p.261 Janissaries: Elite soldiers usually recruited from Christian families that served the Ottoman Empire for centuries.
p.276 ikhwan: religious militia composed of nomadic desert tribesmen.
About the Author and Translator
Alessandro Spina was the nom de plume of Basili Shafik Khouzam. Born into a family of Syrian Maronites in Benghazi in 1927, Khouzam was educated in Italian schools and attended university in Milan. Returning to Libya in 1954 to help manage his father’s textile factory, Khouzam remained in the country until 1979, when the factory was nationalized by Gaddafi, at which point he retired to his country estate in Franciacorta, where he died in 2013. The Confines of the Shadow (Morcelliana) was awarded the Bagutta Prize, Italy’s highest literary accolade, in 2007.
André Naffis-Sahely’s poetry was most recently featured in New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015) and The Best British Poetry 2014. His translations from the French and the Italian include Balzac’s The Physiology of the Employee and Émile Zola’s Money. He has also translated several works by North African authors among whom Rashid Boudjedra, Abdellatif Laâbi, Mohamed Nedali and Tahar Ben Jelloun. His translation of Abdellatif Laâbi’s Selected Poems was selected for a Writers in Translation award by English PEN in 2015.
The Colonial Conquest: The Confines of the Shadow Volume I Page 30
