Monday Poetry: Two Readings by Mona Kareem and Sara Elkamel
Last May, poet-translator team Mona Kareem and Sara Elkamel launched I Will Not Fold These Maps, a collection of Kareems poems translated to English by Elkamel. Among the launch events was one hosted online by ArabLit; it can still be watched on our YouTube channel. As part of the launch, Kareem and Elkamel recorded several poems together. The two shared below are not from the collection, published by the Poetry Translation Centre, but these recordings were arranged by the PTC. You can enjoy them here or at our YouTube channel, read by the poet and translator, in generous celebration of Women in Translation month. Mona reading "Happiness" in the original: Sara reading "Happiness" in its English translation: Mona reading "A Break for ...
Sunday Submissions: Modern Poetry in Translation ‘Water’ Focus
Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT) have opened calls for submissions for its forthcoming issue, with 'water' as its theme. They write: For our November 2023 issue, we invite new translations of poetry that relates to water. Waterways shape every culture and every language in the world. As billions around the world contend with water scarcity, floods, hurricanes, pollution of oceans, rivers, and lakes, the harms of water privatisation, the theft of water rights from indigenous peoples, and more, MPT would love to highlight poetry in translation that explores how poetics shape our imaginations as water-based creatures. We welcome poetics that hold space for both angry witness and hope, for intimate realisations in aquatic environments, or otherwise in the presence of H₂O, for both the most gargantuan and smallest-scale of waves ...
Summer Reads: ‘Rice Pudding for Two’
"Take a pinch of cinnamon with one hand and a pinch of vanilla with the other; delicately sprinkle both into the mixture. Now rub your hands together and bring your attention to your neck, patting your palms against it. This detail is essential for a good rice pudding." ...
Summer Reads: ‘And We Still Have the Sea’
"yes, the sea changes colors / drinking the yellow of my doubt and distrust / turning as blue as my melody / my songs and ships set sail on its scattered waves" ...
Summer Reads: ‘The Crime of Translation’
"But in a broader sense, crime as transgression takes in a spate of ideas, images, and conceits from Arabic literature." ...
Read the Re-Issue of Sargon Boulus’s 1971 Literary Anthology, ‘Tigris’
In 1971, the great, maverick Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus published a single issue of an English-language literary anthology that he called Tigris ...
Summer Reads: Rym Jalil’s ‘My Mother’s Kitchen’
"Every day I lie and say / I know this place. / My mother's kitchen / brims with afflictions / I must pretend to befriend it / we all know it can have only one master / from its beginning to its end" ...
Summer Reads: ‘The Song of the Banu Sasan’
This summer, we will run select pieces from summer issues of ArabLit Quarterly. This excerpt from a tenth-century poem by Abu Dulaf, translated by Brad Fox, ran in the summer 2020 CRIME issue of the magazine ...
From Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi’s ‘A Friend’s Kitchen’
Next month, Poetry Translation Centre is releasing a collection of poetry by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, A Friend's Kitchen, translated by Bryar Bajalan and Shook. To mark the occasion, they have shared an excerpt from the introduction and two poems from the collection ...
Lit & Found: On Humor in Poetry and Translation
"If you are trying to avoid reproducing violence or trauma as it is, if you are trying to distill something in it that evokes something that makes it relatable, or accessible to a stranger—to make it vulnerable—humor plays a beautiful role there." ...
