Hello and thanks for visiting this site.
There are quite a few dual-language Arabic-English books on the market but these are mainly for children. My short story book - "Three Stories From Cairo" is a dual-language book written in English and also translated into Arabic by the Egyptian poet Mohamed Metwalli and I.
These are complex fiction works for an adult readership; and as well as giving an unusual and entertaining insight into the city of Cairo where I live and teach, are also ideal for advanced readers who are interested in expanding their knowledge of English and Arabic through the use of a dual-language text.
Originally, I wanted to publish this work as an Ebook through BookBaby.com until I discovered that most electronic book readers are not programmed to display Arabic, and therefore major Ebook publishers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony don't deal with books in the Arabic language. So I've decided to create a PDF of the book in English and Arabic and make it available to buy on this website.
The book costs $9.99 and comes in the form of 2 separate PDF files (one in English and the other in Arabic). On payment through PAYPAL I will send you the files by email within 24 hours. My Email address is gretchenmccullough@rocketmail.com
An English-only Ebook version for Kindle and other Ebook readers will shortly be available through BookBaby and major Ebook publishers for $3.99
You can read some reviews in English and Arabic below
To see all my work, please click here to visit my website: www.gretchenmccullough.com
To see all my work, please click here to visit my website: www.gretchenmccullough.com
Thanks
Gretchen McCullough
Don Noble's review of "Three Stories From Cairo" from the Tuscaloosa News:
These three
stories, all set in Cairo ,
make use of some of these experiences and exude a sense of the magical.
The first story is told from the point of view of Keiko, a
Japanese girl in Cairo preparing to return home
to teach Arabic to businessmen in Tokyo .
The apartment above her is supposed to be empty, but Keiko hears noises. Cairo is noisy. Of course
the Bawab, the super, tells her she is imagining things, especially “drilling”
noises. In fact, the key has been rented, loaned and copied so often that there
actually is a woman up there sewing belly dancer costumes. A part-time
prostitute uses the place, as does a young man. In a flight of fancy,
McCullough describes a herd of cats who congregate there, complete with
dialogue. “Fat Louie played the piano. Sasha played the drums.” Everyone lies
to the foreigner. No matter. She will leave soon.
In “Taken Hostage by the Ugly Duck,” Hada, an uptight
conventional housewife disappointed with her own life, is scandalized by the
British gay man across the alley. He is often naked, entertains young men,
makes a lot of noise. To retaliate, she buys, inexplicably, a great blue heron
that “yaws” noisily at him. He counters by buying a parrot that sings, loudly,
“Wait a minute, Mr. Postman,” and “I’m on the top of the world, looking down on
creation.”
When the flat across the alley goes silent, Hada misses the
excitement and even imagines foul play.
“The Story of Fresh Springs” is a murder mystery, sort of.
Two young women, Pomegranate and Peach, are murdered. Detectives Hawks and
Falcon are on the case.
In time, a virile young man “Superboy,” a kind of acrobat,
is arrested probably wrongly, since it seems he has really been using his
athletic skills to climb up trees and into the bedrooms of willing, bored
housewives.
Like McCullough’s other stories, this too ascends into the
metaphorical/fantastic as the detectives quell crowd unrest by threatening to
let loose a pack of cross-eyed Chihuahuas ,
trained to chew off the big toes of protesters.
The physical volume of these Cairo stories itself reflects the
international nature of her work. First, one reads the stories “normally,” from
the front to the middle of the book. Then, if able, one can read the stories in
Arabic translation, a collaboration between McCullough and Egyptian poet and
editor Mohamed Metwalli, from the back of the book to the middle, there meeting
the end of the English version.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gretchen McCullough was raised in Harlingen Texas Japan .
She earned her MFA from the University
of Alabama and was awarded a teaching
Fulbright to Syria
from 1997-1999. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Texas Review, The
Alaska Quarterly Review, the Barcelona Review, Archipelago, National Public
Radio, Storysouth, Storyglossia, and Guernica .
Translations in English and Arabic with Mohamed Metwalli include: Nizwa, Banipal,
Brooklynrail in Translation, Al-Mustaqbel.
