RANDA JARRAR

Yay! I’m finished translating Hassan Daoud’s novel, The Year of the Revolutionary New Bread-making Machine. I need to go through and make sure it’s all kosher/halal, but otherwise, the actual translating work is through! Whew. Here’s the publisher’s blurb for the book, which makes it sound a lot more serious than it is:

Abu Ali and his brother have just moved to bustling 1960s Beirut. They spend their days sitting in the sun outside their traditional bakery, chatting with customers.

For the men working inside the bakery life is starkly different. Working endless shifts in the furious heat of the old bread oven, they fantasize about escape. Mohammed sings all day long in his beautiful tenor voice, while the others lean exhausted on sacks of flour and dream of becoming wrestlers.

When the brothers acquire their revolutionary new bread-making machine, the workers struggle to adapt to the new conditions, and one by one their dreams fade into oblivion …

A poignant, wry portrait of a 1960s Beirut as it burgeons into the future.

You can get a copy in October…

You can check out the Palestinian poets on NewsHour here. It’s a badass segment.

Thanks Selina for the link!

It’s warm in my house. I went through and pushed the windows up, getting spider webs on my hands. The unseasonable warmth reminds me of dreams: it feels unreal, yet it cloaks me. My son is patient when I climb up to my writing nook to translate. I asked him yesterday what he thought my second novel should be about. He rolled his eyes and gave me the same answer he gave last time: it should be about a single mom, and written in journal-format. I roll my eyes too: I don’t like that idea. I’m 140 pages into my short story collection, yet already I am thinking about the next book. I had a surreal moment this afternoon when I looked up from typing and noticed I was on page 130 on someone else’s novel. If only writing one’s own novel was easy as translating, I sometimes think, then decide, Nah. It wouldn’t feel real.

Picture at left of a lego street taken at “Brick Bash” last Saturday. I wonder if little lego people get road rage…

Nine dead and scores injured when a reservoir collapsed and flooded Um Nasser, a Bedouin village in Gaza, with sewage. Contact UNRWA to see how you can help: 212 963 2255, 212 963 1234

The RAWI 2007 Conference– Writing While Arab: Politics, Hyphens, and Homelands– is happening in Dearborn this May, 17-20. Please go, attend panels, see readings and performances, and be generally interested…even if you live in NY, Chicago, or Toronto.

This image makes my heart race. The word at the bottom of the home-made sign on the right: Hope.

AP/Majdi Mohammed

Revered Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali will be featured on NewsHour with Lehrer tonight, March 22, as part of PBS’s poetry/words in conflict series. Be sure to check it out.

Also, please read So What, a new translation of his works from Copper Canyon Press.

I’m going to set my DVR now…

Someone needs to make an action figure out of this chick. I fucking love her.

*~Thanks to Elka for link!~*

The PEN World Voices Fest has been announced: this year’s theme is “Home & Away” (awesome!) with 162 writers from 45 countries, including Yasmina Khadra, Pico Iyer, and Saadi Youssef (I have to say, I wish they’d invited more women writers to this). Some highlights:

I’ll be there.

is that now, I can read Arabic just as fast as English. I’ve been sad that my eye doesn’t pick Arabic words up as quickly when it sweeps a page the way it does English words. Now it does! Also, I love when I get to translate something funny my own way…