Thank you to Yasmine, who is a superstar in the firmament of Arabic-English literary translation and whose talent and finesse will continue to bring new communities of readers to Arabic literature in translation. And thank you of course to everyone at Words Without Borders, which is one of those few broad-based literary institutions in the US that has remained light in spirit, not fixed in place, but listening to its authors, its translators, its educators, and its readers.

And I will come back to that. But as I give this talk, I want to first of all remember my colleagues Mohammed Zaqzooq and Mahmoud al-Shaer, as well as all the writers we published together this spring, and their families, their friends, and their neighbors all across Gaza. May all of you be safe.

And I also hope that those of you in the audience, both now and later, will bear with me as I try to feel my way forward in this era, for which I do not have the language, in which we watch genocidal horrors on our computers and phone screens, day after day, and yet struggle to find the mechanisms to stop them.

Of course individual choice—which is the gilded promise of our era—gives us almost no leverage, and it is easy to throw up our hands and say we cannot personally affect the systems around us. But we as writers, as translators, as editors, and as publishers are not just individuals, but also a community. A community that can shape words to shape ideas, and then occasionally see these ideas reshape our reality.

So, in this period of accelerated extraction and restriction, where stories can travel while storytellers often cannot, I want to take a moment to reflect not on the literature that reaches us through translation, but on the processes by which it does.

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In the last fifteen years that I have been, in fits and starts, producing the small literary project called ArabLit, I have observed that there is an approach to the literatures of other languages and countries—and I’m speaking particularly about those pairings in which there is a pericolonial or other extractive relationship—that sees literature as a resource, whereby the publisher goes to that other market with a bit of condescension, with their pickaxe or their explosives, their scouts and their freelance translators, and looks to mine what they can of a literature in order to repackage and sell it in their own market.

Now, yes, more often publishers will not go there at all, but will—as during and after the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq—publish literature, for instance, by US soldiers that promises to allow the reader to travel without unsettling their sense of self in any way. Generally, translation is seen as the hero here, the force of un-settling, and is sometimes called a bridge between cultures, something many translators and thinkers have already problematized: Mona Kareem, Mona Baker, Sinan Antoon, and others.

And while I certainly would recommend that you read widely among Iraqi writers—for one thing, they have been producing great literature for more than a thousand years—and while I would love to see more of it available in English translation, I would not suggest that translation is, in itself, necessarily a force for good. And, if we do see a “bridge” of translation, it is often the same kind of bridge that exists in other spheres, where tanks and banned weapons and Hollywood blockbusters cross the bridge into Iraq, while only a few Iraqi stories, under very particular conditions, make it into the US.

After all, translation is not exempt from the real-world conditions in which we find ourselves, and publishers—including sometimes small publishers—will, in the process of taking literature from its context and repackaging it in a way that makes sense for the local consumer, cover it in plastic, put a woman in niqab with kohl-rimmed eyes on the cover, remove a chapter, add a chapter, or sell it in a two-for-one deal with literature by US soldiers. Whatever makes sense in the local market. And sometimes, such publishers will feel virtuous for having done so.

Naturally, writers in a world of great imbalances often want to be recognized in translation, particularly in languages that have more resources, where this means wider recognition, being paid better, getting invitations to international festivals and residencies. Translation here is not a virtue but means of access. Meanwhile, sometimes, book workers in languages with better resources will consider the act of translation such a good as to give no real consideration to how it is done.

So I want to think a little about this how, particularly when a place is at the center of a news-and-attention cycle. One example—that doesn’t involve English—is the way Syrian literature had a boom in Germany, largely in translation.

In 2020, Mari Odoy did a special section for ArabLit on what she called the miniature boom of Syrian literature in Berlin, and I urge you all to read the interviews she conducted. Since ArabLit doesn’t have the greatest search capabilities, I have reposted it at arablit.org/boom/.

So, in this boom, there was a particular kind of literature that was being solicited and cultivated, and a community of Syrian writers—at least in Europe—that was affected by this. And I’ll just quote a couple of the writers and artists Mari interviewed while noting that, here, they are referring not just to publishers, but to event curators, magazine editors, interviewers, and so on.

The poet and writer Ramy al-Asheq told her that people often say “show us how much you are suffering on the way to Europe, and how much Europe is good.”

And the writer and philosopher Yassin al-Haj Saleh talked with Mari about how his story was packaged to be consumable by an audience hungry for these “sexy stories of suffering.” 

This applies not just to Syrian literature in German translation, but to other times and places in which literary translation was mobilized to comfort the comfortable, underlining a superiority narrative. You could find examples in how some Global South to Global North immigration narratives are packaged, or in the “saving Muslim women” genre, to borrow terminology from Lila Abu-Lughod.

But back to Syrian literature in Germany. I do think, if we transport ourselves back in time to 2020, there were several ways this could have gone. Yasmina Jraissati—the core literary agent who has worked with Arabic literature in translation, and who somehow manages to keep an optimistic outlook—thought that this initial opening might ultimately create more space for Syrian literature in German, long-term, as readers discovered great short-story stylists like Rasha Abbas, novelcraft like that of the late and beloved Khaled Khalifa, the poetry of Golan Haji, and much, much more.

However, let’s skip ahead from 2020 to the fall of 2023, when the news cycle has changed, when there are increasing and sometimes violent demands on Arab writers, who were once welcomed by many German readers, to prove that they will not be critical of the Israeli state. When Adania Shibli and other Palestinian and Arab writers are being slandered in the newspapers, and when German publishers are afraid to stand up even for the most basic right to speech. When Syrian Palestinian author Ghayath al-Madhoun, who lives in Berlin, says that while previously he would have been invited to dozens of events to mark the release of a new book in translation, with his latest, there have been virtually none.

