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Contributor

Emma Ramadan

Portrait of translator Emma Ramadan
Photo credit: Katya Potkin
Contributor

Emma Ramadan

Emma Ramadan is a literary translator based in Providence, RI, where she also co-owns Riffraff bookstore and bar. She is the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, and an NEA Translation Fellowship. Her translations include Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, Virginie Despentes’s Pretty Things, Kamel Daoud’s Zabor, or the Psalms, and Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying.

Articles by Emma Ramadan

Several rows of colorful patterned pagnes
Photo by Eva Blue on Unsplash
The Impatient
By Djaïli Amadou Amal
Love doesn’t exist before marriage, Ramla. It’s time you come back down to earth.
Translated from French by Emma Ramadan
You Will Tell Them
By Mariem Mint Derwich
You will say to them that she sleeps in the calabash of worlds
Translated from French by Emma Ramadan
Multilingual
Say to the Tomb
By Bios Diallo
Here the poem ends
Translated from French by Emma Ramadan
Multilingual
Five Translators on the Joys and Challenges of Translating Children’s Books
By Emma Ramadan
Emma Ramadan, whose recent translations include Who Left the Light On? and The Boy (co-translated with Tom Roberge), spoke with five top translators—of Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese,…
From “Pretty Things”
By Virginie Despentes
In Virginie Despentes’s Pretty Things, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan and forthcoming from the Feminist Press, twins Claudine and Pauline hatch a plan to create the “perfect woman,”…
Translated by Emma Ramadan
Game of Ribbons
By Emna Belhaj Yahia
“I don’t like to be lumped in with every woman who wears a scarf on her head.”
Translated from French by Emma Ramadan
On Translating Rachid O.’s “Hot Chocolate”
By Emma Ramadan
Emma Ramadan’s translation of an excerpt from Rachid O.’s Hot Chocolate appears in the August 2017 issue: The New French.The little boy of Hot Chocolate yearns. He yearns for his mother, who…
Hot Chocolate
By Rachid O.
I was thirteen years old, it was time to steal.
Translated from French by Emma Ramadan
From the Translator: On “Photogrammes”
By Emma Ramadan
Emma Ramadan guest-edited the March 2016 Words without Borders issue on Moroccan literature. The issue included her translations of poems from Ahmed Bouanani’s collection, Photogrammes, which…
Crossing Boundaries: Ten Moroccan Writers
By Emma Ramadan
These authors are doing important things in post-independence Moroccan writing, a period fueled with a new energy, vitality, and honesty.
The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers
By Fouad Laroui
So, nichts pairs of pants and Europe awaits me at nine o’clock sharp.
Translated from French by Emma Ramadan
From “Photograms”
By Ahmed Bouanani
I will paint my death on a canvas of autumn
Translated from French by Emma Ramadan
From “Dreams of a Berber Night, or The Tomb of Thorns”
By Siham Bouhlal
I would like to hide in your kiss.
Translated from French by Emma Ramadan
Multilingual