"The interwar years were a golden age for travel writing in Egypt and the Middle East in general; scores of new books arrived to tell Arabic readers about the increasingly connected world."
‘Tart Bites’ Podcast on ArabicEnglish Translation Launches Today
"I've always wanted to start a conversation around translation, from the very beginning of my career."
Bilingual Writer’s Block in the Time of Covid
"In nature, some plants love to bathe in sunlight, others thrive in the dark, but nothing can grow on quicksand, and that’s exactly where many of us writers are desperately trying to sow their creative seeds."
Sunday Submissions: 2020 Columbia Journal Contest Has New Category for Translation
Sawako Nakayasu is judge for the translation category, which calls for submissions "up to 5,000 words or five pages of poetry, with the original text, and written permission from the work’s original author/publisher."
Friday Finds: Ghayath Almadhoun’s ZEBRA-winning Filmpoem, ‘Évian’
"Like a visual representation of the unconscious it is a big unknowable that flows without a break, wave after wave, thought after thought, bearing the words of the poem.”
Translator Sampsa Peltonen on Why Hassan Blasim’s ‘God99’ Is Like Parkour
"The arselongness of the text made me think about how the traceurs keep plunging forwards all the time, almost like just past their tipping point, foolhardily hopping over things, dashing and ploughing into walls. Parkour is also often practised in urban places that smell of piss and fast-food and where you need to watch out you don't step on broken glass or used condoms."
Finding a Voice in English for ‘My Heart Became a Bomb’
"Too frequently, I think, translators give in to the idea that a foreign text needs to retain a lot of that foreignness—this is Venuti’s foreignizing versus domesticating debate."
Banipal Translation Prize Announces 2020’s 5-book Shortlist
The shortlist showcases a wide range of titles, from a Moroccan historical novel to an Egyptian thriller to a tender Kuwaiti war story to two novels from Palestine, one written for teens.
The Iraqi ‘Irvine Kafka Poe’
The comparison is both oddly specific and also strangely unhelpful: Blasim is “Iraq’s Irvine Welsh.” Yes, yes, Irvine Welsh is a name I should instantly recognize. But to be honest, I had forgotten why. Irvine, my brain said. Irvine, California? Worse, my brain had linked the name "Irvine Welsh" to novels and screenplays by the American writer Peter Hedges.
Cairo International Book Fair Pushed to June and July, 2021
The fair's new dates are June 30 to July 15, the committee's statement said.
New in Translation: ‘A Man in His Seventies and a Lady in Her ?’
"A man in his seventies and a lady in her ? / meet / in a hospital in Amman."
Sunday Submissions: ‘What Does it Mean to Decolonise Translation?’
"Tilted Axis Press will pay each contributor a fee of up to £500, depending on the length of the piece."
