Modern Arabic Short Stories: A Bilingual Reader (Arabic Edition)

I am an Arabic student with a strong command of MSA when it comes to Arabic media. I can read and watch Al Jazeera and speak MSA with reasonable fluency. This book is great for taking your Arabic up to the literary level. The language notes are fantastic and helpful at revealing linguistic nuances and cultural/literary references. The English translation is a bit clunky so I would not recommend this book to someone who cannot read Arabic and is looking for a good English translation of Arabic stories to read. The translation is there to help Arabic students and it does a good job of it.

This is a really great book for the advanced learner of Arabic (bare minimum of 2+ ILR reading, but even 3+'s and 4's will be challenged). The authors take a lot of idiomatic license in the translations, which could be confusing for less advanced students, but this approach is great for those who are at the abstract level. The footnotes for language and cultural references are excellent, and the selection of stories from around the Arab would is very diverse and constantly refreshing.

The stories were excellent. But the translation philosophy is to veer off the Arabic many a times and avoid translating some words altogether. As such this book would be a 5 star for story-value but a 2 star for learning value. The student would have to make significant effort and spend a lot of time to find literal translations of many words because of how far the translaters often veered off the original Arabic. I suspect this is an issue translaters fight with i.e. whether to stay literal or grasp the essence and use the receiving language in its own way to express the idea. Both philosophies have their merit but for a student of Arabic the former philosophy would be much more valuable.

This is the perspective of reading the book in Arabic from a native English speaker:How do I describe a collection of short stories like this? Clearly, it is impossible to doubt the quality of the stories, each of which was interesting and entertaining in its own right. My favorites were the `Tale of the Lamp' in which we see a starved traveler stumble upon a rich kingdom, and `The Night and the Sea' which painted a bleak but moving picture with its rich descriptions and overwhelming emotions.Unfortunately, the beautiful use of language means that the language is also suitably hard. Devilishly hard. Consider the first sentence of the first (supposedly easiest) story:They claimed, and god knows it was true, that it was a year of drought, famine, misery, hunger and starvation, god preserve us all. P. 18Or this sentence from Naguib Mahfouz's short story about Siamese twins:They would clash in a vortex of fiery and crazed outbursts. A raging wave would emerge from the depths, removing any sense of shame while impetuosity superseded regret. P. 126I would like to think of myself as an advanced student, despite my terrible writing, but I found many of these stories extraordinarily hard. Were it not for the translations in English these stories would have been too much to handle. I tried to read the entire Arabic story before resorting to the English translation however I found myself switching back after only a page to make sure that I understood the next section in Arabic. Also, when I showed the book to a group of Saudi friends, and as soon as one opened up the book and read the first sentence, one asked me '''' '''''' after saying, "This stuff is hard for us too."Considering the difficulty of the texts, the structure of footnotes and translation is important. But I was disappointed by how the book placed footnotes and the end of the story, necessitating multiple bookmarks and needless page flipping. Worse, the translations did not line up with the Arabic, and often spilled over on to the next page. So reading these stories was harder than it could have been.In the end, the important thing is that there are translations, and for that this book deserves praise. But be warned, if you want to read this for its Arabic content, be prepared for a challenge.

A good compendium for learning, practice, and review. Contains essential elements of vocabulary, semantics, and rigor. Great primer if you can use a dictionary.

I bought this for my kindle, and it is useless as a bilingual reader. The Arabic script is an image file rather than text, and in quite small font at that, and you can't zoom in, highlight, etc. Worse, the structure makes it basically impossible to flip back and forth from Arabic to English, as there is no clear order or system.Rating reflects a review of the Kindle Version, not the texts themselves. In fact, the stories seem great (if challenging).

Good literature. Good, practical translation. Highly recommend it as a learning aid.Though I'd recommend getting a hard copy. The kindle version doesn't show translation and original Arabic text on the same screen. And the Arabic text is an image- you can zoom in but it's uncomfortable to navigate.

I am an advanced Arabic speaker, and I love the layout/format/idea of the book. There are footnotes in the Arabic text that are extremely helpful in catching the nuances of the language. The stories are powerful.However, the English translation of these stories is some of the worst I have ever seen, and I am surprised that they were published. Any advanced Arabic student with a dictionary can verify that key descriptors, clauses, and ideas are completely omitted or adulterated. In general, the language of the translated English text is choppy and does not really do much to preserve the original flavor of the text.

Arabic text not good in the ebook. It is an image rather than text. The size is too small and does not cover the whole screen making it almost unreadable unless you zoom it.

This is a great book for the right reader. What is important to understand is not all books are pitched at readers of any level.This book is intended for someone who is comfortable with the basic ideas of Arabic... grammar sentence contruction etc. And who can read without vowels. Not a beginner.For that level of reader this book will broaden their vocab naturally but expose them to various expressions and phrases that are difficult to come up with yourself or understand if you are not a native speaker.The translation is not necessarily word for word but conveying the ideas. That may or may not be to everyone's taste and it is one of challenges of translation.

Interessante Geschichten. Dazu noch Hintergruninformationen. Tolle Ausgabe

utile per chi già ha qualche conoscenza delle basi grammaticali della lingua araba. È una raccolta di brevi brani dei maggiori scrittori arabi tradotti con testo inglese a fronte. ogni brano è preceduto da una breve scheda, in inglese, introduttiva sull'autore.

The book is more than my expectations.I’m loving the beautiful stories, it’s a bit challenging but that’s what I wanted.