Listen: Fady Joudah Reads Mahmoud Darwish

Courtesy of the Center for the Art of Translation: five poems recorded at the Center's Lit & Lunch series.

Publishers' Weekly Starred Review for New Darwish

If I Were Another Mahmoud Darwish, trans. from the Arabic by Fady Joudah. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26 (240p) ISBN 978-0-374-17429-3

This second volume by the late, great Palestinian poet Darwish (1941–2008) to be translated by Palestinian-American doctor/poet Joudah comprises four nonconsecutive books of longer poems spanning 1990 to 2005. These works follow Darwish's poetic development from a historically focused middle period to the devastatingly personal lyric-epic of his late style. Formally varied—Rubaiyats alternate with sprawling free-form poems, in which prose paragraphs meet both long and short verse lines—Darwish's Sufi-inspired poetry probes, admires, describes, longs for and questions. His subjects are often broad: the inheritance and disinheritance of lands, languages and histories. Sometimes, though, he turns to concrete need, confessing, for example, in “Mural,” his book-length poem about a brush with death: “I want to walk to the bathroom/ on my own.” But Darwish's poems are at their most singular and powerful when he collapses the boundaries between great and small concerns, as when he articulates, “Wars teach us to love detail: the shape of our door keys,/ how to comb our wheat with eyelashes and walk lightly on our land.” The stakes of this work—for Darwish and for his readers—are clear: “O my language,/ help me to adapt and embrace the universe.” (Nov.)

PW Reviews 17 Aug 2009

August Issue of WWB: Andre Naffis on literary competition in the UAE

Who can resist an article entitled Poets, Eunuchs and Pricks? A mordant commentary on the biggerbetterfastermore ethos of the Emirates, Andre Naffis' essay looks at the way in which literary prestige has got mixed up in the rapidly developing skyline, with a planned statue celebrating al-Hakawati (the storyteller).

In a characteristically outlandish twist, the Sheikhs have now decided to set their mores on sexuality down in stone by commissioning a gargantuan eunuch—which is to lord over Dubai’s Zabeel Park, fifty hectares smack in the middle of what is now some of the world’s most valuable real estate. At over one hundred and fifty feet, the statue of Al-Hakawati “the storyteller” would relegate Rhodes’ Colossus to an also-ran.

In Abu Dhabi on the other hand, it's all about live entertainment,

in what is arguably a ploy by Abu Dhabi’s reigning Nahyan clan to style themselves after the Medicis and establish their city as the artistic counterweight to Dubai’s financial hub. The audiovisual jewel in their tiara is “The Prince of Poets”—a contest held at the Al Raha Beach Theatre on the outskirts of the island emirate. Run along the lines of “American Idol,” thousands of applications are processed until a select thirty-five poets compete in the broadcasts which unfold over the course of ten weeks.

As for the Medicis, this patronage of art has inspired some heated exchanges in Arab literary community and blogosphere, and casts a revealing light on the sociocultural makeup of the Emirates.

Take the first season when there were claims that the judges, hoping to foster a sense of national pride, awarded first prize to the Emarati Maatouk, while the far more popular Palestinian Barghouti came in fifth. Barghouti, whose father, Mourid is the author of I Saw Ramallah, could no doubt take solace in the not inconsiderable cheque ($27,000) and in that he walked away with that much sought-after accolade, the modern poet’s wreath, which he was accorded when his poem “Jerusalem” was immortalized with a cell-phone ring-tone. Nevertheless, the mini-scandal drew attention to the deep seated divisions between local and foreign Arabs. Palestinians and other Arabs constitute a second tier to privileged Emaratis.

What does this all amount to for poetry? Naffis links the ambitious scale and political capital of both projects to

the deep-seated ambivalence the Arab world displays when the ‘word’ intermingles with Islam’s current conservatism. Poetry is often dubbed sihr halal, “legal magic,” which, aside from the peculiar phrasing—one that would be unthinkable in other contexts as the average Arab has an understanding of magic not too dissimilar from that of Salem’s witch-hunters circa1692—points to a marked difference between East and West.

Yet

Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani and Adonis, that perennial Nobel contender, were and have been known to fill stadiums with record audiences.

What Naffis doesn't add is that all three poets have also been thorns in the side of governments as well as popular figures. When state-sanctioned, can poetry continue to be the Arab world's rock and roll?

Raja Shehadeh on Mahmoud Darwish

In the Guardian BooksBlog, one Palestinian writer pays tribute to another, who was also his neighbour in Ramallah. Not just a small literary world, but a moving tribute from a Palestinian writer whose reputation is growing fast to a national mentor figure and international ambassador for Palestinian literature.


