PEN Atlas on Booktrust

PEN Atlas is featured on Booktrust's Translated Fiction site, a lively and exciting resource whether you're a reader or translator, with reviews, articles (including an inside look at the BCLT Translation Summer School), a blog, and news of UK prizes and initiatives for fiction in translation.

Read: Translation in Practice

Thanks to Words Without Borders for flagging up this new book from Dalkey Archive Press. Based on a British Council symposium, translator Gill Paul gathered contributions from leading translators, including PEN members Ros Schwartz and Amanda Hopkinson, to present the most coherent and comprehensive guide to the pragmatics of translation.

Egypt: Belal Fadl's Essays reviewed by Baheyya

A thoughtful review by Egyptian blogger Baheyya gives an intricate context for the new collection of essays by screenwriter and al-Destour editor (read more about those aspects of his career in this Egypt Today article) Belal Fadl. Baheyya describes his new collection as "irresistibly named" and she's right -- I'd definitely pick up a book called The Original Inhabitants of Egypt: Stories about the Genius of the Place, the Idiocy of the Rulers, and the Indifference of the People if it were ever to appear in translation. "Original Inhabitants," Baheyya explains, are

Egyptians who are neither rich nor middle class, but somewhere in the vast space beneath, what we alternately call lower-middle class, lower class, underclass, the marginalized, or the horrid “simple folk” (البسطاء).

But, as she goes on to elucidate, Fadl has made his career out of peddling stereotypes of these ordinary Egyptians in films and TV -- and he does so in many of the essays. As Baheyya avers, this seems a shame because -- from her account, at least -- the book appears to open up a view of Egypt's proletariat (to use a word coined by another great essayist), at once traditional and modernising, that translations of Alaa al-Aswany's novels have only begun to broach for non-Arabic readers.

Baheyya has thoughtful reviews of two other works of non-fiction that cast a light: Karima a-Hifnawy's Diary of a Pharmacist (review), a memoir by an outstanding activist who -- like her better-known contemporary Nawal al-Saadawi -- combines medicine, human rights and an assured literary tone, and novelist Galal Amin's What Has Life Taught Me (review). The blogger may claim that

Autobiography is my least favourite literary genre, too easily prone to posturing and self-exoneration, or else heavy woe-is-me tales about the author’s suffering at the hands of a cruel world. Life is already too full of braggarts and whiners to have to be subjected to them in books

but her reviews suggest that -- above and beyond the pitiful rate of fiction in translation (see ThreePercenter Chad Post's most recent round-up and sharp analysis of US stats at Publishing Perspectives -- we're missing out if memoirs, essays and autobiographies aren't crossing languages and cultures as well.

Literature Without Borders

A few news items on the free movement and translation of literature across borders:

Iraqi novelist Fadhil al-Azzawi's novel The Last of the Angels is published has been translation by The Free Press [US], and the first review is out in the Quarterly Conversation.

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Knesset Member Yuli Tamir has proposed a draft bill that would challenge the Israeli embargo on books published in Syria or Lebanon, making books in Arabic more available in Israel. Yuval Azoulay's article in Ha'aretz looks at the challenges facing readers coming through Israeli customs or looking to obtain books in Israel, with an update on the campaign against the embargo launched by Adalah, as the Atlas reported in February.

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Emirati newspaper The National offers a global overview of its summer reading recommendations with a nifty hotspotted map. Recs include Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game and Bahaa Taher's Sunset Oasis. Chad at Three Percent suggests turning this format into a social networking app like Cities I've Visited on Facebook...

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And Three Percent also put up this short video of the Big Think's interview with Alane Salierno Mason, founder of the brilliant Words Without Borders, discussing literature in translation. In other videos (the Big Think seems to work on one idea per short film), Alane discusses the continuing fortunes of publishers of translation, the guiding impulse for WWB and her thoughts on the power of Oprah.

Call for New Translations

two lines World Writing in Translation will be accepting poetry and fiction submissions for its seventeenth volume through November 25, 2009. Previously unpublished translations from any language will be considered, and works from outside Europe are especially sought. The volume will be edited by award-winning translators Natasha Wimmer and Jeffrey Yang.

