Journalist Rasha Azab, who was at the Ministry of Culture sit-in, has been summoned for questioning; also, Egypt’s general prosecutor has taken up a complaint filed against 31 artists and writers participating in the Ministry of Culture sit-in, including Salwa Baker, Bahaa Taher, and Sonallah Ibrahim:

@sharifkouddous: Moving street ballet performance of Zorba in front of occupied Culture Ministry #Egypt

Azab has been summoned over her much-publicized slapping of Ahmed El-Mogheer, while Bakr, Taher, and Ibrahim — as well as publisher Mohamed Hashem and more than two dozen others — stand accused of libel, slander and offending the symbols and institutions of the state, threatening the security of the nation, and inconveniencing the public by occupying the minister’s office.

Alaa al-Aswany writes in support of the sit-in; his “Do We Need Movies?” and points to the root of Egypt’s power and influence as cultural.

But certainly not all authors have supported the sit-in. At Al Ahram Weekly, Youssef Rakha writes as a “traitor” to the cause in “The Parable of the Riots and the Intellectual: On the Ministry of Culture Protest,” which in some ways echoes Khaled Fahmy’s “Ministry of Culture or Ministry of Intellectuals?” but ultimately has the artist raise his hands and step away from politics entirely. Also at Al Ahram Weekly, Gamal Abdel-Gawad pokes interestingly out toward the future, “Moment of Truth for Intellectuals,” about the history of artistic co-optation and about how artists will face a new future:

In the fierce ideological struggle currently taking place in Egypt, religion and arts are competing for the soul and spiritual needs of the Egyptian public. While religion is well entrenched in societal culture and psyche, arts need the support of institutions currently controlled by the same religious forces who control mosques and religious institutions as well.

Secular intellectuals have to face Egypt’s new political reality. The ideological service intellectuals used to offer previous regimes is no longer needed. Consequently, the support previous governments used to offer for intellectuals should not longer be expected. The challenge currently facing Egyptian intellectuals is to generate sufficient independent resources and societal demands to sustain cultural production. This challenge is part and parcel of the greater challenge facing Egypt’s secular opposition seeking to generate support at the grassroots level.

Intellectuals in Egypt effectively contributed to the anti-Mubarak revolt. Ironically, the post-Mubarak regime is posing an existential threat to Egypt’s intellectuals and their professions. The answer to the challenge raised by Islamic rule is only partly political. While all kinds of political activism should be mobilised in such a struggle, political activism need to be guided by a new vision, addressing the philosophical and sociological questions of modernity, identity and democracy in a society where the state is no longer interested in the modernisation of national culture.

It is a struggle in which the contribution of intellectuals is more than needed, but this time within arrangements different from those prevailed not only in the last 60 years, but also in the past 200 years. And this is a struggle that is much more serious than facing the minister of culture.

Also read:

Ahram Online: From opposing culture minister to fighting for Egypt’s identity

One of ArabLit’s favorite readers and book-club leaders, Elisabeth Jaquette, has just posted the Cairo Book Club’s first-ever podcast, from their discussion of Mourid Barghouti’s I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, led by the book’s English-language translator, Humphrey Davies:

The podcast begins with Jaquette giving background on Barghouti, his memoirs, and Davies, some of which you can also find on Rolling Bulb. What follows is a lively discussion of the several aspects of Barghouti’s memoir, published in Arabic in 2009 and in English translation in 2011. Davies also digresses at one point to pitch audience on reading Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun:

If you want to know about Palestinian disposession, you have to read Bab al-Shams [Gate of the Sun]. You feel it living and breathing. In terms of really getting to the essence of what people felt and lived — a lived experience — a mass of people.

Davies contrasted that with Barghouti’s book which is the view of “one person, a sensitive observer’s view on things.” Davies said that, in particular, he wanted people to read the section on the separation wall. “Because I think it will have an impact on people.”

There was also an enjoyable argument at the middle about the extent to which Palestinian literature must carry the burden of explaining history. Davies also talked quite extensively about his thoughts on translation. He said you certainly wouldn’t want to get too literal, because, “Some translations sound weird because they try to capture every little thing” and then “you get something that just reads strangely. Maybe it’s better to sacrifice that little bit in the interest of a smoother more sort of flowing translation.”

Davies repeated a couple times that: “I go with what seems right to me at the time.”

There was also an important point raised about the dangers of over-domesication: “I want people always to know that they’re reading a book about a different place,” Davies said. “If you try and hide that, then — though I’m not excluding theoretically that there may be cases where it could be done — in general, it’s probably not a good idea. There are some phrasings that might have the same functions as an idiom in Arabic” but that “would stick out like a sore thumb. “

No examples came to mind for Davies, but let’s say, for instance, if you tossed in the phrase “stick out like a sore thumb” into your translation. That might well stick out. Indeed, I have often pulled up short in translations that used “raining like cats and dogs” and “beating around the bush.”  

“In general,” Davies said, “you have to be careful not to do that.”

So what is translating about? Well, “a lot of translating is about not making a fuss, too much,” Davies said. You don’t want to have the reader “trip over the stuff that doesn’t matter so that they can get to the stuff that does matter.”

The group talked about translating names; when that works and doesn’t work. Indeed, I am currently re-reading Mahmoud Saeed’s Ben Barka Lane, and I’m glad that translator Kay Heikkenen didn’t translate Si al-Jaza’iri as Mr. Algerian.

Getting in all the nuances can be difficult, Davies said, because, “They won’t allow you to use footnotes. You can occasionally sneak in a little phrase…but rarely can you do that. Sometimes, I resort to a translator’s note. … But then, who reads translator’s notes?”

Jaquette asked an excellent question: Did Ahdaf Soueif’s translation of Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah influence his translation of I Was Born There, I Was Born Here?

Everybody kept telling me, “Wow, we hope you do as good a job as [Ahdaf Soueif].” I think after I’d done my first draft without looking at her translation. [then] I looked at her translation, and I looked at the original Arabic [of I Saw Ramallah], and I decided, ‘These [I Saw Ramallah and I Was Born There, I Was Born Here] are very different books.’ I mean, the Arabic is a very different book. Strangely. Because the one is a sequel to the other. But stylistically, they’re quite different, I find. And so I thought, well, she did a fantastic job, but it’s not really relevant.

If I thought they really were the same, I suppose the best thing to do would’ve been to have read her translation before, or at least several chapters of it, and somehow internalize it as much as possible. And hope that that would then reflect itself. Because she did do an excellent translation.

That wrapped up the first CBCP. You can listen to it online at Rolling Bulb.

Also remember that the summer book giveaway is still ongoing, and both of Barghouti’s memoirs – I Saw Ramallah and I Was Born There, I Was Born Here are both eligible reads. The prize remains a copy of the 2013 PalFest anthology; contest closes August 14.

I find today’s “best books on Egypt” list from The Guardian profoundly disappointing:

The Guardian’s choices.

First, there are a mere three books on the list: Palace Walk, The Yacoubian Building, and Tarek Osman’s pop-history book, Egypt on the Brink.

Second, these are three books you have probably seen on any number of “best of Egypt” or “best on Egypt” lists before. It does seem that, if you’re going to create a “best books in/on Egypt” list, one of Mahfouz’s trilogy and al-Aswany’s Yacoubian are de rigeur. Before Jan 2011, the third book probably would’ve been Max Rodenbeck’s The City Victorious; afterwards, clearly, it needs to have an “Arab Spring” hook.

Now: I wouldn’t steer you away from reading the Trilogy or The City Victorious. But, my goodness, there’s a whole world out there. (There’s even a world of Egypt beyond Cairo.) If the role of the list-maker is to bring the reader some fresh ideas, these are not.

One of The Guardian commenters suggests adding “the works of Youssef Rakha,” an excellent, fresh suggestion — thank you, Nemesis2020. Rakha’s two novels are both being translated into English, his Sultan’s Seal by Paul Starkey (to be published by Clockroot) and his Crocodiles by Robin Moger (to be published by Seven Stories Press). If you’re looking for something post-2011 — and since this is a list of books on Egypt – do read “Thus Spoke Che Nawarrah,” although it’s not for the faint of heart.

When Max Rodenbeck was asked for his Egypt-reading suggestions, in the Economist, he mentioned the short stories of Yusuf Idris and Yahya Taher Abdallah. Idris, you may know, was the other Egyptian on the “Nobel Prize shortlist” of 1988. There are some wonderful stories in The Essential Yusuf Idris (ed. Denys Johnson-Davies) and in Taher Abdallah’s The Collar and the Bracelet, for which translator Samah Selim won the Banipal translation prize in 2009. As Selim wrote in her afterword, “Abdullah was a poet, a master craftsman of language steeped in a centuries-old oral tradition, a modern-day heir to the itinerant balladeers who performed the ancient epic cycles of North Africa and southern Arabia in Egypt from the fifteenth century onward.” Well then.

Although Rodenbeck suggests Idris and Abdallah over Mahfouz, I wouldn’t slight our Nobel winner; I’d just suggest we could pick a novel that isn’t the Trilogy. After all, Mahfouz didn’t exist just to tell us about mid-twentieth-century Egypt. He existed as a novelist. So, outside of Cairo, to Alexandria: Miramar.

Honestly, I am not sure how these lists get made without including Sonallah Ibrahim. Some might suggest The Committee (as Sinan Antoon did on the “5 before you die” list), others Zaat (selected by Hosam Aboul-ela), but I am absolutely weak-kneed for Ibrahim’s Stealth, beautifully trans. Hosam Aboul-ela.

