NO. 72 | SUMMER 2017

a quarterly publication of the ata’s literary SOURCE division

FEATURES

Naguib Mahfouz: ARAB LITERATURE 07 Cairo, Arabic, and World Literature AND ARABIC Online Resources 14 (in English) for TRIBUTE TO NORMAN Arab Literature Arabic and the THOMAS DI GIOVANNI 20 Spanish Language Tributes to Norman 25 Thomas di Giovanni (1933-2017) by Andrew Graham-Yooll and Michele Aynesworth SOURCE | Summer 2017 1 Louis Comfort Tiffany,On the Way between Old and New Cairo (1872)

IN THIS ISSUE

From the Editors...... 03

Submission Guidelines...... 04

Letter from the LD Administrator...... 05

BTW Cartoons by Tony Beckwith...... 06, 24, 29

Naguib Mahfouz...... 07 By Patrick Saari

Online Resources and Recommended Reading for Arab Literature...... 14

By the Way: Add Arabic and Simmer for Eight Centuries...... 20 By Tony Beckwith

Norman di Giovanni, the Master’s Translator...... 25 By Andrew Graham-Yooll

The Varmint and Me: A Remembrance of Norman Thomas di Giovanni...... 27 By Michele Aynesworth

Credits...... 30

SOURCE | Summer 2017 2 FROM THE EDITORS

As everyone knows, unfamiliar territory beckons exploration, so last year we at Source Michele Aynesworth our issues on Arab literature and the Arabic language. Patrick Editor-in-Chief Saari had long been an decided admirer, to albeit focus, in for English the first translation, time, one of Specializes in translating of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) and had Argentine and French authors recently read, in French, The Yacoubian Building by the Egyptian [email protected] novelist Alaa Al-Aswany (born 1957), an author spearheading a more recent generation of writers. This admiration inspired Patrick to write an extensive article on Mahfouz, not only a writer undisputed but also one of those rare persons who were genuinely lovedwhose by stature all who as knew one of and the read twentieth him. century’s literary greats is This section also provides references for online literary resources and recommended readings in English for those interested in delving into the vast world of Arab literature, as well as photos, a painting, a map, and calligraphy. And Tony Beckwith has lent Tony Beckwith a hand in this undertaking by including his essay on how Arabic Associate Editor permeates the Spanish language as a result of Moorish occupation of a large part of the Iberian peninsula from A.D. 711 to 1492. A native of South America’s Southern Cone, resides in This Summer issue is also devoted to the translator and editor Austin, where he works as Norman Thomas di Giovanni (1933-2017), famous for his a writer, translator, poet, collaboration with Jorge Luis Borges and author of a key memoir, and cartoonist The Lesson of the Master [email protected] friendship and work with Borges and providing insights into the complexities of literary translation. (2003), chronicling The Anglo-Argentine di Giovanni’s writer and journalist Andrew Graham-Yooll and our Editor-in-Chief Michele Aynesworth have written their personal remembrances. In her letter as LD Administrator, Jesse Tomlinson announces the

Source layoutLD Guest and Speaker next LD for Administrator this year’s ATA Paula annual Arturo. conference (ATA58) in Washington, D.C., on October 25-28, and welcomes ’s new For Source translation from or into Portuguese (deadline for submissions: Patrick Saari Chief Copyeditor October 15,’s seeFall page issue, 4 wefor looksubmission forward guidelines). to contributions on literary Born in Pasadena, California, now living in Quito, Ecuador, writes, translates, and interprets in English, French, and Spanish [email protected]

SOURCE | Summer 2017 3 SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Source is both a forum for the discussion of literary translation and a vehicle for LD members and guest As the journal of the ATA’s Literary Division, contributors to publish their work. Novice translators, as well as those with more experience, are encouraged to submit translations of poetry and prose together with their meditations on the process. We are also constantly on the lookout for submissions from Asia, Africa, and all other less frequently represented cultures.

