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Join The Jung Center for an evening honoring contemporary Arabic literature and the work of literary translation. University of Houston Professor Hosam Aboul-Ela will read from his translations, including his latest, the Egyptian magical realist novel Distant Train by Ibrahim Abdel Megid. Poet and physician Fady Joudah reads from his translations of the works of the internationally renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, with a brief discussion to follow.
About the books and authors:
Distant Train, by Egyptian novelist Ibrahim Abdel Megid, is a lyrical
novel set in Egypt's western desert. Written in the tradition of
magical realism, the book's events spring from the dreams, customs,
migrations, and desires of people living in historic obscurity on the
fringe of the glitzy, petrodollar kingdoms of the Middle East. In its
mixture of avant-garde experimentation and invocation of myth, Distant
Train breaks new ground in Arabic language novelistic art. Similarly,
its translation challenges conventional notions of what Arabic fiction
should be. One of the most prolific novelists of Egypt's post-Naguib
Mahfouz generation, AbdelMegid was born in the literary city of
Alexandria where he has set the majority of his award-winning novels.
In addition to translations into several languages, his novels have
inspired numerous films and television dramas in Egypt.
Mahmoud Darwish is one of most admired and celebrated poets from the
Arab world. The author of more than twenty books of poetry and ten
books of prose, Dariwsh has received numerous honors, including the
Lenin Peace Prize, the French medal for Knights of Arts and Letters,
the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, and the Prinz Claus Award from
the Netherlands. The Butterfly's Burden presents three recent books in
their entirety in a bilingual volume, each translated into English for
the first time: The Stranger's Bed (1998), Darwish's first collection
of love poems; State of Seige (2002), a terse, politically charged
sequence written in Ramallah; Don't Apologize for What You've Done
(2003), a song "green like the phoenix" after the daily horrors in
Ramallah.
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