Currently she is a Senior Instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Composition at the American University in Cairo
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Mohamed Metwalli was born in Cairo in 1970. He was awarded a B.A. in English Literature f rom Cairo University, Faculty of Arts in 1992. The same year, he won the Yussef el-Khale prize by Riyad el-Rayes Publishers in Lebanon for his poetry collection, Once Upon a Time. He co-founded an independent literary magazine, el-Garad in which his second volume of poems appeared, The Story the People Tell in the Harbor, 1998. He was selected to represent Egypt in the International Writers' Program, IWP, at the University of Iowa in 1997. Later he was Poet-in-Residence at the University of Chicago in 1998. He compiled and co-edited an anthology of Off-beat Egyptian Poetry, Angry Voices, published by the University of Arkansas press in 2002. His most recent collection, Lost Promenades, was published al-Kitaba al-Ukhra in 2010.
"ثلاث قصص من القاهرة" مجموعة قصصية للأمريكية جرتشن ماكولة
الجمعة، 22 يوليو 2011 - 22:32
مجموعة "ثلاث قصص من القاهرة"
كتب بلال رمضان
صدر حديثاً عن آفاق للنشر والتوزيع بالقاهرة مجموعة قصصية بعنوان "ثلات قصص من القاهرة" للكاتبة الأمريكية المقيمة فى مصر جرتشن ماكولة.
والكتاب العربى الإنجليزى يجمع القصص الثلاث مكتوبة بالإنجليزية مع الترجمة العربية التى قام بها الشاعر المصرى محمد متولى واشتركت معه الكاتبة فى الترجمة، وقد قام بعمل تصميم الغلاف والرسوم الداخلية الفنان والممثل البريطانى المعروف لورانس روديك.
والكاتبة جرتشن ماكوله نشأت فى هارلنجن بولاية تكساس، وبعد تخرجها فى جامعة براون عام 1984، قامت بالتدريس فى مصر وتركيا واليابان.
حصلت على درجة الماجستير(MFA) من جامعة ألاباما، حيث حصلت على منحة الفولبرايت للتدريس فى سورية من 1997 حتى 1999.ظهرت لها قصص ومقالات فى العديد من المجلات المرموقة. وتقوم حاليا بتدريس الكتابة الإبداعية بالجامعة الأمريكية بالقاهرة.
ومترجم الكتاب هو الشاعر المصرى محمد متولى أحد مؤسسى مجلة الجراد والتى ظهر ديوانه الثانى ضمن إصداراتها بينما نال جائزة يوسف الخال عن ديوانه الأول، مثل بلاده فى مؤتمر الكتابة الدولى بجامعة أيوا بالولايات المتحدة عام 1997، واستضافته جامعة شيكاغو كشاعر مقيم صيف 1998، نشرت مجموعته الشعرية الأخيرة" النزهات المفقودة" ضمن اصدارات الكتابة الأخرى 2010.
والكتاب العربى الإنجليزى يجمع القصص الثلاث مكتوبة بالإنجليزية مع الترجمة العربية التى قام بها الشاعر المصرى محمد متولى واشتركت معه الكاتبة فى الترجمة، وقد قام بعمل تصميم الغلاف والرسوم الداخلية الفنان والممثل البريطانى المعروف لورانس روديك.
والكاتبة جرتشن ماكوله نشأت فى هارلنجن بولاية تكساس، وبعد تخرجها فى جامعة براون عام 1984، قامت بالتدريس فى مصر وتركيا واليابان.
حصلت على درجة الماجستير(MFA) من جامعة ألاباما، حيث حصلت على منحة الفولبرايت للتدريس فى سورية من 1997 حتى 1999.ظهرت لها قصص ومقالات فى العديد من المجلات المرموقة. وتقوم حاليا بتدريس الكتابة الإبداعية بالجامعة الأمريكية بالقاهرة.
ومترجم الكتاب هو الشاعر المصرى محمد متولى أحد مؤسسى مجلة الجراد والتى ظهر ديوانه الثانى ضمن إصداراتها بينما نال جائزة يوسف الخال عن ديوانه الأول، مثل بلاده فى مؤتمر الكتابة الدولى بجامعة أيوا بالولايات المتحدة عام 1997، واستضافته جامعة شيكاغو كشاعر مقيم صيف 1998، نشرت مجموعته الشعرية الأخيرة" النزهات المفقودة" ضمن اصدارات الكتابة الأخرى 2010.
| 3 Stories from Cairo - Al Masry Al Youm Review |
Read AlMasry Alyoum Review
by Marcia Lyn Qualey. Al-Masry Al-Youm in English.
At first glance, Gretchen McCullough and Mohamed Metwalli seem perfectly cast for their roles: she, the hard-working prose writer in a neatly pressed shirt, and he, the bohemian p
 oet. But despite – or because of – their differences, they form an unusual and successful translational partnership, the latest fruit of which was McCullough's bilingual short story collection "Three Stories from Cairo" translated by Metwalli and launched last month at Zamalek's Diwan bookstore.
