11 Books and 11 Photos to Celebrate Denys Johnson-Davis (1922-2017)
Choosing ten was too difficult, so here are eleven, with eleven photographs, courtesy of Denys and his wife Paola Crocian.
Choosing ten was too difficult, so here are eleven, with eleven photographs, courtesy of Denys and his wife Paola Crocian.
Surely this blend of gloriously geeky scholarship (about half of each page is footnotes) combined with the several hundred whimsical, hilarious, gorily descriptive and downright bizarre names for the lion, collected by Ibn Khalawayh and translated and explicated by Larsen with such aplomb, should be a bestseller?
For instance: “a state of non-action” (judge Tahia Abdel Nasser) and “slow, meticulous, stagnant narration” (Rasheed El-Enany) and “a stagnation” (also Rasheed El-Enany), which makes the book sound a bit like having x-rays done at the dentist: a mildly discomfiting process that seems as though it will never, ever end.
When asked back in 2009 what Arabic works should be translated into English, poet-translator Fady Joudah told the Quarterly Conversation he’d like to see Ghassan Zaqtan’s Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me in English. Joudah has since translated that collection — and won… Read More ›