music.wikisort.org - Poet

Yasmine Seale (b. 1989) is a British-Syrian writer and literary translator who works in English, Arabic, and French.[1][2][3][4] She is the first woman to translate the entirety of The Arabian Nights from French and Arabic.[5][1] In addition to her written work, she also speaks publicly and gives workshops on theory and practice of English-Arabic translation.[6][7] In 2020, she received the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry.[8]

As of 2021, she is working on a translation of Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi's early 18th-century work "Perfuming Humanity by Interpreting Dreams."[9][10] She is also translating the work of Al-Khansa.[3][11]

Critical reception

Robyn Creswell writes in The New York Review that Seale's translation of The Thousand and One Nights "has a texture – tight, smooth, skillfully patterned – that make previous versions seem either garish or slightly dull by comparison."[12]

Personal life

Seale was raised in Europe and grew up speaking English, Arabic, and French.[13][14] Her mother is Syrian, and her father is Tunisian-Russian and was raised in the United Kingdom.[14] She previously lived in Istanbul and is currently based in Paris.[15]

Partial list of works

Poetry

• "Conventional Wisdom" (winner of the 2020 Queen Mary Qasafiri New Writing Prize)[8][16]

Translation

• Aladdin: A New Translation (edited by Paulo Lemos Horta, 2018)[17]
• The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights (edited by Paulo Lemos Horta, with foreword by Omar El Ekkad and afterword by Robert Irwin, 2021)[18][19][20][21]
• "The Gap" by Maya Abu al-Hayyat (short story) (published in All Walls Collapse: Stories of Separation, edited by Will Forrester and Sarah Cleave, 2022)[22][23]
• Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi, with Robin Moger (ed. Dominic Jaeckle, 2022)[24][25]

Essays and articles

• "The Travels of a Master Storyteller," The Paris Review, May 2021 (first published as foreword to Elias Muhanna's translation of Hanna Diyab's The Book of Travels)[26][27][28]
• "After the Revolution: Three novels of Egypt's repressive present," Harper's Magazine, January 2018[29]
• "Camera Ottomana," on Ottoman photography, FRIEZE, September 2015[30]
• "Q v. K," on Turkish alphabet politics, LRB blog, October 2013[31]

References

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