Under the supervision of the Dean of the College of Arts - University of Basrah, Prof. Dr. Majid Abdul Hameed Al-Kaabi, and within the program of the Cultural Unit in it, the novelist, storyteller and translator, Salma Saleh, gave a lecture on the platform of the College of Arts.
The lecture, which was presented on Wednesday evening, 8/12/2021 at nine, included three sections. The first section was about her experience in translation, which included many important literary works in German. Including the translation of “The Thirtieth Year” by Ingeborg Bachmann, in 1995, and the translation of “Kassandra” and “Media - Voices” by Christa Wolf, and Filotas Lessing. The second part of the lecture was devoted to talking about her creative works, which were divided between the story and the novel, and she began with the short story collection “In the Ride of Life” in 1961, “Because You are a Human” collection in 1963, the “Transformations” collection in 1974, “The Advancement,” a novel published in 1979, “Searching for Trenches ”, a collection of short stories, published in 2006, “The Abyss” a novel, published in 2014, and “The Year of Cancer”, a biography, published in 2016. All the way to her last two works published in 2021, which are a collection of stories entitled “The Missing Sentence”, and a novel entitled “The City Painter”. The last section of the lecture was a reading of Salma Saleh's stories in her own voice.
The lecture was followed by interventions and questions from professors and postgraduate students of the Arabic language department related to the writer’s position on concepts such as feminism and exile narrative, and she saw in them theoretical concepts that may not apply to every writer, to all written experiences, and to all environments. Here, there is a difference between Arabic writing and Western writing. Dr. Salma Saleh pointed out the weak influence of German literature and translation from German on Arabic literature due to the different topics included in German literature from the topics that are included in the Arabic literature.
Salma Saleh was born in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq an there she completed her secondary education, and studied law at the University of Baghdad and journalism at the University of Leipzig. There, she also received a PhD for her thesis (Global Trends in the Evolution of Media) in 1986. During the years of study, she worked in Iraqi radio, during which she wrote and presented a number of radio programs, including for your happiness, before you sleep, what the listeners write and good morning. Her articles were published in Iraqi newspapers and magazines, including Al-Qandil Magazine and Radio and Television Magazine. She wrote her stories for children in the magazine (Majallati). She also supervised the children's appendix to the magazine Al-Mawqif Al-Arabi, which was issued in Cyprus. After graduation she continued to work in the Iraqi press and was known through her daily column (Free Corner) in Sawt Al-Arab newspaper in 1967, then she worked in the weekly Alf Ba magazine from its first issue until 1977 and wrote a column in it entitled (I see), and wrote her stories for children in the magazine “Majallati”. She studied music at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1969, and studied painting before that in 1967 at the same institute. She held her first painting exhibition there in 1969. A number of her texts were translated into English, German, Spanish, Persian and Malayalam. She has lived in Germany since 1978 and in Berlin since 1983.
