Posts filed under 'Syrian war'

Living Inside the Text: An Interview with Marilyn Booth on Translating Jan Dost’s Safe Corridor

September 18, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

I do think it’s essential, as a translator, to bring empathy to a text, to make that empathy work in the translation, when it is appropriate.

Syrian writer Jan Dost’s Safe Corridor is a searingly surreal portrait of the physical and psychic wounds that war inflicts on the most vulnerable among us. Narrated with lyrical intensity by thirteen-year-old Kamiran, the novel blends the brutal reality with Kafkaesque metaphor, depicting Syria’s painful conflict and the ways by which its abhorrent violence is processed and internalized. Furthering this work’s poignant impact is its lucid, flowing translation by renowned author and translator Marilyn Booth; in this interview, she speaks to us about remaining faithful to voice, handling stylistic variations, and her much-admired history with Arabic literature.

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):  What first drew you to Safe Corridor and to Jan Dost’s work in particular?

Marilyn Booth (MB): I first met Jan at the Emirates LitFest in Dubai, just before the COVID pandemic. We had a wonderful conversation about literature and life, and I left with a couple of his books. When I read Safe Corridor (ممرّ آمن), I was absolutely blown away. Since then, I’ve read several more of his novels, though not all of them yet.

Jan is not only prolific but remarkably versatile—a poet, a novelist, a memoirist, and he also writes compelling historical fiction. Distinctive narrative voices are what most draw me, as both reader and translator, and that is precisely what I found in Jan’s work. He is a meticulous stylist, with hardly a wasted word. For a translator, that makes the work more demanding, but also deeply rewarding. READ MORE…

In Conversation: Ghayath Almadhoun

March 19, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Ghayath Almadhoun and Sohini Basak

My poems are full of death, but that’s because they are also full of life.

Describing Ghayath Almadhoun’s poetry in Adrenalin is anything but easy. The blurbs on the book call the collection ‘crucial political poetry’, ‘urgent and necessary’, ‘passionate and acerbic’, and ‘our wake-up call’, although we find out that Almadhoun’s own views on his poetry are slightly different. Written in the wake of the Syrian war, the refugee crisis, and a personal loss of his homeland, the poems in Adrenaline are formally experimentally and emotionally explosive. In a voice that is, in equal measure, full of wonder and irreverence for the turn the world has taken, Adrenalin dwells on war, empathy, displacement, suffering, love, and hatred unapologetically. Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham, and released by Action Books last November, this is the poet’s first selection of poems to be published in English.

The collection starts with the poem ‘Massacre’ (which can be read at our Guardian Translation Tuesday showcase), with the unforgettable lines: “Massacre is a dead metaphor that is eating my friends, eating them without salt. They were poets and have become Reporters With Borders; they were already tired and now they’re even more tired.”

Born in Damascus, the Palestinian poet Almadhoun has been living in Stockholm since 2008. The following interview was conducted over email and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Sohini Basak (SB): As a point of departure, could you tell us which writers you have been reading these days? And are you working on something new?

Ghayath Almadhoun (GB): I am now re-reading Tarafah ibn al-Abd. He was so young when he died, in the sixth century (around twenty-six years old). He is a great poet and could be described as pre-postmodern as he was ahead of his times. I’m also reading Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal.

About my work, I have begun a new project—my fifth poetry book. I find myself in front of the question that I faced when I started writing more than twenty years ago: will I survive this time? Will I be able to write something new? And, like always, I punch the world in the face and continue writing.

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