Aha! You’re expecting me to say Barghouti’s I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, which I would, except you already know you want to read Barghouti’s follow-up memoir, which should be out in English next fall from AUC Press. (The translation, I’m told, is being done by Humphrey Davies.)
I don’t, as a rule, object to “foreign” words in English-language texts. Would Beckman call Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart an ethnic glossary? And yet it’s full of untranslated terms, and not just the Big Three: flora, food, and dress. Many of the italicized terms, in Things Fall Apart, force the reader to try to see Igbo culture on its own terms instead of “in translation.”
If there is a first family of Arabic literature, it might well be Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour, Palestinian poet/memoirist Mourid Barghouti, and their poet-son Tamim Al-Barghouti.
This morning, the computers at Amazon.Com kindly alerted me (as someone who raved about Sonallah Ibrahim’s Stealth) that Egyptian author Radwa Ashour has a new book out in English this […]
