This is part two to eminent and pioneering translator Denys Johnson-Davies’ reflections on Tayeb Salih, after the passing of would’ve been Tayeb Salih’s eighty-fifth birthday. Here, Johnson-Davies returns to Salih’s work, particularly his most famous novel, and what stands as Salih’s real and lasting achievement.
Often, we contemporary English-language readers look to authors as our world’s moral compasses. Sometimes it works, and they lead us true. Great authors speak some sort of truth, at least about their particular obsessions. But mediocre, good, even great authors — Knut Hamsun usually comes to mind — sometimes follow their compass into ugliness.
Libyan poet, translator, and short-story writer Ghazi Gheblawi has been enthusiastically tweeting about Mansour Bushnaf’s “Chewing Gum,” now out in English translation, by Mona Zaki, from Darf Publishers. So, what’s the big deal about “Chewing Gum”?
Gaza author Hedaya Shamun writes — although her writing rituals have disappeared — about the world she sees around her. Translation by Ghada Mourad and Tyson Patros.
This year, 2014CE, hasn’t been a very particularly good one for real-world human ventures. Fortunately, however, it has been an excellent one for Arabic literature in translation: Iman Humaydan Younes’s circling “Other Lives”; Radwa Ashour’s emotional “Tantoureya” and “Blue Lorries”; Jabbour Douaihy’s sharp “June Rain”; Sonallah Ibrahim’s compelling “Stealth” was re-issued; two more volumes of the incredible “Leg over Leg”; several interesting collections. But the book that has made my year, thus far, is Amjad Nasser’s “Land of No Rain.”
The TEDxSana’a Book Club has established a small but vibrant book community in Yemen’s largest city, as reported in the Yemen Times this week. Now they’re looking to expand even more,
“But then I understood. There is some point where it’s impossible to cross the wall between two languages if you don’t change it.”
It’s not likely a good time to be raising funds for a three-day Arab-American literature conference — set to take place in Minneapolis, Minn. mid-September — but, if it weren’t for literature, how would we make the world bearable?
Some vision of “fidelity” to a translated work is surely necessary — otherwise, what would make it a translation? — but the “Temporary Center for Translation,” which opens tomorrow at the New Museum in New York, interregates “what exactly constitutes a likeness.”
