Robin Moger
Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English who lives in Barcelona. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared in Blackbox Manifold, The White Review, Asymptote, Words with Borders, Washington Square Review, Michigan Review and elsewhere. He has translated several novels and prose works, most recently Haytham El Wardany’s The Book of Sleep (Seagull), Agitated Air: Poems after Ibn Arabi with Yasmine Seale (Tenement Press), and Slipping by Mohammed Kheir (Two Lines Press).
titles translated by Robin Moger
Iman Mersal
Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger.
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
From one of the preeminent poets of the Arabic-speaking world, a brilliant work of creative nonfiction retracing the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature's tragic heroine.
"A subtle and universal exploration of identity."—Aida Alami, The New York Times
Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age 27. For the next three decades, it's as if Enayat never existed at all.
Years later, when celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbles upon Enayat's long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, she embarks on a journey of reflection and rediscovery that leads her ever closer to the world and work of Enayat al-Zayyat.
In this luminous biographical detective story, Mersal retraces Enayat's life and afterlife though interviews with family members and friend, even tracking down the apartments, schools, and sanatoriums where Enayat spent her days. As Mersal maps two simultaneous psychogeographies--from the glamor of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal's own past--a remarkable portrait emerges of two women striving to live on their own terms.
With Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal embraces the reciprocal relationship between a text and its reader, between past and present, between author and subject.
Iman Mersal
Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
Iman Mersal has only one photograph of her mother, who died giving birth at age twenty-seven. But the woman portrayed in it strikes her as very unlike the one in her fleeting childhood memories, in mood, expression, dress.
When Mersal has a child of her own decades later, she begins to wonder whether it’s possible to depict a mother with any degree of fidelity. How to represent—in photography, dream, memory, or writing—an individual whose complex inner landscape has suddenly come under threat of looming archetypes? What is hidden in traditional representations of motherhood? What lies outside the narrative in which motherhood “means giving, the melding of two distinct selves, a love unlimited and unconditional”?
Sifting through the archives of motherhood, including journal entries, photographs, and the writings that have informed her own poetic practice, Mersal privileges questions over answers, drifting over arriving, allowing a form of motherhood to exist in these pages unbounded.
Motherhood and Its Ghosts is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.