Dubai: Translation from Arabic to English is not just a matter of substitution, but a "translation from one culture into another culture, not just one language into another language," Denys Johnson-Davies, prolific translator told Gulf News yesterday on the sidelines of the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.
Described by the late Edward Said as "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time," Johnson-Davies has translated more than 30 works and in 2007 was awarded the inaugural Shaikh Zayed Prize for Personality of the Year for his services to Arabic literature.
"Arabic was taught like Latin, like it was a dead language," Johnson-Davies, 88, recounted of when he was studying the language.
Although he studied Arabic at both the London University and at Cambridge, he really learnt and grasped the language when living in a Nissan hut (temporary housing shelter) in the south of England during the Second World War.
"I lived in a Nissan hut with Arabs," he said of his time working for the BBC. "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," he recalled.
Johnson-Davies took part in an Arabic/English session during the festival, along with Yann Martel (The Life of Pi), Samer Abou Hawwash (who translated the latter), Abdo Khal (Spewing Sparks as Big As Castles) and its Arabic-English translator Anthony Calderbank.
First visit
Johnson-Davies first visited the UAE in 1950, to work as a temporary unpaid translator. A plane picked him up from Doha, where he was living, and landed in the desert, as there were no airports at that time.
There were also no hotels in Dubai, so he had to stay with photographer Ron Codrai.
In 1969, Johnson-Davies returned to run the UAE's first radio station Sawt Al Sahel (The Voice of the Coast). "There were no roads," he said of his journey to the station's headquarters in Sharjah, in which he drove a small car over the desert.
He also travelled around the emirates during the late 1960s, visiting Ajman, Ras Al Khaimah and also Muscat in Oman.
Johnson-Davies selected and translated short stories for the book In a Fertile Desert: Modern Writing from the United Arab Emirates, published in 2009 by the American University in Cairo Press.
The British Council said of Johnson-Davies that 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".
Johnson-Davies was born in Canada, grew up in Cairo, Wadi Halfa, Kampala and Kenya and moved to England at the age of 12. He currently lives in Cairo with his wife Paula.
The four-day Emirates Airline Festival of Literature ended Saturday.
