Language: Arabic

Towards a Greater Social Consciousness: Persa Koumoutsi on Translating Arabic Literature Into Greek

November 4, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Persa Koumoutsi

If a text is written simply to express our personal wants or concerns, it is not literature, in my view, but a form of self-centered expression.

Born and raised in Cairo, Persa Koumoutsi is a literary translator and a writer. Having returned to Greece after completing her studies at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, she began focusing solely on translating Arabic literature into Greek in 1993. She has since worked on the works of many distinguished authors, including fourteen novels by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, as well many Arab poets. Her bibliography includes the first Anthology of Contemporary Arabic Poetry in Greek, for which she received the First Prize of the Hellenic Society of Literary Translators in 2017. Among her other works, the Αnthology of Modern Arabic Female Poetry was also widely lauded in 2022. She has also published the Αnthology of Palestinian Poetry and the Anthology of Egyptian Poetry.

In this interview, originally conducted in Greek, I spoke with Persa about the renewed interest in Palestinian literature in times of genocide, the importance of translation as a means to make struggles known and build solidarities beyond human borders and language barriers, prison literature, as well as the future of Arabic translation in Greece. The latter concerns not solely translation for the sake of itself, but as a powerful tool to bring forth voices of those marginalized.

Christina Chatzitheodoru (CC): Since October 7 and the ongoing genocide, several young Arab writers and poets have been translated into Greek, including your recent translation of Najwan Darwish. There is a renewed interest in Palestinian literature in particular. Can you tell us more about this?

Persa Koumoutsi (PK): Of course there is a renewed interest, not only in Greece but all over the world, especially in Europe. The tragic events in Gaza have brought to the fore an unspeakable tragedy, and thus many of my colleagues and translators around the world—and in Greece—have devoted themselves to translating works that highlight this problem and its dimensions, as well as its impact on our collective and individual consciousnesses—especially those of whom are concerned with contemporary Arabic culture and its literature. One such work is a collection by the renowned Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish entitled, in Greek, I Kourasi ton Kremasmenon (Exhausted on the Cross), which, as the title suggests, alludes to the enduring pains of the Palestinian people, the irredeemable trauma, and the grievous injustice they have been inflicted upon them. Poetry, in my opinion, is the most powerful literary genre in these cases, since everything can be said and highlighted through the condensed word of poetry. . .

CC: The Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani once stated: “My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case, and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.” How does this view relate to your own approach to translation? READ MORE…

A Country Grey with Sunlight: Samira Negrouche on Francophone and Arabophone Algerian Poetry

October 30, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

We are part of a country, a region, a language, sometimes of a generation or an aesthetic, but as authors we also try to bring a singularity.

Labelled by scholar Ana Paula Coutinho as one of the most gifted writers of the new Maghrebian literary movement, poet and translator Dr. Samira Negrouche sails across Algerian French, Tamazight, and Algerian Arabic languages. She is part of a group of Algerian writers collectively known as The October Generation, and her poetic vision (as sketched by one of her Spanish translators, the Argentine-born French author Carlos Alvarado-Larroucau) is in the same league as Stéphane Mallarmé and Alejandra Pizarnik. Resembling the Mediterranean Sea plainly visible from her Algiers apartment, her artistry and activism are fluid and expansive—crusading for the spirited interchange of literary and cultural thought across languages, artistic mediums, landscapes, and aesthetic style. ‘More literally than many poets, Negrouche has had her fingers on the pulse of Algiers’, Jill Jarvis summarises in Decolonizing Memory: Algeria & the Politics of Testimony (2021).

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Negrouche on her body of work as a poet and translator; the current Algerian poetry and literary translation scene in the Francophone, Arabophone, and beyond; and the milieu that informs her philosophy and practise as a writer and cultural worker.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You translate Algerian writers working in Arabic and Tamazight into French, and in turn, your works have been recast into several European languages. I’m interested in the ethnolinguistic milieu you come (and write) from—and write against. 

Samira Negrouche (SN): I was born in Algiers, a city that has always been multilingual. Growing up in this city, I have been surrounded by these three languages that I like to call my mother tongues (although there is a traumatic history behind it). I am lucky to be part of a Berber-speaking family that has kept our ancestral language, and it is a language I keep using every day. There is Kabyle, the local daily language we use in my family, and also is the standard Tamazight, used and taught by a much larger group.

