THE MAN WHO INTRODUCED A CANON

Denys Johnson-Davies, translator of Arab writers, dead at 94

In 1967, the term “Arabic literature”, for most Western readers, meant two books, the Koran and The Arabian Nights. But that year, readers were handed a full menu of contemporary fiction in Arabic with the publication of Modern Arabic Short Stories, an anthology that showcased the work of 20 writers, including Yusuf Idris, Tayeb Salih, Zakaria Tamer and Naguib Mahfouz, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988.

The translator was an Englishman living in Cairo, Denys Johnson-Davies, who had made it his life’s mission to bring the writers he loved, and in many cases knew personally, to an international audience. He had been at it for more than two decades. At his own expense, he had published Tales From Egyptian Life, by the short-story writer Mahmud Taymur, in 1947, and he was the first to translate a story by Mahfouz, who at that time was still working as a civil servant.

Over the next 50 years, he was a one-man cottage industry, translating more than 30 Arabic novels, short-story collections and anthologies, including the works of Egyptian writers Tawfik al-Hakim and Mohamed el-Bi-satie; Iraqi writer Abdul Malek Nuri; and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

He was best known for his translations of Mahfouz, whom he came to know in Cairo immediately after World War II, well before many Egyptians were even acquainted with his work. After Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize, Johnson-Davies translated his The Time And The Place: And Other Stories (1991), The Journey Of Ibn Fattouma (1992), Arabian Nights And Days (1995) and Echoes Of An Autobiography (1997).

Johnson-Davies — whom critic Edward Said called “the leading Arabic-English translator of our time” in The Independent of London in 1990 — exposed Western readers to the diversity of contemporary Arabic literature in a series of important anthologies. These include Egyptian Short Stories (1978), Under The Naked Sky: Short Stories From The Arab World (2001) and The Anchor Book Of Modern Arabic Fiction

(2006).

Johnson-Davies died on May 22 in Cairo. He was 94. His wife, Paola Crociani, confirmed his death to the British newspaper The Guardian.

Denys Johnson-Davies was born on June 21, 1922, in Vancouver, British Columbia, where his English father was a lawyer and teacher. He learned Arabic, and quickly forgot it, when the family lived in Cairo and Wadi Halfa, in Sudan. After brief periods in Uganda and Kenya, he was sent back to England at 12 when he suffered a bout of amoebic dysentery.

After cramming, he passed an examination that secured him a place at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, once he turned 16. In the meantime, he spent a summer in Cairo and then enrolled at the School of Oriental Studies in London before working toward an accelerated degree at Cambridge, where Arabic was taught in the same way as Latin, Hebrew or ancient Greek — as a dead language.

His graduation coincided with the outbreak of World War II. He joined the Arabic section of the BBC, where he was exposed to Arabic as a living language spoken by millions.

“I lived in a Nissan hut with Arabs,” he told the United Arab Emirates publication Gulf News in 2010. “They were intrigued to find an Englishman among them, and they weren’t going to speak English just because I was there, so I started speaking Arabic.”

After the war he moved to Cairo and, employed by the British Council, taught translation at the British Institute. He began socialising with Egyptian writers, whose work he hoped to bring to English readers.

“I was a sort of dictator of the field, which I enjoyed, actually,” he said in an interview at the American University in Cairo in 2011.

It was an uphill climb. Interest in the literature of the Arab world was virtually nil. Two decades elapsed between the publication of Tales From Egyptian Life and Modern Arabic Short Stories, which Oxford University Press agreed to take on only if Johnson-Davies found a prominent academic to write the introduction.

“They are terrible cowards,” Johnson-Davies told Gulf News, referring to publishers in general at the time. “Arab writing? There ain’t such a thing! For them, it was The Arabian Nights

and that was it.”

Bleak prospects for translation, and the poor rate of pay, led him into a variety of fallback occupations. “I never thought of myself as a translator; it was something I did,” he told Egypt Today in 2006. “I may be well known for it, but it is a very badly paid profession, so I’ve done all sorts of things.”

His translation work continued unabated during this time. “I continually promise myself, with each book translated, that it will be the last,” he wrote in his memoir, “and yet, like the nicotine addict, I find myself returning to the habit.” He received steady support from the British publisher Quartet Books, beginning in the 1980s, and later from the American University in Cairo Press.

Johnson-Davies’ first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, a photographer, and a son from his first marriage.

He also wrote books for children, many of them based on Arab folk tales or legendary Arab heroes. After converting to Islam and taking the name Abdul Wadud, he translated three volumes of Hadith, or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. In 1999, Quartet Books published a collection of his own writing for adult readers, Fate Of A Prisoner: And Other Stories.

His most recent work of translation, Homecoming: 60 Years Of Egyptian Short Stories, was published by the American University in Cairo Press in 2012.

Publishers of the time were terrible cowards. Arab writing? There ain’t such a thing! For them, it was The Arabian Nights and that was it