Submitters are encouraged to read previous volumes in the series, which can be ordered directly from the Center for the Art of Translation. Full submission guidelines here. Publishers interested in submitting manuscripts for serialization should contact Annie Janusch at ajanusch [at] catranslation.org.

• Previously unpublished work only.
• The translator cannot also be the author of the piece unless it is a co-translation.
• We generally publish one to four poems from a single submission, but we will read up to a maximum of ten pages.
• The average prose submission is about 2500 words, but we do publish shorter and longer pieces (1000–4000 words). Short stories are preferable to novel excerpts. However, novel excerpts will be considered if thoughtfully excerpted to stand as independent pieces (to the extent possible).
• In order to be considered, submissions must include a brief introduction (400–500 words) with information about the original author, the background of the piece, and unique issues that the translation process presented. To see a sample introduction, click here. If you'd like to download it to your computer, right-click the link.
• All submissions must include a copy of the original text.
• Translators are expected to acquire copyright permission for all work not in the public domain.

Hanan al-Shaykh on Kensington Gardens

It's a bit wet to enjoy the real thing at the moment, so it's cheering to see the original stories published in pamphlets about London's Royal Parks. It's particularly great to see a story by Hanan al-Shaykh, "A Beauty Parlour for Swans," published in Arabic and English facing-page translation by Christina Phillips with the author. al-Shaykh's previous novel, Only in London, gave a mordantly entertaining insight into the mixed-and-match worlds of the Arab community in London, so her take on Kensington Gardens promises things every bit as magical as Peter Pan.

Khaled Juma: The Violin Teacher- For Gaza Wherever She Is

Our third piece from the brilliant Khaled Juma (translated by Isis Nusair and Rewa Zeinati) -- and the final piece in our New Writing from Gaza portfolio (which can be read as a series here). It's a moving meditation on making art (and life) in the shadow of the Wall.

The Violin Teacher- For Gaza Wherever She Is
Khaled Juma

“Wherever your face may turn, everything carries the potential of exploding.” Mahmoud Darwish

The sea reveals its blueness to the city* Proud of the gentleness of the air that seeps from the scent of distant women* Presents its dawn with exposure that cannot be delayed* Little girls play at the edge of a wave that was born out of a small imbalance between water and laughter* They are as light as a brief line of poetry* As beautiful as the meaning of beauty found in a dictionary* Moving towards womanhood as a challenge to time and place* The day begins as soon as the sparrow washes, with the dew of the morning, his feathers from the light of yesterday* He watches the little girls with love and concern, both part of his nature*

The raid peels away the sparrow and the wave and the girls and the dew and the light and the day before and today* A man stumbles in the darkness to understand an episode found in an extended tale* Electricity, his wife, the flour all fail him* Just like any other cadaver, the carcass of time is left hanging on the thread of the television* Time doesn’t understand why it’s become a corpse and the man doesn’t understand time and the darkness doesn’t understand the man and the new year doesn’t understand the darkness and the aircraft don’t understand the new year*

A long wait in the syllabus of night and day* Many songs are scattered around by the radio stations* The hero cannot strip off his heroism* Pigeon lovers and a language walking proudly on the asphalt* The language is killed and dies alone and away and cold as a mammoth buried in snow made of snow*

In the scene a language that’s lost its limb* Another with a broken musical scale* And a third language whose only speaker has died* With my own eyes I saw ten terms sneak into my dictionary without my lifting a single finger to stop them* The city boasts in the festival of cities* A bride is soaked in henna shaped like ladders and gentle clouds that hide the repulsive sound of something like modern computer games found in the hand of a reckless child, who kills limitlessly, the dead disappearing immediately, so he’s not delayed from his ensuing targets* The father laughs because his child completed a part of the game without losing* The electric power goes out but the instinct of the child, and so he begins to wail*

A poet sits alone, surrounded by warm air* Across from him two oranges that signify all that remains of what seems to be civilization* Daring, he eats one, making the other one feel lonely, so she says to herself: “This murderer is merciless”*
A woman hangs her horror on the window, away from boys who claim to be shivering from cold not fear* The horror falls off the edge of the window* It shatters all over the floor of the room and its shrapnel hits everything and all time* The clock on the wall has decided to retire after feeling useless at its job* A boy utters a philosophical statement unbefitting his age* The father is shocked and wishes he could go outside to inform the neighbors of his pride* The road is blocked by heavy air* The sea is blocked by two opposing notions* The horizon is pierced like a rusty aluminum can* And the flute no longer means what it says*

The lonely violin teacher leaves behind her loneliness and her violin and closes her notes upon the fingers of her students and walks away* She throws a final look of farewell at her footsteps* She kisses the hot sand and heads off without looking back* I am protected by an idea and the idea is protected by the wall:

Oh God:
Let us know of a prophet, whatever his name may be.