As a citizen of Algiers, I use our common daily Arabic that is often mixed with words from other languages—mainly Berber and French. This language has its own music and images. It has a lot in common with languages used in other parts of Algeria, but retains certain specificities. Finally, the Arabic we use in newspapers and universities is more standard.

French is still the main language for scientific studies in local universities, and it is also used in many other fields. It is a vivid language, especially in urban spaces. Additionally, English is starting to gain more attention among the youngest generations. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2024

October 28, 2024  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel and Xiao Yue Shan

Exploring the breadth and depth of our latest issue!

Dive into our latest issue through the eyes of our blog editors, who take a close reading of the pieces that most moved them. In confronting shame and invisibilization, tracking the recurrent tides of grief, rending the mysterious forces of music and literature into poetry, and reimagining the painful, final moments of a migrant’s journey—these translations offer us avenues into wonderment, connection, and understanding.

When I was young, I developed a compulsion to count my fingers, pinky to thumb and back again, to fifteen, whenever I found myself in a situation I didn’t understand, or when I felt ashamed or guilty. The repetitive, reliable action was my way of putting a cork in my anxiety, to stem the building pressure that threatened to well up, and reorient myself in the world around me. No one else I knew had the same need—at least, not that I could see—and realizing this put a box around the world, shut by lock and key, depriving me of any access. In Ornela Vorpsi’s Offworld, in translation from the Italian by Antonella Lettieri, the main character Tamar feels similarly severed from the rest of the world. Where I experienced it like a dam ready to burst, Tamar feels a “fissure,” as if from an earthquake, splitting her brain and setting her apart from other people; where I had a box, Tamar views the world through a window, from which she observes the comings and goings of her neighbors and their visitors. Tamar’s fissure is fueled by an inexplicable wanting, a sense of shame and lust that she cannot put into words: “I could not tell my mother nor anyone else what was happening because I did not know either. I was brutally suspended in fear, under its control.”

From her window, Tamar watches the many sons of her neighbor Maria, entranced by their indulgence and languid masculinity, their bodies cast in light and smoke reminiscent of a Caravaggio. A Virgin Mary watches over the boys’ room, holding a baby Jesus—a reminder that God is always watching, and a source of the religious paranoia that haunts Tamar throughout her life. The religious undertones to her shame are in part what prevent her from recognizing what it is that she wants, even though she knows she lusts for something:

I too, Tamar, felt that I desired something uncatchable, even if I could not give it a name. It took many shapes, my desire, I only sensed that it was sly, that it deceived me, slipping like an eel from between my fingers, from between my thighs.

READ MORE…

Our Fall 2024 Edition Is Here!

October 24, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Feat. Jon Fosse, Mikhail Shishkin, Natascha Wodin, Bothayna Al-Essa, and Nebojša Lujanović in our Special Feature themed on outsiders

You and I, self and the other—it is the oldest, simplest difference we know. At a time of flooding across the world, from India to the US, the writers of our Fall 2024 issue call attention to physical and social separation, to the rushing waters that pull us apart, rendering us #Outsiders to one another. In exploration of this theme, we proudly bring you new work from 32 countries, including drama from Norwegian Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse, an interview with exiled Russian author Mikhail Shishkin, a review of French icon Simone de Beauvoir’s latest English publication, nonfiction by Omani writer Hamoud Saud, a spotlight on Brazilian artist André Griffo, and, for our final Brave New World Literature entry, a moving essay by the recently announced US National Book Award nominee the Kuwaiti author Bothayna Al-Essa. One year on from October 7th, Al-Essa confronts the limits of literary activism as she reflects on her video calls with a Gazan colleague: “Did I expect a person besieged in an open prison since 2006 to rejoice at the sight of a shelf of books?” In another highlight, German-Ukrainian writer Natascha Wodin’s narrator resuscitates her drowned mother, trying to fathom her across the gulf of time even as she pictures the Regnitz river washing her away. Meanwhile, Swiss poet Prisca Agustoni and Moroccan author Khalid Lyamlahy confront another kind of drowning—that of modern day migrants in search of a better life—in particular, the 269 lives lost to the sea around Lampedusa in a shipwreck, the news of which lights up Agustoni’s phone, and the death of a Gambian Lyamlahy never got to know: “I dream of a book that would contain all the words refused you, all the silences imposed on you. A book where the word ‘help’ is constantly repeated, in which the author would fade from each line, each fragment, to give you back the space denied you in life.”

