‘I Do Not Wish For You To See Gaza As Anything But a Rose’
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.
mlynxqualey
About mlynxqualey
Posts by Marcia Lynx Qualey:
The Lyric, Slapstick, Romantic, Academic ‘Land of No Rain’
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.”
What Does It Take to Found a Library in Sana’a, Yemen?
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,
Promiscuous Translations and the New Palestinian Poetry Collection, ‘A Bird is not a Stone’
“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.”
Arab-American Writers Lag in Raising Funds for Annual Conference
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?
New York’s ‘Temporary Center for Translation’: A ‘Modest Experiment’
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.”
Denys Johnson-Davies on How Tayeb Salih Got His Start
As what would’ve been Tayeb Salih’s eighty-fifth birthday passes, eminent and pioneering translator Denys Johnson-Davies shares some reflections on his time with Salih when the great Sudanese novelist first joined the Arabic section of the BBC in London.
8 To Read from Gaza
Any “listicle” on Gaza risks being an exploitative act, piggybacking on and redirecting attention from the current human catastrophe. But silence isn’t much of a solution, either. So, a list.
On Tayeb Salih’s 85th Birthday
Sudanese novelist Tayib Salih (1929-2009) would have been 85 today. He was born in a village in north Sudan and originally intended to work in agriculture.