“Would the original have sounded like Jabra’s English in Hunters in a Narrow Street, a product of the 1950s, in which the characters swoon and passionately exclaim ‘Darling!’? And if the original of Cry in a Long Night sounded like that, was I beholden to translating it back into such an idiom? Or did I owe my reader the language of 2022?”
Read moreA few photos from Jabra’s archives, from 1940s Jerusalem, and the same sites now.
Read moreThis talk by literary historian Elizabeth Holt will explore the intersection of oil, modernism, and empire, to consider how pipelines and energy infrastructure curate Arabic literature.
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“The wave of days rises / and recedes, bidding farewell to / shells of love and hate / upon the body / resounding with the echoes of words.”
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“Usefully, the Banipal list is not just a list, but also includes brief introductions to both the works and their authors, as well as some contextualization.”
Read moreYet Iraqi literature continues, somehow, to blossom. There are older writers Fadhil al-Azzawi and Muhammad Khudayyir still at work (although the former in exile), and much younger ones, too: Thirtysomething Iraqi Hassan Blassim has been called “perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive.”
Read moreI missed this in last week’s Al Ahram Weekly, but I suppose it wasn’t “timely” in any case: these are memories of a Palestinian who died in 1994 and whose […]
Read moreI have known Jabra Ibrahim Jabra—whose relatives and Baghdad home were lost to a car bomb last month—as a novelist and memoirist. However, the great Palestinian writer, who died in […]
Read moreSomehow, I thought I could quickly track down each of these 100 titles, translate them (roughly), note whether or not an English translation or excerpt exists, and be done with […]
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