TOPIC FOR THE FALL 2017 ISSUE: We are now soliciting contributions on literary translation from or into Portuguese for the Fall issue. • Contributors are asked to follow the format guidelines below. • Submission deadline for the Fall: October 15 •

FORMAT:

Cambria font, size 12, without indented paragraphs. • LineSubmit breaks articles between up to 1600paragraphs words, but Word no wordor text breaks. file, single-spaced. • • Endnotes please, not footnotes. • PleaseUnjustified include righthand a brief, margin.factual bio and photograph. • Links and illustrations, etc., are encouraged. • Submissions may be edited. • Submissions go to [email protected] • •

Source American Translators Association 225 Reinekers is published Lane, by Suite ATA’s 590 Literary Division Alexandria, VA 22314

All previously unpublished material copyright © the respective authors.

SOURCE | Summer 2017 4 LETTER FROM THE LD ADMINISTRATOR

Dear Literary Division members: Welcome to our new design for Source!

Source We’ve been hard at work refreshing the Literary Division’s image with Jesse Tomlinson feedbacka new logo about and arewhat now the very division pleased is up to to, put so out please, the first drop issue me a of line and Literary Division letwith me its know updated what look. you Whatthink doof Sourceyou think? It’s always great to receive Administrator [email protected] We are also pleased to announce that ’sKatrina new look. Dodson will be joining Jesse Tomlinson is an Speaker. Dodson is the translator (from Portuguese) of The Complete interpreter, translator, editor, Storiesus in Washington, by Clarice atLispector ATA58 this (New year Directions, as the Literary 2015), Division’s winner of Guest the 2016 and voice talent. Originally PEN Translation Prize, the Lewis Galantière Prize from the American hailing from Canada, she Translators Association, and a Northern California Book Award for now lives in Mexico and translation. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Designated translates from Spanish Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of into English and interprets California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil. in both languages. She has written for Guernica, McSweeney’s, and The Millions, and her Her special interest lies translations have appeared in Harper’s, Granta, Lapham’s Quarterly, and in Mexican culture, the elsewhere. She is currently adapting her Clarice Lispector translation tequila industry, and literature. Her translation Brazilian modernist classic, Macunaíma: the Hero Without a Character, The Consummate Art of byjournal Mário into de aAndrade, book and for working New Directions. on a new translation of the 1928 Dreaming: The Art of Rocío Caballero, published by Dodson will give two sessions at the conference this year: Forms of Black Coffee Gallery, Faithfulness in Literary Translation and Researching Literary Translations. was released in November at the Guadalajara The After Hours Café will be held Friday, October 27 from 9:00- International Book Fair. excerpt (original work and readings that are not translated into English will11:00pm. be during I’d love the tolast see half you hour). there! This Bring is your your chance original to or read translated something number of poetry readings last year that were really lovely—you could beout next! loud Sharethat you’ve your work written and or meet translated, colleagues. so give it a go! We had a And some news for the future of LitDiv: the division is very happy to has been a wonderful assistant administrator and the division is lucky toannounce have her that as our Paula next Arturo administrator. will be our A division’svery warm next welcome administrator! to Carolina Paula Cortez who will be supporting Paula as the new assistant administrator. For now, enjoy this issue on Arabic language and literature. Jesse

SOURCE | Summer 2017 5 “Why don’t I think she’s a serious Russian translator? Because she said that, if Pushkin came to shove-kin, she could translate Tolstoyevsky standing on her head.”

SOURCE | Summer 2017 6 By Patrick NAGUIB MAHFOUZ Saari

Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), Egyptian novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, the first Arabic writer to be so honored. Mahfouz was the son of a civil servant and grew up in Cairo’s Al-Gamaliya district. He attended the Egyptian University (now Cairo University), where he earned a Naguib Mahfouz in his twenties degree in philosophy in 1934. He then started working in the Egyptian civil service in various positions from 1934 until his retirement in 1971.

