From the Archives: Haytham El Wardany on Sleep as the First Stage of Rebirth
“No, sleep is not a rehearsal for death!”
Interviews
From the Archives: How Mahmoud Darwish Inspired a Poetry Movement in Assam, India
“The off-LBF podcast below explores the Miyah poetry movement that was sparked in April 2016 when poet Hafiz Ahmed composed ‘Write Down I Am a Miyah,’ inspired in part by Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘ID Card,’ and shared it on social media.”
On Translating the Linguistic Diversity of ‘Hot Maroc’
“It is the research and the work that the reader may not see in the final translation that will determine the quality of that translation.”
A Revolution against Realism: A Talk with Yasmine Ramadan
” As I argue throughout the book, the formulation of the sixties generation is not neutral but rather is a strategy that helps writers gain access to positions of power and prominence in the field of cultural production.”
Rula J. Abisaab on Writing a Novel of Faith, Skepticism, and Violence Through a Camera’s Lens
“I treat my novels and poetry as forms of art, in which I explore all that I do not want to articulate in academic arguments and proofs.”
‘A Bed for the King’s Daughter’: Finding a Home for Arabic Short Stories in Translation
In January 2021, University of Texas Press published Shahla Ujayli’s A Bed for the King’s Daughter, which won in 2017 the AlMultaqa Prize, given annually for short-story collections: By Tugrul Mende […]
Rebecca Johnson’s ‘Stranger Fictions: The History of the Novel in Arabic Translation’
“But when you think of it instead as an single literary field that contains a porous border between the translation and the original, then you start to think of translation as a form of novelistic production, as critique, as interpretation. It can even be theory.”
‘Poetic Justice’: A Quarter Century of Collecting Moroccan Poetry
“This is not a book of “high” culture only. It contains the tastes of many aspects of Moroccan society.”
Tareq Imam: ‘The Writer Has Become Everyone’s Target’
“Translators have approached me in the past about translating my work into English, but it didn’t come to anything because I wasn’t comfortable with some of their editorial suggestions, such as amplifying a particular aspect of the text or emphasizing an element to which I hadn’t given prominence.”