A severely injured nineteen-year-old soldier caught at the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War tries to piece together his life as he waits for aid that may never arrive. As he inches toward death, he recalls the minor and major events of his life and his country that led him so close to death. Told in vignettes that jump across time and place, Samar Yazbek’s newest novel Where The Wind Calls Home is a heart-wrenching story that questions the value of life in a combat zone with equal parts compassion and anger to craft a brilliant war novel. Translated from Arabic by Leri Price, Yazbek’s story introduces English readers to a moment in Syrian history that is equally haunting and beautiful.
Arabic
Moving on from the theme of communication examined in her last novel, Bitter Orange Tree, International Booker-prize winner Jokha Alharthi turns her exacting focus and lyrical style to marriage and motherhood in contemporary Oman. Sensitively translated to reflect Alharthi’s ability to switch seamlessly between the different voices of her two central characters, one pragmatic, one passionate, the story also touches on the constraints and expectations of Omani society where traditional beliefs persist despite rapid modernization.
A 2022 round-up of reviews of works in translation from Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, Dari, Pashto, Kazakh, Russian, French and Spanish.
In this lyrical follow-up to her Man Booker International prize-winning novel, Celestial Bodies, Jokha Alharthi explores love, desire and language through three generations of an Omani family.
If you happen to have a few hours to spare and a swash to buckle, here are two rousing epic adventures from Persia and the Middle East to fill in the time. If we think of Persian epics, the two titles which probably come to mind are Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and Vis and Ramin by Fakhruddin As’ad Gurgani, both available in excellent Penguin translations by Dick Davis. There’s also Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, which is based on an episode in Ferdowsi’s poem. As for Arabic ones, the massive (and anonymous) Thousand and One Nights is the best-known.
Year in year out Spain produces 1,500 kilos of that delicate spice, saffron, sold wholesale for US$700 per 100 grams. Gourmets were puzzled a few years back when 1900 kilos of Spanish saffron hit the market. Food inspectors soon discovered that the yellow powder contained traces of the flavorless plant root, or worse, animal droppings. The huge increase in volume came from the diversion of Iranian saffron, whose sale is stifled by the American embargo, to Spain’s packagers. Along the way crooks put their fingers on the scale by adding the impurities. Similar scams were practiced by spice dealers in 13th-century Damascus, involving precious products like myrobalan, agarwood, ginger, indigo, musk, ambergris. “Wise up to these things,” exhorts the Book of Charlatans, this newly translated compendium of tricks, cheats and phony spells.
The title of this book is the first “imposture”, flouting the venerable approach of calling this 12th-century Arabic classic the “Assemblies” or the “Seances of Hariri”. Maqamat means a halting place, where an audience might sit around and tell stories. It can, at a stretch, mean “to get up”, focusing on the storyteller standing before his audience. With “Impostures” as the title, Michael Cooperson, a professor of Arabic literature at UCLA, puts us on notice not to expect a traditional translation. The Maqamat recounts in 50 episodes the impostures of the protagonist Abu Zeid, posing as beggar, poet, plaintiff, scholar or sufi, in order to con money out of his appreciative and affably gulled assembly of listeners. He succeeds in opening their purses by deploying the most dazzling verbal gymnastics imaginable. Acrostics, palindromes, rhymed verse, rare words, this does not even begin to describe the extent of Abu Zeid’s rhetorical arsenal.