A candlelit vigil in Ramallah following the death of Mahmoud Darwish. Photograph: EPA

John Berger on Mahmoud Darwish

John Berger has been perhaps the most vocal advocate and generous reader of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry in the English-speaking world, bringing into being (with translator Fady Joudah and publisher Neil Astley) the major collected works, The Butterfly's Burden. He has written many essays on the interconnection of place and poetry in Palestinian literature -- the most recent being the resonantly-titled "A Place Weeping," in this months Threepenny Review. In the essay, he describes a visit to Darwish's grave in the village of Al Rabweh, coining the term 'landswept,' with its double intimation of tears and razing, to speak of the landscape he sees and feels. He ends with an exhortation to travel imaginatively through a continued engagement with Darwish's poetry:

Mahmoud Darwish's grave on the hill of Al Rabweh has now, following decisions made by the Palestinian Authority, been fenced off, and a glass pyramid has been constructed over it. It's no longer possible to squat beside him. His words, however, are audible to our ears and we can repeat them and go on doing so.

Festivals: Free the Word, Palestine Festival of Literature

In London today International PEN's Free the Word festival kicks off. Running through the weekend, it boasts a packed calendar of themed events exploring Heaven and Earth -- set off beautifully by the festival's primary location, Shakespeare's Globe. The festival brings together writers from around the world, many of whom make their homes in the UK, including to UK-based Arab writers: Samir El-Youssef will take part in "Beyond Faith and Reason" this evening, while on Sunday Leila Aboulela will join controversial French author Catherine Millet to discuss "Heavenly Pleasures."

Travelling in the opposite direction, 17 international writers head to Palestine for the second Palestine Festival of Literature from 23rd-28th May 2009. Because of the difficulties Palestinians face under military occupation in travelling around their own country, the Festival group of 17 international writers will travel to its audiences in the West Bank. It will tour to Ramallah, to Jenin, to al-Khalil/Hebron and to Bethlehem. To mark Jerusalem’s status as Cultural Capital of the Arab World for 2009, the festival will begin and end in Jerusalem. On the occasion of the first festival, last year, Mahmoud Darwish said:

Thank you, dear friends, for your noble solidarity, thank you for your courageous gesture to break the moral siege inflicted upon us and thank you because you are resisting the invitation to dance on our graves. We are still here. We are still alive.

This year, there are several Arab writers participating: Suad Amiry, Suheir Hammad, Nathalie Handal, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Jamal Mahjoub, Raja Shehadeh, and Ahdaf Soueif. Soueif, chair and Founder of PALFEST, said

We were overwhelmed by the responses of both our audience and our authors last year; so we can't wait to go back. We found that Palestinian cities – even in theextraordinarily cruel circumstances in which they find themselves – manage to produce brilliant art and top class education. PALFEST aims to help them carry on doing that.

The Palestine Festival of Literature was inspired by the call of the late great Palestinian thinker, Edward Said, to “reaffirm the power of culture over the culture of power.” PALFEST 09 is organized in co-operation with Yabous Productions, and in partnership with the British Council.

Darwish Therapy in Athens Airport

A beautiful post about poetry in motion (and in everyday life, both lived and virtual) by Palestinian blogger Raising Yousuf.

__Updated__

Global Voices provides some context on Raising Yousuf blogger Laila El-Haddad's airport purgatory. El-Haddad offers up this thought as a larger context for her own recent experience of being refused entry into Gaza, her home:

“The quintessential Palestinian experience,” historian Rashid Khalidi has written, “takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any one of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and verified.”

Breytenbach on Darwish

South African writer and anti-apartheid activist talks to The National about his friendship with Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. It's revealing, perceptive and moving. Breytenbach

tells a story of a holiday the pair once took in Ramallah. They were put out to find that they were expected to have an audience with Yasser Arafat. “We were not interested in that,” says Breytenbach. “We didn’t want to be recuperated… And also we couldn’t see what poetry we would be talking about when we talked to Arafat.” But despite his unwillingness, circumstances seem to have forced Darwish to give in. “Very early one morning in the hotel we were staying in, he came, Mahmoud came and talked to us and said: ‘I couldn’t get out of it. I promised him…’ So he was doing a little bit of carrying and fetching… He was not a totally cut-off rebel.”

Indeed, one of the facets of Darwish that Breytenbach singles out for special praise is the way in which the man and the monument are brought into an uneasy dialogue in the work. “He had this hard gift,” says Breytenbach, “of somehow being both private and very public in the same poem, to the extent that I think one can really see the poet at work, struggling with his own private demons... At the same time I don’t think he ever extrapolated from there. He’s not trying to imagine that whatever was ailing him was kind of an incarnation or a representation emblematic of the larger cause – or the other way around, for that matter.”

