but flashing glances
but that can do
what must be done.
– Iman Mersal, ‘I Look Around Me,’ translated by Khaled Mattawa, Words Without Borders, January 2006, used here by permission
Today (May 25), Mersal is among the Sheikh Zayed Book Award program’s most adamantly acclaimed laureates, welcomed as the 2021 winner in Literature for her creative nonfiction work
Fee Athar Enayat Al-Zayyat (In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat), published in 2019 by Al Kotob Khan Library.
The French Edition, Actes Sud/Sindbad, the Arab Library
In April, Actes Sud’s Sindbad Arab Library published
Sur les traces d’Enayat Zayyat, a translation into French by Richard Jacquemond. An English edition reportedly is in progress.
Brave new world: Naveen Kishore at Seagull Books. | Photo Credit:
Gurmehar Kaur
In a scenario where U.K. or U.S. publishers almost exclusively decide which translated books the Third World gets to read, Kolkata-based Seagull Books bucks the trend by commissioning translations directly for both local and global markets
The politics of translation has been brilliantly excavated in recent decades by theorists ranging from Walter Benjamin to Gayatri Spivak. More quantitative studies also exist, indicating how translation flows in certain directions: for instance, from English to other languages, sometimes even from one language to another via the medium of English. These are highly unequal flows in a world of great inequalities. A handful of languages, with English as the first of the first, determines these flows.
How Photographers Responded to the Arab Spring
Ten years after protests ignited across North Africa and the Middle East, how can artists give meaning to revolution?
Samar Al Summary,
Hrair Sarkissian traced the flight path of a migratory bird and found it looked exactly like a noose. He constructed a small model of the building where he spent most of his life in Damascus, then, over seven hours, bashed it to bits with a sledgehammer, pausing after every strike to take a picture. Maha Maamoun used literary fiction, cinematic history, and a cache of YouTube videos documenting the nighttime break-ins at state security buildings in Cairo (and elsewhere in Egypt) to convey the weird inner fantasies let loose by periods of political unrest. She made works based on the stories of a man haunted by visions and a drug dealer who turned into an animal hybrid of zebra and goat. Samar Al Summary scoured Beirut for signs of survival and resistance at a time of imminent economic collapse. In th