Adam Talib recently gave a talk at the American University in Cairo on “Translating for Bigots.” Talib, who is working on his fourth literary translation, looked at a number of reasons why a reader might look at Arabic literature (in translation) with less sophistication than he’d look at English literature.
In a comment on “Making It Visible: Jonathan Wright on (Not) Translating Alaa al-Aswany’s ‘Automobile Club’,” reader Martin Sa’ada made the comment — about the dispute between Marilyn Booth, Penguin, and Rajaa Alsanea — that, “Well, it’s the author’s work, and re-working the translation is entirely the author’s prerogative; I’m not sure the translator should be lecturing the author regarding what the book is supposed to mean.”
The British Council, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing and the British Centre for Literary Translation are co-sponsoring a Literary Translation Summit from Dec 8-12 in Doha, Qatar, alongside the Doha Book Fair.
Ferial Ghazoul and John Verlenden — both at the American University in Cairo — have won this year’s University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award for their collection “Chronicles of Majnun Layla and Selected Poems of Qassim Haddad,” by Bahrain’s great living poet.
Translators are often expected to remain invisible puppeteers, unseen by all except specialists and those good at squinting. The translator who stays in the background is praised: The reader, we’re told, wants to connect with Elias Khoury, not Humphrey Davies; Jurji Zaydan, not Samah Selim. But there are moments when translators feel they must be heard.
The magazine The Common is publishing its first work of Arabic literature in translation in Issue 6, which is set to be released on October 28. We asked a few questions about the process of Jennifer Acker, the magazine’s founding editor and editor in chief, and of Hisham Bustani, whose work is featured in the magazine.
Emerging Arabic-Polish translator Aleksandra Lasota-Barańska is a student of Arabic language and Islamic Culture at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. She has a few publications and is now looking to publish her first translated collection, of Najwan Darwish’ poems. She answered a few questions for ArabLit about the landscape of Arabic literature in Polish.
Marilyn Booth translated Hassan Daoud’s novel The Penguin’s Song as a labor of love and initially strugged to find a publisher. Now it’s forthcoming from City Lights Books in Fall 2014 and a second excerpt just ran on the (new! improved!) Asymptote.
It’s not often that a major poet will attend a workshop on translating his poetry, but, next month, the Poetry Translation Centre (PTC) will have al-Saddiq al-Raddi on hand to discuss […]
