Category Arabic
A Voice Sufficiently “Raspy”: Anna Levett in Conversation with Translator Robyn Creswell
In November 2023, Robyn Creswell was awarded ALTA’s National Translation Award in Poetry for “The Threshold.” Nominally, this became the occasion for our interview, but as a longtime admirer of his work, I was excited to ask him not only about this collection, but about his broader philosophy and practice of translation.
One Man, Three Voices: A Case for an English Retranslation of Mohamed Choukri’s “Al-Khubz al-Hafi”
This call is not to assert that “For Bread Alone” is a poor translation. Instead, for a book whose translations have been so hotly contested and so politically bound, the more perspectives available for an Anglophone audience, the better these complexities can be elaborated and explored. To expect a single translation to capture every facet of a work is to set it up for failure, but Bowles’ alteration of Choukri’s nuanced critique of colonial violence and its impact on the everyday realities of Moroccan communities and individuals is not a loss the Anglophone readership should be expected to sustain. Whereas a single translation acts as a lens through which we view a slightly altered work, the existence of many translations promise to render this lens kaleidoscopic.
On the Scale of Conflict, its Crimes and Traumas: Adania Shibili’s Minor Detail, Translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette
By Sheera Talpaz “Try to remember some details,” implores the speaker of one of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai’s well-known poems (Amichai, 318). In translation, it’s impossible to tell that the original Hebrew recalls the Passover Haggadah’s Rabbi Yehuda (naturally), who proffered a mnemonic for the ten plagues, brutal punishments that God memorably rained down on […]
On Dispersal and Translation: Golan Haji’s “A Tree Whose Name I Don’t Know,” Translated from Arabic by Stephen Watts and Golan Haji
By Ghada Mourad In an interview with Prairie Schooner, Golan Haji, a Kurdish Syrian poet, translator, and pathologist residing in France since 2011, states: “Translation is a process of changing places while you are in the same place […] It’s the stranger who comes to your house, is welcomed, is invited, and you know that […]
Translation without an Original: Raja Alem’s “Sarab,” Translated from Arabic by Leri Price
By Amanda Al-Raba’a On November 20, 1979 an insurgent group called al-Ikhwan led by Juhayman al-‘Utaybi besieged the Grand Mosque in Mecca in opposition to the Saud family and increased Western influence in Saudi Arabia. Two of the pillars of Islam are intimately linked to the Grand Mosque: it houses the Ka‘aba, towards which Muslims […]
Within the Lines: Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue, Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
Reviewed by Andrea Shah Basma Abdel Aziz’s début novel, The Queue, was written in the span of two fevered months, after the author came upon a line of people waiting outside a closed government office in her native Egypt: “The gate to the building would certainly open shortly, I thought to myself; after all, it […]
Bridging the Distance: Marilyn Booth’s Translation of The Penguin’s Song by Hassan Daoud
Reviewed by Ghada Mourad The Penguin’s Song (ghināʾ al-batrīq) tells the story of a family of three whose lives are completely transformed as a result of their displacement out of the old city of Beirut. The twenty-year old son, whose upper body deformation makes his figure and way of walking evocative of a penguin’s, narrates […]