McCullough researches her stories. She cuts things out of newspapers, particularly Egyptian cartoons, and keeps notebooks full of them. “She is industrious,” Metwalli says, rubbing his face. “I envy that.”
Metwalli writes when inspired, when the poem becomes urgent and he feels he must get it down on the page. He doesn’t walk to the poem, he says. He waits for it to materialize.
McCullough’s Texas-accented speech is slow and measured. She listens attentively and waits a few beats before she speaks. Metwalli, on the other hand, delights in letting his words race out, playing with synonyms and sayings. At the Zamalek book signing, his remarks made audience members alternately giggle and shift uncomfortably in their seats.
McCullough is an instructor at the American University in Cairo and evinces a sense of duty about her work. At times, she seems to envy Metwalli’s free spirit. As to why he’s translated some of her stories but not others, she said, “Mohamed doesn’t do things unless he likes them.”
When interviewed after their book signing, McCullough attempted to treat every question seriously. But Metwalli laughed off several reporters. He seemed to find two young female reporters particularly amusing, and later did an imitation of one who’d asked, of McCullough’s book, “Excuse me, but is she saying bad things about our culture?”
They are not always the mischievous poet and the serious prose writer. Metwalli’s poems are in many ways more serious than McCullough’s playful stories. And Metwalli is particularly earnest when discussing which poets are (and aren’t) worth reading.
Their translational partnership started in 2008, not long after they met through poet Maged Zaher. McCullough has helped to bring a number of Metwalli’s poems into English, and he has translated several of her short stories into Arabic. Metwalli’s “The Story of Light” recently appeared in translation at The Brooklyn Rail.
It’s common enough that a translator would question the author about a tricky or ambiguous passage. Some authors and translators develop a close working relationship as they make their way through several drafts of a story or novel. But McCullough and Metwalli take this yet further: “It’s just like sitting side by side together,” she said, “and translating, painstakingly, sentence by sentence.”
With Metwalli’s poetry, he said, McCullough was his “idiomatic adviser,” telling him when a word was too flat or overused. The poems are polished to clarity, reading as though they had been written in English:
Long ago a primitive man went out to his forest / He saw the moon above / Hit it with a stone and hurt its feelings / Since then the moon leaked light / From the opening in its dim glass.
For McCullough, Metwalli was both her stories’ translator and their champion. He was the one who encouraged her to publish the collection. Although he chose the three shortest stories – complaining that the others were more like “novellas” – the process was not quick. Each paragraph was a journey.
“That’s why I was joking that it would take 150 years to translate 30 pages,” McCullough said. “We would do a page, a paragraph.” They’d say “today, we’re going to work on the translation. Today, we’re going to work on another paragraph.” And through all that, she said, they were “having lots of discussions and fights.”
When rebuilding Metwalli’s poems in English, McCullough talked through individual words and phrasings that felt wrong. She said that Metwalli’s English translations of his poetry would sometimes have “the correct word but not the poetic word.”
“Even though he’s really, really fluent in English,” McCullough said, “there’s still lots of things he doesn’t know.”
McCullough said that, in turning her stories into Arabic, syntax was the biggest challenge. “Just the structure of the language is so different,” she said. “My inclination is still to want to write a sentence in English, but in Arabic.”
The partnership has certainly affected their availability to different audiences. But it also may have changed the creative trajectory of their work. Metwalli scoffed at questions about whether McCullough has exoticized certain aspects of Egyptian life. But McCullough said that, in fact, he had questioned some of her portraits. “I had one [story] that he criticized and he thought it was Orientalist.”
McCullough’s Cairo stories have developed since she started writing them in 2005, she said. “Maybe in the beginning they were a bit more Orientalist,” she said. “Maybe having other people read them… It’s also having different kinds of readers.”
McCullough’s stories were also visually “translated” by theater artist Laurence Rudic, who did the stories’ accompanying black and white illustrations. In including illustrations, McCullough said, she was inspired by Mahmoud Salem’s “Adventures of the Five.”
“We were trying to do something that’s fun,” McCullough said. “A pleasurable, small read.”
She would like to compile the rest of her Cairo stories, although it might not be Metwalli who translates them into Arabic.
“It’s very stimulating and it’s very interesting and I think it’s a very interesting linguistic exercise,” McCullough said of their co-translations. But “it’s not speedy and it’s not practical. If we were trying to make a living out of it, forget it.”.
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