Home: New Arabic Poems

Sep 15, 2020|4:30pm

4:30 pm PT | 5:30 pm MT | 6:30 pm CT | 7:30 pm ET

Virtual Event

This event has already taken place.

Two Lines Press joins the Brookline Booksmith’s Transnational Literature Series(opens in a new tab) to celebrate Home(opens in a new tab), the second book in the Calico Series. Editor Sarah Coolidge will be joined by contributors Robyn Creswell, Hodna Nuernberg, and Rawad Wehbe for readings and conversation.

This event will take place on Zoom. Register on Brookline Booksmith’s website,(opens in a new tab) and while you’re there, order a copy of the book(opens in a new tab).

About Home:

Evoking the sights, sounds, and tastes of contemporary life, the poets in Home explore the intimate world of everyday life, its agonies and delights. A glass shatters in a neighbor’s sink followed by the stomping of “little feet”; a woman falls asleep on the shoulder of a man she doesn’t know on an airplane; and a man passes his time smoking alone a café, observing the charge of activity all around him. The worlds these poets traverse are not devoid of politics, wars, and global migrations, and yet by taking the minutiae of everyday life as their subject they remind us of the need to periodically turn inward and find meaning in the specific and deeply personal.

Featuring work by Iman Mersal (Egypt), Samer Abu Hawwash (Palestine), Ines Abassi (Tunisia), Fadhil al-Azzawi (Iraq) and others, this second book in the Calico Series introduces readers to contemporary voices from across the Arabic-speaking world that are sorely underrepresented in the United States. Beautifully rendered into English by some of today’s leading Arabic translators, these poems are presented alongside their Arabic originals in a bilingual collection that celebrates language and its power to transform even the most familiar surroundings into enchanting landscapes for us to inhabit, if just for a moment.

Contributor

Sarah Coolidge

Sarah Coolidge received her BA in comparative literature from Bard College. She enjoys reading books in Spanish and English, and she writes essays on photography and international literature.

Translator

Robyn Creswell

Robyn Creswell teaches comparative literature at Yale University. He is the translator of Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Tongue of Adam and Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell and Notes from Prison (both published by New Directions). He is the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton). His essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The Nation, and elsewhere. (Photo credit: Annette Hornischer)

Translator

Hodna Nuernberg

Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg holds an MA in francophone world studies and an MFA in literary translation, both from the University of Iowa. Her translations from the French and the Arabic have appeared in Anomaly, Asymptote, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Poet Lore, Two Lines, and elsewhere. Nuernberg lives in Morocco, where she serves as an editor-at-large for Asymptote and works as a translator for film and TV. Her co-translation of Raphaël Confiant’s Madam St. Clair, Queen of Harlem was published by Diálogos in January 2020.

Translator

Rawad Wehbe

Rawad Wehbe is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He studies Arabic literature across historical and traditional delineations. His translations have appeared in Inventory, Words Without Borders, and DoubleSpeak.