I also loved this article, by Ed Lake, for coining the word "bonhomous" to describe the atmosphere at the Dubai festival, where he was speaking to Breytenbach.

New Writing from Gaza: A Portfolio

Over the last few weeks, protest songs for Gaza -- by Michael Heart and Invincible, among others -- have been flying around the blogosphere, giving a voice to the anguish and anger of Gazans, who were almost silenced by Israel's media blockade, and by damage to infrastructure. Journalists, bloggers and ordinary citizens, resilient and determined, posted when they could, via SMS to friends if they had to, and have made known the stories that didn't appear on the news.

These observations from the moment, on the ground, are thrilling, moving and necessary. They counter media bias, alert us to action, and give us a glimpse of what it feels like to be in Gaza. How much more so, then, might a poem or story, honed by a brilliant writer until it is dense with image and meaning? As the outpouring of grief at Mahmoud Darwish's death last year showed, literature, and poetry in particular, has a particular place in Palestinian culture -- and has had a particular place in reaching out from Palestine to the rest of the world, from Ghassan Kanafani's "Letter from Gaza" to Mourid Barghouti's Midnight.

But only a few Palestinian writers are being translated. In Palestine, the Khalil Sakakini Centre and the House of Poetry have both fostered new writers and new magazines. In the UK, Banipal and Modern Poetry in Translation have both had special Palestine issues in recent years, which have shown the depth and range of work being produced. Telegram's Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women, edited by Jo Glanville, introduced a number of new voices, such as Adania Shibli.

When I interviewed Adania in early December 2008, she spoke passionately about the writers she knew in Gaza, about the intensity of their work and the way that Palestinian poetry was changing in response to the conditions of siege. That was before the invasion. When the news and images of Gaza (not from Gaza) began to appear, I emailed Adania and offered to host a selection of writing on the blog: her choice of writers, immediate and new voices with essential things to say and powerful styles in which to say them.

Over the next month, we'll be publishing the work that she selected on the blog, as it arrives from Gaza. The first group of writers to arrive is diverse in age, background, experience, and style, but I find all of their voices compelling. On Monday, there will be a selection of short pieces by novelist, playwright and political scientist Atef Abu Saif, who lives and teaches in Gaza.

Following Abu Saif, whose stories will appear over three days, the blog will feature work from:

Soumaya Susi
Khaled Jum'a
Nasr Jamil Shaath
Fatena al-Gharra
Yousef Alqedra
Naser Rabah
Najah Awadallah

posted as it arrives from the Arabic translators have very graciously given time and support to this project, excited by its urgency and by discovering new work. Each writer presents translators with a different challenge and promise, and each will be translated differently. Excitingly, translator Isis Nusair is working on Khaled Jumaa's work with Michael Rosen and Shaun Levin, two anti-Zionist Jewish writers, whose acts of translation demonstrate how literature can build community and solidarity.

Abu Saif's pieces have been translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, who also translated Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness, a sequence of prose poems framed by the August 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Abu Saif's pieces - microstories, fragments - are dateless, although filled with precise detail of season and place. Minutely focused on a gesture, a piece of graffiti, on the author's own act of seeing, they are both like news stories - in their brevity, their concrete detail - and utterly unlike anything the media can offer.

In a 2008 Guardian article about the Poetry Translation Centre's ambitious tour and chapbook series, Sarah Maguire, who is translating Faten al-Gharra's work for us, wrote:

Poetry in this country is our favourite minority artform, largely greeted with bafflement, often with dismay. And yet we live alongside people for whom poetry is a central, essential passion. My hope is that by attempting to make their poems at home in our language, we can also translate a little of their enthusiasm. Poetry thrives through translation.

With this selection, we hope to show not only that poetry thrives through translation, but that people thrive through poetry, not only being written but being heard. The act of translation -- whether literally between languages, or metaphorically from the page onto a blog -- is a catalyst, a helping hand, to bring readers to the writing, and through that writing to resonant emotions and truths.

As Adania says: we are "trying to make the words of Gaza louder than those of the bullets and the bombings." Please come back to listen over the next month.

Poems for Palestine: From the Internet

Michael Smith's 2008 Free Verse supplement, featuring selections from Mahmoud Darwish's "A State of Siege (fragments)", with its beautiful, compelling observation:

This siege will last until we teach our enemy
selections of pre-Islamic poetry.