So this development was very fast: from the extractive to shutting down, from profiting off the writing of a community to abandoning it.

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I also imagine that this picture of literary translation will be unfamiliar to some translators. In some language pairings, there is a more equal relationship and often a multi-way dialogue. I am in no way suggesting that there should not be repackaging or some forms of adaptation, or that there is or should be any agreement about what “good literature” is from language to language and culture to culture. The French absolutely have the right to believe Ayn Rand is a misunderstood genius.

But key here is that, in these language pairings where there is a more equal relationship, as well as an ongoing emotional and material investment in both directions, writers often get more control over how they are presented. And publishers and others are not coming in to strip a landscape bare, then abandon it as the attention cycle moves relentlessly on.

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Now, the literature currently in the spotlight, in many languages, is Palestinian. If we set aside literary institutions for a moment, much of the individual and community attention on Palestinian literature is in the deepest solidarity—the sharing of poetry by Refaat al-Areer, Mosaab abu Toha, Hiba Abu Nada, and others. The little libraries at the student encampments. The free books on Palestine offered by publishers like Haymarket, Interlink, Saqi, and Between the Lines. And I do believe that literature can create shared spaces and new understandings.

But also, some of the attention to Palestinian literature is opportunistic. There is the republication of older Palestinian poetry in order to deflect what literary institutions are doing now as they remain silent or obscure violence, sometimes on behalf of donors. And there is also the making of money.

I cannot speak for other publishers, but our only short story collection was by Palestinian author Samira Azzam and was translated by the wonderful Ranya Abdelrahman, with a foreword by Adania Shibli, who is such a champion of Samira’s work. The book was published at the end of 2022, and, thanks to Adania and our small community, it did receive some attention in 2022 and the first half of 2023. But it then received extraordinary, unexpected attention in late 2023 and 2024, and I think we have now sold more than five thousand copies of a short story collection by a long-deceased writer in translation.

We published this book because we thought that economic success with it was impossible, and thus that no other publisher would be interested, otherwise we would have suggested this project to a larger publisher. And while when I checked last week, our most popular issue of the magazine was still our CATS issue, this is the first time bookshops around the world have been reaching out to us, asking to stock our “Gaza! Gaza! Gaza!” issue, and I imagine we will ultimately sell more copies of this issue than any other. I will add that all profits from this issue go to our partners at Majalla 28 in Gaza.

But obviously other publishers have noticed this sort of interest, including larger publishers, some of whom have reached out to us.

In a recent Zoom call with one publisher who asked for recommendations of Palestinian literature, I was told, “We don’t want to capitalize on what’s happening.” I do believe this editor was being self-reflective, but with the recognition that one might indeed capitalize on the current attention cycle.

Yet unlike in Germany, where we documented one part of this story (interest) happening in 2020 and another (vilification) happening in 2023 and 2024, here, in English, they are happening at the same time, and there are publishing houses simultaneously interested in and afraid of Palestinian literature.

I say all this not from a position of someone who has solved all the questions of how to support literature without opportunistically benefiting, but only as someone attempting to find the words to describe the landscape around us.

I also don’t believe that any of these things must happen, or that any of these relationships need to be extractive.

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I do want to highlight some initiatives that I believe are more multi-directionally sustainable, beginning with one in Germany. The organization called 10/11, named for the uprisings of 2010 and 2011, is run by Katharine Halls and Sandra Hetzl. 10/11 is not just a cooperative effort in which the ongoing interests and needs of writers matter when promoting their writing in translation to German and other readers. But the staff at 10/11 also are proponents of their own writers and translators making a living. Yasmina Jraissati’s Raya Agency, of course, has been a relentless champion of the rights of Arab authors for two decades. And there’s Ruth Ahmedzai’s new Azulejos.

I’d also note that, when I refer to extraction and profit, I don’t mean only among for-profit publishing activities.

Nonprofit bodies also can be extractive, demanding literature of a certain sort to show to their donors, so that they can prove that they are achieving particular outcomes. Instead of supporting a local literary community, for instance, they might end up supporting only particular narratives: a certain frame on women’s rights, a certain kind of freedom of speech, while closing out other possibilities. 

One of the things I admire about Words Without Borders—and there are many—is that while they certainly have shared values, I don’t see them trying to impose a definition of what a world literature should be. As I have seen it, they don’t enter a country or language with a pre-set idea of what they want to showcase, such as only “liberating women” narratives or “suffering women” narratives. But instead, they listen to local writers, translation communities, and to bicultural translators.

I want to finish by recalling a thread that translator-author Anton Hur shared on Twitter, in which he talked about the failures of some big literary institutions—some of which have met this moment with cowardly marketing language at best and genocide apologia at worst—suggesting that literary institutions should be more cloudlike: that literary weight should not settle into giant buildings fixed in place, but that they should be able to move, to change shape, to change with writers and literary movements instead of trying to fix them in place.

There is sometimes a lamenting of the closure of small literary magazines. But as Anton notes, clouds move and reform, come together and separate. ArabLit has hung around in the stratosphere for a long time now, some would say too long, largely because it doesn’t have much heft. And when it closes, I look forward to it breaking up and reforming into new and interesting projects. Most especially, to how it might feed new communities that can write and translate a more just and generous world.