Humphrey Davies, who translated The Yacoubian Building, as well as many other works of Egyptian literature, doesn’t mention that in his “5 to read before you die list,” but he does give a nod to Mohammad Mustagab’s Tales from Dayrut; for a Mustagab taster, read the delightful “The Battle of the Rabbits,” trans. Moger.

These lists rarely seem to include poetry, but I would be remiss in not including Iman Mersal, who represented Egypt at the summer 2012 Poetry Parnassus in London. Her collection These Are Not Oranges, My Love, was translated by Khaled Mattawa. If you’re interested in the flavor of the 18 days, I also suggest Maged Zaher’s collection The Revolution Happened and You Didn’t Call Me. 

As long as we’re breaking away from prose-only lists, then we can break past the boundary of “book” as as a printed thing. Let’s list Sarah Carr’s blog, http://inanities.org/. If she’d written this post, it would be satiric, delightful, and you’d be stifling a snort instead of nodding ruefully. And yes, dammit: It’s her country, too.

NOTE: Suzy Joinson pointed out that somehow — somehow — I didn’t mention Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club. I thought I always mentioned Beer in the Snooker Club. It is frankly unbelievable that I didn’t.

ALSO: Albert Cossery should be here. And Hussein Omar, who is allowed one addition, throws in Edmond Jabès. For his other suggestions, you can visit Twitter. Alexander Key also made his own list.

This is not comprehensive — it’s rather obviously reactive — but I cannot fail to mention:

Fathi Ghanem’s The Man Who Lost His Shadow, trans. Desmond Stewart

Khairy Shalaby’s The Lodging House, trans. Farouk Abdel-Wahab

Taha Hussein’s The Nightingale’s Prayer

The Essential Tawfiq al-Hakim, ed. Denys Johnson-Davies

Gamal al-Ghitani’s Zayni Barakat, trans. Farouk Mustafa

Mohamed al-Bisatie’s Houses Behind the Trees, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies

Radwa Ashour’s Specters, trans. Barbara Romaine, and Farag, which has been signed by BQFP.

Any of these books will win you a spot on the summer book giveaway for a copy of the 2013 PalFest anthology.

Jonathan Guyer (@mideastXmidwest) has recently launched Oum Cartoon / أم كرتون – oumcartoon.tumblr.com – a blog about Arabic cartoons. ArabLit asked him a few questions about the site:

“Morsi’s Achievements.” From Oum Cartoon. By Amro Selim.

ArabLit: How do you choose which cartoons to post? What makes a great cartoon? 

Jonathan Guyer: With so many cartoons published daily in the Egyptian press, I’ve been playing it by ear. The goal of Oum Cartoon is to offer a lens into the comic landscape, from the opposition to semi-official newspapers to the Brotherhood and everything in between. I’ve begun by posting illustrations that capture political developments that are often absent in the Western media. For example, cartoonists are drawing gags about electricity cuts and gas shortages with frequency. These shed more light on the situation here than news reports.

A great cartoon is one that engages the reader, forcing one to rethink a political reality and laugh at one’s own bias. But a cartoon is only as effective as its lines and its composition. It must contain movement, so that the reader feels as if he or she is standing alongside the characters.

Whenever I interview a cartoonist, I ask him or her, “What is a cartoon?” Does it need a joke? Is sarcasm a prerequisite? What is the reader’s role in all of this? In due time, I’ll post these reflections from Egypt’s leading cartoonists on the blog.

AL: Who are your favorite working cartoonists? And all-time?

JG: There are so many outstanding illustrators working in Egypt right now. Al-Masry Al-Youm‘s Doaa El-Adl draws fiercely against the establishment and has a beautiful style of inking; I have great respect for her project. Al-Shorouk‘s Amro Selim deserves credit for his prolific output, up to seven cartoons a day, all of which are a stitch. Ahmed Nady pens powerful and disturbing grotesques. And that’s just to name a few.

One of the most exciting publications in Egypt right now, as you’ve written much about, is the comic magazine Tok Tok. The gang behind it — Makhlouf, Andeel, Shenawy, among others — are part of a new Golden Age of Egyptian caricature. Thanks to them and other pioneers, it seems that everywhere I look in Cairo — in public squares, galleries, and of course in graffiti — there are cartoons.

All time favorite? I’m a nut for R. Crumb, despite his occasional misogyny. His portraits of old bluesmen (and women) are simply outstanding. Crumb’s intricate cross-hatching gets me every time. Meanwhile, there are tons of brilliant U.S. cartoonists, like Susie Cagle, Matt Wuerker, Matt Bors and Ann Telnaes, who are revolutionizing how cartoons interact with the internet. I discussed their work in this Cairo Review essay from last fall.

AL: Are you interested in them more from a political standpoint or an artistic/aesthetic one? Or are they separable? 

JG: I’m a glutton for cartoons and a political addict so I find it challenging to disconnect the aesthetic from the political angle. For instance, the zinger in this cartoon by Abdallah wouldn’t work without the martians and their googly eyes. Amro Selim’s loose handwriting is part and parcel of this illustration‘s laugh line. Content and form are intimately linked but I need to study more Kant and Adorno to understand why.

Can pen strokes and the captions be deconstructed? There is a tradition in Egypt of writers and artists working together on cartoons, most famously the duo of illustrator Mustafa Hussein and humorist Ahmad Ragab, who have been publishing in Al-Akhbar since the 70′s. Today, Al-Tahrir newspaper uses a similar arrangement — pairing artists and writers. But many cartoonists I have spoken to think that these two roles mustn’t be separated.

AL: Can you tell us about the cache of old comics you found?

Old comics.

JG: An antiques dealer in the Boursa, in downtown Cairo, sold me a collection of sixty out-of-print books of Egyptian and Arab cartoons. Among the jackpot: monographs of Egyptian greats (Salah Jahin, Hegazi, and Mohi El-Din El-Labad); cartoon books on celebrities such as Saddam Hussein and Princess Di; a pamphlet put out by the Caricature Club in partnership with the Ministry of Population and Family Welfare — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The only lemon is, “A Hundred and One Uses of a Dead Cat.”

I’ve also dug up 40+ graphic novels, illustrated humor books, and vintage comics from booksellers in Cairo and Alexandria. I even have a comic of Kafka’s The Trial translated into Arabic as well as three comics about the 18 days in Tahrir Square. I’m excited to share all of these gems with Oum Cartoon readers.

AL: You also do your own cartooning…where can we see those? Does being a cartoonist change how you see others’ cartoons?

JG: In college, I started drawing for the Brown Daily Herald and have since spilled ink on ForeignPolicy.com, FireDogLake, the Arabist, CairObserver, and others. Some of my favorite cartoons can be found here. Sketches and doodles going back to 2008 are archived on my other blog, Mideast by Midwest.

As a cartoonist, I’m fascinated by the process of creating as much as the final product. Where does the idea come from? How do editors respond? Where does the cartoonist buy his pens? What’s his or her sketchbook look like?

And back to aesthetics, I like a free hand and a bit of sloppiness and as such I am drawn to artists who use Photoshop very minimally. When I visited Amro Selim’s office, his cartoon from that day’s Al-Shorouk was drawn on a leaf of scratch paper, the back of an internal memo I think.

Jonathan Guyer is associate editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs and a Fulbright fellow researching political cartoons in Egypt. He previously served as a program associate for the New America Foundation’s Middle East Task Force in Washington, DC, and as assistant editor ofForeign Policy’s Middle East Channel. He has contributed to the National, Guardian, and Daily Beast. On Twitter: @mideastXmidwest.

What is a lonesome monkey? Did translator Trevor LeGassick ever eat a bean patty? What do Canadians think of when they think of arugula? These are a few questions that came up at Cairo’s first-ever translation slam:

By Elisabeth Jaquette

Adam Talib and Randa Abou Bakr grappled with these questions and more in Cairo’s first ever Arabic Translation Slam, hosted by the British Council on May 28. Talib and Abou Bakr went head to head over their translations of a passage from Yusuf el Rayya’s ‘Ashiq el-Hayy in a discussion moderated by Neil Hewison, Associate Director for Editorial Programs at the American University of Cairo Press. Adam Talib is Assistant Professor of classical Arabic literature at the American University of Cairo, and Randa Abou Bakr is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University.

The night began with a reading of the original Arabic passage followed by Abou Bakr and Talib’s translations, as audience members had the chance to follow along in print. Hewison said he hoped the evening would illuminate how and why translators make certain linguistic choices and what they go through when they tackle a text.

CULTURAL CONTENT

Much of the discussion revolved around how to handle cultural content, such as references to a certain brand, or colloquial, idiomatic expressions. What does a translator do with the phrase allah ya wareeki, or the author’s mention of a pack of Cleopatra cigarettes and a bundle of girgeer?

Round 1:

Arabic: أشعل سيجارة كليوباترا، ولم يلق عود الثقاب في المنفضة التي سحبها معه إلى غرفة النوم، وضعها على الكومودينو، ومدد طوله على السرير

Talib: He lit a cigarette—a Cleopatra—but rather than toss the matchstick into the ashtray he’d brought to the bedroom with him, he set it down on the bedside table and lay back on the bed.

Abou Bakr: He took a cigarette out of his local cigarette pack and lit it up, but did not cast the match in the ashtray, which he took along to the bedroom. He put the ashtray on the nightstand and stretched out on the bed.

