| Why This Journal? |
| Sabry Hafez |
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The editor outlines the rationale behind the launch of Al-Kalimah, in cyberspace. He sets out the Arabic cultural context in which it emerges, the need for a free debating space, and the role it hopes to play in re-establishing the power of the independent word, and explains the present status of the English site of The Word, until it becomes fully bilingual.
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| West-East Divan or Procrustean Bed? |
| Nicola Liscutin |
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The translation of Rashid al-Daif's recent book into German engendered a wide debate. But none of the articles on the issue presented a thorough reading of the German text, and the strategies of its form. Here Al-Kalimah offers the first critical analysis of this text by the German critic and scholar, Nicola Liscutin.
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| My Fathers Suitcase: Nobel Lecture |
| Orhan Pamuk |
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Confronting a suitcase full of notebooks left by his father, himself a writer, Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer, experienced troubling emotions - anxiety, rivalry, shame. Here the Nobel laureate pays tribute to his most loyal reader, his real father, and his symbolic one, European literature
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| Village Small Talk |
| Mahmud Tahir Lashin |
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This short story which was first published in 1929 is widely recognized as the first mature Arabic short story. Its theme of the frustrated secular intellectual and narrow-minded religiosity is still relevant and reverberates in the present Arab condition.
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| Fear and Money In Dubai |
| Mike Davis |
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As your jet starts its descent, you are glued to your window. The scene below is astonishing: a 24-square-mile archipelago of coral-coloured islands in the shape of an almost-finished puzzle of the world. In the shallow green waters between continents, the sunken shapes of the Pyramids of Giza and the Roman Colosseum are clearly visible
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| Alexandria: From Nasser to Lawrence Durrell |
| Mona Anis |
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In December 2007 the Alexandria Library and the British Council in Egypt organized a celebration to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Here Mona Anis revisits the work, puts it in the context, and offers a new post-colonial reading of its different novels.
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| A State of Siege |
| Mahmoud Darwish |
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Although Mahmoud Darwish wrote this long poem during the destructive siege of 2002, its poetic power and topical relevance are still valid today on both the dire Palestinian situation, and on the wider Arab one with its varied manifestations of the mentality of a besieged nation. Al-Kalimah offers the full translation of this long poem
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| Coloured Telephones: A Dialogue |
| Fuad al-Takarli |
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In his latest text, the very last dramatic text that he wrote before his death, Fuad al-Takarli, the leading Iraqi novelist, offers his sarcastic and tragi-comic representation of the dire situation in Iraq and shows how occupation and religious mediocrity are leading the country into chaos, anarchy and destruction
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| Phantasmagorical Meeting in Iraq |
| Ali Badr |
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Ali Bader is probably the most significant novelist to emerge in Iraq in the last two decades. He offers his insights into the dichotomy of the Iraqi intellectual movement, between home and exile, and the problems Iraqi writers face during these tragic and turbulent times
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| On Translation |
| Sarah Maguire |
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Sarah Maguire, is the founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre. A selection of her poems was translated into Arabic by Saadi Yousef; Haleeb Muraq., was published by Dar Al-Mada in Damascus in 2003. Here she offers some pertinent insights into the complex process of translation, specially poetry translation.
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