Zahia Rahmani’s ‘Muslim’ Wins 2018 Hemingway Grant
How have I lived these past days? Everyone wants me, everyone condemns me. “Are you one of theirs?” “No.” “Are you one of ours?” “No.” Then you’re a Muslim!
How have I lived these past days? Everyone wants me, everyone condemns me. “Are you one of theirs?” “No.” “Are you one of ours?” “No.” Then you’re a Muslim!
I answered her, my eyes fixed on a pile of clothes, deep in thought, “I’ve got to find the dress, the dress is the key, it’s the ax that will cut down poverty right from its roots.”
“We had no experience of dealing with something like this. The smell from the hospital was like the stench of rotten eggs. We gave people the standard facemasks but it did no good.”
For #WITMonth, ten short stories by women, translated from Arabic to English, by writers from Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Jordan.
“Collaborations, hybrids, and translations are welcome.”
The last, the short-short “A Man in a Cup,” is an adapation of a short story by Iraqi writer Hadiya Hussein of the same name. If you won’t be in London, you can watch it online.
“When my mother died in the mid-seventies, her only extant portrait took on a greater significance.”
“I suspected that, though Lyons’ translations would point me to relevant episodes, I could not trust his framing of the characters’ actions. And indeed, I found that he frequently left out important details with a bearing on gender roles.”
As Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth) opens, we list nine of the best women’s works translated from Arabic to English and published in 2018.