book translations (French-English)     
Authors:   Evelyne AccaD,   Ezza Agha Malak,   Noureddine ABA

femmes du crépuscule /
women of the twilight

Accad, Evelyne.
Paris: Eds. AlfAbarre, 2011. Bilingual Ed., with prefaces by translator Hahn and author Accad. Illustrated by Jay Zerbe.
TO ORDER: www.alfabarre.com

From Lebanon to Indiana, by way of Frankfurt and Paris, women express their distress, their suffering, their passion for life. They speak of their body, their wounds, their terror, living in a world without hope. Evelyne Accad’s writing mixes the tragic and the poetic, prose and poetry, references to the Bible and to the Koran ; her texts are a luminous moment in a world that is sinking into darkness. These short stories were written between 1970-1980, period associated with the great wave of feminism launched in May 1968.  These texts, reworked in 2008, continue to speak to today’s issues .

Evelyne Accad, born in Beirut, Lebanon is a writer, poet, singer and composer. Professor Emerita in Francophone, Arabophone and Comparative Literatures, as well as African and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, and at the Lebanese American University of Beirut, she is the author of many works, studies and novels in English and French, translated into several languages, and recipient of several awards for her writing. See: http://www.editions-harmattan.fr/minisites/index.asp?no=25 and other sites on her work.

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Accad and Hahn at the Salon du Livre; Beirut, Lebanon (2011)

Baghdad: deaths Untold

Agha Malak, Ezza. Linus Publications, 2011, with preface by translator Hahn.
Cover Art: Gilles Sicard.

TO ORDER: Linusbooks.com

This contemporary novel, based on true events, depicts an unusual love story, between an American woman journalist at home in Lebanon and a Lebanese journalist who grew up in Palestine, whose family left to seek refuge in Lebanon, and who then fled to Iraq with his American wife in order to avoid becoming ensnared in corrupt politics. The Lebanese author, Agha Malak, harshly criticizes all the political players and groups described (from Yassar Arafat, to George W. Bush to Saddam Hussein). The couple's daughter, a symbolic and concrete union of East and West, becomes an innocent victim of war, wounded in crossfire. The love story, with its demonstration of cultural bridging, threads a positive note of optimism and peace in this novel set in a recent historical context fraught with violence. The novel ultimately critiques the abuse of power in all its forms, and puts a human face on the suffering induced by war. What drives the storyline is a continual quest for "truth," The novel invites careful reflection on recent Middle East conflict, by portraying various perspectives, some of which have not had extensive exposure in Western media until now.

Ezza Agha Malak, of Lebanon, is Professor Emerita of the Université Libanaise and the Université Saint-Joseph (Lebanon), where she taught French linguistics and literature. Awarded the title of Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, she holds two PhDs from Lyons II (France), and has received awards for her  numerous collections of poetry, short stories, and novels in French. For more information: http://www.ezza-agha-malak.com

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Hahn with authors Karen Boustany (ctr) and Ezza Agha Malak (rt); Salon du Livre, Beirut, Lebanon (2011)

Coquelicot du massacre / 
poppy from the massacre

Accad, Evelyne. 
Paris. L'Harmattan, 2006. Bilingual Ed.
With prefaces by translator Hahn and author Accad.
TO ORDER: See L'Harmattan.

This novel recounts women's response to the 1975-1990 civil war in Lebanon, as told by four female narrators whose personal stories alternate and intertwine. A woman professor, her anxious student, a woman with child crossing the demarcation line to reach the other side of Beirut, and a music teacher-singer provide the main characterizations and reactions to their stressful circumstances. This novel, with its historical backdrop, gives the reader insight into Lebanese culture of the time and strategies women used to survive and rise from the ashes of war like poppies from a massacre. Accad herself taught in Beirut during the civil war and these stories, while fictionalized, are drawn from her experiences and eye-witness accounts.

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Anosmia:  Nostalgia for a forbidden sense

Agha Malak, Ezza.
University Press of the South, 2009.
With Author's Note and Preface by Gilles Sicard.
Cover: Gilles Sicard

TO ORDER:
See University Press of the South.

This novel about a Lebanese woman who loses her sense of smell, is an intriguing journey into the world of scent, and description of how the olfactory sense is attached to memory. A love story that takes place in Lebanon and France, the protagonist recounts a childhood spent in sensory-rich souks, complete with traditional soap factory and perfume shop, while an unsatisfactory arranged marriage to her cousin cannot obliterate a forbidden first love, from a different religious tradition. Agha Malak's exploration of the connection between sense and memory provides the narrative impetus for this woman's personal and universal journey of self-discovery.

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L'excisEe / the excised

Accad, Evelyne.
Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009. Bilingual ed. 
With prefaces in both English and French by the author and translator. Cover art: Cynthia Hahn

TO ORDER: Visit
L'Harmattan.

This novel is Accad's most celebrated to date, with translations in several languages. In this text, which takes place in Beirut at the eve of the civil war, and also in an unnamed desert country, traces the story of a woman who grows up in a strict, Arab Christian family, who goes against her father's wishes and runs away with a Palestinian man to another country. Her vision of a newly constructed relationship built on mutual trust and equality is quickly disillusioned by the realities of living within her new husband's restrictive community. As she discovers the tradition of full veiling, and witnesses the rite of excision on young girls, she decides that she must escape oppression at any cost. Excision in this novel is both a physical element of suppression and a symbolic extinguishing of women's rights. Accad aptly and eloquently gives voice in this novel to women whose voices are not commonly heard, and pleads universally for equality of relationship between men and women while noting the effects of oppression that may occur in both Christian and Muslim communities.

