Podcast appearances and mentions of elias muhanna

Dr. Raf Fatani is spearheading Amazon Alexa in Arabic globally. While most firms tend to revert to the Modern Standard Arabic (or Fusha - فصحة) when they speak to over half a billion Arabic speakers globally, Raf decided that Alexa cannot go down the same path and that an investment has to be made once and for all to bring colloquial Arabic to technology. We discuss the challenges of building Alexa in Arabic from the ground up, what is the utility of a virtual assistant today and what does the future look like.Here is a link to Prof. Elias Muhanna's article that Raf and I discussed at the beginning of the podcast: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/translating-frozen-into-arabicFor more information visit www.conversationswithloulou.com

Dr. Raf Fatani is spearheading Amazon Alexa in Arabic globally. While most firms tend to revert to the Modern Standard Arabic (or Fusha - فصحة) when they speak to over half a billion Arabic speakers globally, Raf decided that Alexa cannot go down the same path and that an investment has to be made once and for all to bring colloquial Arabic to technology. We discuss the challenges of building Alexa in Arabic from the ground up, what is the utility of a virtual assistant today and what does the future look like. Here is a link to Prof. Elias Muhanna's article that Raf and I discussed at the beginning of the podcast: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/translating-frozen-into-arabic For more information visit www.conversationswithloulou.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We talk to scholar Elias Muhanna about translating a magical, delightful eighteenth-century travelogue. In 1707 Hanna Diyab journeyed from his native Aleppo as translator to a rapacious and sometimes ridiculous Frenchman. He survived a shipwreck and a pirate attack, met King Louis XIV, and gave TheThousand and One Nights translator Antoine Galland a dozen new stories. Cheated out of a promised job in Paris, he eventually returned to Syria, where he wrote it all up in his old age.  Show Notes You can download a free Arabic PDF of the Book of Travelson the Library of Arabic Literature website. You can read more about Diyab (and speculation about whether he was the “real Aladdin”) in Paolo Lemos Horta's Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights. You can read Yasmine Seale's stand-alone translation of Aladdin, introduced by Lemos Horta, or get her new Annotated Arabian Nights, edited and introduced by Lemos Horta, out this month from WW Norton.

An abbreviated version of The Nights will be coming out in Fall 2021, in Seale's translation for W. W. Norton. The fuller Nights is currently set for 2023. You can follow the Nights Bot, with which Seale shares fragments of her translation, on Twitter.    You can watch a recording of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2020 The Bookseller Webinar -The global influence of the Arabian Nights, with Richard van Leeuwen, Marina Warner, and Yasmine Seale, on YouTube.   You can read Seale's talk with Veronica Esposito, “Wild Irreverence”: A Conversation about Arabic Translation with Yasmine Seale,  in World Literature Today.   At the beginning of the episode Seale reads an excerpt from Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi's Ta'tir al-anam fi tafsir al-ahlam, which is featured in the DREAMS issue of ArabLit Quarterly, released December 15. Seale also reads her poem “Conventional Wisdom,” which won the poetry category of the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. The Book of Travels by Ḥannā Diyāb -- the Syrian writer who related the Aladdin tale to Antoine Galland -- will be out from the Library of Arabic Literature, in Elias Muhanna's translation, in May 2021. Seale has written the foreword to the first volume.

We talk to scholar Elias Muhanna about translating a magical, delightful eighteenth-century travelogue. In 1707 Hanna Diyab journeyed from his native Aleppo as translator to a rapacious and sometimes ridiculous Frenchman. He survived a shipwreck and a pirate attack, met King Louis XIV, and gave TheThousand and One Nights translator Antoine Galland a dozen new stories. Cheated out of a promised job in Paris, he eventually returned to Syria, where he wrote it all up in his old age.  Show Notes You can download a free Arabic PDF of the Book of Travelson the Library of Arabic Literature website. You can read more about Diyab (and speculation about whether he was the “real Aladdin”) in Paolo Lemos Horta's Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights. You can read Yasmine Seale's stand-alone translation of Aladdin, introduced by Lemos Horta, or get her new Annotated Arabian Nights, edited and introduced by Lemos Horta, out this month from WW Norton.

