Today, January 15, 2024, marks forty days since Israel assassinated Refaat Alareer, internationally renowned and beloved Palestinian poet, scholar, and professor of English literature at the Islamic University in Gaza. Refaat taught and mentored a generation of young Palestinians in Gaza to tell their stories to the world in English. Publishers for Palestine has declared this day a...
A Review of Myriam J.A. Chancy, Harvesting Haiti. Reflections on Unnatural Disasters. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023.
If I weren’t invariably late with everything, this review would have been posted at 4:53 p.m. yesterday, January 12, 2023. Like most events that break time and begin a new calendar for some portion of the world (what Jalal Toufic has termed a surpassing disaster), what happened in Haiti at that exact time, in just forty-five seconds exactly fourteen years ago, has no doubt been forgotten by nearly everyone else everywhere else. That’s just how it is. Time is a mother.
For that very reason, along with a host of others (including at least a...
A Review of After World by Debbie Urbanski (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
Artificial Intelligence is the narrator is Debbie Urbanski’s novel After World—a relevant theme since the debut of Chat GPT in late 2022 and the broadening discourse about AI in writing. Urbanski’s consideration of AI predates the controversies over students using Chat GPT to write their assignments, and she isn’t as worried as one might think. While writing After World, Urbanski utilized Chat GPT and GPT-4, even participating in an interview conducted by an AI interviewer to promote this novel.
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Much of what was happening around the world remained unknown to most people. The vast majority didn't know anything about it or couldn't decode the signs of this revolution. In the big cites, the fuses had been lit, and we could smell the sparks coming from Vietnam, the Prague Spring, Bolivia, Chicago, and Woodstock. I sensed it, but nothing and no one had clearly communicated these things to me. You could feel it in the air, but there was no verbal confirmation.
—from "Coming Out," Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
About twenty-five years ago I started translating Laura Mancinelli’s I dodici abati di Challant (1981), an Agatha Christie-inspired murder...
Rakhshan believed no sins existed, unless a woman had committed one. That may be why her life had always progressed like a chain of dominos, invariably promising complete destruction with the fall of the first piece, after which she would have to build everything anew. Ever since childhood and into her youth, until now, at thirty-five years of age, she had always known what awaited her down the road with every first mistake, paying the price dearly and later beating herself up helplessly to get her life back in order.
—from "Ten Minutes," Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
My first work of literary translation included a trilogy of poems from the Iranian poet Rasool Yoonan...
