How to Swim the Backstroke with a Shilka Missile
“They say this city was once beautiful.”
Women in Translation Month
Sunday Classics: Samira Azzam, Whose ‘Relative Obscurity Today Is a Grave Injustice’
“I would love for her entire corpus to be translated, particularly given that what little has been so far is highly unrepresentative of her overall body of literature.”
#WiTMonth Friday Finds: Rachida Madani in English and Arabic
“But men / but the wind push her out on the cliff. / She watches the ocean / she would like to hurl herself into the ocean / to drink up the ocean.”
Three to Read: Maghrebi Women Writing in Dutch
For Women in Translation Month (#WiTMonth), we focus on three Maghrebi women writing in Dutch.
#WiTMonth’s Translate This: Hadiya Hussein’s ‘What Will Come’
“You’ll find something that looks like a boulder, but it’s not—it’s cork, painted so that it resembles rock. Push it aside and go out. A few meters away you’ll find someone who’ll look after you.”
Remembering Fadwa Suleiman: ‘Two Tears Flooding Paris’
This poem first appeared in the British magazine The Wolf. It appears here — to celebrate the life and writing of Fadwa Suleiman — with permission.
Sunday Classics: The Fearless Zaynab Fawwaz (c. 1850-1914)
“When Zaynab Fawwaz died in early 1914, long obituaries appeared in Egypt’s newspapers: she was not forgotten in her own time.”
Women’s Writing in Arabic: The State of Translations to Spanish, French, Greek
Nadia Ghanem: “At any rate, both nationally and internationally, the literary production of women is neglected, of that i’ve no doubt, and I can’t explain it to myself given that Algerian women produce so much literature.”
#WiTMonth Poetry: Amina Saïd’s ‘I Live Here in the Basement of the Gare de Lyon’
“you come from somewhere else too he says / and the stones moan with absence / the earth stops turning / once yes once I also had a country”