Other poets featured are Ghassan Zaqatan, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Samih Al-Qasim, Sharif S. Elmusa, Fadwa Tuqan, Abd al-Aziz al-Maqalih, Samer Abu Hawwash, Naomi Shihab Nye, Seema Atalla, Saud el-Asadi, Izzidin al-Manasrah, Jihad Hudaib, Omar Shabbanah, Ahmad Dahbour, Anas al-Ayla, Mohammad H Ghanaiem, Nathalie Handal, Khaled Abdallah, Walid Khazendar, Youssef Abd al-Aziz, Ghazi al-Theeba, Khairi Mansour, and Mourid Barghouti.



John Berger reads from Mahmoud Darwish's "Mural."

And Ghassan Kanafani's "Letter from Gaza", written more than 50 years ago:

"In the middle of the year, that year, the Jews bombarded the central district of Sabha and attacked Gaza, our Gaza, with bombs and flame-throwers. That event might have made some change in my routine, but there was nothing for me to take much notice of; I was going to leave. this Gaza behind me and go to California where I would live for myself, my own self which had suffered so long. I hated Gaza and its inhabitants. Everything in the amputated town reminded me of failed pictures painted in grey by a sick man. Yes, I would send my mother and my brother's widow and her children a meagre sum to help them to live, but I would liberate myself from this last tie too, there in green California, far from the reek of defeat which for seven years had filled my nostrils. The sympathy which bound me to my brother's children, their mother and mine would never be enough to justify my tragedy in taking this perpendicular dive. It mustn't drag me any further down than it already had. I must flee!"

Read the full letter on the tanjara.

What Can Literature Do?

Two answers today, with reference to the current situation in Gaza, from the Guardian: Pankaj Mishra, writing in the Review, argues that we should listen to authors when they speak about politics, if they are speaking from within -- and with deep knowledge -- of the situation that they speak about. His examples are Arundhati Roy (which is a little disingenuous, as Roy was a distinguished campaigner before she was a novelist, and said explicitly after publishing The God of Small Things that she would capitalise on her success not with another novel, but by using her sudden fame to bring attention to the plight of India's poor) and the more curious and compelling example of David Grossman, who has been active in using his influence as one of Israel's most highly regarded novelists to plead for peace and dialogue with political leaders. Mishra could go further, and include writers and artists who have formed, one to one or through organisations, the kind of bonds that Grossman asks his government to seek. He could have mentioned Etgar Keret, who co-authored Gaza Blues with Palestinian writer Samir El-Youssef.

Naomi Klein, in an op-ed piece arguing for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, draws attention to such important cross-cultural project in her answer to the counter-charge "Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less." She responds with

a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

The Andalus website offers astonishing facts about Arabic-Hebrew cultural exchange (or lack thereof): Since the 1930's just over 30 Arabic language fiction titles have been translated into Hebrew, most of them authored by E

gyptians and Palestinians (before Andalus Publishing began operating, not a single Syrian, Iraqi, or North African writer was translated to Hebrew from Arabic - the Moroccan Taher Ben Jaloun was translated from French as were a number of others). Of these, only three are women: the Palestinians Sahar Khalife and Fadwa Tuqan, and the Egyptian Nawal al-Sa'adawi.

Contemporary Arabic writers who have been translated into many languages, and, needless to say, are well known to every literate Arab, remain unknown to the Hebrew reader, save for the Egyptian Nobel laureate Nagib Mahfouz. The names of authors such as the Egyptian Sunallah Ibrahim, the Syrian Zakaria Tamer, the Lebanese Hanan al-Sheikh and Elias Khoury, not to mention the Iraqi Jew Samir Naqqash who writes and publishes in Arabic from his home in Petach Tiqva, Israel are not familiar to the Israeli public, nor is their extensive body of literary work.

Naqqash's neglect in Israel - as one of the few Mizrahi writers to continue using Arabic while living in Israel - points to the profound disconnect that Israel has effected from its Arab eighbourhood and citizens, including its according of lower status to Mizrahis (Jews from the Middle East and Maghreb). Initiatives like Andalus - named for the medieval Islamic state in the Iberian peninsula in which both Muslim and Jewish literature flourished and interconnected - are slowly rectifying this, and working to encourage an exchange of views through literary culture, and to integrate Israel into the geographical and historical Arab community in which it is located.

To date Andalus has published six titles (the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish's Why Have You Left the Horse Alone and State of Siege, the Moroccan Muhammad Choukri's For Bread Alone, the Sudanese Al-Tayyeb Saleh's The Wedding of Zein and the Lebanese Elias Khoury's Bab al-Shams), and a catalog of work by nine Palestinian women artists titled Self Portrait; translated five titles (Mahmoud Darwish, Mural, the Lebanese Hoda Barakat's The Stone of Laughter, Hanan al-Shaykh's The Story of Zahra, Al-Tayyeb Saleh's Bandar Sah, and the Palestinian Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's The First Well); and acquired the rights to translate and publish works by the Palestinian Taha Muhammad `Ali (poetry anthology translated by Anton Shammas), Muhammad Choukri's Streetwise, and more.

