BULAQ | بولاق

Raph Cormack is author of Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt's Roaring ‘20s, which chronicles the lives of many of Egypt's biggest stars of the early twentieth century.

Show Notes:

The Amar Foundation has an archive of Mounira al-Mahdiyya songs such as the one we end the show with, "اسمع اغاني المهدية"

Raph also wrote about “Queer Life in Cairo in the 1920s” for the Gay and Lesbian Review.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

An abbreviated version of The Nights will be coming out in Fall 2021, in Seale's translation for W. W. Norton. The fuller Nights is currently set for 2023. You can follow the Nights Bot, with which Seale shares fragments of her translation, on Twitter.

You can watch a recording of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2020 The Bookseller Webinar -The global influence of the Arabian Nights, with Richard van Leeuwen, Marina Warner, and Yasmine Seale, on YouTube.

You can read Seale's talk with Veronica Esposito, “Wild Irreverence”: A Conversation about Arabic Translation with Yasmine Seale, in World Literature Today.

At the beginning of the episode Seale reads an excerpt from Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi's Ta'tir al-anam fi tafsir al-ahlam, which is featured in the DREAMS issue of ArabLit Quarterly, released December 15.

Seale also reads her poem “Conventional Wisdom,” which won the poetry category of the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. The Book of Travels by Ḥannā Diyāb -- the Syrian writer who related the Aladdin tale to Antoine Galland -- will be out from the Library of Arabic Literature, in Elias Muhanna's translation, in May 2021. Seale has written the foreword to the first volume.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For our end-of-year book list, we made up our own categories -- from “best poet I hadn't heard of before” ” to “best book about cannibalism” to “best book that lived up to the hype” -- and added a few more along the way. It's a journey through 10 books that struck us and stayed with us this year.

Show Notes

Best literary cookbook for children (MLQ): Arab Fairy Tale Feasts, Karim al-Rawi, ill. Nahid Kazemi. Read the review by Marcia and her 10-year-old.

Best book I've been waiting for years to see published (Ursula): Ahmed Bouanani's La Septieme Porte, a history of Moroccan cinema from 1907 to 1986. Bouanani was a writer, poet and film-maker who was censored and blacklisted; the manuscript of this book was nearly destroyed in a fire, and was painstakingly put back together by his daughter, Touda Bouanani.

Best collection of poetry by a poet previously unknown to me (MLQ): Except for This Unseen Thread, Ra'ad Abdulqadir, tr. Mona Kareem, published by Ugly Duckling Presse

Best book I'm reading even if I haven't gotten far (Ursula): Ahmed Naji's prison memoir حرز مكمكم; read an excerpt in English translation at the University of Michigan website, translated by Khaled Mattawa.

Best book about cannibalism (MLQ): Physician on the Nile: A Description of Egypt and Journal of the Famine Years, by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, ed. & tr. Tim Mackintosh Smith

Best book I've ordered someone for Christmas (Ursula): The Annotated Arabian Nights, ed. Paulo Lemos Horta, tr. Yasmine Seale

Best gift book for under $20 (MLQ): Midnight in Cairo, by Raphael Cormack, which reminded Marcia of Zeinab Zaza's “يتامى الإسكندرية,” a historical police procedural set in 1930s Alexandria that focuses on the precarious lives of women.

Best book that actually lived up to the hype (Ursula): The Book of Sleep, by Haytham al-Wardani, translated by Robin Moger.

BONUS CATEGORY: Best Arabic-language list in translation in 2021, Seagull Books

Best introduction to a novel (MLQ): Balqis Sharara's introduction to the re-issue of her late sister Hayat Sharara's When Darkness Falls. You can read it, tr. Hend Saeed, on ArabLit.

Best book about the “Syrian refugee crisis” (Ursula): The Wrong End of the Telescope, by Rabih Alameddine

We also say goodbye to Humphrey Davies (1947-2021). There is a digital memorial in progress at arablit.org/humphrey/.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We talk to scholar Elias Muhanna about translating a magical, delightful eighteenth-century travelogue. In 1707 Hanna Diyab journeyed from his native Aleppo as translator to a rapacious and sometimes ridiculous Frenchman. He survived a shipwreck and a pirate attack, met King Louis XIV, and gave The Thousand and One Nights translator Antoine Galland a dozen new stories. Cheated out of a promised job in Paris, he eventually returned to Syria, where he wrote it all up in his old age.

Show Notes

You can download a free Arabic PDF of the Book of Travels on the Library of Arabic Literature website.

You can read more about Diyab (and speculation about whether he was the “real Aladdin”) in Paolo Lemos Horta's Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights.

You can read Yasmine Seale's stand-alone translation of Aladdin, introduced by Lemos Horta, or get her new Annotated Arabian Nights, edited and introduced by Lemos Horta, out this month from WW Norton.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We look at new writing from Syria and about the experiences of Syrian refugees, including Ramy Al-Asheq's Ever Since I Did Not Die, a book he categorizes not as poetry or prose but as “pieces of my body, haphazardly brought together in a paper bag.”

Show Notes

Ramy Al-Asheq's Ever Since I Did Not Die was translated by Isis Nusair and edited by Levi Thompson.

Samar Yazbek's Planet of Clay was translated by Leri Price and is on the shortlist for this year's National Book Award, in the Translation category.

Rabih Alameddine's The Wrong End of the Telescope follows a Lebanese-American trans woman's journey to the Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece.

Haya Saleh's Wild Poppies won the 2020 Etisalat Award for Arabic Children's Literature in the YA category and follows two young Syrian boys, Omar and Sufyan, as they struggle to come-of-age during wartime.

