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“She closed her olive-green eyes and sang songs she’d learned from the women in her family.”

This is the sixth and final installment of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which has been made available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman. 

On Mondays this winter, we are publishing installments of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman.

“No electricity tonight. / Boredom is about to kill me.”

Refaat Al Areer had set the scene, declaring, “If I must die,” and Alaa Al Qatarawi’s sorrow metamorphosed into a butterfly that perseveres. She writes, “If I die, my butterfly does not die.”

The people named in this poem are the writers, painters, and musicians martyred in the genocide. They are only a few of the many artists who were martyred in the past two years of war against Gaza.

Iman Humaydan, Michelle Hartman, and Emma Hardy discuss the new translation of Iman’s book “Songs for Darkness” and songs as a tool for the transmission of memory, of solidarity, and as a method of resistance.

In this conversation with ArabLit’s Tugrul Mende, translator Alex Elinson talks about how literary prizes affect the translation landscape, the draw of detective novels, and how he hones voice in a novel with many starring characters.

Algerian novelist Said Khatibi talks with us about his latest novel, and the conversation turns to organ theft, the global shifts in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and what he hopes to illuminate with crime novels: not the whodunit, but the why.