This is what came up in Google images when I typed in "Dutch literature."

Tim Parks on the Paradoxes of ‘International Literature’

Apparently, Arabic novels are not the only ones that suffer from translators’ poor pay, rushed jobs, and editors looking to fill a niche.

Writing in the TLS, Tim Parks echoes what Anthony Calderbank says in a soon-to-be-released Literature Across Frontiers report.  Calderbank, however, says it more entertainingly: “No one is willing to pay a translator a fair whack for their work.”

Parks also writes:

An editor at a Dutch publishing house remarks that if she wishes to sell the foreign rights of a Dutch novel, it must fit in with the image of Holland worldwide. An Italian editor comments that an Italian novelist abroad must be condemning the country’s corruption or presenting the genial intellectuality that we recognize in different ways in Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco or Roberto Calasso.

I’m really not sure what the image of Holland is worldwide. Wooden shoes and red-light districts?

Parks also writes:

Rather than liberating us, the process of internationalizing literature reinforces stereotypes as, faced with the need to be aware of so many countries, we use a rapid system of labelling. And the faster the translator has to work, the more, you can be sure, the final product will be flattened and standardized.

The Guardian also has a piece on translation this week: Translators must read with their ears

And via Words Without Borders: New MLA Guidelines on Evaluating Translations

PalFest 2011 Closes to Blast of Tear Gas

According to the PalFest site, the literature festival closed Wednesday night with a blast:

The 2011 Palestine Festival of Literature closed in Silwan last night. It was schedule to start at 7.30pm, but from around 5.30pm the Israeli Army were in the area, roads had been blocked off and street battles had flared up. Nevertheless, some artists and audience members were managing to get the night’s venue – the Silwan Solidarity Tent.

At 7.30pm the Israeli Army fired tear gas at the tent, and everyone inside fled.

But by 8.30pm all the different groups found each other – some had been in the tent, some had been stuck in road blocks – and walked back up to the tent, and held the event with tear gas hanging in the air and soldiers watching from the hill. The night closed with DAM performing to a packed tent.

Video from the closing night:

The Marginalization of Libyan Fiction (and Critics, Too)

Shakir Noori writes, in Gulf News, that if you want to read Libyan writers, you need to look for them in English. Notably, Noori mentions the most recent issue of Banipal,* which featured Libyan authors.

Noori mentions, but doesn’t go into detail about, the systems of patronage vs. torture that have suffocated Libyan authors living in Libya, and further writes: “I feel that the absence of critics, apart from the dictatorship and scarcity of books contributes to the isolation of Libyan literature.”

Noori also hopes for a new, post-Ghaddafi dawn for Libyan lit.

Oil Field by Mohammed Hasan Alwan, translated by Peter Clark

The Guardian this week published a new short story by Beirut39 laureate Mohammed Hasan Alwan. The Saudi author’s short story, “Oil Field,” was translated by Peter Clark. It opens:

When Ja’far’s father went to work for SakOil, I asked my Dad about these oil fields everyone was talking about. He told me they weren’t that far from our village. That evening I kept on asking and asking him about them, and eventually he took me up to the roof of our house. He pointed with his slender hand to the eastern horizon, where five spots of light flickered uncertainly.

Arabic Literature at the London Book Festival

Susannah Tarbush writes about Arabic literature at the LBF in the Saudi Gazette, and Ghazi Gheblawi posts audio of the talk “The Hidden Face of Libyan Fiction.”

Censor-free Egyptian Theatre Festival

Al Arabiya reports that this year’s Arab Theater Festival, hosted by the Egyptian Society for Amateur Theater, was free of past censorship rules. Al Arabiya interviewed Egyptian artist Sabry Abdel Mun’em, who said, “Some of the scripts have become bolder in their content and there is no longer the fear or paranoia of censorship.”

More:

• Arab News: ‘Arabizi is destroying the Arabic language’
• Ahram Online: Fifth International Prize for Arabic Fiction Open for Nominations 

*I have not yet gotten mine. I think perhaps the mail system has gone funny.

That may or may not be. In any case, names you should know:

Abdulrahman Munif (1933-2004). One of the most significant Arab writers of the last century and one of the first new Saudi novelists; his Cities of Salt quintet was chosen by Sinan Antoon (for our summer writing challenge) as one of the “five books you should read before you die. Daniel Burt, in his The Novel 100, ranked the quintet as the 71st greatest novel of all time. He was not one of the Arabic-language writers mentioned by Denys Johnson-Davies as in contention for the “Arab Nobel” (which went to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988), perhaps because virtually nothing of his was in English or French translation in 1987, and Cities of Salt wasn’t fully out until 1989.