Klein found a way for her important book to reach Hebrew readers, and in doing so, to support a publisher committed to dialogue, allowing Andalus to publish further voices and bringing attention to them globally.

“In Gaza, we are subject to news but cannot see TVs.”

That's how Ayesha Saldanha titles her round-up of Palestinian bloggers today on Global Voices (who also have fascinating and necessary round ups from Turkey, Lebanon and Syria, as well as round-ups focused on reactions to the Gaza bombings from Chile and Taiwan). Tel Aviv-based blogger Lisa Goldman is using her access to technology to gather voices, events and stories from the "other side," documenting protest marches in Israel, calling friends in Gaza and reporting their stories, and linking to blogs and video from across the web. Saldanha's moving pull-quote attests to two ways in which the internet can offer a space for alternative voices: first of all, it allows those who "cannot see TVs" (and are not often invited to speak on them) to see the news, and moreover to make it; second of all, it builds global community, where those who can see the TVs a) get an alternative perspective that may balance media bias; b) can offer support to those blogging (in various ways, for example Saldanha is posting SMS messages from her friend Hasan in Rafah who has no internet access); and c) can shift perspective from seeing certain populations or individuals as "subject to news" to seeing them as agents, and as full members of the human community.

Blogs, of course, extend what literature has been doing for millennia -- through narratives that touch on commonalities (whether it's the sense that "we're all bloggers -- I could be blogging from Rafah, what would that be like?" or details of daily life lived differently) that can encourage us to walk in another's shoes. Social networking, again like literature, can also be used as propaganda -- bloggers are alternately (cynically) impressed by and outraged at the Israeli government's use of Twitter to hold press conferences and dominate news cycles. Whatever the reaction, it's an example of governments recognising the power of the medium: Anthony Lowenstein of The Blogging Revolution has a great story today about the Iraqi Revolutionary Guards Corp setting up 10, 000 blogs to counter the perceived liberalism of the Iraqi blogosphere.

It's a truism but here goes: the internet moves faster than literature. That's its advantage -- for example, this Gaza care package campaign organised through Facebook -- and its disadvantage, as misinformation spreads wildly and the source with the fastest broadband (or any power and phone lines at all) wins. History has always been written by the victors, but now the victors can write it from their mobile phones in the midst of the battle, shaping global response as well as posterity. So blogs that emerge from communities that have less access to technology (and to power in both the political and electrical senses) stand as an important bulwark against the complete eradication of their side of the story. Sites like Global Voices and toot perform a critical function in gathering these voices into a shout, focused and centralised.

In doing so, they act like old-fashioned publishers, selecting and honing the voices that surround us. Novels and poetry, too, are an important bulwark, a record of diverse voices. Some would argue that they are more accessible (to writers) and influential (to readers) than the internet, as a poem can be passed from hand to hand, and mouth to mouth, a novel smuggled out in sections if it has to be. Books are seen as custoded, collected, polished: a longer-lasting, more penetrating, and more effective representation of a situation, narrative, identity, image. And yet the gatekeepers are many, not least the gatekeeper of translation which means that many voices who are celebrated in their own linguistic culture don't reach ears beyond it. For English-language readers, that makes the value of books such as I Saw Ramallah, The Butterfly's Burden, and the novels of Elias Khoury invaluable, along with the promotion and support offered by PEN's Writers in Translation programme and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature.

I Saw Ramallah, with its announcement of witnessing as direct action and reclaiming the narrative voice, directly addresses the panic and powerlessness captured in Saldanha's quotation from Professor Said Abdelwahed, as reported in the Moments in Gaza blog. But its author Mourid Barghouti has also recently joined Facebook, posting poems old and new (in Arabic) as well as more diary-like entries that amplify his poetry's connection to, and influence on, his readers.

Digital technology offers dizzying possibilities to move from subject to storyteller, for those who can access them. The waves of rage, love, hate, anguish, activism and emotion pouring forth in the blogosphere can't, and don't aim to, replace poetry, but they uphold the spirit of art: "KEEP MAKING THINGS WITH WHATEVER YOU HAVE."

"Give Me the Pavement!" The Bombing and the Brink Part VI

The final part of Guy Mannes-Abbott's conversation with Mourid Barghouti about the "poetry of the pavement," Palestinian writers, and the internationality of literature.

