{"id":305856,"date":"2017-04-10T14:28:01","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T14:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2017\/04\/10\/in-praise-of-defeat-by-abdellatif-laabi-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-04T14:28:45","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T14:28:45","slug":"in-praise-of-defeat-by-abdellatif-laabi-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2017\/04\/10\/in-praise-of-defeat-by-abdellatif-laabi-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“In Praise of Defeat” by Abdellatif La\u00e2bi [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists<\/a> and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win<\/a> series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and read!<\/em><\/p>\n

The entry below is the first about the poetry longlist,<\/a> and is written by Emma Ramadan, translator from the French and co-owner of Riffraff bookstore and bar<\/a> in Providence, RI.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<b”In Praise of Defeat<\/em>“:https:\/\/archipelagobooks.org\/book\/in-praise-of-defeat\/ by Abdellatif La\u00e2bi, translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Morocco, Archipelago Books)<\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 53%<\/b><\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA<\/span>: 11%<\/b><\/p>\n

Abdellatif La\u00e2bi\u2019s In Praise of Defeat<\/em>, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, is an 800+ page proof of poetic genius. I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve ever read another book of poetry in translation where the electric connection between translator and author produced such gripping results. The book contains a selection of poems, chosen by the author, of his poetic work from the late 1960s to 2014, aka his entire poetic range.<\/p>\n

hear the clash of languages
\nin my mouth
\nthe thirst for new births
\nhear the swish of sweat
\nat my underarms
\nthe ripple of my biceps
\ndriven by my inner fauna
\nspringing from caves
\npen bloodied
\nmy head against every wall
\nmy breath at the gallop
\nspewing planets
\nin its eruptions<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you\u2019ve heard La\u00e2bi\u2019s name before, it might be because he co-founded the journal Souffles<\/em> in 1966, during Morocco\u2019s \u201cyears of lead,\u201d as a way for artists and intellectuals to wage a written war for democratic ideals under a monarchy persecuting independent and progressive thinking. King Hassan II began implementing torture and imprisonment, and poets were not immune. Abdellatif La\u00e2bi was himself tortured and then imprisoned for more than eight years for his political beliefs and writings. Many of the poems in In Praise of Defeat<\/em> were in fact written while he was serving his sentence in Kenitra prison.<\/p>\n

Write, write, never stop. Tonight and all the nights to come. Another night when I can do nothing but write, confront this silence that provokes me with its idiom of exile. I brace myself to the full to explore the voice of the prison night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These poems give us an idea of what it means to be a Moroccan poet. For La\u00e2bi and his compatriots, politics and poetry were one and the same, every poet a combatant, spurred on by the desperate necessity of continued resistance on the page.<\/p>\n

The sun is dying
\nwith human murmurs on its lips
\nChaos will come and clear the stage
\nof this old tragedy
\ntold a thousand times
\nby an idiot
\nin an empty theater
\nThere will be another eternity
\nof roiled absence
\ndueling masks
\nand the failure to write<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[65886,35996,64586,49386,59176,60166,65876,37876],"class_list":["post-305856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-abdellatif-laabi","tag-btba","tag-btba-2017","tag-btba-poetry","tag-donald-nicholson-smith","tag-emma-ramadan","tag-in-praise-of-defeat","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305856"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":396692,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305856\/revisions\/396692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}