Tayeb Salih

al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ

aṭ-Ṭaiyib Ṣāliḥ

An arresting work by a major Arab novelist.

Season of Migration to the North

An 'Arabian Nights' in reverse, enclosing a moral about international misconceptions and delusions. This is the story of a student who returns to his village after his obsession with the West had led him to London and the beds of women with similar obsessions about the mysterious East.

Kuzeye Göc Mevsimi

موسم الهجرة إلى الشمال

عرس الزين

ضو البيت

When a young man returns to his village in the Sudan after many years studying in Europe, he finds that among the familiar faces there is now a stranger - the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed. As the two become friends, Mustafa tells the younger man the disturbing story of his own life in London after the First World War. Lionized by society and desired by women as an exotic novelty, Mustafa was driven to take brutal revenge on the decadent West and was, in turn, destroyed by it. Now the terrible legacy of his actions has come to haunt the small village at the bend of the Nile.

La stagione della migrazione a nord

Le nozze di al-Zain

This long-awaited new book by the acclaimed Sudanese author Tayeb Salih is an evocative masterpiece. Consisting of two volumes originally entitled Dau al-Beit and Meryoud, it tells the story of a green-eyed stranger who, wounded and hungry, appears on the banks of the river near the village of Wad Hamid, this work recounts the life of a man who cannot remember his name, race, nor religion, and speaks a language no one understands. The villagers take him in, teach him the Koran, and give him a name, Dau al-Beit. Restored to strength, Dau al-Beit transforms the lives of the people who cared for him, invigorating them with his ideas and enriching them with the merchandise he trades and the crops he harvests. Marrying a village girl, he remains in Wad Hamid for five years until he is lost to the river he came from. His son is later given the nickname Bandarshah. The continuing narrative revolves around the part-mythical figure of Bandarshah, his eleven sons, and his grandson Meryoud. As readers, we become the amazed spectators of village politics, initiation ceremonies, weddings, floggings and burials - scenes peopled with a cast of genies, devils, and houris - and encounter the mysticism of the Arab world described in a prose so absorbing and fascinating that we want to return to read it again and again.

Bandarshah

“The Wedding of Zein” unfolds in the same village on the upper Nile where Tayeb Salih’s tragic masterpiece Season of Migration to the North is set. Here, however, the story that emerges through the overlapping, sometimes contradictory voices of the villagers is comic. Zein is the village idiot, and everyone in the village is dumbfounded when the news goes around that he will be getting married—Zein the freak, Zein who burst into laughter the moment he was born and has kept women and children laughing ever since, Zein who lost all his teeth at six and whose face is completely hairless, Zein married at last? Zein’s particular role in the life of the village has been the peculiar one of falling in love again and again with girls who promptly marry another man. It would be unheard of for him to get married himself. In Tayeb Salih’s wonderfully agile telling, the story of how this miracle came to be is one that engages the tensions that exist in the village, or indeed in any community: tensions between the devout and the profane, the poor and the propertied, the modern and the traditional. In the end, however, Zein’s ridiculous good luck augurs an ultimate reconciliation, opening a prospect of a world made whole. Salih’s classic novella appears here with two of his finest short stories, “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid” and “A Handful of Dates.”

The Wedding of Zein

Vem är den mystiske Mustafa Sa'id? Förvisso den mest briljante studenten i sin generation, den förste sudanes med stipendium för att studera utomlands, först i Kairo, sedan i Oxford. Men varför har han slagit sig ned i den lilla byn vid Nilens strand istället före att inta sin givna plats bland högdjuren i Khartoum? Bit för bit rullas Mustafa Sa'ids mörka hemlighet upp: Med sikte på att erövra Väst såsom hans hemland en gång erövrats av kolonisatörerna, likt en hämnare sprungen ur Mörkrets hjärta, drivs han obönhörligt mot en fruktansvärd tragedi. har skrivit efterord.

Utvandringens tid

Au jeune étudiant rentré au pays après un séjour en Europe, Moustafa Saïd entreprend de raconter son histoire : celle d'un destin déchiré entre la vie immémoriale de l'Afrique et le mouvement de l'Occident. Moustafa Saïd en effet a passé de nombreuses années en Angleterre, où il a mené des études brillantes, séduit de nombreuses femmes, provoqué le suicide de deux d'entre elles, brisé le mariage d'une autre... Sur sa vie plane une ombre de mystère. Peu de temps après son récit, inachevé, il meurt noyé dans le Nil, alors qu'il était excellent nageur : son confident tentera dès lors de remonter le cours d'une vie complexe, de comprendre qui fut réellement le fascinant Moustafa Saïd, et c'est avec une science dramatique extrême que l'auteur distille les éléments de cette envoûtante enquête.

Tayeb Salih

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