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.)Continue Reading

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.”Continue Reading