The National Translation Awards, now in their nineteenth year, promise to be “the only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction that includes a rigorous examination of both the source text and its relation to the finished English work.”
“Excerpts from longer works are welcome and preference will be given to contemporary work published within the last fifty years.”
“Therefore, it is important that future policy actions should focus on enabling support structures and facilities that would allow the publishing and translation of Arabic literature within the Nordic region.”
The Palestinian short-story collection is by Gazan writer Nayrouz Qarmout, whose “The Sea Cloak” first appeared in the Book of Gaza, ed. Atef Abu Saif. It’s being brought into English by emerging translator Perween Richards.
“The great thing about the book is that you can one minute want to shake almost any of the characters by the shoulders and then at the next sympathize. Even the central character in Goliath’s Eye chapter, is simultaneously evil, banal, and kind of understandable, in an appalling way.”
“But I do know, deep inside, that the act of translating Taha Muhammad Ali into Hebrew was, for me, a kind of prayer, for me who never prays, because prayer is a one-way message, and those who pray don’t expect to hear answers to their supplications, but they go on.”
If modern Arabic literature in English translation had a patron saint, it was Denys Johnson-Davies.
“Cairo was my final stop, where I would find what I was looking for. Cairo, where—thirty-two years after I bade him goodbye—I sit, knitting words together, weaving together the tale missing from the Thousand and One Nights.”
“Along with the translated poem(s), translators should also submit a commentary on the translation process, addressing particular challenges posed by the text or specific translation choices.”