We're back! Catch up on everything you missed over the summer, including Women in Translation Month and a Fall reading list full of intriguing new titles.  Show Notes:  In our opening, Marcia reads "Four Years Without You" (For Mahmoud Darwish) by Samar Abdel Jabar, trans. Zeina Hashem Beck August was Women in Translation Month with ArabLit highlighting Arab women authors you may not have heard of yet.  The Female Voices in Arabic Literature webinar featured writer Iman Mersal, translator Sawad Hussain and scholar Dr. Marlé Hammond.  Melanie Magidow's translation of a (small portion) of the epic poem of Dhat al-Himma is out from Penguin Press as The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman.  Warda, by Sonallah Ibrahim, trans. Hosam Abul-Ela, is out from Yale University Press Slipping, by Mohamed Kheir, trans. Robin Moger, was published in June by Two Lines Press.  The Library of Arabic Literature is behind the bilingual edition of Hanna Diyab's Books of Travels (trans. Elias Muhanna)and al-Baghdadi's A Physician on the Nile (trans.. Tim Mackintosh-Smith). Diyab is the source of some of the stories Antoine Galland added to his version of the 1001 Nights, including the story Aladdin.  Samar Yazbek's Planet of Clay (trans. Leri Price) is forthcoming from World Editions.  The Egyptian writer Basma Abdel Aziz's 2016 novel The Queue (trans. Lissie Jacquette) was a widely praised work of dark political fantasy. Her follow-up, tr. Jonathan Wright, is Here Is A Body. Ursula's article on Edward Said -- on his own account of his life and those of others, including a recent biography -- can be found at The Point.  

Poet, artist and translator Yasmine Seale is at work on a fresh translation of the Thousand and One Nights. Show Notes:  An abbreviated version of The Nights will be coming out in Fall 2021, in Seale's translation for W. W. Norton. The fuller Nights is currently set for 2023. You can follow the Nights Bot, with which Seale shares fragments of her translation, on Twitter.  You can watch a recording of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2020 The Bookseller Webinar -The global influence of the Arabian Nights, with Richard van Leeuwen, Marina Warner, and Yasmine Seale, on YouTube. You can read Seale's talk with Veronica Esposito, “Wild Irreverence”: A Conversation about Arabic Translation with Yasmine Seale,  in World Literature Today. At the beginning of the episode Seale reads an excerpt from Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi's Ta'tir al-anam fi tafsir al-ahlam, which is featured in the DREAMS issue of ArabLit Quarterly, released December 15. Seale also reads her poem “Conventional Wisdom,” which won the poetry category of the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. The Book of Travels by Ḥannā Diyāb -- the Syrian writer who related the Aladdin tale to Antoine Galland -- will be out from the Library of Arabic Literature, in Elias Muhanna's translation, in May 2021. Seale has written the foreword to the first volume.

Episode 393with Elias Muhannahosted by Sarah BaldwinDownload the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudIn this episode, Sarah Baldwin talks with Elias Muhanna about an essay he wrote for the New Yorker in May 2018 in which he describes recent advances in translating pre-Islamic Arabic texts. The conversation focuses on the groundbreaking translations of Muhanna's friend and colleague Ahmad Al-Jallad and how his work has changed our understanding of life on the Arabian peninsula before Islam.This episode comes directly from our friends at Trending Globally, a podcast of Brown University's Watson Institute.« Click for More »

Sarah Baldwin talks with Elias Muhanna [https://vivo.brown.edu/display/emuhanna] about an essay he wrote for the New Yorker [https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-new-history-of-arabia-written-in-stone] in May 2018 in which he describes recent advances in translating pre-Islamic Arabic texts. The conversation focuses on the groundbreaking translations of Muhanna's friend and colleague Ahmad Al-Jallad and how his work has changed our understanding of life on the Arabian peninsula before Islam. Editing by Babette Thomas '19 Theme music composed by Henry Ross Bloomfield: www.heybloomfield.com Download episode transcript

Described as a small book about a very large book, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Elias Muhanna tells the story of an encyclopedia, or a universal compendium, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition in Mamluk Egypt, written by Shihab al-Din...

