Day of Translation 2024: Desert Poetics and Translation
Fernando A. Flores, Samia Henni , Mayada Ibrahim, Elisabeth Jaquette, and Heather Nagami explore how one particular environment, the desert, can connect translated literary works across borders.
On September 26, 2024, the Center for the Art of Translation presented its annual Day of Translation, co-hosted by The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn and livestreamed worldwide. This panel, featuring Fernando A. Flores, Samia Henni (joining remotely), Mayada Ibrahim, Elisabeth Jaquette, and Heather Nagami discuss the desert as a space for connection and transformation.
What’s illuminated when translated literature is approached from the common ground of environment, rather than language or nation? In this panel, we focus on one particular environment, the desert, and how it connects translated literary works across borders. Together we challenge literary tropes about the desert as an empty or barren space, or the site of Orientalist fantasies, exile for societal outcasts, road trips, and climate change allegories. Excavating desert histories of colonialism, war, environmental destruction, and language loss, we find beauty in the aesthetics of the desert and come to understand why many writers see it as a rich and fertile space for transformation.
Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and raised in South Texas. He is the author of Tears of the Trufflepig, Valleyesque, and the forthcoming novel Brother Brontë. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Samia Henni is a historian and an exhibition maker of the built, destroyed, and imagined environments. She is the author of Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (2017, 2022, EN; 2019, FR) and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (2024). She is the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (2022) and War Zones (2018). She is also the maker of exhibitions, such as Performing Colonial Toxicity (Framer Framed, If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; gta Exhibitions, Zurich; The Mosaic Rooms, London, 2023–04), Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, 2017–22), Archives: Secret-Défense? (ifa Gallery, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2021), and Housing Pharmacology (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020). Currently, she teaches at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture in Montreal and co-chairs Columbia University Seminar’s Beyond France.
Mayada Ibrahim is a literary translator and editor based in Queens, New York, with roots in Khartoum and London. She works between Arabic and English. Her translations have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published by Willows House in South Sudan, Archipelago Books, Dolce Stil Criollo, and 128 Lit. She is the managing editor at Tilted Axis Press, an independent publisher of contemporary literature by the Global Majority.
Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from Arabic and Executive Director of Words Without Borders. Her translation of Minor Detail by Palestinian author Adania Shibli was shortlisted for the National Book Award and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Other translations include Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Sudanese author Rania Mamoun, The Queue by Egyptian author Basma Abdel Aziz, and The Frightened Ones by Syrian author Dima Wannous. Elisabeth’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Words Without Borders, The Common, and World Literature Today, as well as a dozen anthologies. Formerly, she was Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association.
A fourth-generation Japanese American poet and Kundiman fellow, Heather Nagami is the author of Hostile (Chax Press, 2005). Heather was born and raised in Southern California. She earned her BA from University of California, Santa Cruz, and her MFA from University of Arizona. Her poems have been anthologized in Poetry and Prose for the Phoenix Art Museum (Four Chambers Press, 2014), The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (The University of Arizona Press, 2016), and Poetry at the End of the World (Moria Books, 2019). Heather’s recent work can be found in Poetry, jubilat, Sporklet, Dream Pop, and Lantern Review.
