51 research outputs found
Jonathan Wright on translating Arab and Iraqi literature, interview by Ruth Abou Rached
Full text linkJonathan Wright is a British journalist and literary translator, known for bringing many works of Arab fiction to new audiences via translation for the past fifteen years. His recent works, however, seem more connected to Iraq: in addition to The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim and Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, he has translated The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon (Yale University Press, 2020) and God 99 by Blasim (Comma Press, 2020). Jonathan is currently working on a semi-biographical novella by Iraqi writer Ali Bader and on works by Palestinian activist and fiction writer Ghassan Kanafani yet to be translated or retranslated, into English. In this interview, Ruth Abou Rached and Jonathan Wright discuss the experiences of Wright translating Iraqi and Arabic fiction and Wright offers his thoughts and recommendations
The politics of women-focused activism, academia and the state in Middle East and North Africa
No full textThis article is a transcription of a conversation between Zahia Smail-Salhi and Ruth Abou Rached on the emerging trends and developments in women-focused activism. Here, we explore activism inside and outside academia; the politics of feminism in MENA state discourses; the changing terms of reference for gender; the diverse locations and solidarities of women-focused political engagements
Book Review: The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East, edited by Anna Ball and Karim Mattar:Reviewed by Ruth Abou Rached
No full textBook Review: The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East, edited by Anna Ball and Karim Mattar:Reviewed by Ruth Abou Rached
No full textRemembering the literary achievements of Daizy Al-Amir
No full textminent Iraqi writer Daizy Al-Amir passed away in Houston, USA in November 2018. Born in Alexandria in 1935, she was a prolific short-story writer who wrote and travelled across many countries and continents throughout the course of her life. Daizy Al-Amir’s legacy to Arab and women’s literature, particularly in Beirut, are many-faceted. This article pays tribute to two important aspects of Daizy Al-Amir’s work: her literary works published with the highly influential literary journal Al-Ādāb from the 1960s and her short stories about women in the Arab world that were published in Arabic–English translation
Iraqi women (re)writing their stories: An overview of short stories and novels by Iraqi women in English translation
Full text linkSince the 1970s, Iraqi women writers have engaged with translation as part of their creative expression and literary activism. Until recently, little has been written on how stories by Iraqi women writers have been mediated in English translation. This gap is surprising in view of Iraq’s high international profile for decades. In this article, I revisit the times and places in which Iraqi women stories – and their politics of counter-hegemonic solidarity – have been mediated into Arabic–English translation using analytical frameworks of feminist translation that focus on paratexts and paratranslation. In doing so, I hope to add to the growing scholarship on Iraqi women’s writing, with a focus on how Iraqi women’s stories are presented in translation. By exploring the ways by which Iraqi women’s stories have emerged in Arabic and English, I draw attention to how Iraqi women writers do tribute to the lives of Iraqi women, men and children in past and recent contexts of publication
Iraqi Women’s Stories:Reading Iraqi Women Writers’ Arabic Novels in English Translation Using Analytical Perspectives of Feminist Translation
No full textThis study offers a critical exploration of Iraqi women writers’ novels in Arabic-English translation as a body of work which reflects in many ways the impact of seismic political changes on the peoples of Iraq at different times and places. Iraqi women writers’ novels have been acclaimed for privileging localised gendered perspectives of everyday life over discourses of hegemonic politics in Iraq while negotiating the shifting effects of state censorship, violence, war and dislocation on Iraqi literary output, inside and outside of Iraq. With Iraq’s modern history of war, conflict and fluctuating political contexts, the strategies used to mediate Iraqi women writer’s novels in Arabic in English translation have been varied. In view of many Iraqi writers having to publish their novels outside of Iraq, the politics of Iraqi writers’ location – and that or their literary works - have emerged as potentially charged and fruitful points of debate in contemporary Iraqi activist scholarship. The strategies of translation used to mediate Iraqi women writers’ novels at different junctures thus raise interesting questions on how Iraqi women’s stories told from localised, gendered and distinctly Iraqi perspectives were translated into English, a language associated with and at times intertwining Iraq’s recent history of war, occupation and political instability. The aim of this study is to raise appreciation of Iraqi women writers’ novels as an important part of contemporary Iraqi and Arab literature by putting forward a new approach of reading how Iraqi women writers’ novels move across languages in shifting, charged frames of gendered geopolitical contexts.In this study, then I analyse the different strategies used to mediate six Iraqi women writers’ novels and story-making in English translation. To do so, I use and interrogate analytical frameworks of feminist translation which are underpinned by the theoretical premises that all writing, including translation are (gendered) re-writings of socio-linguistic, gendered and intersectional dynamics of power. While these premises configure borders between (gendered) writing and translation as fluid, ambiguous and transformative in ways potentially salient to Iraqi women writers’ novels, paradigms of feminist translation are yet to be explored in depth alongside Iraqi and Arab women’s literature in English translation. The outcome of my study is two-fold: one, to draw critical attention to the innovative gendered writing strategies used in this tradition of Iraqi and Arab women’s literature in Arabic and English translation and two, to offer potentially new theoretical horizons for feminist translation studies and other academic fields critically engaging with Iraqi and Arab women’s literatures in translation.<br/
Irakerinnen erzählen ihre Geschichte:Iraqi Women’s Stories
No full textThis study offers a critical exploration of Iraqi women writers’ novels in Arabic-English translation as a body of work which reflects in many ways the impact of seismic political changes on the peoples of Iraq at different times and places. Iraqi women writers’ novels have been acclaimed for privileging localised gendered perspectives of everyday life over discourses of hegemonic politics in Iraq while negotiating the shifting effects of state censorship, violence, war and dislocation on Iraqi literary output, inside and outside of Iraq. With Iraq’s modern history of war, conflict and fluctuating political contexts, the strategies used to mediate Iraqi women writer’s novels in Arabic in English translation have been varied. In view of many Iraqi writers having to publish their novels outside of Iraq, the politics of Iraqi writers’ location – and that or their literary works - have emerged as potentially charged and fruitful points of debate in contemporary Iraqi activist scholarship. The strategies of translation used to mediate Iraqi women writers’ novels raise interesting questions on how Iraqi women’s stories told from localised, gendered and distinctly Iraqi perspectives were translated into English, a language associated with and at times intertwining Iraq’s recent history of war, occupation and political instability. The aim of this study was to raise appreciation of an important part of contemporary Iraqi literature by putting forward a new approach of reading how Iraqi women writers’ novels move across languages in shifting, charged frames of gendered geopolitical contexts.<br/
Feminist Paratranslation as Literary Activism:Iraqi Writer-Activist Haifa Zangana in the Post-2003 US
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