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Algeria Ismaël Aït Djafer. Wail of the Arab Beggars of the Casbah. Jack Hirschman, tr. Willimantic, Connecticut. Curbstone. 2004. x + 63 pages. $12.95. ISBN 1-880684-96-9
THE HANDSOME BILINGUAL EDITION of Ismaël Aït Djafer's Wail of the Arab Beggars of the Casbah reintroduces to English-language readers an underground sensation first published in French in 1951. In short lines that create a chantlike effect, Djafer evokes the suffering of urban Algerians. Staying close to the French original, Jack Hirschman's translation captures the raw intensity of this memorial to a nine-year-old girl murdered by her impoverished, tubercular father, Khouni Ahmed, who twice shoved her until she fell beneath a truck in Algiers in 1949. Djafer, then a twenty-two-year-old Algerian student, embedded this fact and its aftermath, Khouni's incarceration in a mental institution, in the core of his impassioned and...