By Zuberino, Guest Author Yesterday afternoon, London played host to the winners of the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (popularly known as the “Arabic Booker”): Morocco’s Mohammed Achaari and […]
Today, Michael Cooperson (translator of Shalaby’s The Time Travels of the Man Who Sold Pickles and Sweets) talks literary time travel, long nights of smoking and drinking, and how he’d read TTTOTMWSPAS post-Jan25.
I recently read through Adam Talib’s translation of Khairy Shalaby’s The Hashish Waiter, out this spring from AUC Press. Adam was kind enough to get into an email debate over such questions as whether Shalaby’s descriptions sometimes work at cross-purposes and what it means to sound pretentious. Read on to find out what would cause “the whole literary community” to “have a heart attack, stroke out, and soil themselves.”
Youssef Rakha asks, in “Anticipating July 8”: “Should [Egypt’s] revolution pick up where it left off, now, what would be the intellectuals’ role in it?”
As I was finishing off an article about the bookstores and other publishing ventures that have been launched since Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, I saw a short note about a graphic novel called Autostrade, which will be released July 11 at Bikya Books and Café in Nasr City. I tugged on the thread and followed it to a new publishing house: Division Publishing. Since I wanted to include them in the article, I sent off a quick note with some hurried questions; co-founder Marwan Imam was kind enough to respond in detail.
When I first began gathering “rules for translating,” in the vein of these “rules for writing” (and these), I was expecting newspapers and magazines to elbow each other out of the way for such illuminating material. Really.
Australian writer and publisher Carmen Callil, one of this year’s Man Booker International judges, certainly has had her share of quotables this year. The most famous one—about Philip Roth sitting on her face—unfortunately has nothing to do with Arabic literature.
Walaa Quisay (@WalaaQuisay) continues her project of translating “revolutionary Arab poets.” First, she worked her way through twenty-nine of Ahmed Fouad Negm’s colloquial poems, and now she’s holding a vote as to which poet’s work she should translate next.
Iraqi poet and Poetry Translation Centre (PTC) workshop leader Worod al-Musawi has called translation “the most exhausting form of creativity one can do.” She recently spoke to The Conversation Papers about translation and Iraqi poetry. Here at ArabLit, she answers questions about her work with the PTC. This is part II of a series that began with PTC founder Sarah Maguire.
