Arabic | Short Fiction | Tunisia
September, 2015Hassouna Mosbahi's fiction often sounds somewhat autobiographical, and this is certainly true for these two short stories. Each of them illuminates the character of the same type of contemporary Tunisian intellectual, who is a person torn between the cool comforts of Europe and the frustrating warmth of Tunisia.
- William Hutchins
Arabic | French | Jordan | Play (excerpt)
July, 2015The complex process of writing my documentary play She He Me included the translation of its multilingual source material. One of my characters is Algerian (Randa), one is Lebanese-American (Rok), and one is Jordanian (Omar). So I was working from interviews in Lebanese Arabic and Jordanian Arabic (which are somehow similar), French, and English. Take Randa, for example. Algeria, like Lebanon, was colonized by the French, so Randa often spoke French during our interviews, especially when reading from her prison diaries. French is the language Randa favors for reading literature and expressing herself in writing, and she'd written her prison diaries in French with the additional intent of keeping less educated prison guards from understanding them. Randa had also traded in her Algerian dialect for a flawless Lebanese one because she felt more empowered by her experience in Beirut and her Lebanese femininity.
Not only were there different languages to contend with. Each character's words were operating on a different emotional register, and there were also micro-nuances within that. Rok speaks a highly Americanized English with some "bro"-like phrasing, yet when he speaks Arabic, it's very much a southern Lebanese cadence. I kept a few sentences from his mother in Arabic so we can trace the southern Lebanese village roots of her socio-political background, and we can understand their impact on Rok. Omar comes from Jordan, which was a British Mandate. Not only is he fluent in English, but he also studied in London, so he sometimes would throw the Queen's English in the middle of a hardcore Transjordanian accent. That accent is very much associated with a kind of Transjordanian male bravado, which becomes an interesting and powerful reclaiming when a gender radical like Omar speaks it.
For the purposes of the hotINK readings, I wrote the script in English. We're hoping to have a production in Beirut soon, and for that I'll have to translate the script back into Arabic, hopefully with support from the actors. It's true that people in Lebanon speak French and English as well, but I would really like to see this piece performed in Arabic, as a political statement.
- Amahl Khouri
Arabic | Play (excerpt) | Syria
July, 2015The challenge of translating Mrs. Ghada’s Pain Threshold has been to strike the right balance between staying true to the play’s subtleties and yet at the same time not to lapse into excessive opaqueness so as to disengage the English-speaking viewer or reader. Here is a play that is all about what is not said, or the hidden meaning behind the words uttered, and the challenge for the translator is to capture those subtleties in English.
There is a problem, indeed I would go so far as to say a crisis, with regards to plays that come out of the Middle East or are about the Middle East and reach an English-speaking audience. Often theatres mistake being "relevant" for headline-chasing, and so the Middle Eastern plays chosen tend to respond to current events and remain in the by now well-charted territory of terrorism, war, and Islamic fundamentalism. These are certainly worthy topics for any writer to tackle and I’m not suggesting we impose a moratorium on plays that deal with these subjects. Yet focusing exclusively on these topics can mean that we limit the space for other plays by Middle Eastern writers that deal with universal themes such as the quiet defeats of lonely individuals, which is the central focus of Mrs. Ghada’s Pain Threshold. Abdullah Alkafri has created in Ghada a character that will resonate with audiences worldwide. Through her they will learn something about Syrian society, but far more importantly they will learn a great deal about themselves. For me that is when theatre is at its most alive.
- Hassan Abdulrazzak
Arabic | Lebanon/Egypt | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2014Lana Abdel Rahman is a Lebanese writer, living in Cairo. In her novel The Snow of Cairo, published by Afaq Publishers in Cairo, Abdel Rahman not only explores Sufi ideas, but also reincarnation. Bushra, a young Syrian woman, moves to Cairo from Syria with her Egyptian mother. Bushra's father has died, and her mother wants to return to her Egyptian roots. But soon after their arrival, Bushra's mother dies and Bushra must cope with her grief and alienation, alone except for a few Egyptian relatives. Bushra feels the visceral presence of another woman, Nur Jihan, in her dreams and even in her body. Nur Jihan was a young Egyptian princess who was married off to a Turkish prince. She is a woman from the past with a tragic story; someone Bushra could not have possibly known in her life. Chapter One of the novel alternates between the voices of two narrators, Nur Jihan and Bushra. Nur Jihan also remembers her past life as a gypsy dancer called "Soleil."
In The Snow of Cairo time is borderless: the narrators' shift verb tense from present to past and back again. Consciousness is similarly fluid and dreamlike, evoking the fluidity and inscrutability of history and the dead. In Chapter One, Bushra learns many secrets of her mother's life. The novel holds us in suspense as the lives of the two narrators, at first seemingly unrelated, crisscross and circle back to the secret of Nur Jihan's death.
- Gretchen McCullough
Arabic | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
April, 2014Zuhdi Al-Dahoodi is a Kurdish Iraqi who writes in Arabic and German and lives currently in Germany. He was born in Tuz Khormato, Iraq, in 1940. In 1956, he was forced to move to Kirkuk to continue his education after leading a student strike in his hometown against the Tri-Partite Aggression. He attended a Teacher Training Institute in Kirkuk from 1957 to 1959, and then taught in the village of Mama near Kirkuk. He was imprisoned in Kirkuk, Baquba, Ramadi, and Hilla from 1964-66, and then studied at the University of Leipzig, Germany, from 1967 to 1972. He received his doctorate from that university in 1976. Between 1976 and 2005, he taught in universities in Iraq, Libya, and Germany.
