Between Two Arabic Translators with Yasmeen Hanoosh
In this new monthly interview series, translator Yasmeen Hanoosh talks with talented and celebrated Arabic translators about their work, about making a living as a translator, about the politics and art of translation, about what informs their choices—on a large and small scale—and more.
Yasmeen is an award-winning literary translator. Her translation Closing His Eyes (Luay Hamza Abbas), received an NEA translation fellowship in 2010, and her translation of Scattered Crumbs (Muhsin al-Ramli) won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Prize in 2002, and has been since excerpted in a number of publications. Yasmeen’s other English translations of Arabic fiction have appeared in various literary journals and publications, including World Literature Today, Banipal, ArabLit Quarterly, Michigan Studies Quarterly, Jadaliyya, Words Without Borders, The Iowa Review, among others.
In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Jonathan Wright discuss Wright's start in literary translation, its divergence from the sort of translation he practiced as a journalist, and his ideas about what he calls Arabic polyglossia ...
In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Michelle Hartman discuss how the conceptual framework of solidarity raises important questions about translation, what it means to share (or not share) political commitments with an author, and ways of making co-translation equitable ...
In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy discuss the idea of untranslatability (and perhaps, by extension, unreadability) and the work Salim Barakat, and why, if a translation were complete and perfect, this might mean that the work was born dead ...
In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Margaret Litvin discuss the triangulation of translating Arabic literature and Soviet Russia into English, vanishing intertexts, and why translating Sonallah Ibrahim's Ice into a single language would have been like "putting salad through a blender." ...
In this "BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS" conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Samah Selim discuss authorship and adaptations in translated texts, Samah's "Turjoman" project and the ways in which the field of translation is specific to location, her translation of Arwa Salih, and the "small arsenal of knowledge, resilience, and love" Salih's work continues to bring into the world ...
maia tabet and yasmeen hanoosh are both Arabic-English literary translators who have spent decades living and translating from multiple diasporic locales. In this conversation, they retrace the trajectories of their experience as translators, uprooted Arab women, and bilingual diasporic subjects to identify intersections and divergences along their paths ...
