Search results for ""author abdelfattah kilito""

In the beginning there was one language—one tongue that Adam used to compose the first poem, an elegy for Abel. “These days, no one bothers to ask about the tongue of Adam. It is a naive question, vaguely embarrassing and irksome, like questions posed by children, which one can only answer rather stupidly.” So begins Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Tongue of Adam, a delightful series of lectures. With a Borgesian flair for riddles, stories, and subtle scholarly distinctions, Kilito presents an assortment of discussions related to Adam’s tongue, including translation, comparative religion, and lexicography: for example, how, from Babel onward, can we explain the plurality of language? Or can Adam’s poetry be judged aesthetically, the same as any other poem? Drawing from the commentators of the Koran to Walter Benjamin, from the esoteric speculations of Judaism to Herodotus, The Tongue of Adam is a nimble book about the mysterious rise of humankind’s multilingualism.

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“Reading Kilito has always been, for me, an adventure. Kilito dares the reader to travel with him, riding over the frontiers between fiction and reality, between literary criticism and storytelling. He is a writer with his own personal library; a reader who invents an imaginary present out of fragments drawn from the past. The Clash of Images is a marvelous book, a mysterious alchemy of tale and teller. This student of Roland Barthes proves the French master’s point: every critic could be a novelist in disguise.”—Elias Khoury, author of Gate of the Sun Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Clash of Images is an enchanting collection of linked stories set in a coastal city of memories. It is a time when the old Arabic world of texts and oral traditions is making way for something new—the modern era of the image, the comic book, photo IDs, and the cinema. Together, the stories form a kaleidoscopic memoir of growing up in two worlds, a brilliant mixture of cultural and family history. Here are tales of first kisses and first reads, Tintin and the Prophet Muhammad, fantasies of the Wild West, the inferno of the bathhouse, and the lost paradises of childhood. The Clash of Images is a magic lantern of a book, a celebration of storytelling and all its pleasures that is beautifully translated by Robyn Creswell, who won a PEN Translation Fund Award for this collection.

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One of the Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Books of the Year Winner, 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, Translation Category Shortlist, 2021 National Translation Award Finalist, 2021 PROSE Award, Literature Category Fifty rogue’s tales translated fifty ways An itinerant con man. A gullible eyewitness narrator. Voices spanning continents and centuries. These elements come together in Impostures, a groundbreaking new translation of a celebrated work of Arabic literature. Impostures follows the roguish Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī in his adventures around the medieval Middle East—we encounter him impersonating a preacher, pretending to be blind, and lying to a judge. In every escapade he shows himself to be a brilliant and persuasive wordsmith, composing poetry, palindromes, and riddles on the spot. Award-winning translator Michael Cooperson transforms Arabic wordplay into English wordplay of his own, using fifty different registers of English, from the distinctive literary styles of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, to global varieties of English including Cockney rhyming slang, Nigerian English, and Singaporean English. Featuring picaresque adventures and linguistic acrobatics, Impostures brings the spirit of this masterpiece of Arabic literature into English in a dazzling display of translation. An English-only edition.

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Maqāmāt Abī Zayd al-Sarūjī is a scholarly, Arabic-only edition of the celebrated work by al-Ḥarīrī, which is also available in English translation from the Library of Arabic Literature as Impostures. Al-Ḥarīrī's text consists of fifty stories about the adventures of the itinerant con man and master of persuasion Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī, as told by the equally itinerant and often gullible narrator al-Ḥārith ibn Hāmmam. Al-Ḥarīrī was a virtuoso writer of the rhymed prose narrative genre known as the maqāmah, which would continue as a popular literary form into the twentieth century. An Arabic edition with an Arabic foreword and English scholarly apparatus.

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One of the Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Books of the Year Winner, 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, Translation Category Shortlist, 2021 National Translation Award Finalist, 2021 PROSE Award, Literature Category Fifty rogue’s tales translated fifty ways An itinerant con man. A gullible eyewitness narrator. Voices spanning continents and centuries. These elements come together in Impostures, a groundbreaking new translation of a celebrated work of Arabic literature. Impostures follows the roguish Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī in his adventures around the medieval Middle East—we encounter him impersonating a preacher, pretending to be blind, and lying to a judge. In every escapade he shows himself to be a brilliant and persuasive wordsmith, composing poetry, palindromes, and riddles on the spot. Award-winning translator Michael Cooperson transforms Arabic wordplay into English wordplay of his own, using fifty different registers of English, from the distinctive literary styles of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, to global varieties of English including Cockney rhyming slang, Nigerian English, and Singaporean English. Featuring picaresque adventures and linguistic acrobatics, Impostures brings the spirit of this masterpiece of Arabic literature into English in a dazzling display of translation. An English-only edition.

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