Why remove the word ‘Cleopatra’ from the text, asked Hewison, and what cultural significance does it retain when you keep the word? While Abou Bakr felt it important to preserve the cultural content of idioms, brand names didn’t hold the same cultural currency for her. “Not all of the cultural background of a text is important, and I don’t try to reproduce every bit of it. I reproduce it when it’s related to a larger worldview of the author, but when it comes to a brand of a cigarette, I try to avoid confusing the reader. In the end you’re communicating the mindset of the author and the worldview that informs a literary work – you don’t have to see that in particular words like Cleopatra or girgeer. When I say cultural content, I mean the way those people think, their attitudes towards women, phrases they use that would betray a certain worldview – things like tameyya have less to do with this than a idiomatic expression does.”

Talib, who included the word ‘Cleopatra’ in his translation, noted that these decisions are often simply intuitive. “I couldn’t have done this another way. Any time I encounter a brand name or something like this I try to shoehorn it in. It never occurs to me to do something else. It’s instinctive; I just do it. What’s relevant about Cleopatras? It might be interesting for someone reading in Canada that Egyptians call their cigarettes Cleopatras, but what’s relevant for the text is that it’s the cheapest brand of cigarettes.”

Yet in the end, including the word Cleopatra doesn’t convey that information, he confessed. “If anything, what I’ve written is misleading, because one expects that this sounds extra exotic to Canadian reader – he may think the character is smoking a Cleopatra like it’s a Cuban cigar. What I do is a stylistic choice but it’s not actually communicating the relevant information.”

Joining the discussion, translator Humphrey Davies spoke eloquently in support of keeping such words in the text, regardless of their ability to convey accurate or relevant information. “I feel strongly about the value of having Cleopatra there as a word irrespective of whether it conveys information, because I think as a reader you are putting together a world in which these people live, bit by bit, as you read every text, with every fragment. The more specific a word is, the more it helps you to construct that world, that imaginative world. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the fact that they are these cigarettes are the cheapest, which I agree is a relevant consideration. Words have a certain magic – there is something about them that sticks in your brain, especially when they are words like Cleopatra. They resonate, somehow. You don’t know why exactly they are resonating or what it is they are conveying to you, but it is part of that process of creating an engagement with that world you’re trying to enter into. I think it’s very important to keep the specificities.”

Round 2:

Arabic:         !الله ما يوريك

Talib:           God spare you!

Abou Bakr: Oh lord! Freakish stuff!

Talib and Abou Bakr espoused different strategies with regards to idiomatic expressions. “I generally don’t try to preserve the religious dimension of everything in the passage – but at the same time I’m not one of those translators who try to make Arabs read like French secularists,” said Talib. “I don’t de-Godify the Arabic text. But the danger is that keeping all the religious references can play into the stereotypes that a foreign reader might have about Arabs.”

With this expression and others, Abou Bakr tended to preserve the meaning of the original Arabic over finding a corresponding English phrase. “There are different strategies when do you choose to translate colloquial and idiomatic expressions,” she said. “You can translate it literally, but it wouldn’t carry the meaning – on the other hand something more close to the meaning doesn’t sound colloquial. You could find an equivalent expression, but that would be foreignizing the text, which I don’t like to do as a philosophy. If you provide an English idiom without the Arabic cultural content it’s a pity, because you lose something in the process. You have to make choices as to what you’re going to reproduce in the target text, because you can’t reproduce everything.”

FOREIGNIZATION V. COMFORT

Hewison concluded the discussion by asking Talib and Abou Bakr about their fundamental approach to translation: “Is it to make the reader feel that they are reading about an unfamiliar culture – not to bring them into any kind of comfort zone? Or is it to make the book read like a text that was written in English, which happens to be set in the Arab world?”

“I try to make the reader the most comfortable; I try to be the La-Z-Boy, business class translator,” said Talib. “I try to make it as easy for someone with no experience of the original context to pick it up and enjoy. I prettify, I simplify – at a minimum, without actually changing anything. At the same time I have a very heavy hand in my use of language. I think I have a personal style – when you read the translations, they read a lot more like what I write than the way the original authors write. Arab writers will use more metaphors than English writers and if you’re going to make readable English, you’re going to have to lose some of that. One day we’ll get a point where Arabic literature is seen sufficiently respectable and they can do that, but until that time, when a woman lets herself go, she can’t be ‘a wild mare breaking out of the stable’ – she can’t, not in my translation, not in 2013. It just doesn’t work. If we had a few more Nobel Prize winners, if we had a movement like magical realism, you could do that, but until then it’s just not a right that Arab authors have in translation.”

Abou Bakr embraced a different strategy. “I would translate a metaphor like that, because it reflects something about the culture, what they think about women. It might not be appealing to a western audience, but to me – who cares. I think of literary translation as an act of cultural exchange and I think of the text as communicating the culture it came from, and that is usually the thing I care about most about translation, which is why I tend towards foreignizing the text for the target reader. I don’t go with the comfort principle because I want the target reader to make extra effort at understanding and communicating with this culture, which is why I think the text should reflect the source culture. At the same time I like to be as invisible as possible as a translator.”

“There was this maligned generation of translators who weren’t particularly good writers, who wrote clunky text that turned people off Arabic literature,” agreed Talib. “That’s the kind of stuff I was first exposed to, and I rebel against it – I try to the greatest extent possible to write in an informal register of smooth, fun English. If you actually want the ideal reader to actually notice significant differences between their cultural background and the background in which the book was produced, you’ve got to make the book as readable as possible in order for the reader to get to those points. A big problem is that people don’t finish reading Arabic literature, or they don’t read a second book because of the quality of the English.”

At times, Hewison chimed in with the publisher’s perspective. “I generally prefer to produce texts that are a comfortable read for the English reader,” he said. “You can still have plenty of cultural color in there – if people are wearing galabeyyas and sitting down to eat girgeer and so on, it comes through in the text. But I don’t like the idea of throwing obstacles in people’s way. Anything that trips the reader up is to be avoided.”

Translators in the audience brought up other aspects of language that didn’t arise for those on stage. Wiam el-Tamami mentioned the importance of considering the musicality of language, arguing that “readability might have less to do with meaning – understanding literal meaning – and more to do with music and rhythm and flow. Junot Diaz, for example, creates a language of his own, a mix of English and Spanish, and we don’t understand what he’s saying, but the music and magic of the words really means something. We apprehend text and language in different ways, not just on this level of literal meaning but also on so many other levels. I think if you manage to get that flow and rhythm by transposing it into a natural English while keeping some of the natural Arabic – tameyya and girgeer and galabeyya – girgeer means something, even if you don’t know what it means, the sound of it tells you something. Including Arabic words is not necessarily tripping up the reader – it’s creating an independent world and creating a language within each book, each text.”

The audience’s lively discussion around Talib and Abou Bakr’s texts proved that each and every word in a translation presents a choice. Even when approaching the same goal, like reproducing the original Arabic’s cultural content, each took a widely different tack, which in turn resulted in two very different texts. While translators are often said to be doing their job best when they remain invisible, unfelt within a text, it was refreshing to see them take the stage for a night and shed light on the intricacies of their craft.

Elisabeth Jaquette is a graduate student in Anthropology at Columbia University and a 2012-13 CASA (Center for Arabic Study Abroad) fellow at the American University in Cairo. She has been based in Cairo since 2007, where she runs an Arabic-English book club and tweets at @lissiejaquette.

 You can still:

See the video of the whole evening and read the original and two translations online.

On the 4th of July, the Edinburgh World Writer’s Conference (@edwritersconf) tweeted: “As Cairo is on our minds, it’s a fitting moment to publish our Egyptian #worldwritersconf keynote by @SaharElmougy”:

El Mougy’s address was never given, as the Edinburgh World Writers Conference, Cairo edition, was set for December 9, 2012. Because of violence outside the presidential palace, the World Writers Conference cancelled its stop in Cairo, and El Mougy never gave her keynote.

El Mougy, the author of four books, talked about how the Internet has changed writing — and reading — in Egypt, saying that, “Online self-publishing would not bring the writers money, yet their works would be read, they would be given feedback and offered a chance to pool with other writers/ bloggers.”

Further:

In the Egyptian case, blogging was not just an escape from and a challenge to the publishing business. More importantly, it has lead to some radical psychological change in the 1980s generation, which I call “the Emergency Law generation”. This is the generation which has been born to a multi-faceted marginalization. …. Blogging has offered those writers a zone where they can deconstruct and reconstruct their sense of identity against the social and political mainstream. Lately, many Egyptian blogs have been popular enough to seduce publishers into publishing such works (novels, poetry collections and short stories)! In order to keep up with this phenomenon, Amazon has started a self publishing line of E-novellas sold for one dollar. A certain percentage goes to the writers. Is this the door to a deeper and wider change in the world of writing/ publishing? Does it pose a challenge to the critic and to the reader?

She also discusses recent “upheavals” (this was to be given in December 2012, but the world hasn’t settled much):

Quite a number of new novelists have emerged. Some of those writers came from the blogging world. More bookstores have opened. Signing events are taking place, a newly introduced tradition which did not exist before 2004. Private book clubs, operating away from the cultural institutions which monopolized all cultural activities for decades, have mushroomed. Meanwhile, Writers and Artists for Change was founded in 2005, a branch out of Kefaya, the mother movements to many offshoots. On 5^th September 2005, fifty five Egyptian artists and theater critics were burnt to death in a fire that took place in a small performance hall in Beni Soueif.  The tragedy came as yet another bitter reminder of the dilapidated state of the political regime. Writers and artists left their desks and  protested for months on end against the Ministry of Culture and the corrupt regime which protected the minister for twenty three years in office. Serious questions related to the state’s continuous efforts (since the 1970s) to “tame” the Egyptian writers have surfaced.

