Rebekah Maggor
Photo by Alan Howard
Bio
Rebekah Maggor is a translator, theater director, and academic. She is assistant professor of performance at Cornell University. Her research centers on political theater and drama in translation, with an emphasis on recent Arabic drama from Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. She co-edited Tahrir Tales: Plays from the Egyptian Revolution (Seagull Books/University of Chicago Press) and her forthcoming collection New Plays from Palestine: Theatre Between Home and Exile, co-edited with Marvin Carlson and Mas’ud Hamdan, will be published by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications. As a director, Maggor has staged her translations at venues across the U.S., including the Huntington Theatre Company, Golden Thread Theatre, PEN World Voices Festival, the Segal Theatre Centre, Harvard University, and Cornell University. She has received grants from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation’s Theatre Communication Group Global Connections, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, among others.
Project Description
To support (in collaboration with Mas'ud Hamdan) the translation from the Arabic of New Plays from Palestine: Theatre Between Home and Exile by Mas'ud Hamdan, Rama Haydar, and Bashar Murkus. This collection brings together bold and original new works by Palestinian writers from Damascus, Haifa, and the village of Isifya. The plays offer grassroots perspectives on war, exile, occupation, and displacement, and push the boundaries of dramatic form. This translation will make a major contribution to the small extant body of Arabic-to-English drama and the works of these three playwrights have not yet reached an American audience.
I am honored to be among the recipients of this National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. My co-translator, Mas’ud Hamdan, and I are delighted to receive this award, as it will give us the time we need to prepare our translations for publication and performance. It will also meaningfully increase the visibility of this collection of new Palestinian plays, to be published by Segal Theatre Center Publications. Most importantly, it will draw much-deserved attention to these excellent playwrights. There is a rich canon of Palestinian drama in Arabic, and we are gratified to contribute to the small, but growing list of these works now available in English translation. For me personally, this award comes at a vital moment in my career. I have dedicated much time and effort to fostering awareness around the creativity and complexity involved in dramatic translation and the crucial role it plays in the practice and research of theater, and cultural circulation more broadly. There is a general misconception that translation is simply a substitution of linguistic equivalents—a technical chore that any bilingual person, or even a computer program, can accomplish. But translators travel far beyond the words on a page to a nexus of research and creative writing. We study the historical context, the political currents, and the artistic influences that flowed into a text and then, with faithfulness, doggedness, and flights of fancy, reconstruct them in another language and culture. As the NEA makes clear through this prestigious fellowship, the translation of literature is an imaginative and intellectual endeavor, and I am most grateful for the legitimacy this award lends to my work.