Returns to Marrakesh / Retour à Marrakech

Abdelwahab Meddeb (1946–2014) was a North African intellectual and author of several fiction and nonfiction works primarily in French. Among many other works, he is author of the novels Talismano and Phantasia.Claudia Esposito is associate professor of French at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is author of The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb.Laura Reeck is an independent translator and scholar. She is the author of Writerly Identities in Beur Fiction and Beyond and coeditor of Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France.

"The translation is masterful in its accuracy and precision. And it is elegant. It preserves the uniqueness of Meddeb’s rhythms in its prose." —Ronnie Scharfman, author of Engagement and the Language of the Subject in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire "Throughout this many-layered poetic travelogue, the meanderings of the mind and the city’s 'hedonic architecture' are one. Whether rendering Jemaa el-Fnaa’s organized chaos, the city residents’ sensuous and spiritual communal life, or the refined play of shadow and light in centuries-old mosques, the translation is as luxuriant as Meddeb’s Marrakesh." —Teresa Villa-Ignacio, associate professor of French and translation, Kent State University "To read Meddeb is to walk in the footsteps of a poet guided by the undulating rhythms of scents and colors, voices and spirits, portraits and shadows. More than a Marrakesh travelogue, this is a mystical journey, a dizzying quest for meaning that breathes memory into fleeting gifts and miracles." —Khalid Lyamlahy, University of Chicago "A unique introduction to this unparalleled writer’s intellectual, philosophical, spiritual, literary, architectural, and artistic wanderings, inseparable from his travel across the Mediterranean and beyond." —Thomas C. Connolly, author of A Poetic Geneology of North African Literature "Meddeb’s Marrakesh is never one city, and Esposito and Reeck honor this plurality of registers. Arabic phrases appear in their original script; Italian phrases remain in Italian; dialectal and classical Arabic are not collapsed into one another." —Jordan Silversmith, Asymptote Journal