Follow the Translations! The Transnational Circulation of Hassan Blasim's Short Stories

Hassan Blasim has been critically acclaimed as one of the most important contemporary authors in Arabic. Blasim's story as an internationally renowned author began in 2009 with the first translation of a collection of his stories into English, The Madman of Freedom Square. The actual breakthrou...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Aesthetics and Politics of Linguistic Borders pp. 27 - 47
Main Author Löytty, Olli
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published Routledge 2020
Edition1
Subjects
Satanic Silence
Air Hostess
Swedish Language Schools
Iraqi Christ
Helsingin Sanomat
Young Man
Freedom Square
National Languages
Contemporary Arabic Literature
International Book Market
Arts Promotion Centre Finland
Translated Texts
Vice Versa
Literary Field
Finnish Artist
Transnational Writer
Finnish Media
Iraqi Kurdistan
Hakuna Matata
Finnish Literary
Finnish Author
Finnish Readers
Nikolai Gogol
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Summary:Hassan Blasim has been critically acclaimed as one of the most important contemporary authors in Arabic. Blasim's story as an internationally renowned author began in 2009 with the first translation of a collection of his stories into English, The Madman of Freedom Square. The actual breakthrough for him was winning the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014, the British literary award for literature in translation, for his second book in English, The Iraqi Christ. In this chapter, Olli Löytty explores the multilingual routes that Blasim's texts have taken in the global literary field and the mechanisms that regulate their circulation across national borders. Through interviews with Blasim himself, as well as his publishers, Löytty shows how the English translation acted as a bridge between the original Arabic and translations in other languages than English and how translations of Blasim's texts have the potential to dismantle the hierarchies between languages.
ISBN:9780367203153
0367203154
DOI:10.4324/9780429260834-2