Ten months and six days after the sudden fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and his regime, DoppelHouse Press released Critical Conditions: My Diary of the Syrian Revolution, the eyewitness chronicles of nurse-turned-frontline-war-reporter Hadi Abdullah, ably translated by Alessandro Columbu.
A beautifully tender, skin-of-ice-on-water short fiction by Saga Hamdan, translated by Ibtihal Rida Mahmood.
Since 2014, the month of August has been celebrated as Women in Translation Month (#WiTMonth). And like the month itself, translation sits in that “odd uneven time,” a liminal space where language and meaning can be negotiated, reclaimed, or even appropriated. When it comes to the women who inhabit this space, as authors and as translators, the liminality of that space feels like a fertile ground for reclaiming language, narrative, and the power of truth-telling.
There is a beautiful moment in iconic Syrian poet Riyad al-Saleh al-Hussein’s “War. War. War,” here translated by Ibtihal Rida Mahmood, when the narrator sees his beloved on a beach, “Taking a break from despair / She asks me about a delicious place with no police / A place where we could exchange poems and kisses,” and the narrator tells her about this place.
The iconic Syrian poet Da’ad Haddad (1937-1991) was known by fellow Syrian artists in her lifetime, but — as Ibtihal Rida Mahmood wrote in a profile of the poet — […]
