The Banipal Trust for Arab Literature

The first Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation has been awarded to Humphrey Davies, for his translation of Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun, published in the UK by Harvill Secker and in the USA by Archipelago Press. The award ceremony, hosted by the British Centre for Literary Translation, took place on 9 October at the University of East Anglia, with the awards presented by TLS editor Sir Peter Stothard.

 

The judges, author Moris Farhi, literary journalist Maya Jaggi, and literary translator from Arabic and academic Roger Allen, unanimously chose this work. Speaking for their behalf, Maya Jaggi said: “The judges were unanimous in awarding the inaugural Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation to Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun (Harvill Secker), translated by Humphrey Davies. Inspired by refugees’ accounts of the Palestinian expulsion of 1948 and its lingering aftermath, Khoury’s ambitious and richly crafted novel is an epic retelling of myriad individual stories through the central narrative of Khaleel, a doctor tending a comatose former Palestinian fighter in a refugee camp’s makeshift hospital on the outskirts of Beirut. Tracing the meshed histories of Lebanon and Palestine from the 1930s to the 1990s, and the multiple crossings of a once-porous border with the state of Israel, it subtly questions the nature of memory and history, literature and imagination, heroism and defeat. The novel is a monumental achievement, whose translation by Humphrey Davies brilliantly captures the nuances and style of the original.

After being told of his award, Humphrey Davies said: “The initial draft of Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun took me some eight weeks of full-time work during the summer of 2004, part of it in Alexandria . By good luck, the author was in Alexandria briefly during the same period and he and I spent one nine-hour session reviewing my queries. Such contact with the author is, I believe, extremely important; to date I have been fortunate enough to be able to consult almost all the living authors whose works I have translated (I have questions for the dead too, when I meet them).

The Prize was set up by Banipal, the magazine of modern Arab literature in English translation, and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature that was founded in 2004 to support the publication of Arab authors in English translation and the production of live literature events in the UK with Arab authors. It is administered by the UK’s Society of Authors and the Translators Association along with other prizes for literary translation from European Languages. The prize of £2,000 to the translator celebrates the translation and publishing of contemporary Arab authors, entries restricted to works originally published in the thirty-five years prior to their entry for the prize. It is the first prize specifically for a published work of literary translation from Arabic in the English-speaking world. The prize is wholly sponsored during its first year by Mohammed Al-Sowaidi, the Secretary-General of the Cultural Foundation of Abu Dhabi, himself an arts patron and publisher, and keenly interested in developing cultural and literary dialogue between the Arab world and the West.

 

 

Banipal No 26, Summer 2006

The Banipal Trust for Arab Literature

P O Box 22300
LONDON W13 8ZQ UK
Tel: 00 44 (0) 20 8568 9747 info@banipaltrust.org www.banipaltrust.org

Banipal Magazine for Arab Literature

www.banipal.co.uk

Magazines

The Prince Claus Fund supports cultural magazines from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean that focus on Culture and Development.

The Fund strongly believes that magazines, acting as a barometer of shifting attitudes, play an important role in the international debate about culture and development.