Friday Finds: Mazen Maarouf on Humor and Violence
“Humor and violence were walking side-by-side in my neighborhood.”
Poetry
Bulaq 57: ‘Revolt Against the Sun’
In this episode, we are joined by scholar and translator Emily Drumsta to discuss her new bilingual collection of al-Mala’ika’s poetry, Revolt Against the Sun.
Watch Now: ALTA Bilingual Reading Series
On October 6, the American Literary Translators Association held a bilingual reading series focused on Arabic, Turkish, and Persian texts.
Safaa Fathy’s ‘I Would Like to Say’
“I say: I want neither father nor mother, nor to have them put on my road, or slipped into my story.”
Friday Finds: Three Poems and a Digital Book Launch with Najwan Darwish
The launch of the new book — set for October 15 at 7 p.m. BST — will feature readings by Darwish and Alshaer, along with a discussion of the poems and the translation process with PTC commissioning editor Edward Doegar.
Launch of ‘Once Upon a Time in Aleppo’
The event, “Poems to Live for: Session 6,” is supported by the Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine.
Layali Alawad: ‘You Can’t Look at a Painting of Mine and Say, “Oh, This is Syrian Art”‘
“I am a woman, so I want to depict women — and it depends on the woman, but in the period of the war in Syria, I felt like women were affected so much more than men, and I wanted to express that.”
Nizar Qabbani’s 1967 Letter To Gamal Abdel Nasser
“Whoever loves his country, Mr. President, purifies its wounds with alcohol, and with fire cauterizes—if need be—the areas that are wounded.”
Friday Finds: Ines Abassi’s ‘The Key’
“The last key I carried /dangles alone on the key rack / like a corpse at the gallows”