“There were many stories circulating in our town about Hasson, his parents, and how they ended up in the far South, but none were ever confirmed. Some said his dad met his mom in a Baha’i temple in Iran and then came to our town seeking refuge and a peaceful life, keeping their faith a secret. Others said his mom was an Armenian from the North who fell in love with Hasson’s father.”
The central theme of “K.” is much stronger than most literature coming from the Gulf.
Each of the 13 winning translators will receive $2,800 help them finish their project.
“You emerge from behind the scenes, I emerge from behind the nightmares, smiling as if the war hasn’t eaten my brother, and in those days, when my Syrian friends were dying under torture, my European friends were gently withdrawing from my wound which scratched their white lives and didn’t conform in any way to accepted Western criteria of what constitutes pain.”
“My grandfather, Husni Fariz, was the poet laureate of Jordan. I used to relish the chance to sit at his desk and “write poems,” terrible poems in Arabic, ones that tried desperately to rhyme.”
The two Syrians are poet-translator Abdulkadir Musa and poet-playwright Liwaa Yazji.
Mother laughed. “And the ox is naughty like you. Try to sleep.”
My mother left the room and I stayed alone with the rain.
This year, at least three significant memoirs are forthcoming in translation, all of them intimately relevant to women’s lives in 2018, from #metoo to intersectionalism and global solidarity to the fraught spaces between the performance and experience of motherhood.
” TAAM-TAIM’s mission is to promote the diversity of Arabic authors working in Montreal and elsewhere in Canada, by creating a network for Arabic writers and translators to meet, exchange ideas, and collaborate.”
