Where
The Jerusalem Fund Gallery Al-Quds2425 Virginia Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20037
Driving Directions
The Art of Close Reading: A Translation Workshop with Fady Joudah
Workshop participants will work on translating an Arabic poem into English. We will consider the importance of sound, the difference between literal and idiomatic translations, and special difficulties in translating Arabic into English. Participants will be guided through a close reading of a poem, and provided with insights into cultural references and context. No knowledge of Arabic necessary.
About Fady Joudah
Fady Joudah's poetry and poetry translations (from the Arabic) have received the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Griffin International poetry prize, a PEN USA award among others. Alight and Textu are his most recent collections. Textu is a sequence of short poems composed on cell phone where meter is character count. He is a physician of internal medicine in Houston, TX.
About Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here DC 2016
Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here DC 2016 is a book arts and cultural festival organized for January through March 2016, throughout the Washington, D.C. area. Exhibits, programs, and events will commemorate the 2007 bombing of Baghdad’s historic bookselling street, and celebrate the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, to stand in solidarity with the people of Iraq, who have endured so much; and with people at home and abroad who are unable to make their voices heard. Book sellers, who survived the bombing, rebuilt their stores and are once again in business. They sell works by Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, and Jews, children's books, and progressive publications from around the world.
The Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here project began as a call from San Francisco poet Beau Beausoleil in 2007 for writers, and it quickly moved on to incorporate artists, artist books and printmakers all who are responding to bear witness to a tragic loss of a center of literacy and humanity in Iraq. Al-Mutanabbi Street was a street of booksellers, printers, and readers, a street where people still felt “safe” among all the words and books. This is the project’s starting point: where language, thought, and reality reside; where memory, ideas, and even dreams wait patiently in their black ink.
Project Partners:
George Mason University’s School of Art and George Mason University Libraries, Split This Rock, Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, McLean Project for the Arts, Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at The George Washington University, Busboys and Poets, Georgetown University, Cultural DC, Smithsonian Libraries, Brentwood Arts Exchange, Northern Virginia Community College, George Mason University Student Media and Fourth Estate Newspaper.
Support
Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here DC 2016 is made possible in part by grants from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities. Additional support received from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at George Mason University. Busboys and Poets is also a major sponsor. This event is co-sponsored by The Jerusalem Fund, which works to create greater awareness about Palestine through its educational and cultural programs, and to ameliorate the lives of Palestinians in Palestine and the diaspora by funding humanitarian and community development initiatives.
To learn more, visit the festival website.