بيوت Homes
Homes: A Staged Literary Performance
In the summer of 2021, a group of Palestinian writers and poets launched the collective literary project Jism al-Kalam (جسم الكلام, The Body of Language), seeking to break through the boundaries of individual writing and open it up to collaborative literary and theatrical creation. Seven writers participated in the project, each bringing a distinct voice, memory, and language to the exploration of home. These voices came together in Buyut (بيوت, Homes), a literary-theatrical performance staged in Arabic by the Arab Al-Saraya Theater in Jaffa.
The Hebrew translation now being published is not merely a rendering of the work from one language into another, but a continuation of the collective endeavor from which it grew. More than twenty translators and editors joined the writers. Together, they transformed collaborative writing into an act of collaborative translation: a dialogic engagement with text and speech in which Palestinians and Jews come together around texts in Arabic and Hebrew and take part in reshaping them, in the spirit of Maktoob’s translation method.