Translated by Rewa Zeinati and Isis Nusair

Khaled Juma: Emptiness in the Map... Emptiness on the Map

Two excellent translations to round off our successful Refuge in Words/New Writing from Gaza project -- which recently featured on the Body on the Line and on Leonard Schwartz' Cross-Cultural Poetics radio show, and in a follow up article in Counterpunch on Soumaya Sousi's prose poem The City. Isis Nusair and Rewa Zeinati co-translated these pieces.

Here's the first: a vivid, exact and exacting poem about war, media and meaning.

Emptiness in the Map… Emptiness on the Map
Khaled Juma
The options on the street are exhausted* The boy is no longer Jesus* Over the scene’s progression he moves towards final distraction * He listens to what he is not used to in daily life* The flute is irritating as it wounds the fear in the scene from the audience*And perhaps even ten extra bullets have become meaningless* Army, why so serious with your jokes?* The soldier laughed: Your speech for any color but white*

My son: You have to determine the color of the army in order to converse with a tunnel that leads to meaningfulness* Meaning has recently become devoid of its skill* The writer of the article is only interested in the font size of the newspaper* And the army is concerned with a lot more than the font size and the manner in which the demonstrators collapse* The scene quickly changes from a father whose daughter side tracked and got mixed up with tainted boys, despite their combat, to a daughter searching for a father whose features have fallen for no reason upon the asphalt* The satellite T.V. announces an ad for a new air conditioner* The boy leaves to go purchase it* He worries about his mother’s fever* But he has fallen over on his way to the air conditioner* Luckily he has not died completely*

The burden was at odds with the boy who is able to play with his soul that has the capacity to detach from him and return as a kitten* He did not use high philosophy to clarify his situation like the radio station does* The newscaster answered* The boy did what he could and so did the commentator*

The boy forgets his garden as soon as he falls asleep from the flow of medicinal liquid running through veins not designed for this* The nurses guard his sleep from their memory of passersby* Never have they encountered someone with such beauty when asleep* They sing and leave at the end of their shift* And they don’t recall him until their next shift* In his sleep a long and narrow desert* And a bird for the worry that is clueless about who squeezed both of these into sleep woven with such incredible accuracy* The desert becomes a map* The teacher points to the only color and wags his moustache and stick* There is emptiness between one desert and another* The teacher weaves his sentence out of an ancient language* This is the Nile that blushes each time it passes its own funeral* And the Nile as you know is the longest of rivers* If we exclude the rivers of heaven in their long passing under the genius of God’s genius* But the desert snores in her sleep* And her sleep is the river if you didn’t know* The boy is on a paper that’s on a line that twirls* There is emptiness in the map* There is a celebration that falls upon this emptiness and the tree is not aware of what’s under her* The pole at the end of the map is a white forest*As if the pole is making love to the desert!!*

A sudden passing of a cloud over a tent that represents a wall* The boy is a non-identical copy of those who remain in old tents*The conversation is long and useless* Experience has taught him that experience teaches no one but itself* He sifts through his friends only to find them fall through the widest of openings* He alters his riddle each year and still they all fall through* Boredom speaks from within him and he doesn’t have the ability to change his body over this whiteness that befits language* Language is tricky* He curses it as he returns to his neat yearning* The country is mine whether I utter poetry or dream it* He laughed at this thought and a nurse, unlike the rest who’ve completed their shift, smiled at him*

