In a public facebook post, Banipal-prize-winning translator Jonathan Wright announced that he had settled his dispute with Random House over work done on Alaa al-Aswany’s “Automobile Club.”
For the first time in its history, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for the translation of Arabic literature will be shared by two translators: Jonathan Wright (for his translation of Youssef Ziedan’s IPAF-winning Azazeel) and William Hutchins (for his translation of Wajdi al-Ahdal’s A Land Without Jasmine).
If you’re in the Bay Area tomorrow, don’t miss readings by translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid from three forthcoming works.
Palestinian novelist Raba’i al-Madhoun and American translator Elliott Colla recently were interviewed by BBC’s Razi Iqbal. Colla talked a little about his life-journey and how he came to translate al-Madhoun’s “The Lady from Tel Aviv.”
If you’ll be in Marrakech on the 24th and 25th of this month, Dar al-Ma’mûn’s Translating in/Justice is free. If you’re not, you could always make it a resolution (’tis the season) to think more about the connections between justice and translation.
Arabic literature has certainly had its share of bumps, bruises,insults, and injuries in English translation, but just as certainly it’s growing and diversifying. In a year where only three new works were translated from Chinese and distributed in the US, more than 30 were translated from Arabic, from al-Shidyaq’s “Leg Over Leg” to Abdul Aziz al-Mahmoud’s “The Corsair”.
Ahlem Mostaghanemi is unarguably one of the most popular (and controversial) contemporary Arabic novelists. Bloomsbury is putting itself behind a new translation of one of her most successful works, but will English readers also be charmed?
Abu Dhabi-based translator S.A. Qudsi has translated a wide range of Arab authors — Nawal al-Saadawi, Ghada Samman, Naguib Mahfouz, Salwa Bakr, Ghassan Kanafani, Najwa Barakat — into Malayalam. He also translates from English, Indonesian, and Farsi. He answered a few questions about the Arabic-Malayalam relationship for our Arabic Literature, World Readers series.
This year’s #LitSummitQatar has opened in the middle of the Doha International Book Fair — which features titles from some 360 publishers and events with popular authors such as Qatari novelist Abdulaziz Al Mahmoud, Qatari poet Maryam Al Subaiey, and Irish poet Colette Bryce. The fair’s events are overshadowed by nearby fairs in Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, but its literary translation summit (#LitSummitQatar) is a highlight.
