On ArabLit, this has been the “Month of May”: A look forward at new engagements with May Ziadeh, including our collective translation of Ziadeh’s Musings of a Young Woman, translations of May’s poetry, essays reflecting on her work, and more. We also gather the fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and interviews that have appeared this month on ArabLit and beyond.
Katharine Halls’ translation of Shady Lewis’s On the Greenwich Line won this year’s James Tait Black Prize in the fiction category.
“sometimes my soul is wild, / an egret flying far / beyond the ocean’s edge, // and sometimes I curl up, / tender as an anemone when touched, / as salty and as damp.”
“It is the free bird.”
In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Sarah Enany talk about some of the particulars about translating for the stage and, particularly, for song.
“Are you related to *the* May Ziadeh?”
“He stood bewildered at the crossroads, not knowing which way to take.” Classic short fiction about Arabs in early twentieth century Paris by Fouad Elshayeb.
We asked ourselves (and each other) why we wanted to bring May Ziadeh’s Musings of a Young Woman into English. Why May? And why now?
Last month, The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing and Outside in World hosted a conversation between Sawad Hussain, Marcia Lynx Qualey, and Susanne Abou Ghaida about Arabic Young Adult literature and translation.
