ما زالت افرصة مفتوحة .. (أرجو الاهتمام)

Quote: Dear authors and friends, Sorry for having been quiet for a while. Our project goes on, but we proceed step by step. Our call was really successful, many authors contacted us and sent us texts, which means that we had to read them carefully. We selected works from the following participants (but the propositions are still welcomed): Abbas Abboud Ahmad al Malik Ahmad Anas Al Hassan Bakri Alaeddin Shammoug Anas Mustafa Awad Osman Bouchra Al Fadil Hisham Adam Essam Rajab Khalid Oways Lana Mahdi Abdallah Malka El Fadil Omar Nassar El Hagg Osman Hamid Ossama Ruggia Rania Mamoun Mohamed El Hajj However, we will not put the translations of all these works in the same time, as I said before, because we have to be sure that every single text put online has been properly translated. Corrections and discussions with the students take time, for the sake of a good result. The online edition of a translation may be delayed if the French text is not entirely satisfactory. This means that some author will have to wait several months before their texts appear on the website. I have several meetings with the students in the next coming weeks, in order to select the first set of texts which will be considered as publishable for January-February. As soon as these texts have been chosen, probably around end of December, I will send you a new email with the list of authors comprised in this first set (3 to 5 texts). Some introductory texts about Sudan, Sudanese Literature, our university and the aims of the project, as well as some pictures and drawings, will also be online at the same period. In the same time we will announce the other translations to be edited online in the next coming weeks/months. Every concerned author will be contacted again just before the online edition of his works translation. Concerning poetry, we selected one our two poems by author (depending on the size). For the novels, we selected meaningful excerpts. For the short stories, one short story (unless two translators work on the same author’s work). Please, do not hesitate to contact, whatever your questions are. Best regards Xavier Luffin

Quote: اتمنى ان تشمل القائمة مبدعين اخرين، وان يكون للشعراء ايضا نصيب في هذا العمل الجميل

Quote: A passport to the diverse world of Arabic fiction The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic. Edited by Denys Johnson-Davies. 486 pages. $15.95. Anchor Books. When the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz died in August at the age of 94, he was hailed as the man who had almost single-handedly established the novel as a major literary form for Arab writers. The Nobel Prize he won in 1988 made him an icon in the West as well, and something more: a kind of artistic ambassador, a first stop for readers wishing to encounter the Arab world. This was a mixed blessing. For all his genius, Mahfouz is hardly representative of modern Arab fiction as a whole. I cannot be the only Westerner who, picking up the first volume of Mahfouz's "Cairo Trilogy" in my early 20s, abandoned it after a few dozen pages, finding its 19th-century realism slow going. (It was only years later, after I began living in an Arab country, that I picked it up again and saw what I'd missed.) I did not know at the time that there were other Arab novelists who write on an equally ambitious scale, and in vastly different styles. Abdelrahman Munif's epic "Cities of Salt," for instance, which chronicles the discovery of oil in the Gulf, rivals (in my view) anything Mahfouz wrote. There are also dozens of other lesser- known fiction writers, far more diverse (and more lush) than Mahfouz might lead you to expect. Denys Johnson-Davies's new anthology is a much-needed guide to this world. It contains a startling array of styles and subjects: Nubian folk tales, angry social satires, historical fiction, vivid battle narratives, even a lesbian seduction. Alongside some marquee authors, there are North Africans whose work has rarely, if ever, been translated into English. Many of the translations (along with an excellent introduction) are by Johnson-Davies, perhaps the most distinguished Arabic- to-English translator now living. If anything, the anthology is too full. It includes 79 writers from 14 countries, and some of them get only a page or so. Inevitably, this collection will be used as a telescope through which to view Arab life and customs at a safe remove, not just a literary sampler. But in the current climate, with suspicion of all things Arab and Islamic at an all-time high, that may not be entirely a bad thing. There are stories here that echo the old stereotypes: Bedouins exacting blood revenge in the desert, the terror of sandstorms, veiled women living in fear of their husbands. But there is more on other themes, like falling in love, family life among rich and poor, sex. On this last subject, the writing ranges in style and quality from a madly overwritten piece of soft porn by the Egyptian writer Edwar al-Kharrat; to some subtle and beautiful seduction scenes; to a vivid evocation, by Alaa Al Aswany, of a woman's suffering when she allows her boss to molest her at work. The book includes the full text of several masterly short stories, including a justly famous one by Yusuf Idris, "House of Flesh," in which a widow marries a blind man, only to discover that her three daughters have begun silently taking her place in bed while she is away at work. Arab fiction writers do not have a long native tradition to draw on. The great flowering of classical Arabic literature had begun to subside by the 15th century, and Western fiction remained largely unknown until the end of the Ottoman Empire. Even then, there was strong resistance. In societies where religion dominated all aspects of life, the notion of authors creating a separate fictional world was widely viewed with suspicion. Many Arab writers saw "A Thousand and One Nights" - revered as a masterpiece in the West - as a frivolous work unworthy of their emulation. The large gap between written and spoken Arabic also presented writers with a dilemma. Most choose to write in the formal written language, a medium that gives them access to any educated Arab reader from Morocco to the Gulf, but creates an awkward distance from the language of ordinary life. These nuances are mostly invisible to those who read the work in translation, but occasionally one senses an author playing with them. In Sonallah Ibrahim's satirical novel, "Zaat," for instance, excerpted in the anthology, there is the following sentence: "The thing he was not compelled to conceal was much larger, and here we mean his backside or his buttocks or his posterior (the classical dictionary does not provide us with a word approaching, in its morphological precision and accuracy, the more obscene one which is now on the tip of every reader's tongue), and it was this part of his anatomy which shrunk and diminished with the passing of time in direct inverse proportion to the flowering expansion of Zaat's own." Perhaps because of its novelty and its formal mode of expression, some of the earlier Arab fiction reads a bit like 18th- or 19th-century European writing. In novels by Tawfik al-Hakim and Yahya Hakki, the narrator is often an educated urbanite who relates the miseries of rural peasants as a kind of black comedy, in the manner of Gogol. But in later work this distance drops away. Some of the finest writing appears to draw on older traditions of folk tales. In "Nights of Musk," the Egyptian writer Haggag Hassan Oddoul uses the occasion of a woman giving birth to frame an evocative portrait of the entire life cycle in a Nubian village. Inevitably, politics play a role in some of the stories, often for the worse; self-righteousness and melodrama seem to come with this turf. This is true not just of fiction touching on Palestine and the Lebanese civil war but on women's rights. Two stories by Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian who moved to the United States in the 1990s, are angry rants against Muslim treatment of women, and they are among the few stories in the book where an author appears to be playing to a Western audience. (It is worth noting, in this context, that the readership for serious fiction in the Arab world remains tiny by comparison with the West.) But other writers integrate politics into their work in a more oblique and sophisticated way. One of the best pieces here is an excerpt from "Men in the Sun," a riveting novella about Palestinian refugees struggling to cross the desert undetected. The author, Ghassan Kanafani, was himself a Palestinian advocate killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1972 A number of the book's other authors have been censored or jailed, a reminder that whatever its rewards, writing fiction is a far more perilous undertaking in the Arab world than in the West. Perhaps it is surprising that Iraq, which has produced some of the Arab world's best-known poets, has only a few stories in this anthology. One hopes that a storyteller will emerge who can help make some sense of the vast, incomprehensible tragedy that is continuing there to this day.