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Lyamlahy’s feat of empathetic imagination leads off this edition’s wildcard Special Feature, first announced on August 15th. By the time submissions closed one month later, anti-migrant rhetoric in the US had hit a new low with Trump repeating baseless claims of Haitians “eating cats and dogs” in his presidential debate. So, although we received more than one hundred manuscripts spotlighting every stripe of outsider, we decided to carve out space for the racial/national “other” so often denigrated in politics. From Cuban author Odette Casamayor-Cisnero drawing courage from her great-great-grandmother and taking a fiery stand against racism (“I’m done with running away”) to Croatian writer Nebojša Lujanović’s nuanced portrayal of a migrant who cannot bring himself to enunciate his full name for fear of outing himself to other members of his newly chosen community, the myriad voices showcased in this Feature are resounding proof of the struggle and humanity of those we as a society are so eager to condemn to the margins. All of this is illustrated by Spain-based guest artist Anastassia Tretiakova’s haunting photography.

As a magazine that does not receive ongoing institutional support because of our own outsider status—as elaborated in the Fall 2022 issue’s Editor’s Note—Asymptote counts on readers to sustain its mission more than most. If you think this “global literary miracle” (according to Dubravka Ugrešić) deserves to continue, please take a few minutes to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member today. (Interested in joining us behind the scenes instead? Our final recruitment drive of the year closes in four days!) Thank you for your readership and support. We can’t wait to see what 2025 brings!

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A Gazan Woman’s Voice: Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah on translating Asmaa Alatawna’s A Long Walk from Gaza

October 23, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

. . . even in the face of oppression, Arab women . . . take a role in constructing their realities, demonstrating agency despite what they endure.

When it was first published in 2019, A Long Walk from Gaza resounded with Asmaa Alatawna’s evocative descriptions of girlhood, migration, and life under occupation, gathered in an acute testament against the societal and political repressions of a woman’s liberties. Today, in light of the events over the last year, it also preserves a city that has since been overwritten with violence, layering the streets, neighbourhoods, and homes of memory over the present map of destruction. In this following interview, translators Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah discuss their process in translating this nuanced portrait of Palestinian life, the element of double marginalisation within the narrative, and the emotionality of working with a story that evokes the now-gone.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF): How did you come across A Long Walk from Gaza?

Michelle Hartman (MH): I have a relationship with Interlink Publishing. It’s a smallish, independent publisher based in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the only Palestinian-owned publisher in the United States. It’s committed to doing many different things, particularly bringing fiction written in Arabic to English readers—and it’s been doing this for a very long time. There’s a significant list of Arab writers whom the publisher wants to bring to life in English. They occasionally send me novels, and A Long Walk from Gaza was one of them. As Caline and I were working on another project at the time, I sent this book to her for her opinion.

Caline Nasrallah (CN): As Michelle said, we have already worked on several things together, so we have this relationship of her sending me books to read. I’ll then go through these books and decide if we could continue working on them. Once she sent me Asmaa’s novel, I was so taken by it, and I thought it was an important project we had to work on. I felt a duty. I read it, then we discussed it more, and we went ahead.

IF: That’s great. As a literary translator, I usually read a book and find something that speaks to me, motivating me to translate it. What drew you to this book? What are the elements that convinced you to spend much time with it?

CN: Asmaa’s novel is a must-read because of the way it describes life under occupation and all of the hardships that come along with that, specifically in Gaza. There’s little that comes out of Gaza because of the situation on the ground, so the book felt like a lens into something we had never really seen before—that made it feel more relevant. Asmaa reveals this double layer of life under occupation, tracing life as a girl and a woman under occupation, the reality of occupation and internal issues impacting the society in which she lived. While united within a cause, women were also affected by society’s actions. It’s imperative to recognise this aspect, even though it’s often overlooked in literature focusing on a common enemy. Calling out injustice wherever it exists is essential.

READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Men in the Sun and The Dupes

October 9, 2024  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou, Junyi Zhou, and Mia Ruf

. . . the film refuses to downplay their suffering and invites us, the spectators, to partake in their anguish as something fundamentally embodied.

1962 saw the publication of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, a striking novella that depicts the fates of three Palestinian refugees as they seek to make their way out of an Iraqi camp, hoping to find work in Kuwait. From a committed revolutionary and visionary documentarian of liberatory futures, Men in the Sun was one of Kanafani’s most powerful and symbolic tales—a narrative that at once elucidated the precarious liminal position of the exiled, and criticized passivity and silence in the face of injustice. Ten years later, the story would be adapted and released as The Dupes by Egyptian director Tewfik Saleh, who repudiated Arab cinema at the time as being woefully ignorant, stating: “No one ever proposed a serious political analysis of [the Palestinians’] situation as victims of an imperialist machine.”

That same year, in 1972, Kanafani was assassinated by a car bomb placed by the Israeli Mossad; his seventeen-year-old niece died along with him. He would be remembered as a comrade who had never lost faith in the Palestinian cause, continuing to insist that the future, with all its hardships and destructions, was still a site of hope: “I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child. . .” In this vein, him and Saleh were united in the necessity of persistence, with the latter explicating: “. . . I think, even if this isn’t everyone’s opinion, that a film like The Dupes is extremely mobilizing. Under what conditions can we say a film is mobilizing? When it inspires the overthrow of a situation.”

In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, we take a look at Men in the Sun and The Dupes, the way these two master storytellers intersect, diverge, and speak together of human dignity—how it has been undermined by the world. When Men in the Sun was published, there were 1.1 million refugees registered with UNRWA; today, there are approximately six million. The persistence to live continues, and the resistance along with it.

Christina Chatzitheodorou (CC): In these two narratives, Tewfik Saleh and Ghassan Kanafani grasp the meaning behind the Nakba as an ongoing event and a transgenerational trauma, focusing on three generations of Palestinians who, after being expelled from their homeland after 1948, find themselves living in temporary shelters. Yet the fact that Kanafani uses three generations of Palestinians to tell the story symbolizes how the temporary experience of exile has been transformed into something permanent, with dispossession being at the heart of the Palestinian experience. The protagonists each have their own flashbacks—living off their memories—and though they are products of different Palestinian experiences, their commonalities are found in betrayal and despair, the material implications related to the loss of the homeland.

Mia Ruf (MR): I was also struck by the frequent use of flashbacks, both in the novel and the film. Each character enters the story with his respective memory burden. I thought that the montage interweaving Abu Quais’s experiences with shots from the broader “historical record” (diplomatic summits, etc.) was particularly impactful—it really gave us a sense of the scope of Abu Quais’ life, in both general and personal terms. Over the course of the narrative, though, as Abu Quais, Abbas, Marwan, and their smuggler Abu Khaizuran make their way toward Kuwait, all these individual memories converge, in a way. There’s a line in the text: “their thoughts seemed to run from one head to the other”—it’s almost like the men have come to share a collective consciousness, the heat melting their minds into one. In Saleh’s film, this is evoked through shots of swirling dust on the barely-perceivable road toward Kuwait—objects in the physical world become less and less individuated.

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Although the men share in one another’s misery, they die in utter isolation, in darkness, baking to death inside a sweltering water tank. Though it’s not included in the book, the film has the men banging on the insides of the tank for help in their final moments, unheard by Abu Khaizuran, who has been held up at the customs desk. This is a broader theme in the film and text: the exiles’ repeated pleas for help, the world’s failure to respond, and the crushing sense of isolation and betrayal that results.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: A Long Walk From Gaza by Asmaa Alatawna

September 30, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Alatawan’s novel is both personal and political; at its heart, it’s a story about freedom.

