” Like Rahhal, I specialized in Arabic literature in university, so many of the literary references, jokes, and asides were familiar to me, but many more were not and I found myself diving deeply into biographical dictionaries and classical Arabic poetry collections just to keep up.”
“Lebanon is beginning to see a boom in agile, small wineries that are promoting a specifically Lebanese identity to their wines, of which indigenous grapes are an important aspect. This is to me a profoundly anti-hegemonic stance based on the recognition that there is no need to emulate some French idea of excellence.”
“So the main challenge was to convey that numbness and ill-mannered quality on the level of style, while still producing a book clear enough to be readable. That was a negotiation with the publisher, as you can imagine.”
“I think our bestsellers are children books.”
As Ahmad wrote in his interview with al-Riwayah: “I wanted to write, to scream, to protest, to put my imprint on the forehead of this world. I wanted my sons and daughters to know, a decade or two from now, that their father rejected this war, he rejected all this destruction and exposed the thieves who rode on the wave of the revolution.”
“As much as I adore Aaliya, I still harbor aspirations of being a necessary translator – or, more modestly and accurately, a translator who is read.”
“The problem we encountered in Italy is the absence of a site that could connect translators, publishers, and readers, so we thought of building our site in such a way as to meet the needs of these three groups.”
“Sometimes, after an initial agreement with the writer on a certain artwork, I read the text and then suggest some changes in the artwork, so I do some retouching on the work to be more suitable for the book.”
Ihsan Abdel Kouddous’s I Do Not Sleep appears this month from Hoopoe Fiction, in Jonathan Smolin’s translation.
