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“She closed her olive-green eyes and sang songs she’d learned from the women in her family.”

This is the sixth and final installment of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which has been made available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman. 

On Mondays this winter, we are publishing installments of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman.

“Are you tired of walking / My son, are you tired?”

“No electricity tonight. / Boredom is about to kill me.”

Refaat Al Areer had set the scene, declaring, “If I must die,” and Alaa Al Qatarawi’s sorrow metamorphosed into a butterfly that perseveres. She writes, “If I die, my butterfly does not die.”

“Sometimes, I believe that silence itself could carry meaning in the face of this barbarity. Sometimes, I tell myself that I’ll stop documenting atrocities and only write literature. But all of this only makes sense in the context of our desire for justice, our desire to preserve the true essence of humanity.”

Iman Humaydan, Michelle Hartman, and Emma Hardy discuss the new translation of Iman’s book “Songs for Darkness” and songs as a tool for the transmission of memory, of solidarity, and as a method of resistance.

In this conversation with ArabLit’s Tugrul Mende, translator Alex Elinson talks about how literary prizes affect the translation landscape, the draw of detective novels, and how he hones voice in a novel with many starring characters.

“My book really is an examination of how he participated in the coup ,and how he believed fundamentally that the Free Officers were going to install democracy, and—once he realized that they were actually installing military dictatorship—the way he dissented, in the editorials and in person, the way that he was jailed, and the way he turned to fiction to express his dissent directly to Nasser.”