On Sardines and Oranges

I miss Banipal. It was a wonderful magazine that translated Arabic literary work — poetry, short stories, criticism, even novels — for a wider audience, and this book is a Banipal collection of a few dozen short stories from Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia. I’m not sure that grouping makes much cultural sense; it reflects sheer geography more than anything, and Egypt and Sudan on one side, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia on the other, would sit better as discrete clusters. I may be being pedantic, but for good reason: there are clear affinities among the Maghrib stories and among the Nile Valley stories, but the two don’t really speak to each other beyond a vague sense of “arabicity” (عروبة) — and if that’s so, which is entirely fair, then there’s not much reason to fold in the eastern stories at all. Still, most of them were good, well translated, and meaningful, and I was glad to see that my former Arabic instructor, Professor Shakir Mustafa, did a handful of the translations.