Book Launch & Reading

Book Launch for Anna Gréki’s <em>Algeria, Capital: Algiers</em> translated by Marine Cornuet

Fri, Nov 8, 2024

7:00 PM–8:30 PM

The Word is Change Bookstore, 368 Tompkins Ave. (at Putnam), Brooklyn, NY 11216. Free and open to all.

On Friday, November 8th, 7pm at The Word is Change bookstore in Brooklyn, NY we gathered to launch Anna Gréki’s Algeria, Capital: Algiers ! Translator Marine Cornuet read alongside science-fiction writer Radhika Singh and translator and poet David Iaconangelo. Enjoy the slideshow of photos from the reading below:

Anna Gréki (1931-1966) was an Algerian poet of French descent. A member of the Algerian Communist Party, she was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned in 1957 for her participation in the Algerian liberation struggle. Algérie, capitale Alger, a collection of poems Gréki wrote while in prison, was published in 1963 in a French and Arabic bilingual edition.

Algeria, capital: Algiers, translated by Marine Cornuet with an introduction by Ammiel Alcalay, makes this work available to English readers for the first time.

Of Gréki, Marilyn Hacker says:

“…a French poet born in Algeria, anti-colonialist (imprisoned for that) as Algeria battled for independence, writing in French, like Kateb Yacine, to show her freedom from French hegemony, but also her freedom as a woman writer to forge a transcendent and engaged poetics.”

Of the translation, Omar Berrada says:

“Marine Cornuet’s translation deftly conveys Greki’s intimate language of the senses, to “transcribe with words what is done without them.””

Read poems by Anna Greki and more about the book here, a co-publication from Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and Pinsapo Press, and to order the book visit our website here and on Pinsapo’s site here.