Friday, December 15th, 2023 11:40 am ..read more

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AJN: What was your translation process for this text? AJ Naddaff speaks with Hilary Kilpatrick about her approach to translation, the text’s importance, the present day state of some of the monasteries highlighted, and Ghassan Kanafani’s “Men in the Sun”. This is a repost of this interview. I was really very nervous about translating the poetry. But going through the editing process of LAL, in the end, I suppose it turned out to be all right. It was really problematic: How do you translate Arabic poetry? I didn’t really think of trying to do anything in English meter, but I would have perhaps ..read more

AJN: Interesting. Moving on to the topic at hand, I want to follow up on a point from the last time we spoke. You said that you were studying Ancient Greek, Latin, and Arabic at the University of Glasgow when you discovered the pre-Islamic poet Imru’ al-Qays, describing it as “unlike any universe that [you had] entered before.” You have a special relationship to too, and the pre-Islamic They were used on farms for killing rats, so they have very developed paws with sharp nails and quite slender back legs because all their energy is front-loaded. corpus in general, as evidenced by this new book ..read more

AJN: Carrying on from our prior discussion of fate, can you talk about the phenomenon of time in this collection? further delves into the anthology and its portrayal of time and the lines between human and non-human. Montgomery also shares his thoughts on ecocriticism and using contemporary theories in reading poetry of the past. , when the poet or the human animal does the hunting, they become the machine of fate. They inflict death on non-humans so as to reach a moment in which time stands still. The hunter enjoys a moment of near immortality that takes them out of the normal frame of existe ..read more

The high desert of northern and central Arabia, in which the Bedouin tribes known to Ibn Sbayyil spend most of their time, appears as the backdrop to most Najdi poetry. The desert is commonly invoked in contrast to the abundance of the wadi. Desert terrains are termed is a PhD student in History, Theory and Criticism of Art & Architecture and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her dissertation examines colonial uses of architecture as a mechanism of control over nomadic peoples during the British Mandate in the Middle East. She also ..read more

AJN: What was your translation process for this text? AJ Naddaff speaks with Hilary Kilpatrick about her approach to translation, the text’s importance, the present day state of some of the monasteries highlighted, and Ghassan Kanafani’s “Men in the Sun”. This is a repost of this interview. I was really very nervous about translating the poetry. But going through the editing process of LAL, in the end, I suppose it turned out to be all right. It was really problematic: How do you translate Arabic poetry? I didn’t really think of trying to do anything in English meter, but I would have perhaps ..read more

I think it’s important to note these are monasteries in Christian traditions which are pretty unknown to most people in Europe or in North America. Of course, with migration now, the Church of the East has its center in Chicago. But these are rather small communities, whereas where they developed, they are basic Christian communities. And we tend to think when we talk about the Eastern Christians, what you actually mean is the Eastern Orthodox, but in fact, this book takes you out further east. So you really have got a different Christian set up from the one that we’re used to. And I think the ..read more

An Act of Shared Solitude: Reading Monday, February 13th, 2023 7:00 am In this post, Reem Adnan Khayyal introduces us to the #BookTwitter community and describes her experience leading an online group read of Hanna Diyab’s On December 1st, we started #Diyab22, in which readers from all around the world were invited to read Hanna Diyab’s as our #booktwitter read for the month of December, with readers sharing their favorite quotes, thoughts, comments, questions and trivia using the hashtag #Diyab22. Taking part in online group reads, we have learned to read differently. In an attempt to alterna ..read more

On Gender and Translation: A Feminist Reading of Consorts of the Caliphs Friday, January 6th, 2023 6:00 am In this blog post, Professor Leyla Rouhi reads and asks what the book can teach us about gender and translation. What do the study of gender and translation have in common? There are many answers to this question, but one is that both ask us to think more theoretically, while also requiring specific case studies and contextualization to come into focus. Otherwise, their discussion, however well intentioned, will not go beyond generalities. of the Caliphs: Women and the Court of Baghd ..read more