This festschrift for Arabic scholar Jaroslav Stetkevych contains articles that cover the expanse of literature in Arabic, from the beginning to the present. The authors make a point of
examining works composed for a general audience, rather than the often-studied classics. These include love poems, adventure stories, folktales and epics. The influence of other literary
traditions is noted but, for the most part, the works are examined within an Arabic frame of reference, and in terms of poetic form. The exceptions to this are the final two papers. The first
compares metapoetry in English to the recent development of the subject in Arabic. The second is about a contemporary novel by the Algerian Ahlam Mustaghanami and its translation into French.
This is a look at the impossibility of making a perfect translation and also reverses the postcolonial issue of writing in the language of the dominant culture. The many translations of long
parts of the texts will allow non-Arabic readers to a least have a taste of the literature. Annotation 穢2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
