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Je porte ma plume comme une croix sur mon dos, et j’avance. Voici Sisyphe roulant sa pierre à ma droite. La terre gronde sous ses pieds, il avance incessamment vers un but inconnu. Le mystère de sa torture se reflète dans mon âme, comme dans un miroir ténébreux. Je plonge au fond de la transparence de la glace en quête d’un Narcisse souffrant. Ses larmes sont les miens.
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Ghareeb Iskander’s English Poetry and Modern Arabic Verse unravels the workings of the creative translational projects of early Arab modernist poet-translators, which revolutionised the Arab literary scene in the mid-twentieth century onwards—a fundamental contribution to Arabic literary and translation studies that is valuable for students and academics alike.
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There is an ideal alliance between writer and transgressor (translator?): the Works of Marquis de Sade, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Jean Genet, Sadegh Hedayat, and Henry Miller were (are) thus banned and censored and suppressed. Crime: they have not followed the stereotypes of language and have embarked on forbidden paths.
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All in all, Borbély’s works are characterised by meaningful enjambments, fragmented poetic form and intense musicality. A painful life event also affected Borbély’s literary thoughts. On the night before Christmas Eve of 2000, his parents were brutally attacked in a burglary-murder: the poet’s mother was bludgeoned to death as she was sleeping; his father suffered serious injuries. After his mother
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Historian and journalist Mark Blaisse travelled extensively through the country to find answers to this question. He spent the night with princes in a desert camp, inspected the road to Mecca, picked dates, visited a soccer match and art galleries filled with forbidden work and marveled at the adequate flirting in shopping malls. He discovered a paradoxical
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In The Tobacco Keeper, a ghostwriter narrates the life of a fictitious character, the violinist Kamal. The novel has major intertwinings with history, from where comes the main triggers for the changes in Kamal’s life. Another key aspect of the novel is the complex parallels of the Middle East with the West through the juxtaposition of the character with European elements,
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At an Hour’s Sleep from Here is the translation of Franca Mancinelli’s A un’ora di sonno da qui (2018), which consists of her first two poetry volumes, Mala kruna (2007) and Pasta madre (“Mother Dough,” 2013), as well as a previously unpublished sequence, Fuori dal fuoco (“Out of Focus, Out of the Fire”). As an Italian reader of Mancinelli, who is
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Afin de restituer cette tragédie immense, de rendre hommage à l’histoire vraie de cette amitié, Colum McCann nous offre une œuvre totale à la forme inédite ; une exploration tout à la fois historique, politique, philosophique, religieuse, musicale, cinématographique et géographique d’un conflit infini. Porté par la grâce d’une écriture, flirtant avec la poésie
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The inception of the action is the date March 11, when four of the Arab terrorists who blasted the underground in Madrid, were arrested. Bassam resembles each one of them – with a beard and a black woollen hat, sparse moustache, sharp cheekbones and piercing almond eyes. This is the moment when the story unfolds, at whose center is the Syrian, and the narration is related by his fellow-student and friend Ignat, while it is not difficult to distinguish in him the
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De loin! Plus tard, Djaout devint le talentueux romancier que l'on sait. Son assassinat barbare par les intégristes islamistes, ce 20 mai 93, transforma sa vie en destin et sa littérature en profession de foi esthétique. Je l'avais donc traduit en arabe alors qu'il n'avait pas dix-huit ans. C'était la première fois et la dernière fois qu'on le faisait. J'ai eu cette intuition et cet honneur alors qu'il était encore étudiant en mathématiques et totalement
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Sur une période de dix-huit mois, une commission compile une série de témoignages au sujet des relations et de la production à bord du vaisseau où l’activité consiste souvent à surveiller d’étranges objets bourdonnants, qui améliorent l’humeur, fécondent les rêves et hallucinent les consciences. Aussi glaçante qu’émouvante, cette science-fiction révèle le désarroi d’humains contraints de vivre loin de chez eux et les interrogations des
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In her book of letters to the dead, the prize-winning poet Valzhyna Mort relearns how to mourn those erased by violent history.
With shocking, unforgettable lyric force, Valzhyna Mort's book confronts the legacy of violent death in one family in Belarus. In these letters to the dead, the poet asks: How do we mourn after a century of propaganda? Can private stories challenge the collective power of Soviet and American historical mythology?
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Four years ago, I started this book project because I couldn’t sit with it any longer. I couldn’t stomach how people were talking about their Muslim neighbours, the poisonous ‘us-them’ narrative and worse—what Muslims sometimes said about themselves: the quiet guilt that seeped into conversations, a passive acceptance of the blame that was not theirs to share. It needed to stop.
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Fabio Caiani and Catherine Cobham’s The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts is a comprehensive study, which focuses on the historical development of the Iraqi novel. It analyses key texts by prominent pioneer authors who started fiction writing earlier in the twentieth century. The fixation on the writings of the first half of the twentieth century, as Caiani and Cobham point out, allows the reader to view
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Historians have long concurred in identifying professional authors as the occupational group most prone to habitual tobacco use. Writers are most closely associated with the practice of smoking in particular, as if, in the general consensus, the scribe could find inspiration in a tobacco pouch or pry the muse from her hiding-places with a few puffs of poisonous fumes. Other stimulants have found favor among the authorial class;
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