VI. Midnight & Other Poems allows Barghouti to emerge as a “poet of the pavement”; repeatedly banished and permanently looking awry at things. Poems of the Pavement is actually the name of his fifth collection published in 1980. “This is the real start of my voice” he once told me before explaining the context -court poets and political rhetoricians- with figurative argumentation. “So, okay: you occupy the autostrat with your poetry, your bombastic tone, but give me the pavement! Poems of the pavement? I am not in the mainstream -I need the pavement. You take the street -you’ve already taken it, it isn’t mine. I’ll be confined to this. I’m happy with this” -happy enough to produce six further poetry collections, a 700-page Collected Works, the memoir and book-length poem Midnight -published just after his sixtieth birthday.
This selection from those poems, which includes several from the ‘pavement’, also finally allows I Saw Ramallah to be read as the memoir of a great poet. After the jolt of Mahmoud Darwish’s recent death, Mourid wrote of his friend that he “was at the centre of Arab culture in the 20th century because he was a poet, and a Palestinian.” While Darwish was widely considered the greatest living Arab poet, it’s a burdensome mantle that Barghouti will be reluctant to assume.
Once, when talking of his admiration for Darwish, he pointed to a shared creative restlessness. “Do you know what the title of his seventh collection was? - when he was, by now, a legend. Attempt No. 7. Just that,” he chuckled delightedly, “the number 7 not the word. It is the same with me, poetry should be this attempt.”
Meanwhile, nothing should blind us to the depth and range of Palestinian literature, exemplified today in the levity of Randa Jarrar and soul of Adania Shibli. While Jarrar writes in English, Shibli’s work is translated into French and Italian though not yet English -excepting a couple of very fine short stories.
Exactly four years since appearing on the Southbank, Mourid’s first collection of poems in English was published on the day he returned to read at the Poetry International Festival. Finally, readers of his memoir and stunned listeners to his reading were able to pick up his poems too. Each of them knew they were plucking flowers from the brink of being bombed.
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You can read the complete article in a single document here.

Hot Off the Press: Banipal, Words Without Borders, Three Percent

The start of the month means new magazines, new writers and pieces to discover...

Banipal 33 opens with a major 70-page feature on the life and legacy of Mahmoud Darwish. It includes articles, tributes, poems and many photographs of the great Palestinian and world poet, who passed away on Saturday 9 August following complications after major heart surgery in Houston, Texas, at the age of 67. It also includes part 3 of a series on contemporary Syrian literature, including work by Adonis, Fawaz Haddad, Hussein Bin Hamza, Gladys Matar, Khalil al-Neimi, and Ibrahim Samuel.

Words Without Borders December 2008 has an impressive line-up of writers from around the world meditating on The Home Front. All the stories are available online, and you can catch up with forum discussions about classic Yalo by Elias Khoury and about the brand-new Clash of Civilisations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous.

Chad Post at Three Percent is gearing up for his Translations of the Year list with a tantalising catalogue of the ones that almost made it. He also flags up a great US-based magazine for writing in translation: Two Lines (from the Center for the Art of Translation), whose August 2008 issue Strange Harbors featured a focus on Turkish poetry.

2009 Already? Upcoming Events

Two excellent opportunities to enjoy brilliant discussions about literature and translation:

Poetry and Politics: In Memoriam Mahmoud Darwish
A Commemoration at the University of York, March 14, 2009

The death of Mahmoud Darwish on August 9, 2008 left a void in the global literary and cultural landscape. A profoundly committed poet, Darwish gave voice to Palestinian suffering without allowing his literary expression to degenerate into dogma and cliché; indeed often revealing beauty where others only saw evil. This event will commemorate the life and work of this rare poet, evaluating his legacy and relevance to a historical period still unable—or unwilling—to resolve the Palestinian tragedy.

Papers are invited on all aspects of Darwish’s life and career for a one-day symposium at the University of York on March 14, 2009. Our programme will combine critical interventions with readings from the poet’s work, all with a view to helping the public and scholarly communities come to grips with the complex realities of his poetry and the region’s politics.

Confirmed Keynote : Professor Barbara Harlow (University of Texas, Austin)

Please send proposals (250-300 words) and a brief bio (50 words) to yorkdarwish@googlemail.com by January 31, 2009. Please put the words “York Darwish Conference” in the subject line.

