Arabic Translation

One person has pioneered the solution to all these issues. He has been the trail blazer in the promotion of contemporary Arabic literature in English. He estimates his tally of translated books to be 28. He is Denys Johnson-Davies.

Denys is now in his 80s and living in Morocco. He has been a businessman and lawyer, a broadcaster and a diplomat and he also worked for the British Council in Cairo in the 1940s. But it is his career as writer and translator that has been truly phenomenal.

He spent some of his childhood in Sudan and chose to study Arabic as a teenager. He went to Cambridge to study, under R.A. Nicholson, before the Second World War at the age of 16, and was recruited early to the BBC Arabic Service in London. He moved to Cairo during the war, and there started his career as translator and friend of Arab writers. He has been a friend of Naguib Mahfouz for over 60 years, promoting his merits to other legendary Egyptian writers such as Taha Husain.

Under the Naked Sky Denys Johnson-Davies

Denys's first translation was of a volume of stories by the Egyptian Mahmud Taymur; since the 1960s, however, in face of much initial discouragement, he has been promoting contemporary Arabic literature. Heinemann had produced a successful African Authors series in the 1970s and invited Denys to be the Consultant for a similar Arab Authors series. In fact, Denys produced most of the translations. But the series did not match the commercial success of the African series. Many African authors write in English, so the problems and costs of translation were minimal and the African Authors series had huge English-reading markets in West and East Africa. Who by contrast was going to read Arabic literature? Arabs read their own literature in the original Arabic.

But in the subsequent decades Denys has had works published by Quartet in London and by AUC Press in Cairo. He has helped to introduce to the Anglo-Saxon reader the Egyptians Tawfiq al-Hakim and Naguib Mahfouz, the Syrians Zakaria Tamir, the Sudanese Tayeb Salih and the Palestinian Mahmud Darwish. He has edited collections of short stories and of drama. He has also published his own stories (which one critic said seemed like translations from the Arabic!) and has translated works of Hadith.

For over 60 years he has been the loyal friend of Arab writers and he has constantly sought out younger generations of talented authors. He is currently working on a collection of translated stories from the United Arab Emirates and another from Morocco. His role in the history of cultural relations between Arab countries and the rest of the world is unique and unlikely ever to be repeated.

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