Kalima, a United Arab Emirates-based non-profit venture, has just announced plans to translate a very wide-ranging list of foreign books into Arabic and distribute them throughout the Middle East. The inspiration for this idealistic enterprise was a UN report about human development in the Arab world which pointed out that more books are translated into Spanish every year than were translated into Arabic in the whole of the last millennium–an extraordinary and disturbing statistic.
Learning about Kalima inspired me to draw up my own list, a compact boxful of books that I’d send to an Arab (or any other foreigner) who wanted to know what America and its people were like. The list, not surprisingly, became the subject of this week’s “Sightings” column.
Which books did I pick? Here’s a hint: Willa Cather made the cut. To find out more, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal and turn to my “Sightings” column in the Weekend Journal section.
UPDATE: To read the whole thing, go here.
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