Queries can be addressed to:
Ziad Elmarsafy (ze500 [at] york.ac.uk)
Anna Bernard (ab609 [at] york.ac.uk)
David Attwell (da506 [at] york.ac.uk)
Department of English and Related Literature
University of York, Heslington, YO10 5DD, UK

And secondly (although earlier in the year):

Traduttore Traditore? Recognizing and Promoting the Critical Role of Translation in a Global Culture, a week-long seminar (21 Feb - 26 Feb, 2009) taking place in Salzburg, Austria as part of the Salzburg Global Seminar program. Reduced rates are available for participants who can't pay the (fairly steep) fee of 3,300 euros, via an application to the financial aid office. The insanely impressive speakers' list includes:

John Balcom (Co-Chair) - Associate Professor, Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, Monterey Institute of International Studies, California; past President, American Literary Translators Association
Peter Bush (Co-Chair) - Translator; Past Chair of the International Federation of Translators Literary Translation Committee
Gabriela Adamo - Executive Coordinator, Fundacion Typa, Buenos Aires
Esther Allen - Translator; Professor; Author, International PEN Report on Translation and Globalization; Co-Founder PEN World Voices Festival, New York
Marion Boers - President, International Federation of Translators, Montreal; Office Manager, South African Translators Institute, Rivonia
Antonia Byatt - Director, Literary Strategy, Arts Council England, London
Jacqueline Csuss - Board Member, Austrian Translators Association, Vienna; Board Member, the European Council of Associations of Literary Translators
Geeta Dharmarajan - Executive Director, Katha Books, New Delhi
Susan Harris - Editorial Director, Words Without Borders, New York
Michael Krueger - Translator; Author; Director, Carl Hanser Publishing House, Munich
Göran Malmqvist - Linguist; Translator; Sinologist; Emeritus Professor, Stockholm University; Member, Swedish Academy, Stockholm
Mariusz Tukaj - Creative Industries for Development Section, Division of Cultural Expressions and Creative Industries, Sector of Culture, UNESCO, Paris

Best of the Year?

'Tis the season for best-of round-ups: the Literary Saloon have flagged up UK, US, French and German broadsheet lists, of which the most influential (in terms of sales, at least) is probably the New York Times' Holiday Books selection.

Which gave me pause. Remember that debate, earlier this year, about Horace Engdahl's comment that American literature was insular? Well, here are the books in translation on the NYT list, from established favourites Ma Jian, Victor Pelevin, and Roberto Bolaño: Beijing Coma; The Sacred Book of the Werewolf; 2666; Oh, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Good to see that international tensions, fervours, disasters and achievements can all be so neatly summed up by American authors, for the most part the usual suspects (Proulx, Roth, Updike). Non-fiction fares even worse, in a sense, when it comes to opening eyes to the greater world: there are books _about_, say the Middle East, like Robin Wright's Dreams and Shadows and Dexter Filkins' The Forever War , but everything on the list is by American and British writers.

The Guardian's list, which asks authors for their selections, fares little better; but Ahdaf Soueif flags up Raja Shehada's brilliant Palestinian Walks and Chimananda Ngozi Adichie cheers for Rawi Hage's IMPAC-winning De Niro's Game, which is also the only YA book to make the list.

But, they do also have a review of The Earth in the Attic, the first poetry collection from Fady Joudah, who won the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation earlier this year, for his translation of The Butterfly's Burden, a collection of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's late work. Joudah is the first Arab-American to win the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets award (he was selected by Louise Glück in 2007), which has been running since 1919. In his review of The Earth, Charles Bainbridge writes that:

Joudah's poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.

This suggests the deep influence of Darwish's fluent imagination, and also an implicit manifesto for literature -- and for review pages -- in complex and interconnected times.

In other words, come on, NYT, time for a dramatic shift of perspective -- say, to contemplating books written in places other than New York -- in order to challenge received notions.

Two from the Saloon on Contemporary Arabic Literature

The Literary Saloon has two -- perhaps contradictory -- offerings: an op-ed from UAE's The National bemoaning the lack of a coherent "culture of reading" in the Middle East, pointing out that top-down efforts are not connecting to actual readers:

The Emirates Foundation has launched the International Prize for Arabic Fiction as a way for Arab writers and Arab literature to gain exposure. But as The National on Saturday reported, most of the 16 titles nominated for the award cannot be found in Abu Dhabi bookshops.

But they've also put up a review of David Tresilian's very handy A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature, which focuses on fiction where

the contemporary scene now offers almost too much to choose from [...] Tresilian's discussion of works such as Miral al-Tahawy's Blue Aubergine and Ahmed Alaidy's Being Abbas el Abd, as well as Alaa Al Aswany (The Yacoubian Building, Chicago) brings things up to date fairly well.

