(Comp Lit Luncheon) Anna Ziajka Stanton (Penn State) on “Translating the Untranslatable? Arabic Lafẓ in English.”

Dr. Anna Ziajka Stanton is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Penn State University. Her monograph The Worlding of Arabic Literature: Language, Affect, and the Ethics of Translatability (Fordham University Press, 2023) examines practices of translating Arabic literature into English that activate embodied forms of language and affective modes of reception to position Arabic literature ethically for circulation in the world literary system. The book was the recipient of the ACLA Helen Tartar First Book subvention and a Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) subvention to support publication of an open-access edition. Stanton’s other publications include articles in peer-reviewed journals such as the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, the Journal of World Literature, and Middle Eastern Literatures, as well as a chapter on translation in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Modern Arabic Literature. Her translation from Arabic of Hilal Chouman’s novel Limbo Beirut (2016) was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. She has been an Associate Editor at the Journal of Arabic Literature since 2018.