Richard Jacquemond, who has translated a number of key Egyptian novels (Zaat, Amreekanli) and written about the poetics of translation as well as about the social and literary history of Egypt (Conscience of a Nation), will be speaking at the AUC next month.
This week’s major holiday—in your life, I’m sure, as in mine—was International Translation Day! PierenePress did a heroic job of twittercasting live from PEN’s translation-day events; I certainly hope they […]
For someone as obsessed as I am with how to render “insha’allah,” “masha’allah” and other religious sayings in English (I once wrote a whole, indignant piece about the word madrassa), it does seem a bit strange that I missed Joseph Massad’s talk at the AUC.
I don’t, as a rule, object to “foreign” words in English-language texts. Would Beckman call Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart an ethnic glossary? And yet it’s full of untranslated terms, and not just the Big Three: flora, food, and dress. Many of the italicized terms, in Things Fall Apart, force the reader to try to see Igbo culture on its own terms instead of “in translation.”
Now and then, I get a note from an emerging translator who wonders where she or he might submit a short story (or stories, or novel excerpts or poems) translated from the Arabic.
This year, the theme of the International Federation of Translators (FIT)-sponsored “International Translation Day” is a little…un-flashy: Translation Quality for a Variety of Voices. (For an explanation of what that […]
NEA translation grants were announced yesterday ($300,000 worth) and I was pleased to see the stories of Luay Hamza Abbas on the to-be-translated list. I talked about his stories in May after two of them appeared in Banipal 37.
I do hope that Khairy Shalaby has success with the English translation of his The Time-Travels of the Man Who Sold Pickles and Sweets (1991), due out this fall from AUC Press. It was translated by Michael Cooperson.
Qantara this week has an interview with an exceptionally humble-sounding Fuad Rifka, the Syrian/Lebanese poet and German-Arabic translator who recently won the Goethe Medal for his translations.