How will blogging (in Egypt) change the novel? El Mougy says, “ I would borrow Maggie Gee’s question here: will the novel develop into an oral saga? It very well might.”

And whither the Egyptian novel now?

The question of how the novel can keep up with such a radical change of consciousness is open to infinite possibilities. When Egyptian novelists will write about the revolution is unknown to me. But I am certain that the Egyptian novel of the next decade will turn into a playground of experimentation and aesthetic adventures based on the principle of “the sky is the limit”. Haven’t we seen it happen?

Inas Abdel Dayem — the former head of the Opera House — has been named Egypt’s (latest) Minister of Culture. The internationally recognized flautist has been cheered on Facebook and elsewhere as the first woman to hold the position: 

Abdel Dayem was, notably, fired by her predecessor in a move that sparked protests and sympathetic resignations. Her firing was one of the major events in the lead-up to the sit-in at the culture ministry, which called for the resignation of Morsi-appointed culture minister Alaa Abdel-Aziz.

The Wall Street Journal called Abdel Dayem’s appointment a “subtle snub to the Brotherhood,” although goodness knows how subtle it was.

During the sit-in, many Egyptian artists discussed possibilities beyond a centralized Culture Ministry. Abdel Dayem certainly seems qualified to manage a large operation – she replacedAbdel-Moneim Kamel as Cairo Opera House boss in February 2012; before that, she’d been dean of the Cairo Conservatory. But whether Egypt is well-served by a centralized culture beauracracy is another question.

Farouk Hosni, who was head of Egypt’s culture machinery until January of 2011, held the position for twenty-four years. Since then, the longest-running culture minister has been Mohamed Saber Arab, who ran the ministry for nearly a year:

Gaber Asfour (Jan 30 – Feb 8, 2011)

Mohamed al-Sawy (mid-February, 2011)

Emad Abu-Ghazi (March – Nov 20, 2011)

Shaker Abdel-Hamid (Nov 2011 – May 2012)

Mohamed Saber Arab (May 2012 – May 6 2013)

Alaa Abdel-Aziz (May 6 – July 5)

Inas Abdel-Dayem (July 14 – present)

The minister merry-go-round will probably stop here for a while. Probably.

More:

Ahram Online has a longer CV.

Listen to Abdel Dayem play the flute

Reactions to Inas Abdel Dayem’s appointment as the new Minister of Culture have shaken out, generally, along fault lines:

Cheers over the idea of a first female culture minister:

There were also those who said that Abdel-Dayem had been fired by former Culture Minister Alaa Abdel-Aziz for corruption:

Those who called it a slap to the Brotherhood:

Abdel-Dayem supporters who perhaps aren’t excited about the ministry:

And those who wish there weren’t a giant culture ministry:

A few minutes ago, Mohammad Saber Arab — Culture Minister No. 5 in the post-Farouk Hosni world — was sworn in as the interim culture minister. So what happened to Inas Abdel Dayem?

Earlier today, Al-Watan reported that Culture Minister designate Inas Abdel-Dayem would not take on post after threats from the Nour Party, which others reported had been criticizing the proposed cabinet.

However, later in the evening — after it was all over — Abdel Dayem said on OnTV that she was on her way to take the oath when the prime minister called to apologize. She said she received no threats herself.

The Al-Watan article seems to be no longer available, but there were several rebuttals, stating that Abdel-Dayem had not stepped away from the position and would take it on. Al Watan, however, stood by their story, and posted an audio recording of an interview they said was with Abdel Dayem, in which she said she had received threats.

Just before the swearing-in, Ahram Gate issued a list of all the new ministers, with the culture minister not as Abdel Dayem, but as Mohammad Saber Arab, who had previously held the position from May 2012 through May 2013. Then, in May 2013, Morsi appointee Alaa Abdel-Aziz took over, fired Inas Abdel-Dayem (among others) and sparked the Culture Ministry sit-in.

So:

Gaber Asfour (Jan 30 – Feb 8, 2011)

Mohamed al-Sawy (mid-February, 2011)

Emad Abu-Ghazi (March – Nov 20, 2011)

Shaker Abdel-Hamid (Nov 2011 – May 2012)

Mohamed Saber Arab (May 2012 – May 6 2013)

Alaa Abdel-Aziz (May 6 – July 5)

Mohamed Saber Arab (July 16 – present)

#

Also, from Mada Masr: Conflicting statements on Abdel Dayem appointment to Culture Ministry

The United States’ National Endowment for the Arts announced that they had awarded 16 grants, worth $250,000, for translation projects, including a $25,000 grant for Mohammed A. Albakry to translate Tahrir Plays and Performance Texts from the Egyptian Revolution:

Albakry, of Middle Tennessee State University, plans to translate an anthology of six contemporary Egyptian plays written by established and emerging playwrights. According to the NEA release, he will work in collaboration with Rebekah Maggor.

Maggor received her MFA through the American Repertory Theater Institute at Harvard University, her BA from Columbia University, and studied Arabic at Alexandria University in Egypt. She directs the project “Voices of Protest: Middle Eastern Theatre in Translation.” Her first full-length play, Two Days at Home Three Days in Prison, explores the challenges of a young woman soldier assigned to work as a prison guard in an Israeli military prison.

Together with Albakry, she translated Ibrahim El-Husseini’s Comedy of Sorrows, about the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, and directed readings of the play at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, the Segal Theatre Center in New York, and Vanderbilt University.

Other recipients include Erdağ Göknar, who will translate the epic poem Insurgency by Nazim Hikmet and Nancy Naomi Carlson, who’s set to translate a poetry collection by Abdourahman Waberi.

More on Publisher’s Weekly.

Along with author Randa Jarrar, I am late to the party in watching Zaat, the Ramadan TV series based on Sonallah Ibrahim’s celebrated novel:

Sonallah Ibrahim suggests at the opening of Zaat (1992), trans. Anthony Calderbank, that “We could begin Zaat’s story from its natural beginning, that is, from the moment she slid ino our world bespattered with blood, and the shock, the first of many she would endure, that followed as she was lifted feet first into the air and given a hefty slap on the backside (which gave no indication whatsoever at that point in time of the size it would eventually attain due to long hours sitting on the toilet seat).”

However, Ibrahim’s narrator does not begin at that point, as, “The critics, however, would hardly welcome such a beginning, for a straight line, in literature as in morals, rarely achieves significant results, and in our case here would certainly constitute nothing but a waste of time for the reader and writer alike.”

And then, amusingly: “Time which could be better spent in front of the television, for example, and which would benefit both of them far more than ploughing through hundreds of pages.”

The book proceeds to skip forward to Zaat’s courtship with Abdel Maguid Hassan Khamees in the mid-sixteies. But when the Ramadan-series TV adaptation of Zaat opens, it opens with Zaat’s birth, and she is indeed lifted feet first into the air and given a hefty slap on the backside.

The TV series echoes Ibrahim’s novel in that it interweaves Zaat’s story with history and news — newspaper clippings are sensibly replaced with film clips — but it also departs significantly from the book. However, as Matthew Specktor recently wrote on adapting novels to film, “The book is not the movie.” Reportedly, Ibrahim is pleased with the adaptation.

I never imagined Zaat like Nelly Karim, but never mind that.

Watch the first episode or share your thoughts on the series:

Mohammad Saber Arab has spent more time sitting in the culture-minister hot seat than anyone else since January 2011. What is the professor of modern Arab history’s vision for the Egyptian cultural scene? He was recently interviewed by Ahram Weekly:

The only time interviewer Nevine el-Aref’s tone seemed to get at all confrontational was when she stated: “Some say the Ministry of Culture did not play a role in improving the image of the interim government abroad after 30 June.”

Unfortunately, Arab did not roll his eyes and say that the current Ministry of Culture has more important tasks than PR.

Instead, Arab argues that the ministry has worked hard to to dialogue with foreign embassies “concerning Egypt’s political situation and that what happened was not a coup but the nation’s desire.” The new-old culture minister was one of many who marched on July 26.

In terms of making contemporary Egypt more workable for artists and authors — and making more art accessible to the public — Arab noted that, generally, things will go on as before: the state cultural prizes will be granted in August (it’s not clear where the 7 million is coming from, but the prizes will be granted), and other big-ticket events — such as the Cairo Film Festival, the Cairo International Book Fair, and the restoration of the National Theatre in Ataba — will go forward.

Saber Arab also said that he and artists involved in the summer sit-in ”agreed to hold in September a conference to discuss the future of culture in Egypt.” It doesn’t sound particularly promising, although who knows, perhaps energy from the sit-in and the takeover of Akhbar al-Adab will continue. Saber Arab said of the conference:

 All intellectuals, artists, filmmakers, actors, poets, novelists and writers will gather in September at the Supreme Culture Council in a conference to discuss the future of culture during the next two decades and how to face the challenges of the new Egypt. ….

The conference will draw up a plan and a vision of Egypt’s culture future, which in turn would be introduced to the government for discussion after which all the ministries will work to implement the country’s cultural programme.

Arab further said of his vision: “The ministry is not an educational school. It is not a factory to produce creators but puts them on the right track to the future.“ (Bold mine.)

