Memories in Translation: A Life between the Lines of Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies,Naguib Mahfouz PDF

no one has performed extra for contemporary Arabic literature in translation than Denys Johnson-Davies, defined through the past due Edward acknowledged as “the major Arabic–English translator of our time.” With greater than twenty-five volumes of translated Arabic novels, brief tales, performs, and poetry to his identify, and a profession spanning a few sixty years, he has introduced the works of a bunch of writers from around the Arab global to an ever-widening English readership. right here he tells the tale of a lifestyles in translation, and offers intimate glimpses of a few of the Arab writers who're changing into more and more identified within the west. within the Nineteen Forties, whereas educating at Cairo college, he got here to grasp such iconic figures as Yahya Hakki, Tewfik al-Hakim, Yusuf Idris, and naturally Naguib Mahfouz. Later whilst he lived in Beirut, that different nice literary heart of the Arab international, he hung out with such poets as Tawfic Sayigh, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, and Boland al-Haydari. He was once already a detailed pal of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra from his collage days at Cambridge, and later of one other recognized Palestinian author, Ghassan Kanafani. within the Sixties he began an influential Arabic literary journal, Aswat, which released the major avant-garde writers of the time, and in 1967 he prepare the 1st consultant quantity of brief tales from the Arab international. Then he fairly positioned Arabic writing at the overseas literary map with the institution of the Heinemann Arab Authors sequence. in view that then he has endured to choose and translate the easiest of Arabic fiction, such a lot lately the vintage novella by way of Yahya Hakki, The Lamp of Umm Hashim (AUC Press 2004). He has additionally translated 3 books of Islamic Hadith (with Ezzeddin Ibrahim) and different books of Islamic proposal, and has written a lot of children’s books of center jap heritage and folktales.