Translation’s Agitated Mirror
“Perhaps each iteration of the poem is a supplicant, yearning for a connection with Ibn Arabi’s original. Or perhaps each one is a lover, longing to see itself in another. Perhaps they are both.”
Reviews
‘Une Révolte Tunisienne’: New Graphic Novel from Lab619 Co-founders Released in Arabic and French
Une révolte Tunisienne is set in between history and fiction, with the main story taking place in the days of the Tunisian “bread riots.”
Najwan Darwish and the Politics/Poetics of Translating Exhaustion
“Translators of Palestinian poetry, in addition to untangling the poetics of pain (or in our case, exhaustion), carry the additional burden of making people listen.”
Review & Excerpt: ‘The Marooned Mirror,’ A Wonderland Revisited
Captured in the Twilight Wood, Faris and Farah go on a page-turning adventure while taking part in a long-awaited uprising against evil.
All That Ali Kotb Knows: On ‘Meccano’
Before it was published by the now-shuttered Sharkiat publishing house in 2011, the novel won the Ihsan Abdel Quddous Award that same year.
‘No Sun in the Closed Room’: An Exploration of Kuwaiti-Palestinian Identity and Belonging
Writer and translator Jenan Alhamli has put together a special section — with interview, excerpt, and review — to celebrate the 2021 release of Eman Assad’s debut novel, No Sun in the Closed Room, an exploration of Kuwaiti-Palestinian identity and belonging set in late summer, 1991.
Post-Liberation Kuwait: Finding the Sun in the Summer of 1991
“Eman Assad successfully captures the complexities of this struggle between Kuwaitis and Palestinians, and the lives of the “halfsies”; those who fall in between, not knowing exactly where to land, as they’re being constantly pushed by one group toward the other. Eman doesn’t leave Ghassan in Kuwait’s glowing and beaming September sun; instead, she hints at a return.”
The Truth and the Story in ‘The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga’
The novel is a caper with a serious bent, an ecocritical story from a context where life was never anthropocentric enough to need “posthumanism.”
From the Archives: Safia Ketou, the First Algerian Sci-fi Novelist of Post-independence Algeria
“– You are on the Mauve Planet.”