Three girls who sell roses lay upon his thought that breathes out of his vein* The soul remains like a little kitten* Doctors pass by* Nurses* Visitors* Cleaners* Party representatives* Roses* Female students* Singers* Journalists* Blood donors* Military officials* Leaders* And many other professions that bite him out of his bed and bow in front of him momentarily before passing along* The desert is demonstrated on the map* In the map a gap* On the map a gap and the Nile is not here, teacher* Give me my papers so I can show them to my parents* You are a handful of a student for a sad teacher* I didn’t mean it but I scribbled on the map and that’s why the Nile has disappeared* The teacher resigns, divorces his ambition and commits suicide* Light comes from the mirage at the end of the hallway* A light that does not illuminate* A boy touches the flute in a room made of wood* The plants in the room open the window with sharp vision* Producing a heart and breaking the symbol that’s in the heart* The bed opens its eye and dribbles one joint after another* The boy addresses the remaining letters and makes his bed and greets it* He covers it as if sleeping and goes outside, leaning on his teeth and barefoot, and the hallway is long and cold* Two planes flirt with the moon that gnaws at the sea* The sea curses and the moon is happy with the attention* A boy falls out of the plane, he has two braids and in his hand an architectural map that matches more than soul and less than a city* He throws his age in the sea and tries to trap the boy with an open trick* The evening and the moon leave the map* A number of notebooks on the seashore and a face imprinted on cellophane peeks from under the armpit of the only bridge in the city* The city has a relationship with herself, carving a book that is not yet bored of writing* The waves chews on delicious sand* A lonely cane passes by the wave* The sky becomes a lot of numbers that fall into the midst* The boy retreats and the waves retreat to a brief peace tour* The school remains where it is* Why is the school never boring at night?* The horses pass by exhausted in the face of the sleeping traps* In the body of a bird an explosion like Armageddon* Words escape the mouth of the storyteller and the map protests* Emptiness in the map* Emptiness on the map* A map on emptiness* A map in emptiness* The women walk by the neighborhood of the stone orphanage* They don’t understand the map* A group of soldiers pack up their things from the eye of the setting sun* And the boy fools around with his soul that resembles a small cat* She leaves him* Comes back to him* Leaves him* Comes back to him* Leaves him*Comes back to him* The darkness opens up to a devilish star that combs its rays in an imaginary mirror* Every mirror is an illusion in the night* The night is a shift and so is the day* The cat plays with luck* and the flute is in a wooden room, growing up to become a tree of music* A demonstration in the street has no harmony* A sad nation rises from behind the colorful flags and disappears into a product that has no expiration date nor the name of the country of production* The audience slows down* It lowers itself in a direction that spans the street* The noise is loud* A few seconds later only a sound* And no one is in the scene* And no scene for anyone* The trees draw the attention of the bombs that come from various plans* The sleeping people feign death just to get a line in the newspaper* And money suddenly arrives to become a factor in the equation* The city divides into a sea and a fleet of bullets at the peak of the evening* Borders are formed like water flowing over stone* The boy is no longer part of the scene* The broadcaster meets himself* The nurses look forward to the end of the shift* Never have they come across a boy with such beauty when asleep* And his slumber remains on the pillow just the way he left it* And still an emptiness in the map* And still an emptiness on the map*

Translated By Rewa Zeinati and Isis Nusair

Mourid Barghouti in conversation with Ruth Padel, London, June 2009

Thanks to Opus for cutting the video and to Mourid for posting it on his Facebook page!

Mourid Barghouti with Ruth Padel - Revised from Opus Projects on Vimeo.

Atlantic Signs Up Arabic Booker Winner

The Bookseller announces that Atlantic has signed world English rights to Azazil by Youssef Ziedan,

World Literature Weekend @ the London Review Bookshop

With many events crammed into an exciting weekend -- as ever, the LRB brings intelligence, dialogue, style and diversity to literary festival season, with speakers from the Arabic world including Mourid Barghouti (in conversation with Ruth Padel, sure to be a hot ticket!), Hanan al-Shaykh, Elias Khoury and Faïza Guène. The LRB website has more information about events and venues; tickets can be booked on 00 44 (0)20 7269 9030, or books [at] lrbshop.co.uk.

Friday 19 June

3 p.m. Hanan al-Shaykh with Esther Freud

Lebanese author Hanan al-Shaykh examines Arab women’s role in society with Esther Freud.

Saturday 20 June

12 p.m. Translation: Making a Whole Culture Intelligible?

with Independent Foreign Fiction Prize-winning translators Anne McLean, Anthea Bell, Daniel Hahn and Frank Wynne

Anthony Burgess insisted that ‘translation is not a matter of words only’. Umberto Eco has said that ’translation is the art of failure‘. So, what do translators hope to achieve?