We finished on a reading of an untitled poem by Ramy Al-Asheq, published in Transference, translated by Levi Thompson.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We read from the work of Palestinian poets Maya Abu Al Hayyat, Fady Joudah, Asmaa Azaizeh and Najwan Darwish, who writes: “Death has liberated me/ from the shackles of our small jailers,/ just as poetry has liberated us/ from the greatest jailer–time.”

Show Notes

In Palestine these days, the olive harvest is under assault from Israeli settlers. Six prominent Palestinian human rights and civil socierty NGOs have just been designated terrorist organizations.

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's You Can Be The Last Leaf, Trans. Fady Joudah, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions

Najwan Darwish's Collection Exhausted On the Cross, Trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is out from New York Review Books.

Fady Joudah curated The Baffler's series of lyric dispatches from Palestine, from which Marcia read Asmaa Azaizeh's Reflection.

We read Fady Joudah's poem Dehiscence, from his new collection Tethered to Stars.

And if you are interested in hearing much more Arabic poetry, check out the podcast Maqsouda, another Sowt production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Egyptian feminist writer and doctor Nawal El Saadawi always spoke her mind. Her early books were explosive testimonials, based on her medical practice and personal experience, about sexual double standards and the abuses women faced because of them. She went on to write many more books, including novels, plays and several memoirs. Over the course of her life she was jailed, censored, fired, admired, and attacked by Islamists as an unbeliever. She is still one of the best-known and most translated Arab women writers.

Some of the books discussed in this episode include: The Hidden Face of Eve, The Fall of the Imam, Memoirs from the Women's Prison, Woman at Point Zero, Daughter of Isis and Walking Through Fire.

The Radical Books Collective and the Adabiyat Book Club are holding an online master class on El Saadawy's famous novel Woman At Point Zero on November 20, with academic and translator Samah Selim.

Ursula wrote about El Saadawy recently for The New York Review of Books.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sonallah Ibrahim's Warda is the story of a female fighter in the 1960s and 70s Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and of the Egyptian intellectual who, decades later, tries to solve the mystery of what happened to her. We discuss the vibrant and mysterious female character at the heart of one of Ibrahim's most ambitious literary projects with scholar, editor and translator Hosam Aboul-ela. As Aboul-ela writes in his introduction to his new translation, Warda is someone who “somehow manages to embody both the historical and the unimaginable.”

Warda is available, in Hosam Abou-ela's translation, from Yale University Press.

Hosam also writes about Warda in his Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens.

Hosam's translation of Sonallah Ibrahim's Stealth is available from New Directions.

Sonallah Ibrahim's Zaat, in Tony Calderbank's translation, is, unfortunately, out of print.

Hosam Aboul-ela is also the editor of the Arabic list at Seagull Books, an award-winning Kolkata-based publisher. One of the first books it published was The Stillborn by Arwa Salih. Forthcoming titles include Salim Barakat's Come, Take a Gentle Stab, co-translated by Huda Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen; Akram Musallam's The Dance of the Deep-blue Scorpion, translated by Sawad Hussain, and Hussein Barghouthi's Among the Almond Blossoms, translated by Ibrahim Muwahi.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Football and Arabic literature haven't always had an easy relationship. Football has inspired famous authors like Mahmoud Darwish, and anonymous fans who have composed powerful stadium chants. But the sport is sometimes looked down on by writers. We celebrate the sport and its chroniclers, featured in the FOOTBALL-themed fall 2021 issue of ArabLit Quarterly.

SHOW NOTES

Today, we talk our way through the Fall 2021 issue of ArabLit Quarterly, which is all about literature and football. We open with a chant from the Casablanca team RAJA, “Fi bladi delmouni,” or “I Was Wronged in My Own Country,” in the original and then translated by Hicham Rafik.

For more background, read Aida Alami's “The Soccer Politics of Morocco,” in The New York Review of Books.

We go out on the Ultras Ahlawy chant “Hekayetna,” or “Our Story,” translated by Mina Ibrahim.

We also talk about Mina Ibrahim's moving essay “Egyptian Football's Missing Archives.”

Mid-way, we read from Syrian author Luqman Derky's “Knocking on Blue Freedom's Door,” translated by Daniel Behar.

You can find the issue at arablit.org/store

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We're back! Catch up on everything you missed over the summer, including Women in Translation Month and a Fall reading list full of intriguing new titles.

Show Notes:

In our opening, Marcia reads "Four Years Without You" (For Mahmoud Darwish) by Samar Abdel Jabar, trans. Zeina Hashem Beck

August was Women in Translation Month with ArabLit highlighting Arab women authors you may not have heard of yet.

The Female Voices in Arabic Literature webinar featured writer Iman Mersal, translator Sawad Hussain and scholar Dr. Marlé Hammond.

Melanie Magidow's translation of a (small portion) of the epic poem of Dhat al-Himma is out from Penguin Press as The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman.

Warda, by Sonallah Ibrahim, trans. Hosam Abul-Ela, is out from Yale University Press

Slipping, by Mohamed Kheir, trans. Robin Moger, was published in June by Two Lines Press.

The Library of Arabic Literature is behind the bilingual edition of Hanna Diyab's Books of Travels (trans. Elias Muhanna) and al-Baghdadi's A Physician on the Nile (trans.. Tim Mackintosh-Smith). Diyab is the source of some of the stories Antoine Galland added to his version of the 1001 Nights, including the story Aladdin.

Samar Yazbek's Planet of Clay (trans. Leri Price) is forthcoming from World Editions.

The Egyptian writer Basma Abdel Aziz's 2016 novel The Queue (trans. Lissie Jacquette) was a widely praised work of dark political fantasy. Her follow-up, tr. Jonathan Wright, is Here Is A Body.

Ursula's article on Edward Said -- on his own account of his life and those of others, including a recent biography -- can be found at The Point.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.