Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture

		Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 17 - 23 May 2001 Issue No.534
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Current issue \| Previous issue \| Site map

Sting meets Al-Mutannabi
THE PUBLICATION of the programme of the Baalbek Festival has generated much interest in Lebanon. Between July and August musical offerings will include Sting (whose Giza Plateau concert was both successful and problematic), composer Mansour Al-Rahbani (contributing a new, large-scale musical on the life of the great Abbasid poet Abul-Tayeb Al-Mutannabi), the Paris National Opera ballet company and a spectacular new production of Karmina Burana.
"I understand Al-Mutannabi to be a tragic poet," Al-Rahbani said in a press conference at the Lebanese Syndicate of Journalism earlier this week, "a nobleman... and a melancholy lover... His poems testify to as much..."
Cannes and must
THE 54TH Cannes Film Festival (9-21 May) opened last Wednesday with Australian director Baz Luhrmann's musical Moulin Rouge. A "$50 million extravaganza" set in the red light districts of 19th century Paris, it stars Nicole Kidman, Euan McGregor and Kylie Minogue. Competing for the Palm d'Or are 23 films in total -- from the US, France, Japan, Italy, Bosnia, Taiwan, Russia, Portugal, Iran and the UK -- including the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There, Jean-Luc Godard's L'Eloge de l'Amour and Dreamworks' Shrek, a computer-animated film by Andrew Adamson and Vickey Jenson, featuring the voices of Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz and Eddie Murphy. Outside the official competition, highlights include the definitive version of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (now 53 minutes longer). Un Certain Regard, Cannes's main fringe programme, is hosting 22 features from 15 countries this year. (see p 22)
United art republic
INAUGURATED last week by Ahmed Nawar, head of the Plastic Arts Section of the Ministry of Culture, the 53rd Cairo Atelier Salon -- an annual showcase of the work of Atelier members -- closes Saturday. A little celebrated event, the Salon hosts, among others, Hussien El-Gibali, Gazbia Sirry, Ahmed El-Labbad and Adli Rizkallah. Ahmed Elwi's watercolour portrait of 90-year-old "spontaneous" sculptor Abdel-Badie Abdel-Hayy, this year's guest of honour, occupies pride of place among the 100 or more art works that make up the exhibition.
Coinciding with the Salon is a "Week of Egyptian Culture" in Syria, which incorporates a small-scale exhibition of 35 works by El-Sayed El-Qammash (commissar of the exhibition), George Bahgory, Mahmoud Abul-Azm, Mustafa Abdel-Fattah, Ahmed Gad, Adel El-Masri and Mohamed El-Alawi -- seven artists who, according to El-Qammash, not only belong with "the elite of contemporary art" but are "truly representative" of the Egyptian scene.
Dubious signals
"LEBANESE television will resume its broadcast as of 25 May 2001 [Liberation Day] at the latest." Except for its coverage of the Pope's visit to Syria (5-8 May), this message, accompanied by the voice of Lebanese diva Fairuz, is all Lebanese national television has had to offer since it was shut down almost three months ago.
Given the increasing dominance of satellite channels in the region, many have voiced concern over the ability of "one of the region's earliest institutions of its kind" to compete.
Last Friday Lebanese Minister of Information Ghazi Al-Ariedi told Al-Hayat that "nobody should expect national television to compete with other televisions in the region".
In the first six months, home-grown broadcasts will be restricted to "the news and some programmes" -- not yet specified -- while the bulk of programmes will be of archive material. Despite Al-Ariedi's reassuring tone, much remains to be done to ensure the station restarts on a firm footing, and the first six-month's limited scheduling looks increasingly like a play for more time.
Andalus defended
IN OPEN letters to the Arabic press published last week, Moroccan critic Mohamed Berrada shed unsuspected light on the issue of translating Arabic fiction into Hebrew -- a debate triggered weeks ago when Berrada, on behalf of an Israeli publishing house, Andalus, first approached novelists Sonallah Ibrahim and Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid with the aim of securing the copyright for their works in Hebrew translation.
The owner of the publishing house, he wrote to Akhbar Al-Adab, is "known for supporting the rights of the Palestinian people and rejecting Zionism in its various forms... She is a member of the party led by my friend Azmi Bishara," a well-known and unequivocally committed Palestinian, "and she founded this house a year ago with the object of presenting Arabic literature to Israeli readers, convinced of the role of this literature in expressing the depths of Arab [consciousness] and its legitimate objectives. Andalus has no connection with the state of Israel, and the translators it employs are Palestinians..."
The two novelists were not being asked to sell their souls to the devil of normalisation, according to Berrada, but to adopt a positive stance regarding Israeli readers who might be influenced by their writing.
As the debate spiraled out of Egypt, soliciting commentaries from writers around the Arab World, it has become evident that the Andalus initiative was initially confused with "ideologically suspect" projects undertaken by mainstream or right-wing Israeli publishing institutions in the past, the Hedarzi edition of the late Abdel-Hakim Qasem's Ayyam Al-Insan Al-Sab'a being one famous example.
Berrada's statements aside, Egyptian writers like Abdel-Meguid have continued to reject Andalus's overtures .
Compiled by Youssef Rakha

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