Meanwhile, according to Ahram Online, Egypt’s state cultural prizes “will be granted on 26 August following a two-month delay that raised doubts about the prize granting procedures.”

Of course, doubts have been raised in the past – novelist Sonallah Ibrahim cast some doubt on the worth of these prizes when he spectacularly rejected one in 2003, and, earlier this year, novelist Ezzedine Choukri Fishere tweeted to ArabLit, “It is a neopatrimonial system with little to do with literature. Can’t be reformed; too many vested interests. Better gone.”

Last month, the United States’ National Endowment for the Arts announced that they had awarded 16 grants, worth $250,000, for translation projects, including a $25,000 grant for Mohammed Albakry and Rebeka Maggor to translate Tahrir Plays and Performance Texts from the Egyptian Revolution, a collection to be published by Seagull Books and distributed by the University of Chicago Press for the In Performance series. The expected publication date is fall, 2014:

Mohammed Albakry (MA) and Rebekah Maggor (RM) answered questions about the project.

Mohammed Albakry: First off, I’d like to say that my heart goes out to my beloved country at this difficult time. The 2011 popular uprising has been an act of inspiration for many theater artists and for me personally. I wanted this project to highlight the struggles, hopes and heroism of the valiant men and women who dared to dream and who inspired the world in 2011 by their peaceful popular uprising.  But the dream is turning into a nightmare; too much bloodshed and loss of innocent lives.  I have never been so worried about Egypt as I am now, but I am still hopeful that peace and reconciliation will prevail at this crucial moment of Egypt’s long, illustrious history. Following the news about Egypt is becoming almost unbearable  for me,  and I take refuge in the act of translation.  I don’t know if translation could make any difference, but that’s the only thing I can do.

Rebekah Maggor: Before we begin the interview, I’d to say that our thoughts and prayers are with our friends and family in Egypt. As scholars and artists we often feel powerless during such brutal times; we can only hope that the simple act of translating these brave writers’ work will provide some complex and humanistic perspectives on unfolding events in Egypt.

ArabLit: So, first things first: What are the six texts, by which playwrights? Over what period of time were these pieces written/staged?

MA: This translation project “Tahrir Plays and Performance Texts from the Egyptian Revolution”, as the title indicates, engages with the divergent ways in which the Egyptian theater has responded to and participated in social and political change in contemporary Egypt. So most of the plays, with one exception, have been written and staged after January 2011 in State theaters  and Independent theatres throughout Egypt. The six texts we settled on so far are the following :

1. “House of the Naffady Alley” by Mohamed Mahrous. This play was written and staged in 2008. Even though it preceded the 2011 revolution, the play does have revolutionary premonitions.

2. “Tahrir Monologues,” a collaborative drama by Sondos Shabayek and others.

3. “In Search of Said Abu Al-Naga” by Ahmed Hasan Al-Banna.

4. “The Window” by Said Suliman.

5. “Comedy of Sorrows” by Ibrahim El-Husseini.

6. “No Dancing Allowed” by Mohamed Abdel Mu’iz.

RM: In addition to the introduction and the translated texts, we will include an excellent essay on the history of censorship in the Egyptian Theatre by scholar and critic Nehad Selaiha, entitled, “The Fire and the Frying Pan.”

Regarding the period of time the pieces were written, I think it’s important to note that we define “revolutionary” as a work that challenges the entrenched political, economic, social, and cultural power structures of the existing order. In this sense, Egyptian dramatists have been writing “revolutionary” drama for years, even decades. Whether written before or after the start of the revolution, all the plays we chose demonstrate this longstanding theatrical tradition.

AL: How did you decide on these six? What were your main criteria in selecting them? What sensibilities do they share?

MA: Well, the selection process, which is still not quite over yet, has been a long process that entailed reading and evaluating several dozen plays as well as following Egyptian theater reviews and receiving some nominations from theater critics Nehad Seliha and Ibrahim El-Husseini (who is also a playwright represented in the collection).

RM: We’ve also solicited texts and leads from the emerging generation of theatre artists and writers in their twenties, like journalist, playwright and director Sondos Shabayek and poet and activist Amor Eletrebi. We’re reaching out to artists from both within the established theatre circles as well as the fringe.

MA: There were many plays that I read and rejected right away because they were didactic, overtly ideological, or had weak dramatic structures. But there were so many good plays, too. In the end, I found many more strong plays I would have liked to include in this translation project than was possible. One of the main criteria in the selection process was diversity of voices and techniques, and I think we ended up with a  range of dynamic theatrical works with different textual and performance styles (documentary performance, ensemble story-telling drama, monodrama, and symbolic social realism).

RM: I agree with Mohammed that we actively sought out (and are still seeking) a diversity of perspectives on the unfolding political events in Egypt. We have selected pieces by men and women, emerging and established writers, with varying political and religious beliefs, who hail from a range of geographical and class backgrounds. The established writer Ibrahim El-Husseini (Comedy of Sorrows), for example, was born and raised in Sharkeya, Egypt and studied at the Arts Academy in Cairo. He has won numerous awards for his over twenty plays. On the other hand, Twenty-seven year old Sondos Shabayak, director and creator of Tahrir Monologues, comes from a journalism background and is a newcomer to the theatre scene. After the success of Tahrir Monologues she has been able, for the meanwhile, to dedicate herself full-time to creating theatre.

Equally important to finding a diversity of voices has been, very simply, good writing.  But how do you go about defining “good writing”? For me, the strongest works offer complex explorations of both specific and universal themes through compelling characters, evocative dialogue, and powerful and intentional dramatic structure (whether linear, non-linear, or impressionistic).

MA: The selected plays, in terms of their sensibility,  offer a breadth of complex dramatic responses to the January Revolution of 2011 and beyond. By grappling with their country’s reality, they bear witness to the tremendous transformations in Egypt before, during, and after the January 2011 Revolution. But they also address the cross-cultural themes of economic disparity, individual struggles, human rights, and collective awakening that speak not only to Egypt’s revolution, but also to recent protest movements elsewhere across the globe. As I just mentioned, however, the door for selection is not completely closed yet. I am still on the look out for one or perhaps even two newer  dramatic works. I hope to go to Egypt soon to check out the theater scene and collect materials for the critical introduction that will accompany this anthology.

RM: I’d like to emphasize the importance of the cross-cultural themes. As it turns out, none of the dramatists we selected are known in the West, nor have they generally sought a Western audience. When playwright Ibrahim El-Husseini joined me for the reading tour I directed of Comedy of Sorrows last year in the U.S., he expressed complete surprise that American audiences took any interest in a play about the intimate internal politics of Egyptian society. Yet our audiences connected deeply with Comedy of Sorrows on many levels. For example, one of the main characters, Doha, has spent most of her very privileged life unaware of how the “other half”, or the “99%”, lives. And this struck a very self-reflective chord with the American audience.  In writing for a predominantly Arab and Egyptian audience, El-Husseini and the other dramatists offer a nuanced insider’s perspective. Paradoxically, it is the local and intimate focus of their stories and the personal, political, and existential struggles of their distinctively Egyptian characters that create a powerful universality and potential for an enduring literary value of their work.

AL: Will they be published in a collection? Do you know where they will be staged?

MA: Yes, the anthology, Tahrir Plays and Performance Texts from the Egyptian Revolution, will be published by Seagull Publications and distributed by University of Chicago Press. I also hope that many of the plays  will  receive staged readings and full productions in the U.S and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Comedy of Sorrows (Commedia Al-Ahzaan) will be produced by Hybrid Theatre Works from August 21st to August 25th 2013 at HERE Theater, 145 Sixth Ave. NY. Hopefully,  some of the other plays of the anthology will get similar attention.

RM: I am thrilled that there will be a full production of Comedy of Sorrows in New York, starting next week. One of my main goals has been to get these texts up on their feet and in front of American audiences. There have been just a handful of significant anthologies of Arab drama in English translation published in the past twenty years. But very few (if any) of the translations in these collections received full productions in the U.S. Their exposure has been mostly limited to a fairly narrow group of scholars focusing on Middle Eastern studies or Arab literature. The works in our collection have already received some significant attention from the American theatre world.  Partly, of course, it’s because there’s an intense topical interest in Egypt right now. But, when the headlines subside, I believe there will remain a strong interest is these plays because they make an important contribution to a canon of excellent international drama.  In that regard, we’re very happy that the collection will be part of Seagull Book’s In Performance series. This unique series, edited by the incomparable theatre scholar Carol Martin, is dedicated entirely to contemporary international plays and dramatic texts, mostly in translation, written both by established and new playwrights.  The series is aimed at people who want to stage new work, and also at people who want to read diverse theatrical texts and/or study the ways in which local political and theatrical history can be understood in the context of globalization. To date anthologies published or under contract in the series represent Hungary, Russia, China, Poland, New Zealand, the US, Japan, South Africa, Israel, Turkey, and Romania. We’re delighted that Tahrir Plays will be in the company of these other important international anthologies.

AL:  Why are you interested in translating theatre (vs. other genres)? What do you think you need to bring to translating theatre, that makes it different from prose texts, poetry, other genres?

MA: I am deeply interested in translation and translation studies in general, and I’ve published translated short fiction from Arabic before. But Comedy of Sorrows  (COS) was my first experience with translating for the stage.  That was a collaboration with Rebekah who also directed a dramatic reading of the play for Harvard University’s  Radcliffe Institute in March 2012 . That could have been the end of it, but I liked the experience and the challenge of working with drama. Encouraged by the positive reception that COS got,  I wanted to expand the project into an anthology. Now being awarded the NEA Translation Fellowship is a wonderful encouragement and validation for this project.

