Fiction in Translation

What was it like to live in Iraq before the earth-shaking events of the late twentieth century? The mid-seventies to the late eighties witnessed Saddam Hussein’s rise to power, the establishment of Kurdish autonomy in the north, and the Iraq–Iran war. It also brought an influx of oil wealth, following the 1973 war and the spike in oil prices, and a parallel influx of Arab talent, including many Egyptians. We witness all of this and more through the eyes of an Egyptian woman married to an engineer working in Iraq. The narrator, who works for an Egyptian magazine’s bureau in the Iraqi capital, has a behind-the-scenes view of what was really happening at a critical juncture in the history of the region. Moreover, she has a mystery to solve: an Iraqi woman from the marshes in the south has disappeared, and as the mystery unfolds we learn of her love for an older Egyptian Marxist journalist. This is Iraq before and beyond Saddam, Iraq as the Arabs knew it, in the lives of interesting people living in a vibrant country before the attempted annexation of Kuwait and the American invasion. This is the Iraq that was . . .

This multi-layered novel about the depths of human experience and the struggle between polarities, on the surface presents a love story of unrequited passion between Rama—the symbol of multiplicity and creativity—and Mikhail—the symbol of unity and constancy. Their story reflects the relationship not only between man and woman, Copt and Muslim, but also between Upper and Lower Egypt. Through a delicate grid of intertextual references and juxtaposed narratives, the dreams and hopes, fears and defeats of Rama and Mikhail move from the local to the global, corresponding to human dreams and anxieties everywhere. In this novel, Edwar al-Kharrat has created a unique form of narrative discourse in which he presents Egyptian realities and actualities of the 1960s and 1970s, with flashbacks to as early as the 1940s, in an aesthetic form that highlights historical moments while blending philosophical, mythical, and psychological perspectives in a literary parallel to the cinematic technique of montage. In their citation awarding al-Kharrat the Mahfouz Medal, the judges stated: “Rama and the Dragon is considered a breakthrough in the literary history of modern Arabic fiction.”

Suzie Mohamad Galal, born in the Egyptian city of Suez during the War of Attrition in the late 1960s, is a woman of inner conflicts, at once a fighter and a lover, who traverses the boundaries of ethnicity and religion. Her whole life is intricately tied to the wars and political events taking place in Egypt. But as she grapples with where to begin her story of personal and national crises, questions of narration arise: which metaphor best serves the layers of meaning she wants to communicate, and whose voice is telling the story anyway? Red Wine is both timely in its attention to the issues of state brutality, religious extremism, and gender, and timeless in the way it deals with the themes of coming of age, guilt, and sadness.

Yusuf Idris was undoubtedly one of Egypt’s most talented and versatile writers in the second half of the twentieth century. The first two novellas in this volume, Madam Vienna and The Secret of His Power, come from the peak period in his career, the late 1950s and early 1960s, while New York 80 belongs to his late period, the 1980s. Yet something holds these three works together, despite their different periods and their scattered settings: Vienna, an Egyptian Delta village, and New York. They all deal with a seminal theme in Arabic fiction since its nascent years and until today: the East–West encounter, often treated allegorically by Arab writers through a love story between an Arab man and a Western woman who stand for their respective cultures. In these three novellas, Idris harnesses his remarkable narrative skills to tell us some of the most memorable stories of the encounter in Arabic fiction.

This audacious novel opens with Ayn as she reflects on the act of writing and wonders if love alone is sufficient subject for a narrative. Haltingly at first, she weaves the tale of her love affair with Ali with witty asides about her own writing, and the limits and self-deceptions that are at the heart of all storytelling. As the story finds its way, through sea and desert, and the realms of mysticism and magic, we learn of a passionate, volatile relationship, one severely tested through countless separations, of Ayn’s relationships with other men, including her intense encounters with a Corsican ex-convict, and of her own desire to escape the confines of marriage, even to the man she loves. Disarmingly candid in the telling, So You May See leads us gently into a revolt, a fierce rebuttal of conventional romantic literature and an indictment of the sexual mores and unquestioned attitudes to marriage and relationships in contemporary Egypt.

