Davies: translator of Arabic literature
I recognised the name Humphrey Davies as he has indeed translated many of the modern Arabic novels I've read. It's interesting that he doesn't want to be drawn into a conversation about what should or shouldn't be translated, and also that he's booked up with translating work (rightly so!).
An excert from the article (below) mentions one book I wrote about on this site, being Abbas El Abd. When writing about the book I did mention the translation and the translator's note!
"Davies says that he makes a point of calling on living writers whose work he translates for advice, among them Ahmed Alaydi, whose novel Being Abbas El Abd ( An takun 'Abbas al-Abd ) is written in a mixture of styles, including parodies of the standard language, the Cairene vernacular, the speech of the country's young people, and the langue de bois of the Egyptian national press. In this work in particular the challenge for the translator lies in finding apt equivalents for these styles in contemporary English, bearing in mind that the readers of the translation may in themselves be used to different varieties of English vernacular"
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