Much of the excitement of twentieth-century costumbrismo in Spain and Latin America. But novels comes from their deliberate efforts because he lived at a time of rapid, complex, to depart from and clash with nineteenth- and radical social, cultural, and political change century realism: the splendid, meticulously and because he was preternaturally profound told coming-of-age stories, family dramas, and and perceptive, he was inevitably drawn to societal sagas of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, writing about the here and now, people living Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, in Cairo in the twentieth century, the people he and Thomas Mann, Pérez-Galdós, and Tolstoy. had grown up with and knew well. This, however, never prevented realism from spreading its roots ever deeper and wider. In English, celebrated writers in the realist Cairo Modern tradition such as Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, and Alice Munro come to mind, but a good case in point, outside the English- contemporary realist novel was called It comes as no2 surprise that his first speaking world, is the Egyptian novelist and Cairo Modern, a title not only announcing short-story writer Naguib Mahfouz. his commitment to writing about what was currently happening in the city of his birth His decision at the age of 23, in the early 1930s, but also taking an ironic swipe at how it was to devote himself to writing novels was all the more exceptional as poetry had always been shift from the yoke of the Ottoman Empire and still was the preferred and preeminent andevolving, British that occupation is, not very to smoothly:greater political first, the form of literary expression in Egypt, as well as the Arab world in general. The novel was and, second, emergence from a traditional forcibly a European idiosyncrasy, disparaged societyautonomy of rigid and finallyhierarchies independence to one increasingly in 1952 by intellectuals, writers, academics, and the embracing western notions of individualism, general public. Those who did write novels did science, and democracy. This was a century- so as an entertaining pastime, a side activity to long evolution, marked by the unavoidable journalism, philosophy, or politics, and chose to clashes between two worldviews that write in classical Arabic. Naguib Mahfouz would become an expert in chronicling, and also criticizing. time of the pharaohs and whose ambition as Cairo Modern is a slim unassuming book aMahfouz, young author whose was first to novels write weregrand, set sweeping in the (less than 250 pages), set in the early 1930s epics of Egypt,1 a bit like Sir Walter Scott had and probably written in the late 1930s done for England and Scotland, could well have although not published until 1945 by The stuck to historical novels or even depictions American University in Cairo Press. The of local ways of living, something like

protagonist, Mahgub Abd al-Da’im, is in his SOURCE | Summer 2017 7 early twenties and has one year to go before Cairo Trilogy sarcastic, intellectual and supercilious, but But it was the Cairo Trilogy3 published in 1956 graduating from college. He’s cynical and and 1957 that made him famous throughout from a poor peasant family, he has a huge the Arab world and eventually helped him earn chipin a typically on his shoulder sophomoric and carries way. Because his bruised he’s pride like a badge of courage, which makes was 77. Modeled after many of the nineteenth- his ambition for money, women, and power all andthe Nobel early twentieth-centuryPrize for Literature European in 1988, whennovels he Mahfouz had been reading, the Cairo Trilogy portrays three generations of a middle-class the more vulnerable to manipulation. There’s Cairo family and Egyptian society from 1917, something of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and during the First World War, up to 1944, close to evenBalzac’s despicable. Rastignac As about the narrative him, but unfolds,from the at the end of the Second World War. everyvery start turn he’s Mahgub also annoying,willfully makes unpleasant, mistake after mistake, as if in a horror movie where Despite the formidable presence of the everybody takes the wrong road, opens the wrong door, turns a deaf ear to obvious patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, family’s pious and pleasure-loving despotic warnings, and ends up getting slaughtered who is indeed “a piece of work,” there is none in the bloodiest of ways. of the heartiness of Balzac, Zola, Dickens, or But when the tight web of corruption, lies, and there is a melancholy tone to the novel, which deceit Mahgub has deliberately engaged in to oneHardy reviewer in the Egyptian even described novelist’s as “oppressive”work. Rather achieve a bit of status does blow up in his face, and which may have led another to nickname so skillfully has the novelist disentangled the Mahfouz the “Dostoevsky of Cairo” but which, many social and psychological strings tugging for others, evoked Proust. The novel uses the traditional “third-person omniscient point of insecurities, that the reader is left unexpectedly view” but the two characters who skew the heartbroken,at Mahgub’s heart caring and for soul, the anti-heroshot through as if with bias of the all-knowing writer are the youngest he were a wayward son or brother who is child Kamal and the house-bound mother Amina (her quiet gentle presence dominates of the hallmarks of great art. Cairo Modern, althoughdeeply loved not despiteviewed ashis the flaws. most This accomplished is one paralysis, and impending death are the subject ofthe the trilogy’s very last opening chapter). chapters, and her stroke, breakthrough novel that paved the way for futureof Mahfouz’s masterpieces. works, was no doubt the Since Mahfouz has openly stated that in Kamal Afterwards, Mahfouz wrote and published part of the trilogy, Palace Walk, it is easy to several other novels in the 1940s, including assumehe was describing that his parents himself and as siblingsa child in are the the first Midaq Alley, which was successfully transposed inspiration for the rest of the family. And it is to the 1990s and Mexico City for the 1995 this immediate sense of authenticity and this movie El Callejón de los Milagros (with a unique insight into childhood that give the pre-Hollywood Salma Hayek), and The narrative and descriptions of Palace Walk a Beginning and the End, similarly revamped majestic, almost blissful completeness missing for the Mexican movie, Principio y Fin, by Palace of Desire and Sugar Street (all titles are actuallyfrom the the trilogy’s names two of streets subsequent in Cairo), books, where understandingthe filmmaker Arturo of the humanRipstein heart, in 1993. regardless Both Kamal is an adolescent and young man and offilms time, are place, a testimony or culture. to Mahfouz’s uncanny Songs of Innocence and Experience Showing the Two his siblings are adults. It is as if Blake’s

