“My father got dressed, brushed off his tarbush with the sleeve of his jacket, and placed it at an appropriate tilt on his head. Then he twisted the ends of his white mustache all the way up to his nostrils. We left the apartment, locking the door behind us, and went down to the street. I noticed we were heading toward the tram stop.”
“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.”
“I think there is also the question of who gets to write Egypt’s history, and who will maintain the archives and documents necessary to tell that history?”
Coming in August: Books by Sonallah Ibrahim, Ibrahim al-Koni, and Faleeha Hassan.
Coming in June, three new books in translation by Egyptian authors.
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.
“His mouth discharged a second snort. I worried he might attack me, or tear me apart, but he settled his body back into the chair and sighed. “
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.”
