Let Us Spell Out Life: Prison Writing by Ahmed Douma
“Like Negm before him, Douma has been active in nearly every Egyptian social movement of his day. As with Negm, Douma has been arrested, detained, tried and imprisoned—twenty-two times thus far.”
Elliott Colla
Poem #10 from Ahmed Douma’s ‘Curly’
“This throng of questions wounds / Especially when the situation is “silent.”
An Excerpt from Ahmed Douma’s ‘Blasphemy’
“ns, one-sided as ever. But, as I tell my soul and its wishes, the window is merely the beginning of error. It is confusing that it looks at you while you cannot see.”
Lit & Found: Muhammad al-Maghut, tr. Elliott Colla
If only countries could be / exchanged for one another /
The way dancers are in a cabaret.
The American Soldier in Arab Novels
Blasim further said, in an interview for Barnes & Noble, that he didn’t write about Americans, and indeed “deliberately ignored stories of American soldiers, the kind that appear in Iraqi and American literature and art, either as heroes, victims, or criminals.”
A Celebration of Ibrahim al-Koni, the Desert, Russian Literature, and ‘Swiss Sufism’
Encouraged by translator/scholar/writer Elliott Colla—who had an interesting short essay about Ibrahim al-Koni in yesterday’s Ahram Online—I thought we’d make this an al-Koni week. Although not an “Arab” writer, al-Koni is one of the giants of contemporary Arabic literature, and has a unique and world-encompassing literary vision.
Ibrahim al-Koni Wins Arabic Novel Award, Donates 100,000LE Prize to Touareg in Mali and Niger
Leading Libyan author Ibrahim al-Koni yesterday received the 100,000LE “Arabic Novel Award” at the closing ceremony of the Cairo Novel Conference.
Is the ‘Zone of Translation’ a ‘War Zone’?
At the end of this month, a School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)-organized translation conference will kick off in London with a discussion of Arabic-English “translation and the post-modern.”
Eid Links: Free Rafik Schami Download, Follow Colla through Palestine, Events, More
To celebrate (and promote, one would think) their new Rafik Schami release, The Calligrapher’s Secret, Interlink has sent out downloads of Schami’s essay on Arabic calligraphy, “What I Create Will Outlast Time: The Story of the Beauty of Arabic Script.” The essay—like Schami’s other works—is translated by the very-award-winning Anthea Bell.
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