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What have you done with your kids, DAD? 

Agha Malak, Ezza.
New Orleans: University Press of the South. 2013.
TO ORDER: Visit University Press of the South.
Original French text:
Agha Malak, Ezza.
Qu'as-tu fait de tes mômes, Papa?
Paris: Eds. AlfAbarre, 2011.

This novel by Lebanese author Agha Malak addresses important social questions regarding the abuse of women and neglect of children, abuse which leads to the breakdown of the family unit. While the process of separation, recovery of self esteem and healing of those abused can be recognized as universal and contemporary, this story, whose premise is based on true events, is unexpectedly told from the perspective of an adolescent boy, and is set within a Lebanese and subsequent French context, during the 2006 war in Lebanon between Hezbullah and Israel. Ironically, it is this brief war that provides a window of opportunity for escape, and justifies the family's departure from Lebanon, leaving behind the abusive husband and father. French forces provide the necessary means for departure to France, and this sets in motion the family's reconstruction in another French-speaking cultural and judicial context. The story invites the reader to enter into this family's process of reconciliation with the past, while also questioning more generally social structures and attitudes of inequality that allow for the continuation of abuse within families in Lebanon and elsewhere. The narrative may also be interpreted as an allegory depicting Lebanon's divisions and conflicts and a call for its healing and reconstruction on a societal level.

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Wounding Words: A woman's journal in tunisia

Accad, Evelyne. Oxford: Heinemann Press, 1996. African Writer's Series. 

Out of Print. May be available through used book sellers and distributors.

This historical novel documents events during the height of the Tunisian women's movement in 1985, during a Fulbright-sponsored year the Lebanese author spent in Tunis. In this novel that remains contemporary through the topics it discusses, Accad encapsulates the feminist debate, and addresses the question of emancipation for women in the Arab world.

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Le chant perdu d'un pays retrouvé /
The lost song of a rediscovered country

Aba, Noureddine.
Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999.
Bilingual Ed.

TO ORDER: Visit L'Harmattan.

This compellingly modern tale, told by an amnesic Algerian man to his doctor in the form of narrative and poetic monologue, is set in a post-colonial Paris filled with fear and misunderstanding of Arab Otherness. The man's "song" that is slowly recovered as he recovers his memory and re-gains his identity, symbolically gives voice to French-Algerian relations. As the man re-discovers discriminatory stereotypes that label him, he rallies against all discrimination, in an urgent call for world-wide fraternity and peace.

Noureddine Aba is known as a prolific Algerian author who lived for many years in France, and has been widely recognized for his 8 volumes of poetry and 12 dramatic works, which are a literary call for social justice across cultures and time periods.

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OTher translations:

"Bleu Romarin," Translation, poem by Kathryn Dohrmann, East on Central, Vol. 15, Fall 2016.

 “A Woman and a Half,” Translation,, short story, Abdourahman Waberi (Djbouti), in From
Africa: Contemporary Francophone Stories. Nebraska Univ.P., 2004. Editor Adèle King.

Volume of poetry, Le Corps Epique/The Epic Body, Astrid Gâteau (France).  Seeking publisher.

Essay, Joyce Mansour, from André Breton, L’Art magique, “Response to an Inquiry on Magic Art.”  Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Ed. Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley, Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2009: 167.

Article, “Judeo-Moroccan Memory in Quebec,” by Lucette Heller-Goldenberg, in Textualizing the Immigant Experience in Contemporary Quebec. Eds. Susan Ireland, Patrice Proulx, Westport, Connecticut, London: Praeger, 2004: 149-160.

Chapter on 17th century French art, J. Perouse. Paris: City of Art, 2003 (35 pp.); Vendöme Press, New York, 2003.

“Letter to the Silenced Voices,”  4 pp. poem on war in Algeria, by Hédi Bouraoui (Tunisia), Research in African Literatures, “Dissident Algeria,” Vol 30 (3),Fall 1999: 207-212.

Articles on translation:

“On Translating Evelyne Accad: Re-creating Elements of Transnational Expression,” in On Evelyne Accad ; Ed. Cheryl Toman. Summa Pulications, 2007: 331-47 (Scholar’s Choice Award).

 “Traduire Evelyne Accad, ou faire le portrait de l’expression transnationale,” Ed. Dierdre Heistad, Explorations: L’Ecriture d’Evelyne Accad, L’Harmattan, Paris, 04.      
 
“Navigating Literary Translation Choices: The Case of the Polyphonic Text,” American Translator’s Association 42nd Conference Proceedings, Atlanta, 11/2002: 257-60. Revised, published in ATA Chronicle, Literary Translation Issue, Spring 2003.
          
“Translating Culturally Sensitive Material,” CHICATA News, Spring 2002: 1, 3.

“Le mot juste’ or’ le mot injuste,’: Translating Culturally Sensitive Material,” American Translator’s Association 41st Conference Proceedings, L.A., 11/ 2001.           

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