Memories in translation

No one has translated modern Arabic literature more than Dennis Johnson Davis, who was described by the late Edward Said as "the leading translator from Arabic to English in our time." With more than twenty-five volumes of novels, short stories, plays, and poetry translated into Arabic under his name, and a career spanning nearly sixty years, he succeeded in bringing the works of a group of writers from across the Arab world to an unprecedented level. Expanding the scope of readers in English. Here he tells a life story in translation, offering intimate glimpses of many Arab writers who have become increasingly known in the West. In the 1940s, while teaching at Cairo University, he met prominent figures such as Yahya Hakki, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Yusuf Idris, and of course Naguib Mahfouz. Later, when he lived in Beirut, another major literary center in the Arab world, he spent time with poets like Taufiq Sayigh, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, and Pauland al-Haidari. He was indeed a close friend of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra since his university days at Cambridge, and later of another well-known Palestinian writer, Ghassan Kanafani. In the 1960s, he founded an influential Arab literary magazine, Aswat, which published the most prominent avant-garde writers of that time, and in 1967 compiled the first representative volume of short stories from the Arab world. He then truly put Arabic literature on the global literary map by establishing the Heinemann series for Arab authors. Since then, he has continued to select and translate the best Arab novels, the latest being Yahya Hakki's classic novel, Misbah Um Hoshum (American University in Cairo Press 2004). He also translated three books on Islamic discourse (with Ezzedine Ibrahim) and other works on Islamic thought, and authored a large number of children's books about Middle Eastern history and folk tales.