My translation of an excerpt from The Apartment in Bab el-Louk, a stunning graphic novel / 'fabulous noir poem' written by Donia Maher and illustrated by Ganzeer and Ahmed Nagy, is now part of Words Without Borders Campus, here. I originally translated an excerpt of The Apartment in Bab el-Louk for the February 2014 issue of Words Without Borders, International Graphic Novels: Volume VIII, and now you'll find it on a new section of their site.

Words Without Borders Campus is an offshoot of the magazine, where teachers can find fiction, poetry, and essays in translation from around the world, along with multimedia contextual materials and ideas for lessons. Egypt is one of the first three countries featured, along with Mexico and China. 

Part of being a translator is immersing oneself in a specific literary canon, getting to know authors and illustrators, long histories and new trends. While it is always a delight to translate a piece of literature and make it available to new readers outside that canon, a translator is not usually able to transport the context we know so well along with the piece. It is wonderful to see an educational website able to do precisely that, enriching readers' understanding of the literature and pushing them in new directions--particularly for one of my most beloved translations. 

To enter the Apartment in Bab el-Louk on WWB Campus, just walk through the door:

The Syria Justice and Accountability Centre just released a report entitled ‘Maybe We Can Reach a Solution: Syrian Perspectives on the Conflict and Local Initiatives for Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation.’

"This report covers the second phase of research for the Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC), a Syrian-led organization promoting transitional justice and accountability.  It is a qualitative study involving in-depth interviews among all the country’s major political, religious, and ethnic groups, including those in neighboring countries and in areas controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The study finds divisions have grown between pro- and anti-government Syrians in the past year, weakening support for a national-level negotiated peace.  However, it also reports a strong rejection of extremists and a desire to restore normality to daily life, yielding support for local ceasefires and local initiatives to rebuild communities after the war."

I assisted Charney Research with research for this report, and you can download it here.

I have a couple lines in the latest issue of In Other Words: the journal for literary translators published by the British Centre for Literary Translation. The November 2014 issue is #44, Translation in the Digital Age, with Samantha Schnee as guest editor. 

It’s an exciting time to be a translator, particularly with the vibrant, active community in the UK. As Daniel Hahn and Samantha Schnee write in their editorial, “The digital revolution isn’t the only one to reshape our profession of late; just in the past five or ten years, there seems to have been another transformation within the UK translation community, with the creation of multiple new fora promoting and celebrating the art of translation; from the vastly popular Literary Translators’ Centre at the London Book Fair, to International Translation Day… to the creation of the National Writing Centre… and the Translators in Schools programme.”

Along with several other stellar translators, my contribution to the issue is a brief summary of the sessions I attended at this year’s International Translation Day. I report on two seminars: ‘Translating Comics’ with Sarah Ardizzone, Daniel Locke, and Canan Marasligil and ‘Throwing the Book at Them’ with Nicky Harman, Rosamund Hutchison, and Sam Sedgman, which both offered plenty of food for thought. You can take a look at the table of contents and Hahn and Schnee’s editorial here, and if you’re really keen, take a look at the Free Word Centre’s extensive notes on all the sessions.

Finally, speaking of community, I’ve recently joined the Society of Authors, and am glad to be a new member of the Translators Association. So here’s to translation and community both.

English PEN announced its 2014 Writers in Translation Awards today, and on the list are a couple of projects I’m working on. In the press release, Samantha Schnee, chair of Writers in Translation, said: ‘This current list of PEN-supported titles, which ranges from fiction to poetry to nonfiction, will greatly enrich the landscape of publishing in the UK for years to come, increasing cultural literacy. In the hands of some of the foremost translators working today, titles from Arabic and Chinese, from Turkmen to Nynorsk, will open windows onto other cultures for readers of English.’

My biggest piece of news is that Basma Abdel Aziz’s novel The Queue has received a 2014 English PEN Translates award. I’ll be translating the novel, to be published by Melville House UK. I’ve written previously about the novel in Mada Masr, and even with all that has changed in Egypt since Basma wrote it in December 2012, I believe it is just as chilling a reflection of Egyptian politics as it was then, if not more so. I’m thankful to the wonderful Sal Robinson at Melville House for working on the grant application with me, and am quite excited to begin working on my first book-length project for such a stellar publishing house.

Adding to the good news is that a couple of other projects I have been working on with Comma Press picked up English PEN awards this year. The forthcoming collection Iraq + 100, edited by Hassan Blasim, received a PEN Translates grant, and The Book of Gaza, which came out this past June and is edited by Atef Abu Saif, received both a PEN Translates and a PEN Promotes award.

Also on the list of grantees is Susan Bernofsky, whose translation workshop I took at Columbia University’s Graduate School of the Arts. She received a PEN Promotes award for End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German and to be published by Granta. And the ever-prolific Daniel Hahn, who organized and mentored at the BCLT Arabic Literary Translation Summit I attended in Doha last December, received a PEN Translates grant for A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese and to be published by Harvill Secker.

You can read the whole list of winners here; a big congratulations to all.

I’ll be chairing And Other Stories’ first ever Arabic reading group this autumn in New York City, and I hope you’ll join us.

How it works:

And Other Stories is like a CSA of publishing houses – you can sign up for their book list, and get their latest delivered to your door when it’s published. They’re also community supported in the sense that they seek out their readers’ feedback, and have an active community involved in helping suggest new books for them to publish. They’ve won just about every award possible in the UK, as Chad Post notes on the Three Percent blog, and they publish a great deal of fiction in translation.

One way And Other Stories selects fiction to translate and publish is through their reading groups, which they run across several languages and in several countries, with translators, writers, editors, and other savvy readers connected to the publishing house. AOS uses the groups to gather readers’ opinions on as-of-yet untranslated novels, and to help them pick what to publish. As AOS Editor-at-large Sophie Lewis said in an interview with M. Lynx Qualey, “There just aren’t enough of us with enough time or languages under our belts. So our reading groups are open proving grounds for books we think we might be interested in.”
The books:

Well be reading three Syrian novels suggested by Samar Yazbek in 2013: The Epidemic by Hani al-Rahib, The Shell by Mustafa Khalifa, and Ascension to Death byMamdouh Azzam.

Go to the author pages linked above to find out more about the books, download extracts translated into English, find out how to purchase the books, and join in the discussion in the comments section.

From the website:

“The Arabic group is the second in a series of special reading groups in collaboration with the European Society of Authors and kindly funded by the Michalski Foundation. We’re selecting books from the European Society of Authors’ Finnegan’s List, a list of under-translated, under-recognized works recommended by prominent writers from around the world. Lebanese author Hoda Barakat and Syrian author Samar Yazbek have both suggested Arabic titles for the list in the past two years.

You can take part in discussions in person in New York City and Cairo, as well as online in the comments section of the author pages. If your book club in another city is interested in reading along, let us know at [email protected].

Most of all, we want to know what you think of the novels, and thanks to your discussion online and in person, one or more of the books we discuss might make it into English.

We also invite editors from around the world to read the English samples, peruse the author pages and even come to our meet-ups to hear more. (And Other Stories doesn’t publish many titles each year, so we’d be delighted if you followed up on one of these tips and published the author – do let us know!)”

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:

• 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.