SOURCE | Summer 2017 8 Palace Walk is highly accessible and engaging. Readers of the original in Arabic have noted that Mahfouz had, early on, decided he would mix the vernacular Arabic spoken at home, in the streets, in shops, at work, with the classical Arabic of the Qur’an and literature, which is usually marked by an elaborate rhetoric but also tending toward virtuosity in poetry and philosophy. Mahfouz

strike a balance between the two,was onemaking of the classical first writers Arabic to dialectal, simpler, and easier- to-understand while anchoring spoken Arabic into literature.

alsoRaymond his biographer, Stock, one indicated: of Mahfouz’s “Inmost narrative prolific astranslators well as dialogue, and Mahfouz personally developed the modern Arabic prose language that we take for granted today, replacing the almost

still in use when he began to Qur’anic mode of earlier periods, speak, a “third language.”4 write fiction” and creating, so to

Nobel Prize Khan el-Kahlili, a souk-market in Old Cairo, in the district of Al Gamaliya, Outside of Egypt and apart from the setting for the Cairo Trilogy his many other readers in the Arab world, not to mention the Contrary States of the Human Soul were being rewritten as a millions who saw his stories 1,200-page twentieth-century Egyptian novel. Palace Walk is life brought to life on the big screen seen from the eyes of a child, and childhood is viewed as a time of slow-motion assimilation, whereas the two other volumes consist industry (so far 30 of his novels andby Egypt’s short stories popular have movie been made progressive and oppressive encroachment upon family, adolescent idealismof not so andmuch romanticism, a fall from grace expectations, as a chronicle hopes, of and the dreams.world’s was that of an accomplished socialinto movies), realist novelist.Mahfouz’s And image he Divided into 71 chapters, with an average length of 7 pages each, was content to let that somewhat rich in dialogue and humor, with an easy narrative comprised fabricated, easy-to-digest of mostly short sentences, without much stylistic complexity, reputation thrive. Shortly after