In Asmaa Alatawna’s mesmerizing and clear-sighted debut novel, A Long Walk from Gaza, the long journey of migration is revealed as a dense mosaic of innumerable moments—a gathering of the many steps one takes in growing up, in fighting back, and in learning the truths about one’s own life. From the Israeli occupation to the daily violences of womanhood, Alatawna’s story links our contemporary conflicts to the perpetual challenges of human society, tracking a mind as it steels itself against judgment and oppression, walking itself towards selfhood’s independent definitions. We are proud to present this title as our Book Club selection for the month of September; as Palestine remains under assault, A Long Walk from Gaza stands as a powerful narrative that resists the dehumanizing rhetoric of war.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

A Long Walk From Gaza by Asmaa Alatawna, translated from the Arabic by Caline Nasrallah and Michelle Hartman, Interlink Publishing, 2024

There are some books that grab you from the very first line and hold your attention tight, right through every single word to the end; even once you’ve finished reading them, they keep delivering with their exquisite phrasings and stunning imagery, their deft, original storytelling. Asmaa Alatawna’s A Long Walk from Gaza, co-translated by Caline Nasrallah and Michelle Hartman, is one such novel. Through her enthralling and thoughtful prose, Alatawna unfolds idea after idea, fact after fact, emotion after emotion, recounting a tumultuous upbringing and journey that moves with both personal and universal resonance.

A Long Walk from Gaza is Alatawna’s debut in both Arabic and English—a semi-fictionalized, coming-of-age novel. Originally published in 2019 as Sura Mafquda, it explores the struggles of a teenage Gazan girl as she rebels against her surroundings, both at home and at school, and her heartbreak as she leaves Gaza for a new life in Europe. Her escape doesn’t resolve her problems but instead introduces new challenges, revealing the persistent, ongoing internal conflict of exile. While portraying life and a childhood under Israeli occupation and oppression, Alatawna also takes an incisive, knowing look at the patriarchal system of her own people. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 22, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and Charlie Ng

The latest in literary updates from Palestine and Hong Kong!

With a slight delay due to technical issues, in this week of dispatches from around the world our Editors-at-Large introduce the most impactful releases from their regions as of late. From Palestinian poetry that “transcends mere expression” in its beauty and purpose, to a number of works that promote public engagement with literature in Hong Kong, read on to learn more.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

Ibrahim Nasrallah, the acclaimed Palestinian poet and novelist, has recently released a poignant collection of four new poems. The collection is now translated from Arabic by Huda J. Fakhreddine and will be published by World Poetry. Written in the shadow of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, these verses serve as a powerful indictment of global indifference towards the Palestinian plight, echoing the enduring tragedy of the Nakba that began in 1948. 

“I write now so that I do not die,” Nasrallah asserts, emphasizing the urgency of his message. He believes that with each attempt to erase their existence, Palestinians become more defined, more visible. These poems, dedicated to Gaza—a small yet symbolically vast territory—transform its struggle into a universal fight against darkness and tyranny. As Pierre Joris notes, Nasrallah’s work transcends mere expression; it embodies a visceral scream of the body, mind, and spirit, affirming the existence of Palestinians while mourning the losses of those killed and the land that remains elusive.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 13, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy, Miranda Mazariegos, and Wambua Muindi

The latest from Kenya, Egypt, and Mexico!

In this edition of our column for global literary news, Arabic titles are celebrated with the National Book Award’s longlist of Translated Literature, a vital literacy program in Kenya travels to a women’s prison, and a new cinematic adaptation of one of Mexico’s most important novels premiers at the Toronto International Film Festival. Read on to find out more!

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt

Against the backdrop of the war in Gaza, literature emerges as a beacon of hope. Now translated into English, three Arabic literary works have been longlisted for the prestigious National Book Award for Translated Literature, standing as testaments to the resilience of the human spirit. Nasser Abu Srour’s The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom, translated by Luke Leafgren, is a poignant memoir recounting his decades-long imprisonment in Israeli jails. Through the lens of his imagination, Abu Srour transforms confinement into a realm of boundless possibility, exploring themes of love, justice, and the unwavering power of hope. The book’s evocative prose and its author’s unflinching honesty combine into a compelling narrative that has resonated with readers around the globe; interested readers can also see an excerpt published on Asymptote as a part of our All Eyes on Palestine column.