Described as a small book about a very large book, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Elias Muhanna tells the story of an encyclopedia, or a universal compendium, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition in Mamluk Egypt, written by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri. It covered multiple facets of knowledge, from science to history. He talks to us about his inspiration for the book, the structure, the content, and the context of the Ultimate Ambition, its afterlife in the Muslim and the European world and the role of book history in Middle Eastern history. Elias Muhanna is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He earned his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University and has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Whiting Foundation. His research focuses on encyclopedic literature in the Islamic world and Europe, the cultural production of the Mamluk Empire, and the problem of the vernacular in different literary traditions. Muhanna’s publications include an abridged translation of al-Nuwayri’s encyclopedia, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, for Penguin Classics. He is heavily involved in the digital humanities. He edited The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies (De Gruyter, 2016). He is the creator of the Digital Islamic Humanities Project at Brown, a multi-year initiative that convenes an annual conference and hosts a variety of research activities. He is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker’s online edition, and his essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and other periodicals. His blog, Qifa Nabki, is a forum for intellectual exchange and debate on Levantine politics. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Described as a small book about a very large book, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Elias Muhanna tells the story of an encyclopedia, or a universal compendium, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition in Mamluk Egypt, written by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri. It covered multiple facets of knowledge, from science to history. He talks to us about his inspiration for the book, the structure, the content, and the context of the Ultimate Ambition, its afterlife in the Muslim and the European world and the role of book history in Middle Eastern history. Elias Muhanna is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He earned his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University and has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Whiting Foundation. His research focuses on encyclopedic literature in the Islamic world and Europe, the cultural production of the Mamluk Empire, and the problem of the vernacular in different literary traditions. Muhanna’s publications include an abridged translation of al-Nuwayri’s encyclopedia, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, for Penguin Classics. He is heavily involved in the digital humanities. He edited The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies (De Gruyter, 2016). He is the creator of the Digital Islamic Humanities Project at Brown, a multi-year initiative that convenes an annual conference and hosts a variety of research activities. He is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker’s online edition, and his essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and other periodicals. His blog, Qifa Nabki, is a forum for intellectual exchange and debate on Levantine politics. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Described as a small book about a very large book, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Elias Muhanna tells the story of an encyclopedia, or a universal compendium, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition in Mamluk Egypt, written by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri. It covered multiple facets of knowledge, from science to history. He talks to us about his inspiration for the book, the structure, the content, and the context of the Ultimate Ambition, its afterlife in the Muslim and the European world and the role of book history in Middle Eastern history. Elias Muhanna is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He earned his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University and has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Whiting Foundation. His research focuses on encyclopedic literature in the Islamic world and Europe, the cultural production of the Mamluk Empire, and the problem of the vernacular in different literary traditions. Muhanna’s publications include an abridged translation of al-Nuwayri’s encyclopedia, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, for Penguin Classics. He is heavily involved in the digital humanities. He edited The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies (De Gruyter, 2016). He is the creator of the Digital Islamic Humanities Project at Brown, a multi-year initiative that convenes an annual conference and hosts a variety of research activities. He is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker’s online edition, and his essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and other periodicals. His blog, Qifa Nabki, is a forum for intellectual exchange and debate on Levantine politics. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Described as a small book about a very large book, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Elias Muhanna tells the story of an encyclopedia, or a universal compendium, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition in Mamluk Egypt, written by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri. It covered multiple facets of knowledge, from science to history. He talks to us about his inspiration for the book, the structure, the content, and the context of the Ultimate Ambition, its afterlife in the Muslim and the European world and the role of book history in Middle Eastern history. Elias Muhanna is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He earned his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University and has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Whiting Foundation. His research focuses on encyclopedic literature in the Islamic world and Europe, the cultural production of the Mamluk Empire, and the problem of the vernacular in different literary traditions. Muhanna’s publications include an abridged translation of al-Nuwayri’s encyclopedia, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, for Penguin Classics. He is heavily involved in the digital humanities. He edited The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies (De Gruyter, 2016). He is the creator of the Digital Islamic Humanities Project at Brown, a multi-year initiative that convenes an annual conference and hosts a variety of research activities. He is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker’s online edition, and his essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and other periodicals. His blog, Qifa Nabki, is a forum for intellectual exchange and debate on Levantine politics. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Described as a small book about a very large book, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Elias Muhanna tells the story of an encyclopedia, or a universal compendium, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition in Mamluk Egypt, written by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri. It covered multiple facets of knowledge, from science to history. He talks to us about his inspiration for the book, the structure, the content, and the context of the Ultimate Ambition, its afterlife in the Muslim and the European world and the role of book history in Middle Eastern history. Elias Muhanna is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He earned his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University and has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Whiting Foundation. His research focuses on encyclopedic literature in the Islamic world and Europe, the cultural production of the Mamluk Empire, and the problem of the vernacular in different literary traditions. Muhanna’s publications include an abridged translation of al-Nuwayri’s encyclopedia, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, for Penguin Classics. He is heavily involved in the digital humanities. He edited The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies (De Gruyter, 2016). He is the creator of the Digital Islamic Humanities Project at Brown, a multi-year initiative that convenes an annual conference and hosts a variety of research activities. He is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker’s online edition, and his essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and other periodicals. His blog, Qifa Nabki, is a forum for intellectual exchange and debate on Levantine politics. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Described as a small book about a very large book, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Elias Muhanna tells the story of an encyclopedia, or a universal compendium, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition in Mamluk Egypt, written by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri. It covered multiple facets of knowledge, from science to history. He talks to us about his inspiration for the book, the structure, the content, and the context of the Ultimate Ambition, its afterlife in the Muslim and the European world and the role of book history in Middle Eastern history. Elias Muhanna is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He earned his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University and has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Whiting Foundation. His research focuses on encyclopedic literature in the Islamic world and Europe, the cultural production of the Mamluk Empire, and the problem of the vernacular in different literary traditions. Muhanna’s publications include an abridged translation of al-Nuwayri’s encyclopedia, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, for Penguin Classics. He is heavily involved in the digital humanities. He edited The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies (De Gruyter, 2016). He is the creator of the Digital Islamic Humanities Project at Brown, a multi-year initiative that convenes an annual conference and hosts a variety of research activities. He is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker’s online edition, and his essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and other periodicals. His blog, Qifa Nabki, is a forum for intellectual exchange and debate on Levantine politics. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elias Muhanna, an expert in classical Arabic literature at the Watson Institute's Middle East Studies program, remembers a childhood road trip in Lebanon and what it taught him about war and hope.