It's true, as the Tresilian review points out, that

prose narratives, more or less modeled on the Western novel, … tend to get translated and attract the most attention among English-speaking readers

but the international outpouring of love and grief after the death of Mahmoud Darwish suggests some recognition of the traditional depth and ongoing significance and brilliance of poetry as a communitarian, national, personal, and political arena across the Arabic-speaking world.

Arabic Translation Initiative

Another great initiative announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair: The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation is to translate 50 selected Arabic books into foreign languages. The press release says that:

Books to be translated will include Al Sultan al-Ha'er (The Perplexed Sultan) by renowned Egyptian writer Tawfiq al-Hakeem, The Mural of Mahmoud Darwish by famous Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, and Morals of the Muslim by leading Islamic thinker Muhammed Al-Ghazali.

The Foundation supports translation in both directions:

As part of its presence in the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Foundation will celebrate the first edition of the Arabic translation of three of German author Adolf Muschg's books at a workshop to be hosted tomorrow (17 October). During the event, Muschg will share his perspectives on the importance of translation as a vital tool for enhancing global understanding.

The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation will also organise a Book Presentation review that will feature Mohammed by Tilman Nagel. The event will mark the release of the first Arabic edition of the book prepared by Arab philosopher and translator Radwan Al Sayed.

More information will be available after the book fair on the Foundation's website.

Saif-Ghobash Banipal Prize in full

Susannah Tarbush, who blogs as the tanjara, has posted her Saudi Gazette article on the Saif Ghobash-Banipal prize, with full details of the judges' citations for Fady Joudah's winning translation of Mahmoud Darwish's The Butterfly's Burden, his reading of "Not as a Foreign Tourist Does", and of the runner-up and highly-commended titles:

Ghassan Nasr was the runner-up with his translation of the late Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s last novel The Journals of Sarab Affan (Syracuse University Press). In the judges’ view: “As is to be expected with the writings of this poet-novelist, the Arabic text is couched in language of exquisite beauty, and Ghassan Nasr succeeds admirably in transferring the nuances of the original to an English version that is a pleasure to read.”

Nancy Roberts’ translation of Egyptian novelist Salwa Bakr’s The Man from Bashmour (American University in Cairo Press) was highly commended. The jury was “deeply impressed by Bakr’s courageous novelistic exploration of Egypt’s complex relationship with its Christian (Coptic) community during the 9th century AD.” The text uses complex levels of discourse, “and the translation project has therefore been a significant challenge, one that has been met with great success by the translator.”

Describing Joudah's translation of Darwish, judge Roger Allen set a high bar for translators of poetry:

The English versions of the poems “replicate, deliberately so, the structures of the original poems that parallel them on the opposite page, and yet they can be read in their English forms as wonderful transfers of the images and music of the Arabic poems. It goes without saying that this is a major achievement.”

Elizabeth Bachner writes of the desire to engage in the "acrobatic" art of translation - as a writer and reader - when discussing Anne Carson's Grief Lessons, a translation of four Euripides plays. Her powerful description of the translation - kind of a whirlwind met on a knife-edge - applies to Joudah's meeting with Darwish as well.

If translation in any form is a beautiful, treacherous and radical art -- a bit like alchemy, or shape-shifting, or dancing, or dying, or writing poems -- then translating the classics is more beautiful, and more treacherous, and more radical. It’s a kind of epistemological time travel. You have to convey, wholly and purely, the writer’s way of expressing and understanding the world. You are thrust into a vortex of inexact equations and surreal paradoxes. In transforming someone’s words, you risk destroying them, turning them into a pile of babble or ashes or dust. I say this as someone who writes in only one language -- in the translation world, I am a limbless girl watching the ballet. It makes me weep. I can feel how to pirouette with my phantom limbs.

Presenting the Translation Awards

It was announced over a month ago, but on Tuesday night Fady Joudah received the Saif Ghobash - Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, for The Butterfly's Burden, a collection of three volumes of poetry by Mahmoud Darwish. Complete Review blogging at The Literary Saloon seemed shocked, or at the very least surprised, that it's available in a bilingual edition from Bloodaxe (UK) and Copper Canyon (US) -- editions praised by poet Alfred Corn in his behind-the-scenes account of the pre-award ceremony party in London, attended by Joudah, his parents (flown in from Tennessee) and a number of Arab writers.

The event brings another award, in the form of raising the profile of world literature in translation -- not least poetry, which accounted for five of the seven winners - and the work of translators in creating the "big dialogue." While the blogosphere got there first (The Literary Saloon again, who predicted a blog post by TLS editor Peter Stothard, who presented the awards), there were considered articles in Tuesday's Guardian and André Tahourdin's survey in the TLS.