The Asymptote Book Club’s September 2020 selection was Emma Ramadan’s translation of Meryem Alaoui’s Straight from the Horse’s Mouth: As part of the book-club materials, Asymptote editor Allison Braden talked […]
Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, in Elisabeth Jaquette’s translation from Arabic, and Tunisian-Swedish writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s The Family Clause, translated from the Swedish by Alice Menziet, both made the 2020 shortlist of the National Book […]
“Poetry brought a certain degree of cultural legitimacy to politicians, who simultaneously cultivated the support of prominent poets and feared the repercussions of their failure to do so.”
The complete 2020 schedule is now online. For this year’s virtual event, there will be five types of events. These are: sessions, readings, workshops, special events, and — for the first time this year — caucuses.
At the end of last month, three writers — Mona Kareem, Deepak Unnikrishnan, and Krupa Ge — talked about translation, transience, the Gulf, belonging, and more.
“Translation is not a field of instant (or even delayed) validation. Mostly we do the work and leave it in the proverbial drawer for months or years, or we send it out into the world and hear nothing (or just murmurs) back. So classroom work offers a nice change.”
“For instance, the Palestinian society is more familiar with references to Christianity than the Turkish society. … So while translating Darwish’s works, I brought the references to verses from the Bible or the Torah to the attention of Turkish readers.”
“I wanted to see if I could create a night-language, or find some form to reflect the fact that this is a night work…and the fact that these stories take place where dreams should be.”
“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea in my head. Other times I ravage entire books looking for the spark of a joke. I have read more widely on the subject of medieval Baghdad this spring and summer than I have since grad school, and this has been time very well spent.”
