Cairo: Denys Johnson-Davies, a leading translator of Arabic fiction into English, died in Egypt on Monday. He was 94.
Johnson-Davies was buried in a village in Fayoum, south of Cairo, where he had lived for years.
Born in Canada in 1922, he studied the Arabic language at the Cambridge University. In 1940, he worked at the BBC Arabic service where he mingled with Arab employees.
In 1945, he came to Cairo and worked as a translator, a job that gave him the chance to know several writers from the Arab world. Cairo was a hub for Arab culture at the time. He lived in Cairo’s working-class neighbourhood of Al Sakakini.
In 1949, Johnson-Davies left for Baghdad and lived for some years in Beirut, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
His literary career spanned around 70 years during which he translated into English works by around 80 Arab writers from Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.
“During my work in the BBC, I felt there was a renaissance in the Arab world, especially in literature,” he told the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat in a 2006 interview. “I read stories by Mahmoud Taymur and Tawfik Al Hakim,” he added, referring to two acclaimed Egyptian writers.
“[At the time], I became sure no other foreigner was interested in the new literary movement because Orientalists were interested in the past. I became determined to break a new ground. I translated and published from my own money a story collection by Mahmoud Taymur.”
In 1946, Johnson-Davies was the first person to translate a story by Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian writer who in 1988 became the first Arab storyteller to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. That story was from Mahfouz’s early work ‘Whisper of Madness’, which was first published in Arabic in 1938.
Johnson-Davies translated complete works by Mahfouz after the latter’s Nobel Prize win through an ambitious project by the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press.
In 1996, the AUC started awarding an annual literary prize named after Mahfouz upon a suggestion from Johnson-Davies, who was a friend of the pre-eminent writer.
He produced more than 20 volumes of translated Arabic novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, exposing the works of many Arab writers to a wide English readership. They included Yusuf Idris, Yehia Haqi and Saeed Al Kafrawi from Egypt; Sudanese writer Al Tayyeb Saleh; Abdul Malek Nuri from Iraq; and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
In 1967, Johnson-Davies published the first representative volume of short stories from the Arab world writers of the time, including Mahfouz’s allegorical short story ‘Zabalawy’.
A milestone in Johnson-Davis’ career was his establishment of the Heinemann Arab Authors series that featured the best of Arabic fiction to the English-speaking world.
He co-translated with Ezzeddin Ibrahim several books of Hadith or sayings by Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him) and other books of Islamic thought.
Johnson-Davis’ last book is ‘Homecoming: Sixty years of Egyptian Short Stories’ published by the AUC in 2012. The volume features a selection of some 50 stories penned by several generations of Egypt’s leading short story writers.
Nicknamed the “Shaikh of Translators”, Johnson-Davies is widely regarded as the one who has given an international voice to Arabic literature.
“He was a pioneer in the project of translating works of modern Arabic literature into English and in the complex process of persuading publishers of the value of publishing such works in the Anglophone market,” said Roger Allen, a translator and a professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 2007, Johnson-Davis received the UAE’s Shaikh Zayed Book Award for Personality of the Year in the Field of Culture.
