Asmaa Azaizeh’s memoir is an exploration of the universal nature of caretaking, love, and loss. But it is also intensely specific, bringing us into the world of death and its meanings in the farmlands surrounding a Galilee village.
For this year’s Women in Translation Month, we wanted to introduce readers to a few of the women in key roles across the publishing industries across countries in the Maghreb and Mashreq.
These three translations of Asmaa Azaizeh’s “Dragonflies” appeared in the first issue of ArabLit Quarterly, which came out in the fall of 2018.
“Yesterday, I handed all my poems to my publisher. / I feel like I handed him my head / and the words I speak from now on
/ will come out of his mouth. / What a disaster!”
“For me, actually, I think we are impacted by male writers who are writing now, and they are writing about broken masculinity, which I don’t like either. So maybe women are free of this, relatively. Maybe they are marginalized, so they have more opportunity to think, to write.”
Wales PEN Cymru is accepting submissions for their Translation Challenge until May 31.
“Every time we stopped in the shade of a tree, / one of us would shout: ‘Here we are!’ / A fantasy mightier than mountains.”
Today is publication day for the first-ever ArabLit Quarterly.
