“It doesn’t feel like an Arabic novel any more to me, now that it’s translated,” Hosam Aboul-ela said. “it feels like a really unique novel of Marxist international revolution.”
Academic, translator, and writer Hosam Aboul-Ela will give a talk on “Nonfiction in the Novels of Sonallah Ibrahim: The Horizons of Translation” at Indiana University on Thursday, March 31, 2022, at 5pm EDT.
Two very different Egyptian novels appear in translation this month: They are Sonallah Ibrahim’s “provocative masterpiece” Warda, translated by Hosam aboul-Ela and Mohamed Kheir’s “musical and parabolic” Slipping, translated by Robin Moger.
“Like I say, it’s fleeting, but I could write a whole memoir, I think, just about getting that sentence translated.”
On the heels of Banipal 38: Arab American Authors (although he doesn’t mention the collection), the HuffPost’s Anis Shivani asked 10 Arab American writers: “What is distinctive about Arab-American writing today?”
