Dramatizing Short Stories: Yussef El Guindi’s Rewriting of Salwa Bakr’s “That Beautiful Undiscovered Voice,” and “Thirty-One Beautiful Green Trees”

In the light of the scarcity of Western adaptations of literature composed in Arabic, the main objective of this study is to explore how a playwright from a transcultural background approaches the Egyptian literary tradition through adaptation in order to bring Arabic fiction closer to English-speaking audiences and scholars. Such a Beautiful Voice Is Sayeda’s and Karima’s City (2006) are two one-act plays written by the Egyptian American playwright, Yūssef El-Guindī (b. 1960), who emerged as a post-9/11 talent and received the 2010 Middle East America Distinguished Playwright Award. The plays were adapted from Salwa Bakr’s (b. 1949) short stories “That Beautiful Undiscovered Voice” and “Thirty-One Beautiful Green Trees.”