As Saleh notes in his Qantara piece: “The locus of Munif’s work, his fiction as well as his non-fiction, circled around despotism and decadence in Arabia.”

Ghazi Al-Gosaibi (1940-2010). Al-Gosaibi was a poet, a novelist, and a reformist minister in the Saudi government. He died this August. His best-known novel, An Apartment Called Freedom (English translation: 1996), related the experiences of four young men who went to study in Cairo in the late 1950s before returning to their home countries in the Gulf. Other works in translation include Seven, The Gulf Crisis (nonfiction), and A Love Story.

Turki Al-Hamad (1953-present). Al-Hamad is a journalist and novelist, best known for his trilogy about the coming-of-age of Saudi teen Hisham al-Abir. The trilogy, although banned in the Gulf, has sold tens of thousands of copies. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s review in The Daily Star: Turki Al-Hamad’s not-so-explosive trilogy.

Abdo Khal (1962-present). The winner of the 2010 Arabic Booker for his novel She Throws Sparks. (Or, if I must, She Spews Sparks as Big as Castles.) Writes Saleh: “Khal portrays the atrocities perpetrated on the lives of the underprivileged people, the sheer violence exercised by the powerful on the weak.” From an excerpt translated by Anthony Calderbank (the main English-language translator of Saudi literature):

The name of our quarter is The Pit, or The Salt Mine, or The Bottom of Hell, or Inferno; all are terms that reflect torment, and our lives.

The quarter awakens before the sun’s rays penetrate the windows of the huddled houses to the contented lapping of the satiated sea. It awakens to the racket of boys preparing to set off down twisting lanes on their walk to school and the raucous banter of fisherman returning with fresh catches from trips begun the previous night, and songs on the radio exuberant in the dewy morning air: He said good morning without saying a word, Morning breeze, say hi to the one with radiant cheeks, We are farmers on the land of our country.

Yousef Al-Mohaimeed (1965-present). Al-Mohaimeed, who writes about love and the dispossessed, has two books out in English: Wolves of the Crescent Moon and Munira’s Bottle. I have reviewed Wolves of the Crescent Moon, which is promising but ultimately disappointing.  I haven’t yet read Munira’s Bottle, but Al-Mohaimeed has given some interesting interviews about it.

You can also read a short story by al-Mohaimeed on his website.

Leila Al-Johani (1969-present). Saleh writes that “Two female Saudi writers took the responsibility to experiment with style – Rajaa Alem and Laila Al-Johani. In her novel The Silk Road, Alem depicts Mecca as the setting of her narrative, writing about the lives of people coming from various parts of the Islamic world to perform the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.”

Rajaa Alem (1970-present). Alem has written two novels (Fatima: A Novel of Arabia and My Thousand & One Nights: A Novel of Mecca) with Tom McDonough, as well as many works of her own. McDonough interviews her here, for Bomb.

Rajaa Al-Sanea (1981-present). Wait! Maybe Rajaa Al-Sanea is the “Carrie Bradshaw of the Middle East.” You think? In any case, her Girls of Riyadh, published in Arabic in 2005 and English in 2007 (somewhat controversially, because of translation issues), has been extremely popular. It has been credited with starting a new wave of Saudi girl-lit.

Other phenomena:

The “naughty novelists,” who are accused of increasing sexual content in Saudi women’s lit: Samar al-Muqrin (Immoral Women), Siba al-Harz (Others), Wafaa’ Abdel Rahman (Love in the Capital), and Zaynab Hanafi (Features). Sometimes Rajaa Al-Sanea is also placed in this group.

Other Saudis longlisted for the Arabic Booker: Abdullah bin Bakheet for Street of Affections and Umaima Al Khamis for The Leafy Tree, both for the 2010 prize.

Also, Beirut39ers from Saudi (those who won a competition for the best 39 Arab writers under 40): Abdullah Thabit (novelist); Mohammad Hassan Alwan (novelist; I thought the excerpt he had in the Beirut39 collection, “Haneef from Glasgow,” had very good character sketching); and Yahya Amqassim (novelist).