ICWA: Institute of Current World Affairs Jonathan Guyer has contributed a chapter to Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution, a forthcoming book from Routledge. His chapter focuses on the translation of Arabic political cartoons. Here is Jonathan’s abstract: This chapter reflects critically on the translation of Arabic political cartoons, both in broad and narrow terms. The questions I address include the following: How does one translate humour and satire?
Yasmin El-Rifae
June 12th, 2015, Muftah I walked through downtown Cairo on a quiet Friday morning in March 2015, late to a conference I had helped organize and a little bit anxious. The conference was about the political importance of translation – of language and concepts – in connecting protest movements to one another and allowing them to be narrated from within. We had tried to make the conference sound mundane to state authorities, who had issued our permits, but I was not entirely sure it would work.
By Ahmed Refaat Mada Masr, 15 March 2015 I first heard Mona Baker two months ago in a workshop organized by the Imaginary School Program at Beirut, the art space not the city. It was called: “Prefigurative politics and creative subtitling.”
During the three-hour event, Baker briefly summed up what she discusses more elaborately in her research project, “Translating the Egyptian Revolution,” which “examines the language-based practices that allow Egyptian protesters to contest dominant narratives of the revolution and, importantly, to connect with, influence and learn from global movements of protest.
Soraya Morayef / 18 Nov 2014 Comic magazines Samir, Lulu and Mickey Geeb (Pocket-sized Mickey) and Arabic translations of Tintin, Superman and Asterix and Obelix have been read and loved by generations of Arabs. Editorial cartoons are fundamental parts of every daily newspaper. But comic art remains an often unexamined and under-supported part of Arab artistic effort.
A new initiative is intent on changing that.
In September, the American University in Beirut (AUB) began a new academic program focused entirely on the study, archiving and promotion of Arab comic art.
Marcia Lynx Qualey Last updated: 28 September 2014 Why are gentleman-thieves and murder mysteries making a comeback in Arabic popular fiction? When Egyptian novelist and photographer Ahmed Mourad was asked earlier this year, why so few Egyptians were writing crime novels, he said that the genre was new, "and anything new is usually accompanied by a lot of attack and criticism". Then Mourad paused and corrected himself by saying, in fact, the genre was not new at all.
The neo-noir revolution in the Arab world might be seen as nostalgic, but it allows writers to act as ombudsmen in the current political climate Jonathan Guyer Friday 3 October 2014 From Baghdad to Cairo, a neo-noir revolution has been creeping across the Middle East. The revival of crime fiction since the upheavals started in 2011 should not come as a surprise. Noir offers an alternative form of justice: the novelist is the ombudsman; the bad guys are taken to court.
The neo-noir revolution in the Arab world might be seen as nostalgic, but it allows writers to act as ombudsmen in the current political climate Jonathan Guyer Friday 3 October 2014 From Baghdad to Cairo, a neo-noir revolution has been creeping across the Middle East. The revival of crime fiction since the upheavals started in 2011 should not come as a surprise. Noir offers an alternative form of justice: the novelist is the ombudsman; the bad guys are taken to court.
Pocket Novels: The Exile, J. Kessel, 1940. “A Novel of Human Untruths, about a Russian woman and her princesses, in exile, from the pen of the great French writer J. Kissel,” presumably the French novelist and journalist Joseph Kessel (1898-1979) August 20, 2014 | by Jonathan Guyer Cairo: the metal detector beeps. The security man wears a crisp white uniform. He nods and leans back in his chair. The lobby’s red oriental carpet, so worn it’s barely red, leads upstairs to the hotel tavern.
Pocket Novels: The Exile, J. Kessel, 1940. “A Novel of Human Untruths, about a Russian woman and her princesses, in exile, from the pen of the great French writer J. Kissel,” presumably the French novelist and journalist Joseph Kessel (1898-1979) August 20, 2014 | by Jonathan Guyer Cairo: the metal detector beeps. The security man wears a crisp white uniform. He nods and leans back in his chair. The lobby’s red oriental carpet, so worn it’s barely red, leads upstairs to the hotel tavern.
