A good example is the famous joke that goes something like this: a sixty-year-old woman surprises her newly married daughter while walking around the house naked. Despite much research, digging, and questioning, there is no trace of jokes about El Yazghi, Radi, Youssoufi, or Othmani, and not even about Abbas El Fassi. But how do
Category: Music-Songs
Sunday Submissions: 2022 ArabLit Story Prize
4) Some evidence you have the rights to translate and publish this story, such as an email from the author or a scanned note. Translators must have secured rights to the work, and translations must have been previously unpublished.Stories will be judged primarily on the quality of the translated work as a thing-in-itself, although translators
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Lit & Found: Hadil Ghoneim Talks to Trevor LeGassick
It’s likely a reader could easily understand this saying, without any additional explanation, but LeGassick discussed his domesticating philosophy that is, by and large, not currently in use: I wanted to diminish the distance between potential readers and the work itself by making it look as if it didn’t have those cultural issues. He
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Online Extra: Arabic & English from ‘Solace for the Traveler and Entertainment for the Conversationalist’
He said to himself: “I walk, and I gain one donkey. Al-Mahdi asked the bedouin: Do you have any food for us? I’d rather not ride and lose one donkey.” He then walked all the way back to his village and almost died of exhaustion. At a time when people could not entertain themselves with
Ghareeb Asqalani, a Founder of Gazan Literature, Dies at 74
His literary work was primarily interested in layers of oppression and alienation. Ghareeb Asqalani, a Founder of Gazan Literature, Dies at 74 June 22, 2022 by mlynxqualey Ghareeb Asqalani, a Palestinian novelist and short-story writer who Atef Abu Saif called a representative of “the generation that founded the short story in Gaza in the 1970s
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Hot, Short, & Fast: 8 Summer Reads
Also read a Q&A with translator Chip Rossetti. Share this:TwitterFacebookEmailPrintLinkedInRedditTumblrWhatsAppPinterestTelegramPocketSkypeLike this:Like Loading… * Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf, by Malika Moustadraf, tr. You’ll also want Djamila Morani’s The Djinn’s Apple, tr. * ArabLit Quarterly’s Summer 2022 issue, THE JOKE, ed. M Lynx Qualey (University of Texas Press) If you have a reader in
New Short Fiction: ‘The Awakened Memory’ by Salima Saleh
She continued dancing even after the drums had stopped. Share this:TwitterFacebookEmailPrintLinkedInRedditTumblrWhatsAppPinterestTelegramPocketSkypeLike this:Like Loading… I still see that house in my dreams, that heavy, sliding lock of the door to the room, that has to be pushed all the way in during winter nights. * The Awakened Memory By Salima Saleh Translated by Hend Saeed I
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IN ON THE JOKE: The Launch of the Summer 2022 Issue of ArabLit Quarterly
A number are shared here, from those assembled by al-Jawzi (translated for this issue by Sarah Aldawood), the tales of lesser-known jesters compiled by Brian Powell, to the tales translated from the anonymous “Solace for the Traveler” by Hacı Osman Gündüz (Ozzy). Perhaps the tour of humor presented in this issue can be best summed
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New Fiction: ‘The Echo of Silence’ by Hany Ali Said
He soars into a fisherman’s hat towards a silver light but silence’s web hurls its threads at the lapels of his jacket. He earned his MA in Comparative Literature (2021) from Fayoum University, Egypt. Time crawls by as silence prevails, spreading its echo far and wide. A chilling stillness hangs in the air, warning
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Sunday Submissions: Call for Papers on “Who Reads Modern Arabic Literature, How and Why?”
