Arabic Literature in English Translation: A Contemporary and Very Incomplete Selection
By Omar El Akkad
Click here for the full reading list on Bookshop.org
Omar El Akkad (Photo credit: Kateshia Pendergrass)The official language of Qatar, where I spent most of my childhood, is Arabic. As most Arabic speakers will tell you, the language as spoken shifts constantly from dialect to dialect as you move across North Africa and West Asia. Classical, formal Arabic, an incredibly difficult thing to master, anchors the whole region—you’ll hear it often on the nightly news, academic lectures, political speeches. But try to speak exclusively formal Arabic anywhere in the Arab world, and you’re likely to get looks. Duolingo and other language-learning apps tend to opt for the dialect of El Sham, the region that, very broadly, covers all or parts of Syria and Lebanon and Jordan. It’s a dialect that will probably allow you to get by most anywhere. Egyptian Arabic—my Arabic, the language of my kin—is sort of analogous to the dialect of South Boston or The Bronx or the Valley: culturally iconic in its colloquialisms and shorthand, thanks in no small part to decades and decades of films and TV shows set here and featuring this accent. Qatari Arabic has much in common with other Khaleeji dialects, and is full of phrases I love, such as “Esh Lonak?” (this is an incredibly ballpark transliteration, if I’m being honest). Its practical meaning is basically, How are you? Literally, it translates to, “What is your color?” I find something comforting about color as a proxy for state of mind, the way it so readily appears in so many languages and cultures, the way here, where I live now, nobody bats an eye at the thought of feeling blue. Ironically, in Qatari Arabic, you don’t answer Eish Lonak with a color, any more than you answer, “How’s it going?” with a direction.
(Another meeting point across languages I love: the way the longer you marinate in a place, the more letters fall off the pronunciation of words and phrases. Technically, that Qatari phrase should sound like, “Eish Lonak,” but over time becomes something closer to “’Sh lon’.” The way Toronto, after you’ve lived there a while, becomes Tr’naw. The way New Orleans becomes Nawl’. A sense of belonging expressed in the form of negative space).
In reality, Qatar’s most frequently spoken language, in a country where the vast majority of residents are from somewhere else, is a mash-up: all manner of Arabic tongues, the formal English of signage and the cultural English of movies and music, Hindi greetings and curse words, a smattering of Pakistani, Filipino, a dozen other languages. It’s a beautiful thing, I realize now in hindsight, at once able to shake hands with so much of the wider world, and yet so thoroughly of this place and time. My first language is Egyptian Arabic, I am most fluent in what might be described as British-underpinned, American-dominated English, but Qatar’s hybrid dialect, which I only ever speak with a few of my old high school friends, is the language that makes me feel most comfortable in my own skin.
All this is to say, I’ve created the list below not only as a means of introducing Western readers to books by Arab authors they may not have otherwise heard of or read, but also because they represent careful, deeply skilled acts of translation. There is a tendency, when Arabic is translated into English, to err on the side of melodrama: “Aywa, ya basha,” translated from an Egyptian text, should probably end up as something like, “Yes, sir,” or “You got it,” depending on the context, but if the translator has a propensity for exotism, you might end up with “I concur, my class superior!” or some other deranged formality. To their credit, these translations don’t do that.
This is by no means a comprehensive list, nor is it a “best-of,” in any sense. It’s simply a few recommendations of relatively contemporary books (or translations) that I found to be beautiful works of literature. I recommend them all wholeheartedly.
Frankenstein in Baghdad9780143128793
Penguin Books / Penguin Random House
Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad
Translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright
The premise of this novel—a take on the Mary Shelley original, set during the brutal invasion of Iraq, in which the reanimated creature is stitched together from the limbs of bombing victims—makes it sound a lot more action-packed than it is. Instead, Saadawi’s brilliant book is far more quiet and contemplative than the vast majority of novels I’ve read about an illegal war that left up to a million innocent people dead, a war for which no one in any position of real power has ever been held accountable. It is a stunning meditation on the cyclical absurdity of violence, as relevant today as it was more than a decade ago.
Slipping9781949641165
Two Lines Press
Mohamed Kheir, Slipping
Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
It’s common, when talking to non-Arabs about Arabic literature generally and Egyptian literature especially, to revert to the modern greats—Taha Hussein, Naguib Mahfouz—for the same reason one often reverts to the likes of Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitgerald when American literature undergoes the same kind of discussion. But as with any literature, there are waves: authors and movements that shift the terms of engagement, move the plates around. Mohamed Kheir is part of one such movement within Egyptian writing, and has been for decades. Slipping is perhaps my favorite of his books, though it’s hard to choose. It’s also hard to describe a novel that so often feels like a lucid dream. Indeed, much of Slipping is about dreams, and what happens when dreams don’t come true. In this sense, the novel is heavily influenced by the effects and aftereffects of the Arab Spring. But it is also an incredible study of contemporary Egyptian life and culture, full of deeply human characters, even as the novel itself slips in and out of dream states. As a bonus, the translation of this book was done by Robin Moger, who is, I think, my favorite translator alive. As a general rule, if he chooses to translate a book, I’m reading that book.