with Elias Muhannahosted by Chris Gratien and Zoe Griffithreadings by Nora LessersohnDownload the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudClassical encyclopedias and compendia such as Pliny’s Natural History have long been known to Western audiences, but the considerably more recent works of medieval Islamic scholars have been comparatively ignored. In this episode, we talk to Elias Muhanna about his new translation of a fourteenth-century Arabic compendium by Egyptian scholar Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, which covers everything from astrological and natural phenomena to religion, politics, food, animals, sex, and of course history. Al-Nuwayri’s compendium, entitled The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition (Nihayat al-arab fi funun al-adab), is rare glimpse into not only the worldview of a 14th century scholar but also the centuries of texts and learning available to the literati of the Mamluk Empire and the medieval Islamicate world.« Click for More »

with Elias Muhannahosted by Chris Gratien and Zoe Griffithreadings by Nora LessersohnDownload the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudClassical encyclopedias and compendia such as Pliny’s Natural History have long been known to Western audiences, but the considerably more recent works of medieval Islamic scholars have been comparatively ignored. In this episode, we talk to Elias Muhanna about his new translation of a fourteenth-century Arabic compendium by Egyptian scholar Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, which covers everything from astrological and natural phenomena to religion, politics, food, animals, sex, and of course history. Al-Nuwayri’s compendium, entitled The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition (Nihayat al-arab fi funun al-adab), is rare glimpse into not only the worldview of a 14th century scholar but also the centuries of texts and learning available to the literati of the Mamluk Empire and the medieval Islamicate world.« Click for More »