{"id":13988,"date":"2016-01-08T10:11:08","date_gmt":"2016-01-08T14:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=13988"},"modified":"2016-01-08T16:20:57","modified_gmt":"2016-01-08T20:20:57","slug":"finnegans-list-2016-anton-shammas-and-sinan-antoon-on-what-we-should-translate-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/finnegans-list-2016-anton-shammas-and-sinan-antoon-on-what-we-should-translate-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Finnegan\u2019s List 2016: Anton Shammas and Sinan Antoon on What We Should Translate\u00a0Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

via the always excellent Arab Literature (in English)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

BY MLYNXQUALEY<\/a><\/span><\/span> on<\/em> 0<\/a> )<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The European Society of Authors has released its 2016 \u201cFinnegan\u2019s List.\u201d Launched in 2011, Finnegan\u2019s provides an \u201cannual list of under-translated or forgotten works\u201d:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"2016\"The two authors this year focusing on works in Arabic are\u00a0the novelists Sinan Antoon and Anton Shammas. These two, along with eight\u00a0others, have seleceted\u00a0three titles that make up the committee\u2019s \u201celective\u00a0affinities.\u201d In so doing, the Society of Authors\u00a0hopes to \u201crevive a literary canon encompassing all languages spoken and written\u00a0in Europe and beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sinan Antoon recommends<\/strong>three classic works:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Abdelrahman Munif, (A Magian Love Story<\/em>)<\/strong>, Beirut: al-Mu\u02bcassasah al-\u02bbArab\u012byah lil-Dir\u0101s\u0101t wa-al-Nashr, 1974.<\/p>\n

Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, (Rain Song<\/em>)<\/strong>, Beirut: Dar Shi\u2019r, 1960.<\/p>\n

Ghaib Tu\u2019ma Farman, (The Palm Tree and the Neighbors<\/em>)<\/strong>, Sidon: al-Maktaba al-\u2019Asriyya, 1965.<\/p>\n

In his comments, Antoon wrote that A Magian Love Story\u00a0<\/em>is a\u00a0\u201cpowerful novella about a visceral and destructive infatuation. While most of Abdelrahman Munif\u2019s later works were concerned with the interplay of history and politics and how they shape individual and collective lives, A Magian Love Story<\/em> is focused on individual passion and pain, and is written in a poetic language. Badr Shakir al-Sayyab was the pioneer of modern Arabic poetry. He staged a revolt against the form and content of the traditional qasida and changed it irrevocably. His experiments with meter and the new themes he introduced are crystallized in this collection. A milestone in the development of prose fiction in Iraq in the 20th century.The Palm Tree and the Neighbors<\/em> by Ghaib Tu\u2019ma Farman is a tightly structured and masterfully written novel set in the poorer quarters of Baghdad in the middle of the last century. It is a vivid portrayal of a society on the cusp of change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Relatively little of Munif\u2019s work has been translated into English, perhaps in part because of the initial reception of his\u00a0Cities of Salt\u00a0<\/em>quintet by John Updike in\u00a0The New Yorker.\u00a0<\/em>Selections of al-Sayyab\u2019s magical\u00a0Rain Song\u00a0<\/em>have been translated, and were included in the recent 15 Iraqi Poets<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>chapbook edited by Dunya Mikhail. There are many, including Dr. Issa Boullata<\/a>, who have written on al-Sayyab\u2019s importance to modern poetry.\u00a0Banipal 29<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>did a feature on Farman\u2019s work, and\u00a0Jadaliyya\u00a0<\/em>featured a short story of Farman\u2019s in translation, \u201cThe Old Man\u2019s Word.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Anton Shammas recommends<\/strong> three newer works:<\/p>\n

Iman Mersal, (Until I Give Up the Idea of Houses<\/em>)<\/strong>, Cairo: Dar Sharqiyat, 2013.<\/p>\n

Rabee Jaber, (The Druze of Belgrade<\/em>)<\/strong>, Beirut: D\u0101r al-\u0100d\u0101b lil-Nashr wa-al-Tawz\u012b\u02bb, 2011.<\/p>\n

Salim Barakat, (Delshad<\/em>)<\/strong>, Beirut: al-Mu\u02bcassasah al- \u02bbArab\u012byah lil-Dir\u0101s\u0101t wa-al-Nashr, 2003.<\/p>\n