2 p.m. Ma Jian with Flora Drew

Ma Jian discusses his novel Beijing Coma and Chinese repression with his translator Flora Drew. Chair: Boyd Tonkin

4 p.m. Faïza Guène with Sarah Ardizzone

Faïza Guène examines the linguistic and cultural chasm between French-Algerian immigrants and the Parisian establishment with her translator Sarah Ardizzone. Interpreter: Carine Kennedy

Sunday 21 June

12 p.m. Dubravka Ugrešić with Lisa Appignanesi

Dubravka Ugrešić ponders femininity, ageing, identity and her new novel Baba Yaga Laid an Egg with Lisa Appignanesi.

2 p.m. Mourid Barghouti with Ruth Padel

Palestinian writer Mourid Barghouti and British poet Ruth Padel talk about language and exile, themes which permeate his poetry collection Midnight.

3.30 p.m. Voicing the Masters (and Mistresses): Translation with Variations

Marina Warner is in conversation with Robert Chandler about Russian translation, with particular reference to Platonov.

5.30 p.m. Elias Khoury with Jeremy Harding

Lebanese author Elias Khoury talks to the journalist Jeremy Harding about the narrative frameworks of his recent fiction.

Towering Babels? Arabic and/as Other Languages

Two interesting posts about language(s) today, first from blogger Lameen Souag, who is studying translation at SOAS, and keeps the blog Jabal al-Lughat blog, where a fascinating discussion is flowing about "French among Algeria's elite" and the place of Arabic and Berber in Algerian culture, politics and literature. It's an informed debate around a complex issue, showing how language is tied up with all sorts of identities: national, ethnic, classed, generational, and political.

The Washington Times, on the other hand, boobs in its review of Rafik Schami's The Dark Side of Love, claiming that Anthea Bell translated the book "from the Syrian." The Literary Review and Three Percent are all over this mistaken claim, with Chad Post pointing out that - among other things - Bell is probably one of the best-known translators from German: the language in which the book was first published in 2004. Schami's novel does cover an epic sweep of Syrian history, but he moved to Germany in 1971.

World Literature/Literature and the World: Three Views

It's the beginning of literary festival season, and Chad Post at Three Percent has been travelling to many of them, including Montréal's Metropolis Bleu festival, which claims to be the world's first multilingual literary festival; in this rather breathless post he contemplates Canada's "two solitudes" and the implications for global publishing at large -- and gives a sense of the new transnationality of the publishing business.

Over at NewPages, Denise offers a post on the "conundrum" of world literature that picks up on two recent articles about the topic, including Pankaj Mishra's Author, Author column from last Saturday's Guardian Review, which offers a Marxist analysis of "world" literature as a globalised market. Her other pick is a Reuters article concerning the lack of circulation of contemporary Chinese writing. One of the article's sub-heads refers to the "Banned in China" brand, supported by a quote from Jo Lusby of Penguin:

Oftentimes 'banned in China' is the only selling point publishers can use to communicate what the book is about. I don't think it's surprising it's not necessarily the big literary tomes from China which are making it out, but it's the more racy, pacey books.

While censorship may help foreign rights sales, it still "hurts" writers' careers inside China, as Yan Geling comments in the article. The global market is not bringing freedom of expression to the country, in other words.

An article on the AFP about Arabic literature suggests that the fashion for translating banned or controversial books is an extension of Orientalism, whereby only works that conform to (and flatter) Western notions of oppression and liberation get picked up for translation. Lebanese author Jabbour Doueihy makes a sharp critique of the current boom in Arabic novels when he tells the AFP,

Individualism and the ego awoke in the Arab world through the novel, as though it were personal resistance against oppression.

Fakhri Salih, a former jury member for the award and current chairman of Jordan's association of literary critics added that the small upturn in translation, media attention and international funding for Arabic novels stems from a political motivation:

The Arab novel offers Westerners an 'anthropological' tool to understand the Arab world, which has been accused of terrorism since the September 11 attacks.

