Articles tagged " Arabic"
Declining Freedom
Translator’s Note: In Wajdi al-Ahdal’s novel Donkey in the Choir, Tha’ira, the rebellious wife of a Yemeni politician, has neglected work on her master’s degree since her…...
Hanzala
It’s August 2000, and I’m overwhelmed by this emotional leavetaking. It’s the first time you’ve ever dreaded visiting your grandfather al-Atawi, but it’s because you’re…...
God After Ten O’Clock
The State Security Building: The First Arrest of the Seagull It was maybe three or four o'clock, or maybe sometime in between. Why am I trying to establish an exact time? Curses on the clock that forces…...
Founding Fathers
Author’s note: The Iraq in the novel is an imaginary Iraq, and I tried to use it as a symbol for all the Arab countries. Most of the characteristics of the four dictators in the novel are derived…...
Publishing in Tunisia: An Interview with Elisabeth Daldoul of Elyzad
Elisabeth Daldoul founded her publishing house, Elyzad, in Tunisia almost six years ago. My first experience with her was with A cinq mains, a book in which she published five short stories written by…...
from “The Grub Hunter”
Translator’s Note: The Grub Hunter is the story of a former secret service agent who, on being forced to retire after an accident costs him his right leg, becomes obsessed with the idea of…...
Life without Me
What hurts me in all this is that my parents will be forced to bury me before themselves. I feel guilt gnawing at me. I do not know who vomited out this hypothesis, in between the cheap maxims and philosophies…...
On Reviewing Translations: Lorraine Adams
Like many American-born English speakers, I have an unhappy story to tell about my ignorance of the rest of the world’s languages. It begins in my youth when I spent eight years studying Latin. This…...
Adrift on the Nile by Naguib Mahfouz
The fiction of Naguib Mahfouz is marked by a clear, harsh view of modern Egyptian life, and his characters are frequently unsympathetic. Adrift on the Nile, one of the brief novels Mahfouz wrote in the…...
From the Translator: Lydia Beyoud on Fouad Laroui’s “My Father’s Antenna”
Rich with comic and descriptive juxtapositions of traditional Moroccan culture with the exotic and intriguing technology and terminology of the Western world, My Father’s Antenna makes for a comic…...
from “The Future of the Arabic Language”
What is the future of the Arabic language? Language is but one manifestation of the power of invention in a nation’s totality or public self. But if this power slumbers, language will stop in its…...
A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed
I nearly gave up on Leila Ahmed’s memoir A Border Passage. After a lovely, quiet opening that describes the wind in the trees at the house on the edge of Cairo where the author grew up, the narrative…...
Dispatches: Echoes of an Autobiography by Naguib Mahfouz
My reaction to the work of Naguib Mahfouz has been exceptionally mixed. I have enjoyed the light touch and raffish characters of short novels like Adrift on the Nile (my review) yet I could make no headway…...
Say No to Metro Confiscation and Trial
Say No to "Metro" Confiscation Last year we published an excerpt from Magdy El Shafee's Metro, an Arabic graphic novel set in Cairo that deals with the financial and social insecurity in Egypt. Shortly…...
Tayeb Salih 1929–2009
Tayeb Salih was the most eminent writer from the largest country in Africa, yet as Leonard Lopate pointed out last year on a radio program called Underappreciated, his work was barely known in the U.S.…...
Three-week Arabic Arts Festival at Kennedy Center
Tomorrow, February 23rd, marks the beginning of a massive three-week festival of Arabic arts and culture at the Kennedy Center in D.C., titled Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World. This will, by far, be the…...
From the Symposium: Studying the Arab World in Western Universities
Last month I attended the symposium "The Study of the Arab World in Western Universities," sponsored by ALESCO, the Arab League Educational and Scientific Organization, and hosted by the Arabic department…...
Thinkers
In conjunction with the London Book Fair's acknowledgement of the 'Arabic Book' this year (previously mentioned in this blog), the Guardian published a forum in which it asked Arab writers…...
An Interview with Hisham Matar
Concern. I think that was what I craved. A warm and steady and unchangeable concern. In a time of blood and tears, in a Libya full of bruise-checkered and urine-stained men, urgent with want and longing…...
from The Assembly of Secrets
This is how the story began. On that day, which was the sixth of January, 1976, Madame Sarah Nassar died, aged eighty-odd years. The death was expected. The only one to be taken by surprise was Ibrahim…...
The Stranger in His Own Icon
The one whom you found by chance in the mirror, whom you found, by chance, in the mirror in its dark side to be exact was there, alone, thinking of you and trying to ingratiate himself with your isolation…...
A Lady Who Does Not Resemble Me
A lady who does not resemble me emerges now from her dream, still warm She opens the window to the friendly morning and tempts its birds to perch on her brocaded shawl. She then finds time to preen herself…...
Melting Sun
"Things fall apart," Tide not turning. Melting away profoundly In darkness The sun. And I, Like every other day A global world-sized wreck Glaring white, A hollowed art Flattened pastures, Facing an abandoned…...
I Loved You for Your Voice by Sélim Nassib
Modern Egypt is a dream unfulfilled. Independence from Britain was supposed to usher in a glorious era in which Egypt would unite the Middle East under the banner of pan-Arabism. That dream died in 1967,…...
Mrs. Saniya’s Holiday
NOTE: In this portrait of a seamstress (a khiyaata) and her labors of love over the sewing machine, the holiday referred to in the title is the èEid al-Fitr, the three-day feast marking the end…...
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