a historian to see an era in which the world order was convulsing through her eyes.
Fatima El-Kalay:
I first came to May Ziadeh through an aunt who taught Arabic and adored her writing.
Years later, translating these essays, I still find her witty social commentary brilliant, and I just love the irony in her endings: “Yes, to the grieving alone should we say: Happy New Year,” and of the policeman, “Do not wake him—he sleeps in peace, like an innocent child.”
Her words are as fresh and as startlingly contemporary today as they were a hundred years ago. I only hope the same astuteness reaches the English translation too.
Anam Zafar:
It feels fitting that a translator-editor collective was formed to bring a book into the world “that wrestles, again and again, with what it means for women to write, to be read, to be seen”.
I have been thinking more and more about translation as a feminist act, including collaborative work as an act of solidarity. Translation – especially literary translation – can be a precarious profession, though I hope it doesn’t stay that way. It’s important that (women) translators support each other, and luckily we are quite good at that. I hope that naming the collective openly for this project will shed light on just how much shared, human labour goes into any work of translation.
Boutheina Khaldi:
During her stay in al-Asfuriyya mental hospital, Mayy wrote :
“أَتمنّى أنْ يَأْتي بَعْدَ مَوْتي مَنْ يُنْصِفُني”
[I hope that someone will come, after my death, to see that I get justice.]
I am delighted that we are able to rescue one of her works from oblivion and to achieve her dream of being remembered and vindicated.
Emma Hardy:
As a student of Arabic language, my education has been composed by the words of those whose voices carry weight in the realm of Arabic literature. Voices that have guided my understanding of and capacity for communication across languages.
And in the eager mind of a student, the voice of May Ziadeh lingers, demanding action from its listener. Her words ask us to question the constructs presented to us, to challenge our circumstances, and to advocate for that which we believe.
I deeply cherish the opportunity to engage so intimately with her work. It is sincerely a privilege to play a part in the stewardship of her words, and in so encourage the continuation of the conversations she created. Conversations which remain intensely relevant in the world we find ourselves in today.
Ranya Abdel Rahman:
I was immediately drawn to May Ziadeh’s description of the famous 1920 Vengeance Society trial, which she bravely attended in person, attracting many stares in the male-dominated courtroom. Her vivid account of the scene and astute reflections on the justice system made this piece a joy to translate.
It’s truly an honour to be part of this collective project and to bring May’s work to English speaking readers.
Mennan Salih:
It’s been a privilege to partake in bringing May Ziadeh’s profound writing to a wider audience—and especially to do so as part of this all-woman collective, each of whom have their own unique connection to May: through heritage, worldview, or the disappointing familiarity of their work being forced into the background.
We’ve dedicated a month to May Ziadeh here at ArabLit (#TheMonthofMay), but—in the long term—we hope this translation of her Musings will usher in the global renown and timeless legacy that she deserves.
PRE-ORDER the BOOK | MAY ZIADEH SERIALIZED in your INBOX | LAUNCH EVENT MAY 31, 2026