It would be impossible to write anything—it would be suicidal. Fundamentalism is against freedom in general, and freedom for a writer is not just to be free to sit down and write, but to think freely, to express oneself freely. So I think that a fundamentalist society can produce nothing but silence or a literature of opposition written in exile.
August: All right, August isn’t the fall, but if you’re at the Edinburgh Book Festival, stop by the Tahar Ben Jelloun and Elias Khoury event on the afternoon of August […]
Award-winning translator Tiina Nunnally has translated over 50 books from the Scandinavian languages. Ibrahim Muhawi was this year’s winner of the PEN translation prize for his beautiful translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s Journal of an Ordinary Grief.
Interested in the meditations of homicidal religious men revolting against wealth redistribution and threatening retribution? Tahir Wattar’s The Earthquake might be for you.
Judge Briony Everroad, an editor at Harvill Secker, said that they received “about 92 entries in the end.” That’s down considerably from last year, when they received 230 for the Spanish-English translation of”‘El Hachazo” by Matías Néspolo.
Hala Salah Eldin Hussein is Albawtaka Review editor and general manager of Albawtaka Publishing House. Albawtaka Review is an Arabic independent (non-governmental) non-profit online quarterly concerned with translating English short fiction into Arabic.
Still, the Thousand and One Nights have a bad reputation. When we were young, we only read abridged versions—all the explicit scenes were censored. I later read the complete version. The tales express all the dreams that human beings share, yet some people have given themselves the right to confiscate parts of these dreams.
While at the sea, I read a number of books. Two that made an odd pairing were Hanna Mina’s Fragments of Memory (trans. Lorne Kenny and Olive Kenny) and Jose Saramago’s Small Memories (trans. from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa).
This Wednesday (while I was still at the sea), PEN announced the winners of their 2011 literary awards. There were two very worthy winners in the two translation categories. One was for a work of poetry, and the other for prose, although both could be classed as Arabic poetry.