Additionally, Leri Price, a frequent contender for the National Book Award, has once again made the longlist with her translation of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home (which Asymptote had selected for the February edition of our Book Club). This haunting novel delves into the complexities of human relationships and the devastating impact of war on individuals and communities. Another longlisted work is Bothayna al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library, co-translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain. This thought-provoking novel examines the censorship of literature and its profound implications for society. I’m so glad that Arabic literature is shining thanks to the fabulous work of its translators. READ MORE…

A Polyphonic Portrait of Omani Women: A Reading of Silken Gazelles

September 9, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Through interconnected stories, Alharthi masterfully weaves a network of characters in a narrative inhabited by lively, magnificent women.

Silken Gazelles by Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, Catapult, 2024

The acclaimed Omani writer and academic Jokha Alharthi has emerged as an increasingly significant voice on the international literary landscape since her novel, Celestial Bodies (translated by Marilyn Booth), was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2019. Now, once again, Catapult Press has opened the floodgates to another tentacle of the Omani society in the form of Alharthi’s fragmented worlds. In her latest novel Silken Gazelles, also gracefully translated by Booth, a wide net reins in the past to the present, the village to the city, sisterhood to motherhood, and love to loss. The dreamy and nonlinear narrative moves forward and backward in time, treating generations as flexible containers and relying on polyphony to create a poetic geometry of voices.

Tellingly, the intertwined threads of the narrative are captivating from the very beginning; extremely concise hints are made in the early chapters towards the throughline, but the hints are almost complete in themselves. At the end of the first chapter, for instance, Ghazaala’s life is wrapped up in a few sentences. “Within five years [she] had given birth to twins,” writes Alharthi, “finished her secondary education, and entered the university. In her final year of study in the College of Economics, the Violin Player ran away from the house of marriage.” In a similar vein, in the second chapter, when talking about Ghazaala’s foster mother, Saada, Alharthi writes:

It would have seemed so ordinary, so natural, for Saada to live to be a hundred years old. For Saada to always be there, preparing maghbara for the cow and coconut sweets for the children, drawing milk and cream, feeding Ghazaala and Asiya and Mahbuba and the goats, undoing her hair and baking as she sang, exuding a fragrance of incense and fresh dough, laughing her ringing laugh, and forever gathering the plants that could treat poisons and fevers from the high slopes surrounding Sharaat Bat. . . But Saada never made it, not even to thirty.

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Asymptote Podcast: In Conversation with Jamal Saeed

August 29, 2024  |  in Podcast  |  by Vincent Hostak

Don’t missing this latest episode featuring a conversation with one of our contributors to the current issue!

Join us today for a heartfelt conversation with exiled Syrian author Jamal Saeed, author of the 2022 autobiography My Road from Damascus (ECW Press, Toronto). Podcast Editor Vincent Hostak recently sat down with Saeed, now based in Canada, to discuss his devastating short story, a highlight of our recent Summer 2024 edition. Written amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza and translated into English by longtime collaborator Catherine Cobham, My Mother Fatima’s Cough plumbs the depth of grief and loss that follow generations of a family displaced multiple times over. The discussion is accompanied by a reading of an excerpt in English. Listen to the podcast episode now.

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To Exist At All: On Nasser Abu Srour’s Prison Memoir

August 26, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Matt Hanson

. . . Abu Srour exercises a poet’s iteration of prose, gliding towards the mystic wonders of his undivided, individual experience.

The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom by Nasser Abu Srour, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, Other Press, 2024

In his opening note to the readers of his prison memoir, The Tale of a Wall, Palestinian poet Nasser Abu Srour wishes a “rugged time” to those who are heading into his scintillating prose, a terrain which is also interspersed with charged moments of verse. Indicating that its author is a romantic at heart, this philosophical and nihilist work of mental abstraction was inspired by the “womb of a concrete wall” that has held Abu Srour since 1993, when he was given a life sentence at the age of twenty-three for being an alleged accomplice in the murder of a Shin Bet intelligence officer.

As literature, The Tale of a Wall is a visceral, Dionysian feast of words, lain with a delicate hand. Fired by righteous indignation and howling with a disembodied eccentricity, Palestinian self-determination is here distilled into a single voice, tortured within the echo chambers of a confession table and the paper cuts of intellectualism, finishing with a full course of epistolary melodrama. The memoir itself is cleaved in two, with the first half dedicated to letting go, to saying farewell to the world after his incarceration in Hebron Prison in the last year of the First Intifada. The latter portion is devoted to his relationship with a woman named Nanna, a diaspora Palestinian who returns to her ancestral homeland to capture his heart with a power rivalling that of Israel’s occupying force.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 16, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy, Thuy Dinh, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Egypt, Vietnam, and Kenya!