Travel costs and accomodation of all participants will be covered. Second, it calls for interdisciplinary approaches to literary reception that combine hermeneutic and empirical methodologies to elucidate the mutual relationship between literary texts and reading practices. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Readers, Media, Translation and Reception in a Globalized World,” will take place October 5–7, 2022, at
Translating Al-Khansa: ‘Between the Scylla of Shrillness and Melodrama, and the Charybdis of Monotony and Cliché’
In an interview from earlier this year, he told AJ Naddaff, “I felt in the end it would then become some form of emotional vampirism.” * In Seale’s description, al-Khansa’s 40 poems that mourn her brothers who died in battle are “by turns despairing and defiant, vengeful and tender.” She, like Montgomery, noted the
Michel Moushabeck on Interlink Publishing @ 35: New Directions and Books as the ‘Highest Form of Hope’
I also wanted to share with English-speaking readers the beautiful Arabic and North African literature I so much loved and enjoyed reading while growing up. This is partly as a result of what Interlink is doing and partly due to the attention Arab writers are receiving from some independent and university presses, academic journals, and
‘A Poem from the World of Cats’ by Muthaffar al-Nawab
How strange! My country is the biggest.” Day after day, the kitty laughed, but the laugh was a groan. * The morning breeze gently blew through a street that was empty save a dumpster and a respected tomcat, who saw the kitty exiting the State’s door after a nightshift. He unbent his posture, gave up
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Remembering Muthaffar Al-Nawab: Poet, Nomad, and Warrior for Justice Who Fought from the Trenches of Poetry
Riding the night train that passed you by, oh, Hamad, I heard the thuds of coffee milling and sniffed the sweet-smelling cardamom. In these marshes, Al-Nawab communed with sympathetic peasants and fishermen who had suffered under the regime. They jut out from pages like bookmarks in a long book of twentieth-century Middle Eastern history and seem
Muthaffar Al-Nawab as a Friend: A Talk with Dr. Aziz Shaibani
To him, the human being must be universal. One time, he told me: “just like how we dial the radio so that it picks signals that translate into, for example, Monte Carlo, the BBC, NPR, etc., the human mind is like a radio receiver that is linked to the entire universe. But his home in al-Sham has
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Lit & Found: Mohamed Makhzangi’s ‘Foal’
He would place his right hand around the foal’s neck and burst out laughing while taking some sugar out of his pocket for him, the purest kind of sugar in the world. It opens: Trembling, the small foal scurried between his mother’s legs when the sound of explosions struck his ears and the lightning flash
Chip Rossetti on How Mohamed Makhzangi’s ‘Animals In Our Days’ Displaces our Anthropocentric View of the World
Chip Rossetti on How Mohamed Makhzangi’s ‘Animals In Our Days’ Displaces our Anthropocentric View of the World June 2, 2022June 1, 2022 by mlynxqualey Mohamed Makhzangi’s short-story collection Animals in Our Days appears this month from Syracuse University Press in Chip Rossetti’s English translation. Without giving anything away, there are endings of discovery (“Brass Grasshopper,”
10 Books: Animal Tales in Arabic Literature
The Old Woman and the River (al-Sabiliyyat), by Isma’il Fahd Isma’il, tr. Kitab al-hayawan, by al-Jahiz. One of the most translated texts in world literature, Kalilah and Dimnah was adapted into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa’, who worked from a now-lost Middle Persian version, itself taken from the Sanskrit original. Nancy Roberts. You could
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Coming in June: Historical Fiction & Animal Stories
This book, winner of a Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Literature for the 2019-2020 prize cycle, is a family saga set during Egypt’s Mamluk period, and it centers on three generations of Egyptians who are descended from foreign-born Mamluks. If you know of other works forthcoming this month, please add them in the comments or email
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Emad El-Din Aysha on ‘Arab and Muslim Science Fiction’: ‘Our male heroes aren’t criticized for crying’
He has participated in several online conferences on sci-fi- related topics, and has translated numerous novels and stories from Arabic into English. We want to shelter it from corrupting influences, technological arrogance included, which is a Quranic injunction. I’d say we place the spirit center stage. As Arabs especially, we love gardens and vines and