Omar Khalifah’s fast-paced and funny debut novel, Sand-Catcher, was published in Arabic in 2020 and last year in Barbara Romaine’s English translation. Here, Tugrul Mende talks about this novel—which focuses on what it means to remember the Nakba—with author Omar Khalifah and translator Barbara Romaine.
It’s publication day for Omar Khalifah’s fast-paced, satiric, & thrilling debut novel, Sand-Catcher, translated by Barbara Romaine. In this excerpt, one of the core characters, the journalist known only as […]
If you know of other Arabic books forthcoming in translation in December 2024 that should be added to this list, please let us know either in the comments or at […]
This month, we can look forward to new non-fiction, poetry, and novels in translation.
“You’ll find something that looks like a boulder, but it’s not—it’s cork, painted so that it resembles rock. Push it aside and go out. A few meters away you’ll find someone who’ll look after you.”
I don’t, as a rule, object to “foreign” words in English-language texts. Would Beckman call Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart an ethnic glossary? And yet it’s full of untranslated terms, and not just the Big Three: flora, food, and dress. Many of the italicized terms, in Things Fall Apart, force the reader to try to see Igbo culture on its own terms instead of “in translation.”