RM: I was also encouraged by the reception of Comedy of Sorrows and I was very happy that Mohammed expressed an interest in continuing the collaboration. This whole project began with a commission from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute—they solicited a proposal for a performance to open their 2012 conference “Women Making Democracy.”  Initially I was going to commission a theatre colleague in Cairo to work independently on the translation of Comedy of Sorrows. However—and this is quite an amazing story—I discovered quite by accident that my old friend, Mohammed Albakry, who had been my Arabic tutor at Alexandria University over 15 years ago, was now a professor of Linguistics at MTSU, just 40 minutes down the road from Nashville, where I was teaching at Vanderbilt. Mohammed agreed to co-translate Comedy of Sorrows with me and thus this very unexpected and welcome reunion launched our current collaboration. This work is very different from Mohammed’s previous translation work, but I think our combined skills– Mohammed is a linguist and native speaker of Arabic, and I am a playwright, director, and theatre scholar with a working knowledge of Standard and Egyptian Arabic – assure playable theatrical translations.

MA: I would  say that translating dramatic literature — just like other literary genres — requires the same sensitivity to both the source and receiver languages. What is different is that in theater translation, the text is only one part of the larger theater discourse. A theater text, beside  being a written mode of dramatic fiction, is also a performance text that requires the translator to capture and  preserve what theater commentators sometimes call  the ‘language body’ of the dramatic text. In translating drama, more than other genres,  one has to meet the added demand of speakability or  playability, otherwise the actors would struggle with lines that  may sound stilted or not quite natural.

Another point that the theater translator from Arabic to English in particular has to take into account is the gap between the fusha and ammaya (the standard and vernacular varieties of Arabic) and the difference of what is considered theatrical in the Egyptian versus the American contexts. In Egyptian drama, for example, heightened emotionality and melodrama tend to be more common. Finally, I always have to remind myself that a theater audience doesn’t have the benefit of seeing reference annotations or explanatory footnotes on the stage. A dramatic text, perhaps more than prose texts, needs to be as self-contained as possible. Having said that, I have to concede that some translator’s notes might be necessary, and indeed unavoidable, and could be helpful in making certain things clear for directors and actors, but any paratextual material should be kept to a minimum in a translation meant for the stage.

AL: This question is for Rebekah: Why translate vs. focus solely on your own work?

RM: I started translating as a way to inspire my own writing. Of course I’m always reading plays as a source of inspiration, but I think there are three ways to form a truly intimate relationship with a text — act it, direct it, or translate it. Each is a way of interpreting the text and provides a deep knowledge of every aspect the work from its overarching philosophy to the stitching behind its dialogue. I started translating Arab drama in particular because I find the contemporary works so much more relevant and interesting (thematically and structurally) than most contemporary American playwriting. With some notable exceptions, much of our new dramatic writing engages a kind of quasi-subversive identity politics. We’re not writing a great deal of really “revolutionary” work. Contemporary U.S. playwrights also tend to (again, with some notable exceptions) stick within a narrow kitchen-sink naturalism, or perhaps venture into some quirky “magical realism.” The remarkable theatrical spectacle, amalgamations of prose, poetry and song, and ensemble storytelling that the plays in our collection employ are considered utterly “experimental” in the American theatre. We have a great deal to learn from these Egyptian artists.

I will add that it’s sometimes quite difficult to convince English-speaking audiences and fellow theater artists to approach Arab drama in translation as they might approach any good international drama in translation — as an opportunity to form an intimate connection with another culture, while at the same time illuminate the audience about its own situation. On the rare occasions when Arab drama in translation is staged in the U.S., it’s usually produced (and advertised) as a kind of guided tour to a foreign land, one that operates according to a very different logic than the audience’s own society. An audience lured to the theatre by contact with a sensational foreign culture, often overlooks the possibility of a self-reflective understanding of the text. For the translator, one of the most distressing symptoms of this exoticization is the performance of the text with “Arab accents.” Imagine — you’ve just toiled for months to create an elegant, playable English translation that brings this text closer to the English-speaking audience, and suddenly this “foreign” accent hurls it miles away from them. It also sounds downright silly because most people with thick foreign accents don’t tend to speak with grammatically correct elegance, or by contrast with slang-filled colloquial speech. I’ve never seen actors perform a translation of a new French play with a French accent, so it seems ridiculous to use an “Arab” accent with a translation of a new Egyptian play.

I am delighted by the outpouring of interest in the plays in our forthcoming collection, but I’m concerned by the various ways in which these texts can be misinterpreted and Orientalized. When an audience is driven by what scholar Margaret Litvin terms “ethnographic curiosity,” they look to the playwright as “native informant,” which reinforces a rigid hierarchy between East and West.  I hope these translations encourage stirring and unexpected English-language productions and inspire a more integrated way of thinking about the relationship between our societies.

AL: How do you plan to work together in translating these pieces? What did you learn in translating Comedy of Sorrows together?

MA: As the primary translator on this project, I produce the first draft. After identifying the linguistic and stylistic features of the originals, I attempt in my first  translation draft/s to create parallel dramatic effects in English. But I still consider my first draft more as a reader-oriented draft that Rebekah can work on polishing to bring  it closer  to a stage-oriented text. I then get to work on revising the text later to ensure that it doesn’t contain any inaccuracies and that it remains faithful to the original.  This is what worked for COS and it is the process that we would like to replicate for the larger NEA-funded project. Part of the NEA funds will also enable me to organize staged and dramatic readings (there is already some interest expressed by different campuses and theater groups) to get a feel for how the texts sound in the mouths of actors. There is quite a difference between imagining what the text sounds like in my own head  and actually hearing it delivered by good actors.

RM: First, I want to say that it’s a pleasure to work with someone like Mohammed who has such an etymological, grammatical, and over-all deep linguistic knowledge of Arabic and English. So, my process begins by sitting down with Mohammed’s first, meticulous, “readerly-oriented” draft, alongside the original Arabic text. I bounce back and forth between Mohammed’s translation and the original Arabic to create a second translation draft, which is the playable script. We then work together on creating the final draft.

MA: Now, to undertake a collaborative work like this one, one has to share the same vision with the person with whom one is collaborating, and that’s  definitely the case here. Our vision is to produce accurate and playable texts while avoiding the various ways in which these texts could be misinterpreted and Orientalized. Still,  as in any collaboration, the process is not always smooth and there are bound to be occasional disagreements. This, however, often leads to a fruitful discussion and changes that are ultimately beneficial to the project. I don’t think one has to be a theater practitioner  in order to translate drama, but it is a great help to work with someone from inside the theater world.

RM: I agree that there’s a healthy tension in our collaboration. I’m completely oriented towards the stage—my actors and my audience. I’m at home with the unnerving ambiguity of good dramatic dialogue. As a playwright, I’ve experienced first-hand the horror of actors and directors misinterpreting my dialogue. It’s painful. As a younger writer I’d rewrite (and overwrite) lines that had been misinterpreted in a rehearsal or performance. And that killed the rhythm of the scene and killed the character’s voice.  Of course, there are always going to be mediocre actors and uninspired directors who will misinterpret and butcher your work. On the other hand, there are divine actors and virtuosic directors who can, if you leave them room for interpretation, bring your work to places you’ve never imagined possible. In working on translations, I tend to lean towards that kind of open, rhythmic ambiguity and Mohammed leans towards clarity and faithfulness.

I’ll often notice, when comparing the original Arabic text and Mohammed’s first English draft, that he’s added a choice adjective or subtle explanatory phrase here and there. My gut instinct is to cut them out and let the dialogue speak for itself. Of course the American audience has a different base of assumed knowledge, so I do have to admit that some clarifications are necessary. As Mohammed mentioned, hearing the text read aloud by a good actor ultimately settles many of these differences.

As both Mohammed Albakry and Rebekah Maggor noted in yesterday’s interview, Ibrahim al-Husseini’s “Comedy of Sorrows” (trans. Albakry and Maggor) opens tomorrow at NYC’s Here Arts Center: 

More about times and tickets on Hybrid’s website or via Here Arts Center.

Artist and writer Joy Garnett (@joygarnett) is working on a book about her grandfather, Ahmed Zaki Abushady, the Egyptian poet and bee scientist. She answered a few questions about AZ Abushady, his work, and her book project:

ArabLit: When did you first become interested in your grandfather’s life and work (in a serious way)? What role did family stories play? Can you describe your current book-project and what it will encompass?

AZ Abushady as a young man. 1909.

Joy Garnett: The book is a family memoir and an adventure story – a love story – that focuses on Abushady’s life, his work as a poet and bee scientist, and his premature death in relative obscurity in the US. It’s not a biography in the conventional sense. I have an inside story to offer, told through family members and Abushady’s own voice. My discovery of  an archive containing his letters and decades of correspondence was a pivotal moment. They reveal how his personal story is entangled with political and cultural conflicts played out from 1922 to 1946 in Egypt. Central to the story is the point of view of my aunt Safeya, the source of so much of this material. She is Abushady’s oldest daughter and the last living family link to that time. So, I am telling an idiosyncratic story partly through her, and in a way that I think anyone will relate to, whether or not they’re interested in Egypt. Specialists in Modern Arabic poetry and Egypt between the wars will, I hope, be interested as well.

