In celebration of the World Cup, writing by Luqman Derky, who is “not only a poet and actor but also a gifted amateur futbulji who, under slightly different circumstances, could well have started a professional career.”
“sometimes my soul is wild, / an egret flying far / beyond the ocean’s edge, // and sometimes I curl up, / tender as an anemone when touched, / as salty and as damp.”
“Are you related to *the* May Ziadeh?”
We asked ourselves (and each other) why we wanted to bring May Ziadeh’s Musings of a Young Woman into English. Why May? And why now?
How do trees survive when fall strips them of their green leaves, and snow suffocates them, turning them into rigid white ghosts that frighten birds and leave no room to breathe?
The problem with this city has always been not a lack of love, but that intimacy, affection and love hang in the atmosphere and suffocate, just out of the population’s reach. Whenever I walk around its wide and ordered streets, I imagine myself colliding with tiny particles of human warmth, but never grasping them.
Why versify a recipe, let alone an entire recipe collection?
“I am a walking dissonance, a transmission without a terminal.”
On May 1st—yes, May in May—the English translation of Sawanih Fatat (Musings of a Young Woman) by May Ziadeh arrives as the second title in ArabLit’s ERASED, NOT FORGOTTEN series, following Out of Time: The Collected Short Stories of Samira Azzam (tr. Ranya Abdelrahman).
