This month, as in past Augusts, we focused on writing by Arab women in translation. We included new translations of stories and novel excerpts, lit lists, audio recordings of poetry, […]
This year, we continue our Women in Translation Month (#WiTMonth) Wednesday series of “9 Stories” lists.
“At some point you start to feel very patronised.”
“Like music from the courts of the Abbasid Caliphate after a decadent cybernetic makeover.”
“We ran poetry by established and emerging poets — and talked about how women’s poetry in Arabic has changed since the ’90s — published a short story from Iraq, rounded up lists of short stories available online, spoke to writers and scholars, and focused our “Lit & Found” feature on work by women.”
“This is an art that is not meant for the elites, it is meant for the people in the streets. People, I should add, who are perhaps a bit disheartened but still alert, and whose gaze is not fixed on the ground but looks up towards the sky.”
“Every day I lie and say / I know this place. / My mother’s kitchen / brims with afflictions / I must pretend to befriend it / we all know it can have only one master / from its beginning to its end”
As far as we know, there is not an anthology of work by Syrian women writers, in English translation.
Meanwhile, in an August episode of the new podcast MAQSOUDA, co-hosted by Farah Chamma and Zeina Hashem Beck, the host-poets discuss Mersal’s «فكرة البيوت», or “The Idea of Houses.”
