Absinthe 28: Orphaned of Light features contemporary literature of migration translated from and to Arabic. In short stories, creative nonfiction essays, poetry, and selections from novels, a multiplicity of migration experiences is brought to the fore: life in diaspora, undocumented labor, refugeehood, human trafficking, internal displacement, exile.
This issue brings together names familiar to readers of Arabic literature in translation, such as Ghassan Kanafani and Saadi Youssef, with writers making their English-language debuts, such as Dearborn, MI-based Kurdish Iraqi poet Gulala Nouri and Libyan novelist Mohamad Alasfar. Likewise, the issue includes veteran translators Marilyn Booth, Nancy Roberts, and Khaled Mattawa alongside newcomers, several of them graduate students at the University of Michigan.
Each piece is accompanied by a translator’s reflection that meditates on the work’s themes as well as the creative process of translation, and the issue’s poetry is presented in a side-by-side Arabic-English format.
Absinthe 28 comes to us at a time when, according to the UN, one in every 78 people on earth is displaced. This collection serves as a reminder that translation and migration are inextricably linked.