In his comments, Shammas writes that, \u201cWith the publication of her second collection of poems, A Dark Alley Suitable for Dance Lessons<\/em>, Iman Mersal has established herself as one of the most unique, refreshingly subtle and intriguing voices in modern Arabic poetry. Against the backdrop of a poetic scene dominated mainly by the rhetoric and poetics of the leading male poets of the Arab world with their grand gestures and large-scale itineraries, Mersal\u2019s has been a very low-keyed and minor voice, totally oblivious to the tyrannical heritage of the Arab poetic past.\u201d<\/p>\n

He adds that, \u201cHer fifth and most recent collection has a section entitled \u2018the side-roads of life,\u2019 which seems to capture the essence of her project: leaving the Main Road of collective loyalties, and following the personal, the intimate, and the mundane. A selection from Mersal\u2019s poetry, These Are Not Oranges, My Love<\/em>, was published in 2008 (Sheep Meadow). Her poems have been translated into numerous languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Hebrew and Hindi.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, ArabLit published\u00a0A Holiday Gift: Ten Poems from Iman Mersal<\/a>.\u00a0However, Shammas is a bit late here: Mersal confirms that Robyn Creswell is at work translating the poems from this collection.<\/p>\n

Shammas calls Rabee Jaber, whose Mehlis Report<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>received surprisingly little attention in English, \u201cone of the most talented, prolific, original, yet underrated Arabic novelists. Jaber\u2019s novels have over the years brought to Arab readers \u2018news from elsewhere,\u2019 as Walter Benjamin described the task of the storyteller. His subjects include, among many others, the Beirut of the American Protestant Missionaries 22 in the 19th century, Belgrade of the 1860s, and America of the early 20th century. The Druze of Belgrade<\/em>, winner of the 2012 Arabic Booker Prize [International Prize for Arabic Fiction], tells the heartwrenching story of Hanna, a boiled-eggs vendor who, one early morning in 1860, leaves his young wife and new-born girl, and near the port of Beirut finds himself dragged into a ship to replace a missing convict.\u201d<\/p>\n

This year, New Directions is bringing out Jaber\u2019s Confessions,<\/i>\u00a0trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid. <\/i>This perhaps will spark a wider interest in Jaber\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

This is Salim Barakat\u2019s second time being selected for Finnegan\u2019s List<\/a>, and several publishers have sniffed around translating his dense work. As Shammas writes, Barakat \u201cis a Kurdish-Syrian novelist and poet whose masterly Arabic style has brought back to the modern Arabic language the grandeur of its classical past in a totally unprecedented manner. In this regard, and even though five of his novels have been translated into French, he is probably one of the most difficult writers to translate, especially into English. Yet, I can hardly think of any Arab novelist who\u2019s worth the effort and the challenge more than this astonishing writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shammas explains why he chose Delshad\u00a0<\/em>in particular:\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s about that elusive, arduous, impossible \u2018task of the translator.\u2019 Set against the strangulation of the Kurdish language and identity by the modern Syrian state, the novel tells the tragic story of Delshad, who is commissioned by a Kurdish prince to translate for him a book from Syriac into Kurdish, The Compendium of the Reckoning of the Unknown<\/em>, for which he has to learn the Syriac language. Delshad is so entranced by the wonders and challenges of translation that he turns the two volumes of the original into fifty-two Kurdish volumes. Over forty years of meticulous rendering culminate in a Syrian police officer cruelly shooting through the volumes to test the velocity of his bullet. It\u2019s a brilliant foreshadowing of what\u2019s been happening in Syria in recent years.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are a few Barakat excerpts online:<\/p>\n

From Rampaging Geese<\/em>, <\/a>trans. Thomas Aplin.<\/p>\n

From\u00a0The Iron Grasshopper<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>trans. Mona Zaki.<\/p>\n

From\u00a0Jurists of Darkness<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>trans. Marilyn Booth.<\/p>\n

From\u00a0Caves of Hydrahose<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>trans. Sawad Hussain.<\/p>\n

You can read the whole 2016 \u201cFinnegan\u2019s List\u201d report:<\/strong><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.seua.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/Finnegan_2016.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

via the always excellent Arab Literature (in English) BY MLYNXQUALEY on JANUARY 8, 2016 \u2022 ( 0 ) The European Society of Authors has released its 2016 \u201cFinnegan\u2019s List.\u201d Launched in 2011, Finnegan\u2019s provides...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12,24,103],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arab-culture","category-arabic","category-books","category-translation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13988"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13989,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13988\/revisions\/13989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}