Publication Day: Ramy al-Asheq’s ‘My Heart Became a Bomb’
“We knew the hole that was in the back of the head / would try to swallow up whatever we threw behind us / like a vacuum cleaner”
Ramy al-Asheq
Finding a Voice in English for ‘My Heart Became a Bomb’
“Too frequently, I think, translators give in to the idea that a foreign text needs to retain a lot of that foreignness—this is Venuti’s foreignizing versus domesticating debate.”
Ramy Al-Asheq: We Need ‘A Place We Can Represent Ourselves’
“Also, there is much more ignorance about Arabic and Arab literature, and Arab countries, than the ignorance of us about the rest of the world. We have dictators, we have a stupid education system, but here there is no excuse for them, because the information is there.”
On the ‘Boom’ of Syrian Literature in Berlin
In the last five years, there has been a surge of interest in Syrian writing in German translation. In this series of interviews, writers, poets, publishers, and artists in Berlin talk about their experience with the publishing industry in Germany and beyond.
Two Books by Ramy al-Asheq Forthcoming in English Translation
“The situation in Syria for the past decade has been complicated and confounding, and Ramy’s work emerges out of this confusion not to give us solutions but instead to bring us into it as well.”
Extend Your Summer with the New ArabLit Quarterly: The Sea
Includes the perfect hot-and-sweet late-summer story from Muhammad al-Hajj, in pitch-perfect translation by Yasmine Zohdi.