Working on ‘Warda’: ‘Challenging in all the Ways a Translation Project Could Be’
“Like I say, it’s fleeting, but I could write a whole memoir, I think, just about getting that sentence translated.”
Interviews
Enass Khansa and Bilal Orfali on Editing a Series of Classical Arabic Texts for Young Readers
“Something that I was aware of growing up in Syria, but more now that I’m in Lebanon, is that classical Arabic literature is associated with many things, but it’s not associated with being a space for creative and experimental thinking. So I think the main idea for both of us with this is experimental.”
Adil Babikir on ‘Mansi’: A Rare Book, and a Joy to Translate
“Mansi came out in weekly instalments, starting in 1988, before being collected together and published in 2004. It is a unique type of writing, a combination of biography, autobiography, political analysis, philosophical insight – with a great sense of humor and satire. Translating this work was a joyful experience.”
‘Paranormal Will Always Have a Special Place in My Heart’
“Before that, I had read the Arabic translation of the Goosebumps novels, and I knew that I loved horror fiction, but for me this was better — maybe it was the Egyptian environment, characters, and atmosphere that made it familiar and yet outlandish.”
Hawraa Al-Hassan on Reading Resistance and Collaboration in Iraqi Novels
“It is important to note that the state marketed the novels it sponsored (including the novels of Saddam) as belonging to Arab ‘resistance literature’; a corpus of works with a long tradition of anti-imperialist struggle in the Arab world.”
Friday Finds: Emma Ramadan on Translating Meryem Alaoui’s ‘Straight From the Horse’s Mouth’
The Asymptote Book Club’s September 2020 selection was Emma Ramadan’s translation of Meryem Alaoui’s Straight from the Horse’s Mouth: As part of the book-club materials, Asymptote editor Allison Braden talked […]
Reading T.S. Eliot in Arabic: A Talk with Ghareeb Iskander
“Saadi Youssef, in his introduction to the translation of Song of Myself, criticizes those who described Whitman as a “Sufi” poet, but he uses mystic language in his translation of Whitman’s masterpiece. It’s fascinating how a text was read and transformed into different forms and styles.”
Sarah Coolidge on the the Dual-language Poetry Anthology ‘Home’
“The idea behind the Calico Series was always to create books that we ourselves would want to read.”
Caroline Assad: ‘We’re Hoping to Achieve a Shift to a Wider Conciousness’
“In Germany, literature is very much a business, and not everyone understands this idea of literature being so capitalist.”