BULAQ | بولاق

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...

All this season, we will be doing short book-quiz episodes with prizes donated by ten distinguished publishers. We give the answer to the question from Episode 81, “Naguib Mahfouz's Banned Book” and a new challenge for listeners, regarding one of the books we discussed in Episode 82: “The Men Who Swallowed the Sun,” which features Bedouin migration from Egypt to Libya. Send your best guesses to bu...

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 Ital...

All this season, we will be doing short book-quiz episodes with prizes donated by ten distinguished publishers. In this bonus episode, we give the answer to the question from Episode 80, “Just Different: Moroccan writer Malika Moustadraf” and a new challenge for listeners, regarding the subject of Episode 81, Nabuig Mahfouz. Send your best guesses to bulaq@sowt.com . The first listener to respond...

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...

All this season, we will be doing short book-quiz episodes with prizes donated by ten distinguished publishers. In this bonus episode, we give the answer to the question from Episode 79, "Not Yet Defeated," and a new challenge for listeners around our Episode 80 focus, Moroccan writer Malika Moustadraf. After you've listened, send your best guesses to bulaq@sowt.com . The first listener...

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 edition...

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...

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 Ghal...

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....

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 va...

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. Nah...

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 jo...

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 tran...

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 assaul t from Israeli settlers. Six prominent Palestinian human rights and civil soc...

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, ad...

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 wri...

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 throu...

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 y...

Iman Mersal's work spans poetry and scholarship, personal essay and biography. In 2021, Mersal received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for her deeply insightful prose work In the Footsteps of Enayat al-Zayyat . SHOW NOTES This podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award . The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world's most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the...

The Maqamat of Al-Hariri is a story collection from 11th century Iraq that showcases the Arabic language's dazzling, disorienting possibilities. Michael Cooperson received the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for his ground-breaking translation. SHOW NOTES This podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award . The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world's most prestigiou...

This episode focuses on Driss Chraibi's The Simple Past (Le Passé Simple) , a Moroccan novel about a very angry young man in revolt against his father's tyranny and the hypocrisies of his colonial education. Back in 1954, it was compared to an explosion – and it still packs a punch today. Show Notes: The Simple Past was newly re-issued from NYRB Classics in Hugh A. Harter's 1990 translation, with...

We recorded this episode in Cairo with author, translator, and Mada Masr culture editor Yasmine Zohdi. We talked about making art in difficult and precarious times; how to acknowledge the political context; censorship and self-censorship. “ What we talk about when we talk about trees ,” by Yasmine Zohdi, ran in Mada Masr in December of last year. We also spoke about the shrinking of cultural space...

This week we talk about how MLQ's latest passion project, the Arab Lit Quarterly , and the ups and downs of making a living (sort of) writing about 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.

We talk to humorist Karl Sharro about the origins story of his Twitter alter-ego Karl ReMarks and about finding the ideal online nemesis. Marcia takes issue with a new book listing the “hundred best novels in translation.” Show notes Karl Sharro spoke about Karl ReMarks' new book, And then God Created the Middle East and Said ‘Let There Be Breaking News ' (and Analysis) . The book is forthcoming J...