I'm pleased to present the Cairo Book Club’s first podcast: a discussion of I Was Born There, I Was Born Here by Palestinian author Mourid Barghouti, a sequel to his much-lauded memoir I Saw Ramallah. The English translation by Humphrey Davies was named runner-up for the 2012 Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and Davies was very kind in joining us for our discussion of the book and on translation.
Listen to the podcast at Rolling Bulb or download it on SoundCloud.
Mourid Barghouti is a prominent and celebrated Palestinian poet and has spent most of his life in exile. Born in 1944 in the village of Deir Ghassaneh near Ramallah, he graduated from Cairo University in 1967. He has been published throughout the Middle East and lives and works in Cairo. He has published twelve books of poetry, the last of which is Midnight. His collected works were published in Beirut in 1997, and in the same year his memoir, I Saw Ramallah, an account of his first visit home after thirty years, won the 1997 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. I Was Born There, I Was Born Here was published in Arabic in 2009, and the translation by Humphrey Davies was published by Bloomsbury in 2011.
Humphrey Davies is a renowned translator of Arabic literature, two-time winner and two-time runner up of the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. His translations include Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, Ahmed Alaidy’s Being Abbas el Abd, Hamdy elGazzar’s Black Magic, Elias Khoury’s The Gate of the Sun and Yalo and Bahaa Taher’s Sunset Oasis among many others. His translation of I Was Born There, I Was Born Here was named runner-up for the 2012 Banipal Prize, about which the committee wrote:
“Davies catches the spirit of the original text and lets us feel and enjoy the beauty of his English prose. He has adopted exactly the right palette of both vocabulary and tone right the way through, giving readers the beautifully rendered revisiting of a riven landscape. In this fluid translation of a thoughtful and moving book he manages a rare thing – to make you feel you are reading the book in the language in which it was written. The great skill in his translation is not just in the sophisticated understanding of the original… it is also in the rendering of an apparently effortless, yet deeply nuanced English prose.”
As a resource for voracious readers, other books we mention in this podcast include:
We also mention the Palestine Festival of Literature, an annual literary festival established in 2008 which ran from May 25-31 this year. If you would like a chance to win a bilingual copy of this year’s PalFest anthology, enter the summer reading contest over at Arabic Literature (in English).
Thank you to Humphrey Davies for joining us, and thanks to everyone who participated in our discussion: Raphael Cormack, Ismail Wahby, Nancy Linthicum, Will Barnes, Abdel-Rahman Hussein, Laura Dean, Moustafa Kamel, and Elisabeth Jaquette.
Listen to the podcast at Rolling Bulb or download it on SoundCloud.
Listen to the podcast at Rolling Bulb or download it on SoundCloud.
Mourid Barghouti is a prominent and celebrated Palestinian poet and has spent most of his life in exile. Born in 1944 in the village of Deir Ghassaneh near Ramallah, he graduated from Cairo University in 1967. He has been published throughout the Middle East and lives and works in Cairo. He has published twelve books of poetry, the last of which is Midnight. His collected works were published in Beirut in 1997, and in the same year his memoir, I Saw Ramallah, an account of his first visit home after thirty years, won the 1997 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. I Was Born There, I Was Born Here was published in Arabic in 2009, and the translation by Humphrey Davies was published by Bloomsbury in 2011.
Humphrey Davies is a renowned translator of Arabic literature, two-time winner and two-time runner up of the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. His translations include Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, Ahmed Alaidy’s Being Abbas el Abd, Hamdy elGazzar’s Black Magic, Elias Khoury’s The Gate of the Sun and Yalo and Bahaa Taher’s Sunset Oasis among many others. His translation of I Was Born There, I Was Born Here was named runner-up for the 2012 Banipal Prize, about which the committee wrote:
“Davies catches the spirit of the original text and lets us feel and enjoy the beauty of his English prose. He has adopted exactly the right palette of both vocabulary and tone right the way through, giving readers the beautifully rendered revisiting of a riven landscape. In this fluid translation of a thoughtful and moving book he manages a rare thing – to make you feel you are reading the book in the language in which it was written. The great skill in his translation is not just in the sophisticated understanding of the original… it is also in the rendering of an apparently effortless, yet deeply nuanced English prose.”
As a resource for voracious readers, other books we mention in this podcast include:
- I Saw Ramallah, by Mourid Barghouti
- Gate of the Sun, by Elias Khoury
- House of Stone, by Anthony Shadid
- Being Abbas el Abd, by Ahmed Alaidy
- Zahra’s Paradise, by Amir and Khalil
- Leg Over Leg, by Ahmad Faris Shidyaq
- Secret Pleasures, by Hamdy el-Gazzar
- Palestinian Walks, by Raja Shehadeh
We also mention the Palestine Festival of Literature, an annual literary festival established in 2008 which ran from May 25-31 this year. If you would like a chance to win a bilingual copy of this year’s PalFest anthology, enter the summer reading contest over at Arabic Literature (in English).
Thank you to Humphrey Davies for joining us, and thanks to everyone who participated in our discussion: Raphael Cormack, Ismail Wahby, Nancy Linthicum, Will Barnes, Abdel-Rahman Hussein, Laura Dean, Moustafa Kamel, and Elisabeth Jaquette.
Listen to the podcast at Rolling Bulb or download it on SoundCloud.
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