Musa Al-Haloul The sound of ridicule and memory disappears in Istanbul

Syrian storyteller and translator Moussa al-Haloul passed away on Monday, leaving behind a broad literary and cultural legacy that combined narrative, academic research and translation.

 Al-Haloul, a professor of comparative literature, was known for his constant preoccupation with digging through memory, as he wrote down dozens of texts in which he recalled his years of study in the United States, his personal transformations and his first adventures with the diaspora, in a language that combines graceful narrative, wit and careful observation, in an attempt to understand the self and the other and review the stereotypes exchanged between East and West.

Born in Raqqa in 1965, Al-Haloul graduated from the Department of English at the University of Aleppo, before receiving a Fulbright Scholarship to study comparative literature in the United States in 1989, and received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 1995.

After his return, he worked as a professor of English literature and translation at Syrian, Jordanian and Saudi universities, and then settled in Istanbul where he continued his scientific and cultural activity until his death.

Resisting tyranny with irony

He published 3 collections of short stories in which he adopted satire as a means of resisting tyranny and exposing its contradictions, through texts such as "Dog Tax", "Ballot Boxes", "Elephant Owners", and "Rathistan", in which he built symbolic worlds that rely on paradox and absurdity to expose the mechanisms of power, fear and propaganda, inspired by heritage, folklore and legend to tell a contemporary Arab reality in which the citizen turns into a permanent accused.

In addition to the story, Al-Haloul has completed more than 65 books between authorship and translation, and has translated into Arabic notable works such as Snora Ida by Icelandic poet Snorri Sturlsen, David Damrosh's Among the Ruins: The Great Epic of Gilgamesh, The Tales of Aesop, African Origin Myths, This Is How the Vikings Talked, Max Havelar, and The Biography of Charles de Gaulle.

He has made critical contributions to the field of translation through his books "Literary Translation: Practical Applications in Prose Translation" and "Between the Herb of Barzoye and the Life of Gilgamesh", and published the novel "The Book of Exodus to Istanbul".