Yet this 'anthropological' depth of understanding is exactly what Reuters argue that translations from contemporary Chinese literature could offer to Western readers, rather than the equally 'anthropological' titillations of sexual explicitness. NewBooks is right: world literature is a conundrum. Where all the articles agree is that translation is of paramount importance for increasing access internationally, and that the motivations of literature's gatekeepers (both state and corporate) have to be scrutinised, as they have power over what we read and how.

The Message from Gaza: From Blog to Book

Professor Dr. Said Abdelwahed is one of the three bloggers at Moments of Gaza who have been providing on-the-ground news and observations from Gaza since December 2008. Dr. Abdelwahed's blogs struck a chord with Mari Oka, professor of Islamic and Middle East studies at Kyoto University, who translated and collected the posts into a book just published by Sedosha in Tokyo. Dr. Abdelwahed notes that

The Message from Gaza was the first book to document part of the war on Gaza from inside!

The swift transition from blog to book, and from English to Japanese, is distinctive evidence of the internet's potential to change the shape of journalism and publishing towards inclusion, polyphony and democratisation, while retaining high standards of reportage.

Voices from Around the World: Translation Tidbits

A slightly random post that, as a snapshot, reflects the diversity and confluences of world literature and your opportunity to get involved in it!

Monica Carter of Salonica, the "virtual salon dedicated to promoting international literature," has put out a call for unpublished translations for a new digital literary journal, E.Lire.

Three Percent have updated the design of their site -- and also their translation database, with the first installment of news for 2009.

If you're in London, there's a chance to meet writers from the UK, India and beyond at the PEN Literary Café at the London Book Fair. Over in New York, you can catch writers from around the world at the PEN World Voices festival.

And a future translation... Maya Jaggi meets Yousef Ziedan and discusses the international impact of the IPAF.

More from Abu Dhabi: From Arabic to Bulgarian

A really detailed blog post from Chad Post of Three Percent, who is clearly committed to discovering and covering the Abu Dhabi book fair. This one's about translations into and out of Arabic, and it's so interesting that I'm going to quote a whole chunk:

Literature Across Frontiers represents approximately twenty cultural organizations from across Europe that provide translation subsidies to publishers interested in translating their works. In addition, these organizations frequently produce pamphlets and other promotional materials to spread the word about their literature. Alexandra Buchler of LAF came to the fair to make more Arab publishers aware of these programs in the hope that there will be an increase in translations into Arabic from the “smaller languages” of Europe, such as Catalan, Finnish, or Latvian. Her overall goal is to help create networks between European publishers and Arabic ones, in hopes of developing relationships that lead to greater cultural exchanges.

Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of Finnish to Arabic translators out there (for example–this is true with a ton of countries), so LAF is also trying to create partnerships to support the development and training of translators.

Finally, Next Page is also at the fair to spread the word about “Encounters,” a program of the foundation to encourage translation and exchange between Arabic and the languages of Eastern Europe. Through this program they hope to establish better relationships between publishers in the two regions and supply translation subsidies to publishers of both areas. (A very logical and great complement to what LAF is doing.)

In addition to subsidies, Next Page produces some fantastically informative reports. Ina Doublekova gave me a copy of a recent study on “Translations of Books from Arabic in Four East European Countries after 1989,” which is really fascinating. According to the opening summary, over the last decade the average number of titles translated from Arabic into Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, and Serbia, is between 0 and 3 titles per year. (The entire study is available online at http://www.npage.org.) Hopefully thanks to Next Page—and its energetic and brilliant director Yana Genova—this situation will improve greatly over the next few years.

This is exciting stuff, and it would be interesting to track the growth in translated titles along with the growth of refugee and immigrant populations, for example, the influx of Iraqi refugees into Sweden, to see if there is any correlation.

Arabic Booker (Almost) Announced...

And if the Abu Dhabi book fair's coming up, then so is the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, aka the "Arabic Booker," which will shower its bounty - including English translation paid for by Sigrid Rausing, owner of Granta - at the fest. Both The National and the LA Times are spinning the award's potential for controversy: the LA Times focuses on the religious taboos broken by Ibrahim Nasrallah and by Yousuf Zeydan's Beelzebub. Ed Lake at the National picks up on two books that are about the vexed role of the translator/interpreter, suggesting that:

It would be interesting to see Fawaz Haddad’s entry, The Unfaithful Translator, take the prize, if only to see what the Granta people make of it. The Syrian author tells the tale of an interpreter whose unconventional views on the role of free translation in creativity and culture see him condemned for betrayal.