I grew up hearing stories my mother told me about her childhood in Alexandria. Abushady loomed large, but his significance was related in broad strokes. It was all a bit vague and romantic. I was in college when I started to get a real sense of who my grandfather was. I started studying fusha at McGill’s Institute of Islamic studies and got into a conversation with an Egyptian classmate. She set me straight.

When I finally got to Egypt, it was on a student loan. I enrolled in the American University in Cairo’s summer language program. I was twenty. I made a point of looking for Abushady’s books and asking questions about him. I started to figure out who my family was. Once back at the Institute, I sought out critical articles about his poetry, but this was premature. The bulk of critical writing in English was still being written.

In my twenties, I stopped studying Arabic and Abushady altogether. I decided to pursue an art career instead. There was a point when I realized it was either him or me, and I had to make a choice. Many years passed where I barely thought about him, and then a few years ago I felt the pull. Even dead, Abushady is a force of Nature.

Abushady’s student ID card, from Medical School in Cairo.

When my mother, aunt, and uncle started to grow old and sick, I was jolted back into thinking about this project. I taped interviews with them.  I had a day job in a museum library that gave me free access to things like JSTOR and interlibrary loans. And of course, this time around I have the Internet.

I’ve spent the past couple of years traveling to different archives and doing research independently to try to piece together the many parts of Abushady’s life, which is not easy. As a physician, bacteriologist, beekeeper, agricultural and social reformer, poet and publisher, he defies categorization. I want to bring together what I’ve discovered about his main achievements in a single narrative. I would like to show the extent of his influence on Modern Arabic poetry as well as his impact on bee husbandry in England and Egypt. For him, poetry and bees were deeply interconnected. But of course, no one in Arabic literature circles knows much about his bee science contributions and vice versa. The connections are interesting.

AL: Does it get into other family history? For instance, your great-grandmother’s Cairo literary salons? 

JG: There are some colorful characters in the extended family. My great-grandfather, Maitre Muhammed Abushady Bey, was a big lawyer and a pal of Sa’ad Zaghlul. Legend has it that he could get anyone off no matter how serious the offense. His milieu included many writers and poets who exerted an early influence on his young son. I’ve had difficulty extracting more than a few details from that earlier time. I’ve had better luck with the period following Abushady’s return to Egypt in 1922  after ten years living in England. A creative DIY urban scene greeted him, and he was perfectly suited for it. Our close cousins through my great-grandmother, Amina (née Nagib) were the painters and satirists Seif and Edham Wanly, who were integral to the Egyptian artist “scene” in Alexandria. They were part of my grandfather’s circle, which included poets, writers, journalists, cartoonists, calligraphers, painters, sculptors, composers, etc. The Wanly brothers provided illustrations and cartoons for Abushady’s various publications. Edham was very close with my aunt, and they exchanged letters regularly until his death in 1959.

There was also an evil stepmother, an atheist grifter, several instances of unrequited love and a string of tragic, youthful suicides. There are probably too many intrigues to include in one book.

I made an unexpected discovery concerning my grandmother, Abushady’s first wife, Annie. They met when he was a medical student in London, and she was English, of course. Her maiden name was Bamford. It turns out that she was descended from the radical labor organizer, Samuel Bamford, who was a poet in the Lancashire dialect. Her father was a member of the Oddfellows, a centuries-old mutual organization that presaged trade unions. So she came from a long line of radical working class poets who believed in things like financial support for working people and free healthcare for the poor. I believe Annie had a significant influence on Abushady’s vision for social reform. She may have provided the inspiration for his feminism. He was promoting women’s suffrage in Egypt in the 1930s! And he named his two daughters after Huda Sha’arawi and Safeya Zaghul. He actually wanted to institute the principles of England’s Co-operative Movement in Egypt, which shows his romantic, against-all-odds brand of idealism. He was a Wafdist like his father, and as a nationalist he wanted, of course, to see an end to the British occupation. So his Anglophilia was complex, if not conflicted.

AL: Do you remember when you first read his poetry? To what extent are you/the reader interested in it as poetry, and to what extent as part of his story (as an Apollo founder, as an experimenter, an innovator)? What about his other works, literary criticism & historical works & theatre? Will some of his translated work be a part of your book? Do you think some of his works, translated, would interest English-language readers today? Or, re-issued, Arabic readers today?

JG: I can’t speak to what would interest English-language or Arabic readers today. Poetry as a rule attracts a special readership. Arabic poetry of that period is of great interest to scholars. I tried to read Abushady’s poetry while I was at McGill. The Institute has a number of volumes of his poetry in their library. But it was rough going. There was no way, and there is still no way that I, or even many native Arabic speakers, can get a handle on what he was enacting in the Arabic language through poetry. The only people I know who can easily read the poetry of the period and who know and feel what he was doing with language are Arabists and linguists. The rest of us may have to take their word for it. Sadly, most of the translated excerpts I’ve found in dissertations and such are inadequate if not downright awful. It’s probably the most difficult thing to do, to translate poetry. You have to know both languages intimately, and you have to be a poet.

But I do know someone who meets all of these criteria, and who has agreed to translate one of Abushady’s love poems for the book. So that’s very exciting. Apparently, love poetry was his strong suit. When he published his diwan Zaynab in 1924, it was new, fresh — unlike anything that had been done. It helped open the way for what developed into an era of creative experimentation in poetry.

AL: How would you describe the influence of the Apollo, in Egypt and beyond, especially considering such important figures as Kamel Kilani, Abu-Qassem El-Shebbi, Ahmed Shawqi were involved? What role did your grandfather play?

JG: In the Arab world, poetry was stagnating. People were aware, whether they were happy about it or not, of the new kinds of writing being produced elsewhere in the world. There was a very real interest in Modernism across all the arts. Abushady’s vision was for a truly contemporary Egypt. He believed the only way forward was through hybridity and inclusiveness, discussion and debate. In Apollo he published criticism and reviews as well as poetry. He also rather infamously published monographs authored by himself and others on topics such as poverty, religious faith, women’s suffrage, and atheism.

When the great Bengali poet and Nobelist Rabindranath Tagore visited Egypt in 1926, he stayed with Ahmed Shawqi. There is a very moving passage in one of my grandfather’s diaries about their meeting, and about their shared belief that poetry offered a universal language. Abushady really believed that international peace could be achieved and that poetry played an active role in the process.

Apollo’s Society, some members posing in the garden in 1935.

Abushady’s poetry journal Apollo (1932-34) stopped publication for financial reasons after only two years, but its influence was disproportionate to its run. The group of poets, writers and artists he assembled around it, which he called “Apollo’s Society,” and the work they produced, represents the first wave of Modernism in Arabic poetry. And that wave was sustainable. The journal was also unique in that it reached out to writers beyond Egypt’s borders. Abu-Qassem El-Shebbi, as you mentioned, the great Tunisian poet whose verse became popular again in Tunisia and Egypt during the revolutions of 2011, published his poetry for the first time in Apollo.

Abushady generally played an avuncular and diplomatic role, encouraging young poets like El-Shebbi, and publishing their work at a time when the more established, conservative publications refused to do so. Shawqi was the éminence grise, bestowing a certain validation and authority. After Shawqi passed away, Khalil Mutran took his place as the president of Apollo’s Society. So while there was a new vision and encouragement of creative risk-taking, there was also a sense of history and lineage. The intention to link with tradition was made clear through the involvement of these esteemed, elder poets.

AL: And for you, how does this research/writing fit into the rest of your work? Visual art, cultural appropriation/borrowing? How does it resonate with your other projects?

JG: I have always been interested in the archive, and my work as a visual artist, whether painting or new media, has long been research-based. In other words, the contents of the archive I’m researching determines to a large extent the nature of the resulting project. The earliest instance I can think of where I was conscious of this way of working was in the late 90s, when I was compiling declassified images and films of US atomic tests and producing paintings and agitprop. I decided to organize the many links to source material that I had amassed in the form of a website: http://TheBombProject.org  For some years I continued to work on it and add to it. Now it stands as an archive of the project itself, and to the time prior to the advent of RSS feeds and social media, when people aggregated links on static websites.

Now I find that I am dealing with a large, ungainly and fragile physical archive, the Abushady archive amassed by my mother and aunt. It’s extraordinary that it exists at all, and I’ve only recently become aware of how extensive the material is. I’m actually still unearthing parts of it. The fact is, no one in my family for several generations has ever thrown anything away. I have ephemera from 1930s Egypt that includes movie tickets and playbills. I have visas, student ID cards, and death notices. Abushady kept carbons of seemingly every letter he ever sent, and he saved every response. In some instances he collated the full correspondence of several years in chronological order. I found personal letters in both English and Arabic, cables, sketches, and of course, an enormous number of photographs. The visual information tells a story all its own, of course, and has been essential to my writing this book. But it is massive enough, visually startling and significant so as to present a separate project.

So, this is the archive that I am dealing with as a visual artist. After I organize it all, I will need to scan it and digitize it online. Essentially, the project is a portable museum, an open access, virtual Abushady museum. I proposed this project for post-doctoral work, and I have a place offered me at Winchester School of Fine Art at the University of Southampton, in their PhD program for visual artists. It is a program that emphasizes interdisciplinary research across the arts. I am looking for funding so that I can start. In the meantime, I have a book to write.

Front cover of Apollo, Feb 1934 issue.

Over at the Arabist, Ursula Lindsey raises questions, in Et Tu Sonallah?, about the towering Egyptian novelist’s current and past political positions and how they reflect on his role as a sometimes-”oracular novelist,” as he was recently called by Robyn Creswell:

At Stanford, May 2013.

