This indispensible guide to modern Arabic literature in English translation features not only a comprehensive bibliography but also chapters on fiction, drama, poetry, and autobiography, as well as a special chapter on Iraq's Arabic literature. By focusing on Najib Mahfuz, one of Arabic Literature's luminaries, and on poetry--a major, if not the major genre of the region-- Altoma assesses the progress made towards a wider reception of Arabic writing throughout the western world.

Understanding the complexities of Arab politics, history, and culture has never been more important for North American readers. Yet even as Arabic literature is increasingly being translated into English, the modern Arabic literary tradition is still often treated as other--controversial, dangerous, difficult, esoteric, or exotic. This volume examines modern Arabic literature in context and introduces creative teaching methods that reveal the literature's richness, relevance, and power to anglophone students. Addressing the complications of translation head on, the volume interweaves such important issues such as gender, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the status of Arabic literature in world literature. Essays cover writers from the recent past, like Emile Habiby and Tayeb Salih; contemporary Palestinian, Egyptian, and Syrian literatures; and the literature of the nineteenth-century Nahda.

This book covers 60 years of translations, studies, and other writings, which represent Iraq's national literature, including recent works of numerous Iraqi writers living in Western exile. By drawing attention to a largely overlooked but relevant and extensive literature accessible in English, it will serve as an invaluable guide to students of contemporary Iraq, modern Arabic literature and other fields such as women's studies, postcolonial studies, third world literature, American-Arab/Muslim Relations, and disapora studies.

Presents the life and works of Denys Johnson-Davies, who was described by the late Edward Said as "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time." With more than twenty-five volumes of translated Arabic works to his name, and a career spanning some sixty years, he has brought the Arabic writing to an ever widening English readership.

This path-breaking book offers a re-examination of the east-west (Egyptian-French) cultural encounter during the early period of the renaissance or nahda in 19th-century Egypt, through looking closely at the particular contact zone of literary translations, specifically some of the earliest translations of prestigious French literature into Arabic. In this unprecedented study, in contrast with views that presume a passive top-down model of cultural influence, Carol Bardenstein formulates a more complex and ambivalent model - a transculturating one. She shows how - within the translations themselves - an indigenous sensibility is asserted and elaborated, running against the grain of the apparently deferring gesture of borrowing from the French literary tradition, which was viewed by many in the Egyptian intellectual vanguard as having the prestige and cultural capital to civilize an Egypt and an Arabic literary tradition that was perceived as being belated in its development. In translations of works by La Fontaine, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Moliere and Racine, Muhammad Uthman Jalal indigenized the texts in various ways, Arabizing, Islamicizing, and Egyptianizing the textual field. Not only did this translational approach create a corpus of indigenized literary texts, but it also implicitly engaged in the process of experimenting with different possible delineations of the contours of the collective or community that was to produce what was to become modern Arabic literature. In so doing, it anticipated many later explicit ideological formulations about the nature of possible or desired configurations of collective affiliation and identification, as Arab, pan-Arab, regional Egyptian along nationalist lines, pan-Islamic etc., with the passing of Ottomanism.

Nobody has done more for modern Arabic literature in translation than Denys Johnson-Davies, described by the late Edward Said as "the leading Arabic English translator of our time." With more than twenty-five volumes of translated Arabic novels, short stories, plays, and poetry to his name, and a career spanning some sixty years, he has brought the works of a host of writers from across the Arab world to an ever-widening English readership. Here he tells the story of a life in translation, and gives intimate glimpses of many of the Arab writers who are becoming increasingly known in the west. In the 1940s, while teaching at Cairo University, he came to know such iconic figures as Yahya Hakki, Tewfik al-Hakim, Yusuf Idris, and of course Naguib Mahfouz. Later when he lived in Beirut, that other great literary center of the Arab world, he spent time with such poets as Tawfic Sayigh, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, and Boland al-Haydari. He was already a close friend of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra from his college days at Cambridge, and later of another well-known Palestinian writer, Ghassan Kanafani. In the 1960s he started an influential Arabic literary magazine, Aswat, which published the leading avant-garde writers of the time, and in 1967 he put together the first representative volume of short stories from the Arab world. Then he really put Arabic writing on the international literary map with the establishment of the Heinemann Arab Authors series. Since then he has continued to select and translate the best of Arabic fiction, most recently the classic novella by Yahya Hakki, The Lamp of Umm Hashim (AUC Press 2004). He has also translated three books of Islamic Hadith (with Ezzeddin Ibrahim) and other books of Islamic thought, and has written a large number of children's books of Middle Eastern history and folktales.

This book covers 60 years of translations, studies, and other writings, which represent Iraq's national literature, including recent works of numerous Iraqi writers living in Western exile. By drawing attention to a largely overlooked but relevant and extensive literature accessible in English, it will serve as an invaluable guide to students of contemporary Iraq, modern Arabic literature and other fields such as women's studies, postcolonial studies, third world literature, American-Arab/Muslim Relations, and disapora studies.