This week, our Editors-at-Large report on beloved literary figures and emerging talents from their respective regions. From personal tributes to literary luminaries to fan meetups, read on to find out more!

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large reporting from Egypt

In this dispatch, I won’t be reporting on literary festivals and book fairs, as usual. But I will share some good news that personally brought me happiness and gratitude in troubled, gloomy days: Literary translator and cultural worker Nariman Youssef was named head of the Poetry Translation Center (PTC), and Nashwa Nasreldine has joined the PTC team as editor. Excitingly, two Arabic translators have taken over the PTC though they were recruited through totally separate processes. Let this lovely takeover begin and stay tuned for all the amazing work they will bring into the world alongside the PTC’s already brilliant team.

When I praise the new leadership of the PTC, I speak from experience. One day in 2021, I stumbled upon a lifeline: a pay-what-you-want online workshop at PTC. This workshop, led by the extraordinary Nariman Youssef, laid the foundational bricks for my journey as a literary translator. Translating Mustafa Ibrahim’s “Nothing of Note” under her patient, quiet, and profoundly insightful guidance was a revelation. It was as if she was born to lead, with an innate ability to listen, to nurture, and to inspire.

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On Love & War: A Conversation with Majed Mujed

August 14, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

I’ve remained trying to confront death with the power of meanings that call for clinging to life, love, and the radiant beauty of human emotions.

Life is a perpetual conflict between love and war, their supposedly diametric imageries pervading our consciousness. In literature, our depictions of love have adopted the imagery of war to convey the depths of human emotion, and to describe and further lovers’ means and ends. Astonishingly, Iraqi writer and journalist Majed Mujed goes beyond imagery to present love as war, and war as love. “My poems are infused with love,” says Mujed, “even if they sometimes depict the struggles that I and the people of my country have faced.”

Majed Mujed had published six poetry collections in Arabic and received several awards in his native Iraq. Before moving to Ireland in 2015, Mujed worked in Iraq as a journalist and a cultural section chief of Iraqi official newspaper, al-Sabbah, and editor in other local Arabic journals and magazines. He is the recipient of the inaugural “Play It Forward Fellowship Programme,” a pilot programme lasting for eighteen months, offered by The Stinging Fly and Skein Press, and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. This program aimed at creating pathways for writers to develop, showcase, and publish their work.

Mujed’s The Book of Trivialities, published by Skein Press in 2023 and artfully rendered into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, features Mujed’s original Arabic poems alongside their English translation. In my review of the book in Poetry Ireland Review Issue 141, edited by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, I wrote: “The Book of Trivialities is at once an immersion into a war-torn country and discovery (or rediscovery) of a unique voice in Arabic poetry. This beautifully lush book mirrors our own potential and challenges the violence and materialism of the post-20th century.”

In this interview, I spoke with Mujed on the meaning of poetry, the process of translation, love, war, death, and more. This interview was conducted in Arabic, and I translated it into English.

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF): What’s your definition of poetry? And how can poetry change the world?

Majed Mujed (MM): Poetry, in my view, is the wellspring of human emotion, a symphony of words that resonates with the deepest chords of our being. It is the art that captures the essence of our existence, speaking to our divine nature and the enduring principles that govern our lives. Poetry, when imbued with innovative aesthetic and artistic qualities, leaves an indelible mark on our consciousness. It expands our horizons, deepens our understanding of truth, and fosters acceptance of its consequences. This transformative influence prioritizes the humane aspects of our being, steering us away from violence and oppressive behaviours. The impact of poetry extends beyond the realm of words, encompassing the broader spectrum of art, intellectual pursuits, and philosophical endeavours. When we declare that art has the power to change the world, we are essentially acknowledging its potential to transform humanity. By challenging our rigid thought patterns and moral compasses, creative expression can reshape our cultural and artistic perceptions, ultimately promoting values of justice, shared goodness, and generosity. READ MORE…