The Launch of ‘Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature’
On October 17 of this year, Stanford University Press published Refqa Abu-Remaileh's "Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature," which is available online at countryofwords.org. The project, made available through the press's "Stanford Digital Projects" imprint, is an "an interactive digital archive that allows us to retrace and remap the global story of Palestinian literature in the twentieth century, starting from the Arab world, and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America." As ...
‘The Idea Has Failed’: A Poem from Gaza by Basman Aldirawi
This poem is shared by Gazan Palestinian poet Basman Aldirawi, also the author of "This Bread Was Born, This Bread Was Killed." The Idea Has Failed By Basman Aldirawi Translated by Elete N-F & Sarah Lasoye I sympathize with God a lot: My heart, too, has been let down. If we could sit together now we’d share a cigarette. I’d rest my hand on His shoulder, and we’d cry together until a light rain fell, ...
‘Our Loneliness’: A Poem by Hiba Abu Nada
Hiba Abu Nada was a Palestinian novelist, poet, educator, and nutritionist from Gaza. Her novel Oxygen is Not for the Deadwon the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity in 2017. She held a BA in Biochemistry and an MA in Clinical Nutrition from the Islamic University and Al-Azhar University in Gaza respectively, both of which have been destroyed by Israeli strikes. She was killed in her home in south Gaza by an Israeli raid on Oct ...
Fiction
Short Fiction: Adania Shibli’s ‘A Tin Ball’
This story appeared in the FOOTBALL issue of ArabLit Quarterly, which you can still get in print and digital. A Tin Ball By Adania Shibli Translator anonymous The war, it seemed, was over, after it had reached the far extremes of violence ...
Short Fiction in Translation: Mahdi Issa al-Saqr’s ‘The Return’
Mahdi Issa al-Saqr (1927-2006) was born in Basra and published his first short-story collection, مجرمون طيبون (Criminals with Kind Hearts) in 1954. That same year, he and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab founded Modern Art Group, which published new Iraqi writing. Al-Saqr ...
Short Fiction in Translation: Ghassan Kanafani’s ‘The Crucified Sheep’
Introduction by Rachel Green This previously untranslated story, written in Kuwait in 1960 and published in Kanafani’s first collection, Death of Bed 12 (1961), provides a glimpse into some of the concerns of the author’s early Kuwait writings, or what ...
Poetry
‘The Idea Has Failed’: A Poem from Gaza by Basman Aldirawi
This poem is shared by Gazan Palestinian poet Basman Aldirawi, also the author of “This Bread Was Born, This Bread ...
‘Our Loneliness’: A Poem by Hiba Abu Nada
Hiba Abu Nada was a Palestinian novelist, poet, educator, and nutritionist from Gaza. Her novel Oxygen is Not for the ...
Two ‘Little Prose Texts’ by Abdallah Zrika
The following two “little” texts are translated from Abdallah Zrika’s Petites Proses published by L’Escampette in 1998. The author himself ...
Interviews
A Conversation about ‘I’m Here With You,’ a Bilingual Fiction Podcast
The series “أنا معاك / I’m Here With You” is, as its creators write, “an immersive audio drama exploring the ...
In Focus: Poet Olivia Elias’s ‘Your Name, Palestine’
To mark the launch of Olivia Elias’s Your Name, Palestine last month, we share a conversation between the poet and her translators, ...
A Conversation with Derek Walcott Prize-winning Poet Mosab Abu Toha
This conversation originally ran last year, in November 2022, after Mosab Abu Toha won a 2022 Palestine Book Award for Things ...
Country Focus
From the archives
For Valentine’s Day: The Many Loves of Nizar Qabbani
Your love has taught me… how to be sad.
And I have needed, for ages
A woman to make me sad
A woman in whose arms I could weep
Like a sparrow,
Alexander Key: On Domesticating Al-Jurjani 110%
“I’m trying to translate al-Jurjani so that he sounds like a literary critic writing in English, writing in his native language. I don’t want the reader of al-Jurjani’s experience with metaphor to think this guy is foreign – because al-Jurjani didn’t think he was foreign.”
Another Road for Syrian Poetry
“The divide among poets has added a diaspora to the spatial diaspora, which scattered Syrians around the world.”