Annual Lecture 2024
Advance Notice
SAVE THE DATE – 13 FEBRUARY 2025
A Celebration
of Arabic Literary Translation
with the Annual Lecture and the Winning Translator of the 2024 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation
6.00pm-9.00pm, Thursday 13 FEBRUARY 2025
The Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS, Thornhaugh Street, London WC1B 5DQ
ALL WELCOME TO THIS FREE EVENT
THE LECTURE
Margaret Litvin
will speak on
Translating Beauty and Revolt in Arabic Literature Today
Her talk will begin by suggesting that the literary moves that have powered much of Arabic fiction for the past sixty years may no longer work as intended. The shocking formal innovations of the twentieth century may lack their old power to shock: they may now be predictable, even pandering to audience expectations in what Bertolt Brecht would call a “culinary” way. Chief among these is the literature of programmatic ugliness.
The Oedipal rebellion in Arabic letters has succeeded; the adab tradition has somewhat faded from view. And amid the hideous real-world violence of recent decades and especially the past few years, what could be more radical and countercultural than a beautiful person, a beautiful idea, or a beautiful sentence or paragraph? In a context of pervasive ugliness, beauty can be a striking means of revolt. But if it is true that aesthetics have resurfaced as a value in Arabic fiction, then this places new demands on the English translator of Arabic fiction. This lecture will explore those demands and consider some different ways translators respond.
THE WINNER
(to be announced on 8 January 2025)
in conversation with the Chair of Judges Raphael Cohen, along with readings from the winning work.
Who will it be? The six shortlisted translators are:
Kay Heikkinen, for her translation of Before the Queen Falls Asleep by Huzama Habayeb (MacLehose Press)
Sawad Hussain, for her translation of Edo’s Souls by Stella Gaitano (Dedalus)
Nada Faris, for her translation of Lost in Mecca by Bothayna Al-Essa (DarArab For Publishing and Translation)
Katharine Halls, for her translation of Rotten Evidence by Ahmed Naji (McSweeney’s)
Robin Moger, for his translation of Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (And Other Stories)
Nadiyah Abdullatif and Anam Zafar, for the translation of Yoghurt and Jam (or How my Mother Became Lebanese) by Lena Merhej (Balestier Press)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University, core faculty in the Boston University MFA Program in Literary Translation, and the recipient of ACLS, Humboldt, and Radcliffe fellowships. She is the author of Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (2011) and of translations from Arabic including Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice Seagull, 2019) and plays by Jawad al-Assadi and Mamduh Adwan. She was a awarded a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Grant to translate Khalil Alrez’sThe Russian Quarter, excerpts of which have appeared in the Oxford UP anthology Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (2023) and in McSweeney’s.
The Winner ......................
Raphael Cohen was born in 1965 in Brighton and grew up in south London. He is a freelance translator in the fields of politics, development, and literature. He studied Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford University and the University of Chicago. He worked for nearly ten years with the renowned Egyptian publisher Dar Elias. His published translations include Abdelmajid Sebbata’s The Secrets of Folder 42 (Banipal Books, 2024), Poems of Alexandria and New York by Ahmed Morsi (Banipal Books, 2021), George Yarak’s Guard of the Dead (AUC Press, 2019), Ahlem Mostaghanemi’s Bridges of Constantine (Bloomsbury, 2014), Mona Prince’s novel So You Can See (AUC Press, 2011), and the non-fiction text The Jewish Agency and Syria During the Arab Revolt in Palestine by Mahmoud Muhareb (I. B. Tauris, 2023). He was a contributing editor for Banipal magazine. He has been living in Cairo since 2006.
A bookstall, provided by West End Lane Bookshop,
will be open in the Lecture Theatre foyer, before and after the event
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The event is hosted by
SOAS School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
SOAS Centre for Translation Studies
SOAS Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies
and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature