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Mona Kareem's essay “Western Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations” lit up debates among translators and poets. In this episode Kareem talks about poetry, the power dynamics of translation, and the relationship of both to migration, exile, self-censorship, and publication. She also reads from her poetry, both in her own translation and in translation by poet @SaraFarag.

Essays by Mona Kareem

Western Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations 

Bidoon: A Cause and Its Literature Are Born  

Mapping Exile: A Writer's Story of Growing Up Stateless in Post-Gulf War Kuwait

Self-translation Never Lands

Poetry by Mona Kareem

Eleven poems on Poetry International 

Three poems in The Brooklyn Rail

More at Mona's website, monakareem.blogspot.com/search/label/Poetry

Ahmed Naji's essay Taming the Immigrant: Musings of a Writer in Exile 

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Two very different Egyptian novels – Hamdi Abu Golayyel's The Men Who Swallowed the Sun and Mohamed Kheir's Slipping – both circle around issues of migration in different ways. Abu Golayyel's Men (originally The Rise and Fall of the Saad Shin), translated by Humphrey Davies, is an anti-epic epic told in a rough, powerful storyteller's voice, following men as they move from Egypt to Libya and Italy. Mohamed Kheir's Slipping, translated by Robin Moger, is a beautifully crafted sonic landscape of appearances and disappearances.

Show Notes

An excerpt of The Men Who Swallowed the Sun is available at the Hoopoe Fiction website.

“The practice and culture of smuggling in the borderland of Egypt and Libya,” by Thomas Hüsken, is available on the Chatham House website.

An excerpt of Slipping appeared at LitHub.

Abu Bakr Khaal's novel African Titanics, translated to English by Charis Bredon, is available from Dar al-Saqi and Darf Books.

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What was so controversial about Children of the Alley, leading to it being banned for years in Egypt and to an attempt on the author's life? How and when was it published, criticized, understood? 

Mohamed Shoair delves into all of this in his literary investigation The Story of the Banned Book: Naguib Mahfouz's Children Of The Alley (trans. Humphrey Davies). It's a study of literary censorship and of the fight between artistic expression and religious and political authority in Egypt from the 1950s through today. 

The Story of the Banned Book: Naguib Mahfouz's Children of the Alley will be available soon from AUC Press. An excerpt is available at the AUC Press website, as is the book's table of contents.

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She was an outsider, an experimenter, a “rebel realist” and a feminist. You may not have read the short stories of Malika Moustadraf (1969-2006), since her work fell out of print after her untimely death. But tales of Moustadraf's fierce talent never stopped circulating, and now her work is back in print in Arabic and also set to appear in Alice Guthrie's English translation.

The US and UK editions of this collection have different titles. The US edition of Moustadraf's stories, Blood Feast, is out from The Feminist Press, while the UK edition, Something Strange, Like Hunger, is out from Saqi Books.

There is also an audiobook, narrated by Amin El Gamal and Lameece Issaq.

We talk about another important Moroccan author whose work was in danger of falling out of circulation, Ahmed Bouanani, in an earlier episode: Writing to Remember.

The Arabic re-issue of the collection, which includes the late stories, is available from  منشورات الربيع, available online from a number of retailers.

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Egypt's January 25 revolution was 11 years ago. Since then many of its young leaders have been persecuted and the history of what happened distorted or denied. We look at writing that remembers and resists. 

Alaa Abd El-Fattah's You Have Not Yet Been Defeated was translated by a collective, and is out from Fizcarraldo Editions in the UK. A US edition is forthcoming in March 2022 from Seven Stories Press. There is also an Italian translation by Monica Ruocco.

Ahmed Douma's second poetry collection, Curly, was set for release in September 2021 by Dar Maraya. But on the eve of its publication, state security officials confiscated copies of the book. Read Elliott Colla and Ahmed Hassan's co-translations of a poem from this collection, and an excerpt from Douma's “Blasphemy,” on ArabLit. 

Basma Abdelaziz's Here is a Body, which chronicles the Rabaa massacre and its aftermath, was published in Jonathan Wright's translation by Hoopoe Fiction. You can read an excerpt on the Hoopoe website.

Also, join our #bulaqbookquiz for a chance to win a release from one of ten participating publishers. Send your answers to [email protected].

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The Book of Ramallah collects stories set in and around Palestine's administrative capital, which, Maya Abu Al-Hayat writes in her introduction, “represents this mirage, this glimmer of hope that isn't real, to many writers.”

Show Notes: 

Book of Ramallah, edited by Maya Abu Al-Hayat, is available from Comma Press. You can read “Love in Ramallah” by Ibrahim Nasrallah, translated by Mohammed Ghalaieny, at Bookanista. An excerpt from the introduction is available at The Irish Times.

An excerpt of Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah, in Ahdaf Soueif's translation, is available at Penguin Random.

An except of Raja Shehaheh's Palestinian Walks is available through PBS.

“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” by Nathan Thrall, is at the New York Review.

The Present, directed by Farah Nabulsi and co-written by Nabulsi and Hind Shoufani, is streaming on Netflix.

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