7/6/2023 0 Comments Prota culture![]() ![]() Published in 1992 by Brill, this book is the first ever to compressively cover all major aspects of Islamic civilization in medieval Spain. This two-volume work included contributions from more than 42 specialists in Europe, the US, and the Arab world and covered all aspects of the Islamic civilization in Andalusia. Jayyusi edited The Legacy of Muslim Spain. This includes massive encyclopedias of Arabic literature, such as the anthologies published by Columbia University Press (1987, 1988, 1992, 1993, and 1994) of modern Arabic poetry and an anthology on modern Arabic drama (Indiana University Press, 1995). Her involvement was intense and deeply committed:Īs founder and director of PROTA, Jayyusi edited more than 30 works, and supervised the publishing of more than 50. With the support of the university in New York, and later with funds from the Iraqi Ministry of Information and Culture, she completed and published the Arabic poetry encyclopedia, and then launched PROTA. Initially, the director of Columbia University Press, John Moore, invited Jayyusi to prepare a comprehensive anthology of modern Arabic literature. In 1980, Jayyusi founded the Project of Translation from Arabic (PROTA) with the aim to bring Arab culture to the broader world and to provide the best translation of Arabic literature into English. The education they received focused on the accomplishments of the West education of Arab civilization and culture was absent. She was angered that her generation, raised during the British Mandate of Palestine, had no awareness whatsoever about the rich Arab culture and folklore. ![]() She was deeply dismayed that so few Arabic literary works had been translated into English and by the weak methodology evident in those that had been translated. Jayyusi took it as her mission to encourage the wider dissemination of Arabic literature and culture to English-speaking readers. This included the translation of Louise Bogan’s Achievement in American Poetry, 1900–1950 (1960), Ralph Barton Perry’s The Humanity of Man (1961), Archibald MacLeish’s Poetry and Experience (1962), and Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet. In the 1960s, she translated various works from English to Arabic. She published her first book of poetry in 1960, titled Returning to the Spring of the Dreamer (also translated as Return from the Dreamy Fountain). Her son and firstborn, Usama, passed away in 2015 at age 68 they had been especially close, as she shared in a 1986 poem called “To Usama”: “Without your presence / All time of day and night are void.” 2 In an interview some years later, she described Usama’s death as “a bitter blow that overshadowed everything.” 3 Boullata described her work as “one of the best historical and analytical studies of Arabic poetry of the last hundred years.” 1 The Jerusalem academic, scholar, and literary translator Issa J. Her dissertation was titled “Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry.” She would expand this study in later years and publish it with Brill in two extensive volumes in 1977 totaling more than 900 pages. ![]() ![]() She received her PhD in Arabic literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University, in 1970. Three years later, they moved to Kuwait where she became involved with Palestinian women’s groups. The Jayyusi family returned to Amman after the 1958 revolution in Iraq. Living in Baghdad in the 1950s, her knowledge of Arabic literature and especially poetry grew deeper. Jayyusi’s diplomat husband was subsequently transferred to Rome, Madrid, Baghdad, and London, and during that time she studied, wrote, and translated while raising their three children-Usama, Lena, and May. This deeply affected Jayyusi she mentioned Balbisi in various articles. The next spring, one of her most beloved students, Hayat Balbisi, was killed during the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, at the age of 18. A diplomat, he worked at the Jordanian Consulate in Jerusalem until 1947, when he moved to Jordan she moved with him. In 1946, Jayyusi married Burhan Kamal Jayyusi, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin and fellow student at the AUB who studied political science. ![]()
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