The Queue9781612195162
Melville House Publishing
Basma Abdel Aziz, The Queue
Translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette
After many decades of having to live under deeply oppressive, authoritarian regimes, Arab writers have developed a rich lineage of subversive writing: stories that carry out their indictments under the surface. It is, in many ways, a necessary skill set, one the writer must become fluent in so as to stave off the wrath of fragile, vicious political administrations. It has much in common with literary traditions throughout Latin America, contemporary forms in China, and, increasingly, the literatures of the United States (though such currents have existed here for a long time: one thinks, for example, of the detective-noir pastiches of previous century, written by Black American writers, in which the reader wonders who the killer is, only to realize this country is the killer). Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue is an exceptional example of this kind of writing. In Egypt, after an unnamed, failed uprising (you know which one), people are forced to line up outside a central authority (you know which one) building to receive permission for even the most basic things. As one of the character inches closer to death while trying to obtain government proof that he’s been shot, others in the queue must confront what it means to obey at all costs. Anyone who has ever tried to get anything done via the Egyptian bureaucracy will find a lot of this book to be an extrapolation of something deeply, deeply familiar.
The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights9781631493638
Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company
Edited by Paulo Lemos Horta, The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights
Translated from the Arabic by Yasmine Seale
I’m a bit biased, because I wrote a foreword to this edition of what is perhaps the best-known Arabic text other than the Quran. But you can skip that foreword entirely—the reason to read this book is, principally, Yasmine Seale’s brilliant, illuminating translation. Unlike several previous translations that took a There-Be-Dragons approach not only to the text, but to the region it originated from, resulting in sometimes-condescending, sometimes-just-plain-weird interpretations, Seale lets the stories breathe. This is especially important for a compendium of tales with tales, in which the telling of the story is often as important as the story itself—literally lifesaving, in the case of the primary narrator. Paulo Horta also does amazing scholarly work on the origins of several stories, previously either disputed or wrongly attributed, and in the process helps clarify the canon. This is easily my favorite translation of a text that has been in my life as far back as I can remember.
Velvet9789774169304
The American University in Cairo Press
Huzama Habayeb, Velvet
Translated from the Arabic by Kay Heikkinen
This is a novel about a girl in a Palestinian refugee camp. As such, it is by necessity a story about survival amidst miserable conditions. But it is also (by necessity as well, because this is just as much a part of being human as survival is) a novel about joy: the pursuit of it, the learning of a skill, the creation of place and meaning, the finding of love. Hawwa, the central character, is so utterly full: fully realized, never upended in some contrived way to fit any outsider’s gaze. This is all a testament to Habayeb’s skill: in her hands, an act as seemingly straightforward as learning to sew can become both literally and metaphorically binding, can turn stars into a constellation.
No Knives in the Kitchens of This City9789774167812
Hoopoe / The American University in Cairo Press
Khaled Khalifa, No Knives in the Kitchens of This City
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
I love all of Khalifa’s work that I’ve read, but this is by far my favorite of his novels. Ironically, I can’t really tell you why, and in addition, the very few Westerners I know who’ve read the book didn’t like it at all. In the most superficial sense, No Knives tells the story of multiple members of a single family in Allepo over the course of about 40 years, from the 1960s to not long before the revolution and subsequent civil war that caused so much suffering to so many Syrians. It’s one of those books that feels like a whole world. There’s no real narrative throughline, simply people and places and ways of living that contain, among them, not a single false-sounding note. It’s an exceptional account of what it means to exist simultaneously within one’s cultural and political conditions, and in spite of them. Khalifa’s later novel, Death Is Hard Work (2019 National Book Award Finalist), which takes place amidst the worst of Syria’s civil conflict (and which was also translated into English), is probably the more accessible work. But I think this one is the masterpiece.
Minor Detail9780811229074
New Directions
Adania Shibli, Minor Detail
(2020 National Book Award Finalist)
Translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette
Minor Detail is the most impactful novel I’ve read in the last decade, and maybe the best outright. It is short, sharp, and centered on atrocities committed by an Israeli soldier against a Bedouin girl in the summer of 1949. That time period is the focus of the novel’s first half. In the second half, set in contemporary times, a woman tries to find details of what happened to that girl. I won’t go any further into the plot, except to say this novel has an ending that stays with me to this day. It is, simply, a magnificent piece of literature, devastating and unadorned, not a single word wasted.
