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July 2019

Marilyn Hacker and Lina Mounzer in Conversation   When considering who to interview for a discussion on translation, two people came to mind. It seemed a better idea not to choose between them, but instead have them be in conversation with one another. Marilyn Hacker, who lives in France, and Lina Mounzer, who lives in Beirut, are both writers who recently started translating from the Arabic. How could their disparate backgrounds and experiences come together to illuminate the backstage workings of translation from different cultural and geographic perspectives? In the absence of a face-to-face meeting, Marilyn and Lina met through an e-mail

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Interview
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“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?” – Everything is Illuminated,  Jonathan Safran Foer   The saddest day of my life was when my father travelled to

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Non-Fiction
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Photo by Nour Annan In the absence of state-monitored public transportation, van #4 operates as a privately-owned informal “public transit” in Beirut. The van’s route begins all the way from the Lebanese University’s campus in Hadath to Hamra, carrying over 50,000 passengers a day.    I am picked up in Chiyah, next to the wall with bullet ears. This route has it all: burnt tires, an abandoned building calling out the names of dead dogs, wildflowers caught in gust. We are an unlicensed and unregistered van carrying one city. The door won’t slide and hajji has her toes stretched into air. It’s

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prose
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"التشخيص: بنيان بسيكولوجي ديبريسيف، مع ميول للهستيريا". قالت آنّا لينداو في الجلسة الأخيرة.  يومها جلبت معي الكتاب الذي أعارتني اياه قبل أسابيع، وشالاً بلون الفستق الحلبي اشتريته لها كهديّة من جارتي السلوفاكية الصامتة التي تمضي أمسياتها في نسج الشالات والجوارب بقطب دقيقة ومعقّدة. كنت أنوي أن أعيد إليها الكتاب وأهديها الشال. كانا في الكيس إلى جانبي. لكنّني، بدل ذلك، اعتذرت منها وقلت بأنّي نسيت إحضار الكتاب معي، ولم آت على ذكر الشال.  آنّا لينداو تضع دائماً شالاً لونه فاتح على كتفها الأيسر، في أكثر الأحيان. أما ثيابها فهي في غالباً ما تكون إما بنيّة، أو رمادية، أو سوداء.  قالت لي، عقب زيارتي الثانية لها،

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Fiction
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by Chaza Charafeddine, translated from the arabic by Lina Mounzer “Diagnosis: a depressive psychological structure with hysterical tendencies,” said Anna Lindau during our last session.   That day, I’d brought with me the book she’d lent me weeks before, as well as a pistachio-colored shawl I’d bought as a gift for her from my silent Slovakian neighbor, who spent her evenings weaving shawls and socks with small, complicated stiches. I’d planned to return the book and give her the shawl as a gift. They were both in the bag next to me. Instead, I apologized and told her I’d forgotten to bring the book,

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Fiction, Translations
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She is standing outside the hospital doors, clutching at the skin of her abdomen. She bends down to retch. The dusty heat is rising from the pavement. It is a little before six in the afternoon, the sun is still in the sky, but the shadows are long and the quality of light is grainy. It is the same quality of light as that of a partial eclipse. She will remember it like that, like an old photograph, grainy. He stands beside her, holding her hair back as she retches. He is nervous, sweating. In the car, she is almost hallucinating.

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Fiction
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I know Hened’s face. She’s looking at me: her eyes like pickled eggs, her pointy nose and thinning eyebrows magnified and hazed by the thumb marks on her eyeglasses. Hened’s second name is May. She is Egyptian. She is Lebanese. She is my grandaunt, the youngest and only surviving sibling of a family of four. She is eighty-five. I’m sitting next to her in the kitchen of my parent’s apartment. Her hands rest on the table next to a book with the word Valley in its title, a steaming cup of coffee she isn’t drinking, and a blank notepad. Her tiny face

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Fiction
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Christy scampered up the stairs of her front porch. Her long, frizzy black hair trailed behind her like her very own Superwoman cape as she swooshed past the front door and into the house. She ran up the stairs, kicked her bedroom door open, threw herself onto her snuggly blanket, and emptied the contents of her backpack onto her bed. She bit her pillow in delight as she stared at all the coins that were now scattered across the bed, along with a few candy wrappers and some glitter pens. Christy had put her favorite walking shoes onand taken a trip

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Fiction
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She painfully lifted her head up from the wooden table it had clumsily landed on a few hours ago, and stared up at the screen. "Would you like to contact a suicide operator?" read the Facebook message she had received. Her fingers rubbed at her eyes insistently; as if with every forced motion, a sense of clarity would somehow inject itself into her system. Frustrated, she rummaged through the chaos that had become her mind, trying desperately to restore its normal functioning. What the fuck is that? A scent had been pestering her, rendering her increasingly nauseous by the minute. She looked

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Fiction
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by Abu Nuwas, translated from the Arabic by Alex Rowell To the abandoned remains of a Drinking house they set out at dark Traces of wine pouches dragged along its soil And bouquets of basil, some moist, some parched I shut my friends inside, that they’d reunite And I was among them from the start And it was like I’d never known them Back in east Sabat’s remotest parts((A Persian city)) We spent a day, then another, then a third And not till the fifth did we depart Wine circulated in gilded cups Adorned with colourful Persian art On the base a Khosrau((A Persian king)), and on the sides An oryx speared by horsemen’s

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Poetry, Translations
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