He began publishing in 1954 in newspapers and youth journals, and at one time coedited a clandestine newspaper called Sada al-Wa'i ("Echo of the Attentive"). "Two Friends" was included in his first short story collection, which was published in Arabic in 1962. He has published numerous other collections of short stories--including al-Zanabiq allati la Tamut ("Lilies that Do Not Die"; 1978). The novella Usturat Mamlakat al-Sayyid ("The Legend of the Master's Kingdom") was published in 1990.
His Arabic novels include Rajul fi kull Makan ("A Man Everywhere"; 1974), Atwal 'Am ("The Longest Year"; 1994), Zaman al-Hurub ("Time of Flight"; 1998), Wada'an Ninawa (Farewell Ninevah, 2004), Tahawwulat ("Changes"; 2007), Firdaws Qaryat al-Ashbah ("Paradise of the Village of Specters"; 2007), and Dhakirat Madina Munqarida ("Memory of a Dead Village"; 2010).
His books in German, which represent both original works and translations of his own novels, include: Die Kurden (1987), Tollwut Kurdische Erzählungen (1991), Das Längste Jahr (1993), and Abschied von Ninive (2000).
Faleeha Hassan, who is currently in the United States, was born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1967. She earned an M.A. in Arabic literature and has published several collections of poetry in Arabic: Being a Girl, A Visit to the Museum of Shade, Five Titles for My Friend-The Sea, Though Later On, Poems to Mother, Gardenia Perfume, and her collection of children's poetry, The Guardian of Dreams. Her works of Arabic prose include Hazinia or Shortage of Joy Cells and Water Freckles (a novella). Her poems have been translated into English, Italian, German, French, and Kurdish. She has received awards from the Arab Linguists and Translators Association (WATA) and the Najafi Creative Festival for 2012, as well as the Prize of Naziq al-Malaika, the Prize of al-Mu'tamar for poetry, and the short story prize of the Shaheed al-Mihrab Foundation. She serves on the boards of Baniqya, a quarterly in Najaf, Sada al Nahrain (Echo of Mesopotamia), and the Iraqi Writers in Najaf association. She is a member of the Iraq Literary Women's Association, The Sinonu (i.e. Swift) Association in Denmark, the Society of Poets Beyond Limits, and Poets of the World Community.
Arabic | Germany | Short Fiction
September, 2013Zuhdi Al-Dahoodi is a Kurdish Iraqi author who has published many short stories and novels in Arabic. His university studies were in Germany, and he has taught there and in Iraq and Libya.
The short story "Two Friends" comes from his first short story collection and draws on his experiences as a young primary school teacher. In this story, the narrator, who is a very young primary school teacher, receives a lesson in hunting and in life from a sixteen-year-old student who began primary school fully grown.
Arabic | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
July, 2013Najem Wali, who was born in al-Amarah, in southern Iraq, October 20, 1956, currently lives in exile in Berlin, where he works as a freelance writer and cultural correspondent. In 1978, he earned a degree in German literature from Baghdad University. He left Iraq at the end of 1980 after being imprisoned and tortured and after witnessing the start of the First Gulf War, which has influenced his work. He has studied German literature in Hamburg and Spanish and Latin American literature in Madrid. He has devoted many years to travel and to language study, spending six months in Oxford in 1993, six months in Florence in 1996, and three months in Saint Petersburg in 1998. He writes for major German newspapers and for the Arabic paper al-Hayat and is one of the better-known Iraqi and Arab authors internationally.
Mohamed Metwalli was born in Cairo in 1970. He was awarded a B.A. in English Literature from Cairo University, Faculty of Arts in 1992. The same year, he won the Yussef el-Khal prize by Riyad el-Rayes Publishers in Lebanon for his poetry collection, Once Upon a Time. He co-founded an independent literary magazine, el-Garad, in which appeared his second volume of poems, The Story the People Tell in the Harbor (1998). He was selected to represent Egypt in the International Writing' Program at The University of Iowa in 1997. Later he was Poet-in-Residence at the University of Chicago in 1998. He compiled and co-edited an anthology of offbeat Egyptian poetry, Angry Voices (University of Arkansas Press, 2002). He published his third collection, The Lost Promenades, in 2010 with the independent publisher al-Ketaba al-Okhra. The same collection is forthcoming from the General Egyptian Book Organization (GEBO).
Faleeha Hassan, who is currently in the United States, was born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1967. She earned an M.A. in Arabic literature and has published several collections of poetry in Arabic: Being a Girl, A Visit to the Museum of Shade, Five Titles for My Friend-The Sea, Though Later On, Poems to Mother, Gardenia Perfume, and her collection of children's poetry, The Guardian of Dreams. Her works of prose include Hazinia or Shortage of Joy Cells and Water Freckles (a novella). The first six poems featured here come from Qasa'id Ummi (Poems to Mother), which was published in 2010 by Dar al-Yanabia in Damascus, Syria. Her poems have been translated into English, Italian, German, French, and Kurdish. She has received awards from the Arab Linguists and Translators Association (WATA) and the Najafi Creative Festival for 2012, as well as the Prize of Naziq al-Malaika, the Prize of al-Mu'tamar for poetry, and the short story prize of the Shaheed al-Mihrab Foundation. She serves on the boards of Baniqya, a quarterly in Najaf, Sada al Nahrain (Echo of Mesopotamia), and the Iraqi Writers in Najaf association. She is a member of the Iraq Literary Women's Association, The Sinonu (i.e. Swift) Association in Denmark, the Society of Poets Beyond Limits, and Poets of the World Community.
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
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