Posts by Anna Mebel

What’s New in Translation: July 2025

July 14, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Anna Mebel, Jason Gordy Walker, Jordan Silversmith, and Kaelie Giffel

Newly released titles from Morocco, India, Norway, Haiti, Spain, Austria, Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, and Chile!

This month, we’re delighted to present eleven titles from eleven countries, including a lyrical litany of dreams from a Nobel laureate, a psychologically thrilling fiction-study of domestic violence and complicity, a rollicking novel on poverty and police repression in a Brazilian favela, a sharp and surrealistic collection that deeply probes the connection between death and poetry, and much, much more. . .  

1

Writings on Translation by Abdessalam Benabdelali, translated from the Arabic by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jordan Silversmith

“What is at stake in translation,” Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali writes, “is the strangeness of the other.” In Writings on Translation, a slim but resonant volume translated with clarity and philosophical sensitivity by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Benabdelali argues not only that translation is foundational to the development of Arabic and European thought, but that it constitutes a mode of ethical relation—a hosting of the stranger.

Composed of essays selected from two earlier Arabic-language works, this collection positions translation not as the failed transfer of meaning between stable tongues, but as a generative rupture in the myth of linguistic purity. Echoing Derrida and drawing on classical Arabic poetics, Benabdelali deftly critiques the nationalist drive to see language as a closed identity. “The instrument of translation is a living language,” he writes, “and its mirror is condemned to be broken.” It is in this shattering that thought is permitted to migrate.

What emerges then is a meditation on translation as both inheritance and resistance. Benabdelali revisits the Abbasid-era Bayt al-Hikma, critiques 18th-century French Orientalism, and confronts the ambivalence of Arabic literary modernity, where some authors write in expectation of translation while others fear its erasure. His essays resist binary framings of colonizer and colonized, instead advocating for a polyglossic hospitality in which meaning is always provisional and always in motion. READ MORE…

A Landing, or a Recommendation Against Reading Jon Fosse Mid-Air

March 26, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Anna Mebel

Perhaps we’re all lonely and anonymous in our approach towards death, towards the divine, or whatever the “shining whiteness” is.

If you’ve never felt literature’s somatic effects, perhaps you just haven’t encountered the right book—or been in the right place. In this following essay, Anna Mebel explores the perilous consequences of reading Jon Fosse on a plane, where the Norwegian author’s quieting haunting novella, A Shining, catalyzed a sudden contact with apparitions, anonymity, and death at thirty thousand feet up in the air. Where certain texts e may be escapist channels, others set us ever more firmly in our bodies.

I read Jon Fosse’s A Shining on the plane back to Houston after visiting my parents in Miami, having bought the book at the airport bookstore—a sleek black copy with gold branches on the cover that stood out among thrillers, romance novels, and self-help tomes. Why not a Nobel Prize winner, I thought, and a short book too—the perfect length for a three-hour flight and a better use of my time than a magazine I’d leave crumpled and half-read.

I’ve never been one to fear flying, though I’ve often thought about how an old poetry professor—now dead—had described the shape of the plane as a tomb, comparing the experience of flying to being buried alive. Even with the recent rash of freak aviation accidents (growing more frequent by the day during the Trump administration), I still comforted myself with the logic that the odds of anything catastrophic befalling me were tiny. I boarded my plane listening to ambient harp music, and when I got to my seat, I wedged A Shining into the metal contraption that passes for a seat pocket on a Spirit flight. READ MORE…