Specters tells the story of Radwa and Shagar, two women born the same day. The narrative alternates between their childhoods, their days at work, their married and unmarried lives, and the two books they are writing, both called Specters. This lively metafictional novel is a mix of genres: part autobiography, part oral history, part documentary, part fiction. As the narrative moves back and forth between Radwa’s novel Specters and Shagar’s history Specters (about the massacre at Deir Yassin, a Palestinian Arab village near Jerusalem, in April 1948), Ashour unites the projects of history and literature and blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political in one compellingly readable meditation on contemporary life in a fractured world. Winner of the Cairo International Book Fair Prize

Although the Arabs of the Middle Ages gave the world one of the great classics of imaginative writing, The Arabian Nights, modern Arabic literature has its beginnings little more than half a century ago. From early experimentations with the novel and the short story in the 1930s and 1940s, through Naguib Mahfouz’s Nobel prize in 1988 and beyond, Arabic fiction writing is now very much alive and very well indeed. This new anthology of the range of Arabic fiction in English translation, compiled by the man described by Edward Said as “the leading Arabic–English translator of our time,” samples the novels and short stories of seventy nine writers from Morocco to Iraq, from the 1930s to the 2000s. Denys Johnson-Davies has himself produced more than twenty-five volumes of translation from modern Arabic literature, and has followed the progress of this movement from its earliest days when its foundations were laid down by such writers as Taha Hussein, Tewfik al-Hakim, Yahya Hakki, and others. He was the first to translate the writings of Naguib Mahfouz, and introduced the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih to the world. The short stories and extracts from novels in this anthology range from the experimental to the masterful, from fantasy to social realism, and give the reader the broadest possible picture of the state of Arabic writing today.

Upon returning from a trip abroad, the author–narrator learns that his father has died during his absence. Crushed with grief and guilt, he begins a journey of discovery of self and existence. Beset by doubts and at times despair, he almost gives up, but then is granted the priceless gift of appearing before the mythical–mystical Diwan, the council that oversees all affairs of this world, keeping a record of everything that has ever happened or existed and righting wrongs past and present. With the guidance of the Great Master, the Prophet’s grandson al-Husayn, he is able to witness events of his father’s life, his own life, and that of his beleaguered country as he progresses through Sufi states and stations. Granted the ability to be in several places and various eras simultaneously, the narrator is able to bring together heroes and villains and great events and debacles in Egypt’s and all of Islam’s history. Alternating scenes depict the historical martyrdom of al-Husayn in Karbala, and a fantastical confrontation between two camps fighting over the soul of Egypt: in one camp we meet President Gamal Abdel Nasser, al-Husayn, the narrator’s own father, and a ragtag army of valiant but ill-equipped Egyptians in combat with one led by Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat, and Menachem Begin. This surrealist novel with political and mystical overtones and an edge of satire reveals one of Egypt’s greatest living writers at his finest.

Even as a young man, Hamid Farsi is acclaimed as a master of the art of calligraphy. But as time goes by, he sees that weakness in the Arabic language and its script limit its uses in the modern world. In a secret society, he works out schemes for radical reform, never guessing what risks he is running. His beautiful wife, Nura, is ignorant of the great plans on her husband’s mind. She knows only his cold avaricious side. No wonder she feels flattered by the attentions of his amusing, lively young apprentice. And so begins a passionate love story—the love of a Muslim woman and a Christian man.

Set in the ancient Upper Egyptian village of Karnak against the backdrop of the British campaigns in Sudan, the Second World War, and the war in Palestine, The Collar and the Bracelet is the stunning saga of the Bishari family—a family ripped apart by the violence of history, the dark conduits of human desire, and the rigid social conventions of village life. In a series of masterful narrative circles and repetitions, the novella traces the grim intrigues of Hazina al-Bishari and the inexorable destinies of her son, the exile and notorious bandit Mustafa, her daughter Fahima, tortured by guilt and secret passion, and the tragic doom of her beautiful granddaughter Nabawiya. Yahya Taher Abdullah’s haunting prose distills the rhythmic lyricism of the folk story and weaves it into a uniquely modernist narrative tapestry of love and revenge that beautifully captures the timeless pharaonic landscapes of Upper Egypt and the blind struggles of its inhabitants against poverty, exploitation, and time—themes that are echoed and amplified in the short stories included in this volume, which span the breadth of Abdullah’s tragically short career as one of Egypt’s most brilliant writers of modern fiction.

Sonallah Ibrahim has been called the Egyptian Kafka. And no wonder: this wry tale revolves around its narrator’s attempts to petition successfully the elusive “Committee.” Consequences for his actions range from the absurd to the hideous. In Kafkaesque fashion—an intriguingly symbolic and minimalist style—Ibrahim offers an unbroken first-person narrative rendered in brief, crisp prose framed by a conspicuous absence of vivid imagery. Furthermore, the petitioner is a man without identity. The ideal antihero, he remains unnamed throughout the intricate plot, with a locale suggestive of 1970s Cairo. The Committee, first published in Arabic in 1981, sardonically pierces the inflammatory terrain between ordinary men, unbridled displays of power, and other broader concerns of the author’s native Egypt. The novel’s corrosive, shocking conclusion catapults satiric surrealism into a new realm.