The Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) has taken up some of my favorite topics: Arabic children’s literature and translation. They sent out the following call for papers and workshop announcement:
On the eve of the Booker longlist announcement, critic M.A. Orthofer went on at some length flogging one of his favorite horses: Transparency and the Man Booker Prize. So…what of transparency and the Arabic-language prize affiliated with the Booker?
Sixty years after the 1952 revolution, the legacy of both Gamal Abdel Nasser and his regime remain fraught territory. Was Abdel Nasser a true friend of the poor? Was he an enemy of Islam (or just all dissidents)? How should he be remembered? Abdel Nasser has been the subject of a number of literary depictions over the last half-century, from laudatory to humorous to critical.
The imam who narrates Rasha al-Ameer’s “Judgment Day” is pulled in at least six different directions. The novel’s central character is claimed by a corrupt state, by Islamists, by the Quran, by poetry, by fame and by love. In a way, the eloquent TV-star imam is a Mutanabbi of our times.
This month in Asymptote, there are two pieces in the voice of Moroccan-French author Abdellah Taïa: one a piece of memoir published in French in 2007, “Homosexuality Explained To My Mother,” and the other a recent Q&A with the author.
Z told his interviewers: “I believe that the best cartoons are the ones that are both news-related and timeless.” He added: “Our job is to make a mockery of all these human woes.”
“The loss of Mohamed El-Bisatie, as a person and as a writer, is a huge blow. Words like ‘nobility’ and ‘magnanimity’ may seem threadbare, the stuff of obituaries. I will always remember an evening at the very end of 1994 when I started reading his just-published novel Sakhab al-Buhayra: I could not put it down and wished the opportunity
would arise for me to translate it.
Mohamed El-Bisatie was born on a night of rains, thunder, and lightning near Lake Manzalah, in Egypt’s Dakahlia governorate. He arrived on that night in 1937 thanks to the help of a midwife who almost came too late. El-Bisatie relates these moments from his childhood in his autobiographical “And the Train Comes,” noting that he was such a curious toddler, so bent on exploring every nook of his village, that his mother resorted to tying him to a peg in the courtyard.
Egyptian novelist Mohammed El Bisatie, after a long struggle with liver disease, passed away on Saturday. He was 75.
