Al Koni on translation

A little item at the Literary Saloon recently about Lybian author Ibrahim Al Koni caught my eye. Al Koni was talking about translation at the Dubai literature festival recently. This reminded me that his novel “Nazeef Al Hajar” (“The Bleeding of the Stone”) was one of the great discoveries and pleasures of a language-cum-literature class I took last year with Professor Hussein Hamouda, of Cairo University. A number of his other novels–mostly set among tribes in the Lybian desert–have also been translated. I can’t describe how powerful and original his work is.