Some Little Language: Translating Love and Loss in Muslim Spain

Yasmine Seale (b. 1989, London) is a writer and artist whose work includes poetry, criticism, translation and printmaking. Among her translations from Arabic are The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton, 2021), described by the New Yorker as “an electric new translation”, and Something Evergreen Called Life, a collection of poems by the Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun (Action Books, 2022). She is the co-author of Agitated Air (Tenement Press, 2022), a collaboration with Robin Moger responding to the visionary poet and metaphysician Ibn Arabi. Her reviews and essays on literature, art, myth, archaeology and film have appeared in Harper’s, Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry Review, Times Literary Supplement, Apollo, frieze and elsewhere. She serves on the advisory board of City of Asylum, a nonprofit organization that supports writers in exile, and her visual works are in the permanent collection of the British Museum. She has given talks and lectures at universities including Yale, Harvard, Oxford and SOAS, and has performed her work internationally from the Maison de la Poésie in Paris to the Lahore Literary Festival. Her honors include the 2020 Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from PEN America, the Wolfson Foundation, Koç University in Istanbul, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. She is currently a fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She also teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University.