The spark for Lindsey’s comments was that Ibrahim, like many other Egyptian novelists, artists, and culture workers (see: the press conference from last Tuesday), has gotten on board the praising-al-Sisi train while denouncing al-Baradei as a plant for the West. Lindsey writes:

I say this in light of a recent interview in which Ibrahim, commenting on the current situation, says that ”the military power is working on behalf of the people,” and describes Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi as “a gain for political life in Egypt,” a “patriotic personality” and someone who “for the first time since Gamal Abdel Nasser challenged America and the West.”

It is worthwhile to question the validity of an interview on Youm7, and Lindsey does, but a Facebook statement (at bottom) stands by the piece with a correction requested on the headline.

Certainly, the rah-rah-military interview surprised many. But although Ibrahim was heroically anti-Mubarak — as Robyn Creswell reminds us, Ibrahim threw his 2003 Arab Novel Award back in the State’s face — perhaps his stronger literary obsession has been anti-imperialism. Back in 2011, it was surprising that Creswell wrote in the first page of an excellent Harper’s piece that Ibrahim began his speech refusing the 2003 award “by thanking the prize committee and denouncing the complicity of Arab regimes with the foreign policies of Israel and the United States, which is how Cairene intellectuals clear their throats. He then moved on to harder truths.”

While it’s true that denouncing Israel and the US is often done in a throat-clearing manner, and that in Cairo these can be “easier” truths (sort of), it is also a core obsession in Ibrahim’s literary project, and perhaps part of what draws him to the al-Sisi camp (regardless of whether the general has any serious anti-imperialist stance). 

Lindsey further writes: “In That Smell [1966] Ibrahim portrays a country that has turned into a prison, a place where people can’t connect or tell the truth. Yet in the interview he describes Nasser as a ‘great leader.’”

In the end, Lindsey suggests that Ibrahim’s admiration of Nasser and al-Sisi points toward “much less comforting thoughts, not about a lifetime of skepticism and prescience [as depicted in Creswell's piece], but about the recurrence of a certain gullibility or delusion.”

I think gullibility or delusion are perhaps the wrong tack here; we all have recurring patches of gullibilty and delusion. But does this Youm7 interview lead us to ask any new questions about how power is crafted and depicted in Ibrahim’s novels? The relationship of the citizen to the state? And, sure, his literary blindspots?

Or, as Anna Della Subin wrote earlier this week, “Time for a more nuanced look at Ibrahim’s politics than we’ve seen before…. 2/2″

Meanwhile, the 2013 state literary prizes have gone out, with Ahmed Abdel Muti Hijazi winning the renamed “Nile Prize for Literature.” Read poetry by Hijazi at Big Bridge. Meanwhile, the State Appreciation Awards went to Egyptian poet Sayed Hijab, theatre writer and critic Nihad Seliha, and writer Said Salim, and the State Excellence Awards in Literature went to Mohamed Nagui and Nessim Megally.

Statement:

بيان من الكاتب صنع الله ابراهيم

يوم السبت 14 أغسطس 2013 نشرت جريدة اليوم السابع المصرية حوارا معي تحت عنوان :” السيسي شخصية وطنية كبيرة وبفضله نتحدي أمريكا والغرب لأول مرة منذ عبد الناصر وأنا مع ترشحه للرئاسة”. ولم يكن هذا العنوان دقيقا في التعبير عن متن الحوار. وأعطي ايحاءات غير صحيحة. فقد جاء في متن الحديث عندما سألني المحرر عما اذا كنت سأمنح صوتي للفريق السيسي اذا ما ترشح لانتخابات الرئاسة أني أجبت بالنص :” أنا معه قلبا وقالبا الآن لكني اري أن مسألة منحي صوتي له سابقة لأوانها”.

وقد ابلغت الصحيفة بوجهة نظري وتفضلت مشكورة بتصحيح الأمر في اليوم التالي، الأحد 25أغسطس 2013 تحت عنوان: صنع الله ابراهيم : لا أدعم ترشيح السيسي للرئاسة ولكن هذا حقه بالقانون والدستور”.

واليوم الأحد 25 أغسطس فوجئت بصحيفة المصري اليوم تنشر علي صفحتها الأخيرة أني وجهت رسالة الي الفريق السيسي في صحيفة اليوم السابع أطالبه فيها بأن يرشح نفسه لانتخابات الرئاسة وهو ما لم يحدث اطلاقا ويمثل اختلاقا كاملا. وقد بادرت بالاتصال بالصحيفة ووعدوني بتصحيح الأمر

On Sunday afternoon, Egypt’s presidential spokesman Ihab Badawi announced names of the 50 member-committee given the job of re-drafting the suspended 2012 constitution:

“Nostalgia” by Mohammed Abla

It should at the very least be a compelling read, as two novelists (correction: three) — Mohammed Salmawy, Haggag Oddoul, and Mossad Abu Fagr, and a poet, Sayed Hegab – are on the committee.

All have other identities: Salmawy is the long-time head of the Egyptian Writers Union, and has been a journalist and an aide to the Minister of Information; Hegab is apparently also on the High Council of Culture; while Oddoul is also an activist and campaigner for Nubian rights.

Salmawy has several works that he’s composed in English, including Come Back Tomorrow, published by Three Continents Press (1985), Two Down the Drain, published by theThe General Egyptian Book Organization (1993), and Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber : Reflections of a Nobel Laureate from conversations with Mohamed Salmawy, published by the AUC Press (2001).

Two of Oddoul’s works have appeared in English: Nights of Musk: Stories from Old Nubia, trans. (2005) and My Uncle Is On Labor, trans.  Ahmed Fathy (2008).

Sinai activist and blogger Mossad Abu Fagr is also a novelist; he has previously been arrested because of his blog.

You can read more about Hegab in “Son of a widowed city.”

If you don’t think that’s enough book lovers, there’s also Hoda Elsadda, who is a literary scholar and was a judge for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

These four join visual artist Mohammed Abla and director Khaled Youssef on the 50-member committe. Only two members are Islamist, according to historian Abdullah al-Arian: Salafi Bassam el-Zarqa and ex-MB Kamal el-Helbawy, although Ahmed Atteya also notes the presence of MB-sympathetic Doctor’s Syndicate head Khairy Abdul Dayem. Atteya also notes the absence of April 6.

So, all in all, artists have more than twice the representation of Islamists? A strange list.

Over at Mada Masr, Asmaa Abdallah reviews Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa: A Postcolonial Outlook. One of the chapters features commentary by translator and scholar Richard Jacquemond who discusses, in “The Yacoubian Building and Its Sisters,” popular literature and the “growing insertion” of a new, Westernized Arabic literature into a global literary market:

Jacquemond, according to Asmaa Abdallah, gives the heartening assessment that:

Against the odds of an ailing education system, a mostly incompetent publishing industry and failed state cultural policies, a generation of avid readers has risen from the ashes following many years of drought in the reading scene. Jacquemond proceeds to examine a list of the bestselling titles, using the most downloaded books on the website www.4shared.com as his basis, since it is otherwise difficult to obtain reliable statistics given the high rate of piracy and fluidity in the Arab book market.

Indeed, tallying best-sellers even within Cairo is a difficult matter; it’s a mountain at which I have thrown my grappling hook a few times. The three titles Jacquemond found were the best of the best-sellers are unsurprising, and tally with best-seller lists put out by Shorouk, Diwan, and Kotob Khan bookstores:

1. Alaa al-Aswany’s “The Yacoubian Building”
2. Khaled al-Khamissi’s “Taxi”
3. Youssef Ziedan’s “Azazeel”

None of these are critical darlings, although Azazeel did win the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. However, neither are Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer’s (best-selling) books.

Jacquemond also apparently refers to humor-writers Ghada Abdel Aal and Omar Taher, as well as other genre writing, like Ahmed Mourad’s Vertigo and Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia. According to Abdallah, “Some of these new forms, Jacquemond suggests, are better suited to communicating with a Western or Westernized audience” — although, for instance, while Abdel-Aal’s I Want to Get Married! was a best-seller in Arabic, it had no similar reach or connection with English readers.

Abdallah writes:

The chapter concludes that although these works have successfully created a new niche in the reading world, this trend can have detrimental results for aesthetic value. He goes so far as to argue that these works add no aesthetic innovation and are follow a more “economic market oriented logic.”

I feel the need to disagree. While I always flinch at the notion that I should be happy if my child “reads anything” and that “all reading is equally good” — much as I would flinch at the idea that it’s fine to stuff any old food in one’s mouth — I believe there is a place for potboiler comic books, detective stories, satire, romance novels, thrillers, fantasy, MG books about underpants, and more. They shouldn’t supplant the literature that makes my heart breathe, but “junk” food is all right, sometimes. Even if the big novels listed above don’t themselves add aesthetic innovations, several of them are vividly enjoyable and create space for new and different literary fusions.

Others maybe not. But would literature really be better off without “trashy” popular novels? Would the world be better off without the crushing economic realities of “fast” and “convenient” food? Oh, maybe. Certainly, I need to meet Jacquemond’s essay in the flesh, but I do believe that it’s a good thing to foster a greater appetite for reading, even if the books on offer aren’t always Zaat or The Heron or Beer in the Snooker Club.

This fall’s lectures include “Translations of Nasser,” Ibsen’s political drama in Arabic, and the provocatively-titled “The Limits of Translation”: