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.