AUC faculty win international translation award

Ferial Ghazoul, chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at The American University in Cairo (AUC), and John Verlenden, writing instructor at the Department of Rhetoric and Composition, have won the University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award for 2013. They received the award in recognition of their work, translating Chronicles of Majnun Layla and Selected Poems of Qassim Haddad. The award is administered by the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies, under the J. William Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences, University of Arkansas. Ghazoul and Verlenden’s manuscript will be published by Syracuse University Press. The translators and poet also split a prize of $10,000.

Ghazoul and Verlenden have been translating as a team in Cairo since 1995. Their first project, Quartet of Joy by Muhammad Afifi Matar, also won the Arkansas award (1997). In between that prize and this most recent award, the team translated the Naguib Mahfouz award-winning novel, Rama and the Dragon by Edwar Al-Kharrat (AUC Press, 2002). They have also contributed groups of poems by Saadi Youssef and Qassim Haddad to Banipal, the prominent London-based magazine for Arabic literature translated to English. 

In addition to teaching at the University, Verlenden writes fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Ghazoul is also the editor of Alif: Journal of Comparative Politics, a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal at AUC on critical scholarship, published annually in Arabic, English and French.

Born in 1948, Qassim Haddad is Bahrain’s best-known poet. His reworking of the Majnun Layla poem cycle and his copious output from aphoristic short poems to longer, free verse experiments have led to international recognition. The U.S.-based National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a substantial grant to Ghazoul and Verlenden in 2010 for the Qassim Haddad Translation Project.