When it comes to browsing the shelves and diving head-first into the wonderfully vast world of translated literature, sometimes you just need a little help from your friends. In this case—let us be your friends. Our editors are sharing their favourite reads to make sure that yours is time well spent.
Readers already familiar with Nina Berberova’s fiction in collections such as Billancourt Tales, The Tattered Cloak and The Ladies from St. Petersburg will find her first novel—translated by Marian Schwartz—a surprising divergence in style from the lightness of touch and sparse but pungent details in her stories about small casts of characters grappling with challenges in their everyday lives. Written in 1928-29, The Last and the First (Pushkin Press, 2021) is a drama on a broader canvas about Russian émigrés in France struggling to decide whether to return to the Soviet Union or to throw all their energies into establishing a meaningful life in France, specifically whether to join Ilya, the messianic central character, toiling on the land in Provence. It is driven by a complex plot in which the true identities and motives of some characters are initially hidden, and stylistically has more in common with novels of the nineteenth century, Dostoevsky being the writer who springs most to mind for the intense and knotted emotional relationships between the main characters, their striving for some kind of salvation, as well as in the vivid and grimy descriptions of the backstreets of Paris.
—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor (Issue Production)
A tale of two lives, that of a poetess living in the USA and of a Yazidi who saves the women of Sinjar, unfolds through a series of phone calls and a single face-to-face visit. In her pensive The Beekeeper of Sinjar (New Directions, 2018), masterfully translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss, the Iraqi-born Dunya Mikhail recalls her conversations with Abdullah, an ordinary man turned local hero, who has chosen to devote his days and nights to rescuing the innocent girls kidnapped by the militant group Daesh. Simultaneously a meditation on absurdity and a truthful account of real-life experiences, the book offers its readers a path to understanding the shifting values of a region long tormented by its past. The unimaginable loss and heartbreak that pour from every page are curiously accompanied by an almost inhuman ability to forgive, while the deceptively simple descriptions of misery bring home the scale of the disaster. Despite the traumatic events, however, the locals have managed to retain their purity and, what is more, to find time for the poetry of existence. As we all should.
—Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large for Bulgaria READ MORE…
Radical Reading: Sara Salem Interviewed by MK Harb
I’ve increasingly thought more about what generous, kind, and vulnerable reading might look like instead.
At the height of the pandemic, I—like so many of us—looked for new sources of intrigue and intellectual pleasure. This manifested in finding Sara Salem’s research and reading practice, Radical Reading, which was a discovery of sheer joy; Salem views books and authors as companions, each with their own offerings of certain wisdom or radical thought. When she shares these authors, she carries a genuine enthusiasm that they might come with some revelation.
I interviewed Salem as she sat in her cozy apartment in London wrapping up a semester of teaching at the London School of Economics. We discussed our lockdown anxieties and our experiences with gloomy weather until we arrived at the perennial topic: the art of reading. The interview continued through a series of emails and transformed into a beautiful constellation of authors, novelists, and activists. In what follows, Salem walks us through the many acts of reading—from discussing Angela Davis in Egypt to radicalizing publications in her own work, in addition to recommending her own selections of radical literature from the Arab world.
MK Harb (MKH): Reading is political, pleasurable, and daring. Inevitably, reading is engaged in meaning-making. How did you arrive at Radical Reading as a practice?
Sara Salem (SS): Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of spending long afternoons at home reading novels, and when I think back to those novels, I find it striking that so many of them were English literature classics. I especially remember spending so much time reading about the English countryside—to the extent that today, when I am there, or passing it on a train, I get the uncanny feeling that it’s a place I know intimately. Later, when I read Edward Said’s writing on Jane Austen and English literature more broadly—its elision, erasure, and at times open support of empire—it struck me that we can often read in ways that are completely disconnected from the lives we live. This tension was what first opened up entire new areas of reading that completely changed my life, among which was the history of empire across Africa; at the time I was living in Zambia, where I grew up, and often visited Egypt. Critical history books were probably my first introduction to what you call the practice of radical reading, of unsettling everything you know and have been taught in ways that begin to build an entirely different world.
I like that you say reading is engaged in meaning-making, because it has always been the primary way in which I try to make sense of something. Even more recently, as I’ve struggled with anxiety, reading above all became my way of grappling with what I was experiencing: what was the history of anxiety, how have different people understood it, and how have people lived with it? I realise, of course, that not everything can be learned from a book, but so far, I’ve found that what reading does provide is a window into the lives of people who might be experiencing something you are, making you feel less alone.
MKH: How do you reconcile reading for pleasure versus reading for academic and political insights? Do they intersect? Being idle has its own spatial practice of radicality at times, and I’m curious on how you navigate those constellations.
SS: This question really made me think! In my own life, I have always made the distinction of fiction as pleasure and non-fiction as academic/work-related. So, if I need to relax, or want to take some time off, I will instinctively reach for fiction, and if I want to start a new project, I think of which academic texts would be helpful. However, this began to change about five or six years ago, when I began to think more carefully about how fiction speaks to academic writing and research, as well as how non-fiction—unrelated to my own work—can be a great source of pleasure and relaxation. This has meant that they have begun to intersect much more, and it has enriched both my academic work and my leisure time. READ MORE…
Contributor:- MK Harb
; Language: - Arabic
; Places: - Egypt
, - Zambia
; Writers: - Ahdaf Soueif
, - Arwa Salih
, - Huda Tayob
, - Mahmoud Darwish
, - Sonallah Ibrahim
, - Thandi Loewenson
, - Waguih Ghali
; Tags: - intersectional feminism
, - migration
, - Race
, - radicalism
, - Reading
, - sexuality
, - social commentary