He also picks up on:

the one woman on the list, Inaam Kachachi, [who] presents what may be the timeliest offering. The American Granddaughter shows the ravages of modern Iraq through the eyes of an American-Iraqi woman. She returns to her home country in the compromised role of US Army interpreter; how else could that old feminist saw “the personal is political” be made to pack a more dramatic punch?

Dubai: A New Age for Translation?

One last post from Dubai, I swear: the festival has inspired a lot of coverage, with some particularly interesting discussions about translation -- both between languages, and between cultures, its rewards and difficulties.

Over at Global Voices, Ayesha Saldanha (who notices our coverage of Dubai on the blog -- thanks Ayesha!) has a great round-up of posts detailing the several cultural festivals happening in the Gulf region, including book fairs in Abu Dhabi and one in Riyadh, which featured what blogger Ruhsa calls

A noteworthy attempt [by] the Commission PR booth at the Riyadh Book Fair. […] It features examples of items that they have confiscated, photos of items found in raids and also the reasons WHY they are banned. There were also several Commission members explaining things at this fairly popular booth!

That's the Commission of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, with whom the Ministry of Culture has to reach a compromise - including female stallholders being required to leave on days when men are allowed into the fair - to allow the fair to go ahead.

Ruhsa feels that the Commission's stall is a move towards a more transparent process of negotiation between tradition and modernity. In The Khaleej Times, there's a cracking interview with Egyptian poet, and president of Nile Culture TV, Gamal Al Shaer that discusses how these issues played out in Dubai. He commented that

Dubai is not another Singapore. It is an ambitious Arab city that builds skyscrapers, yet adheres to the traditional tent, coffee and falcons; a combination of originality and contemporariness,

a combination that also informed the poetry festival, which included classic recitations in a variety of venues (including malls) as well as more contemporary readings.

Al Shaer also shared a particular insight derived from the difficulties of presenting poetry in translation at live events, and connecting Dubai's ventures into literary culture and transcultural literature to a rich Islamic tradition of translation and cultural interchange.

“It is rather a translation of spirit rather than passionless words,” he said, hoping that the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation would adopt a regional translation project in line with the one implemented in the
 Abbasid age.

Dubai, cont.: Celebration vs. Censorship

The first Gulf literary festival is generating lots of column inches in English-language press from the UK, North America and the Arab world; in the former countries, the emphasis is on censorship (Globe and Mail), women and clichéd images of Arabic literature (it's about camels!): The Independent get all three into the headline of their coverage. In the latter, the emphasis is on the diversity of Arab writers, the challenges of translation (Gulf News) and poetry as a shared culture (Gulf News). The Saudi Gazette highlights this last with a headline that draws attention to the wonderful title of the poetry festival: "A Thousand Poets, One Language."

Abdullah Kader, an acclaimed writer, moderated the evening that witnessed a remarkable turnout of audiences.
Kader said: “Poetry does not always command wide attention.
However, Dubai has given poetry a huge window of opportunity to be experienced in all languages, demonstrating the Emirate’s love for culture and its firm commitment to evoke, preserve and evolve the genre as a creative form of expression.”

"I am a translator. I am a prisoner of your thoughts."

Emily Meredith at the Kaleej Times reports Ibrahim al-Koni's insights into the fraught process of translation from Arabic (via Russian, English, French and back to Arabic in one particularly mind-boggling instance) from the International Festival of Literature in Dubai.

Al-Koni offers a fascinating account of his work with German translator Hartmut Fahndrich,

a scholar whose work originally focused on translating medieval Arabic medical texts rather than modern literature, for 15 years now. The two collaborate on translations, particularly when Fahndrich has doubts about what the text conveys.

“When Fahndrich has his doubts regarding a sentence, we must meet,” Al Koni said. “Many translators are not as conscientious, nor do they have the luxury of a well-established relationship with the author.”

“You as an author can write whatever you want,” he reminisced about Fahndrich telling him, “But I am a translator. I am a prisoner of your thoughts.”

Thanks to Literary Saloon for tipping us off to this article.