SOURCE | Summer 2017 9 winning the Nobel Prize, at the end of an other techniques of his works in an utterly interview, during which he had stubbornly breathtaking manner.7 brushed off questions, a British journalist Mahfouz is now freely referred to, sometimes liked most. Mahfouz cheered up and cried out in the same breath, as an existentialist, a “Johnfinally Galsworthy! asked him which I love Englishhim very writers much.” he5 magical realist, a social realist, a surrealist, a modernist, a post-modernist, an allegorist, But after the work of translating his output had gathered momentum (there are now no Melville, Flaubert, Stendhal, and Tagore. He fewer than 600 editions of his work in 40 hasa disciple been nicknamed of Kafka, Joyce, the Shakespeare, Proust, Faulkner, Tolstoy, languages, including 15 translators into the and Dostoevsky of Cairo, Egypt, and the Arab English language alone), it became apparent that world. He is also, of course, the heir to the rich beneath this tip was a vast and complex iceberg. tradition of Arabic literature, including the In addition to the 34 novels for which he was contemporary Egyptian writers who preceded becoming increasingly famous, he had written him, such as Muhammad Heykal, Taha Hussein, over 350 short stories, 30 screenplays, 5 plays for the theater, memoirs, essays, and a collection not to mention the Qur’an and the Arabian of parables and sayings. He had also enjoyed NightsTawfiq. al-Hakim,In fact, one and of hisAbbas novels, Mahmud Arabian al-Aqqad, a long and productive career as a journalist, Nights and Days (1979), is a sequel to the including a weekly newspaper column. Islamic Golden Age epic and includes several of the same characters, such as the paranoid Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic king Shahryar, his young storytelling wife and author of Orientalism, in a brief insightful Scheherazade, and the lamp-rubbing Aladdin. essay on Mahfouz, highlights his exceptional breadth and scope: His 1959 novel, Children of the Alley, is a far cry

Mahfouz has been characterised since he imaginative, albeit bleak, allegory involving became a recognised world celebrity as mobster-likefrom Mahfouz’s characters social realism, representing as it is aJudaism, highly either a social realist in the mode of Balzac, Christianity, and Islam, and of course God, Galsworthy, and Zola or a fabulist straight out of the Arabian Nights (...). It is closer to was banned in Egypt, eventually leading to the truth to see him, as the Lebanese novelist deathso controversial threats and when ultimately first published his attempted that it Elias Khoury has suggested, as providing in his novels a kind of history of the novel form, an extremist stabbed him twice in the neck. Theassassination stabbing permanentlyin 1994 (at 83 damaged years old), the when nerve and picaresque tale, followed by work in controlling his right arm and hand and drastically from historical fiction to the romance, saga, realist, modernist, naturalist, symbolist, and constrained his capacity to continue writing. absurdist modes.6 One of many examples of experimental Morning and Evening appreciation: Talk, which strings together in alphabetical Raymond Stock concurs with Said’s [F]ar from being the stodgy Dickensian orderwork isdozens the 1987 of character novel sketches. And in drudge, as some have seen him, or just the Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth predictable (if impressive) 19th century goes back to the 1330s B.C. to give us 14 realist writer even more people think him brief eyewitness accounts of (1985), the heretic Mahfouz to have been, [Mahfouz] was really one of the most restless innovators in modern polytheism for the One and Only God. This inventivepharaoh Akhenaten attempt to whoapprehend repudiated the truth Egypt’s changing the style, length, structure and fiction anywhere. He was constantly undermined by the many contradictory behind the pharaoh’s quest for truth is

SOURCE | Summer 2017 10 perspectives provided, so that, by the end of Freedom. Freedom from colonization, freedom from the absolute rule of a king, be indeed hazy and ambiguous. It is a and basic human freedom in the context brilliantthis 180-page contemporary novel, truth example turns outof the to of society and the family. These types of literary devices now known as the Rashomon freedom follow from one to the other. In effect and the unreliable narrator. And the trilogy, for example, after the revolution Dreams (2004)8 and brought about political freedom, Abd al- Dreams of Departure (2007), consist of over 300Mahfouz’s brief dreams, final works, some fantastical, others from him.10 nightmarish, some reminiscent of Borges, Jawad’s family demanded more freedom In other interviews he not only repeats the prose poems, but all distinct from anything theme of freedom but insists on social justice as heothers had ofever Buñuel, written yet before. others of Baudelaire’s despite his depiction of a world far different fromthe core that of of his nineteenth-century fictional universe. Russia, Nevertheless, Mahfouz The Center was doing what Tolstoy did: portraying the intensity with which each individual lives life, When the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk the depth of feeling involved in even the slightest devoted an entire book to understanding of experiences, the vulnerability that this entails, the art of the novel,9 he focused on the hidden and how ingeniously, and sometimes tragically, message that every reader looks for when everyone maneuvers their way in the larger exploring the hundreds of pages comprising a world of family and kinship, neighborhood and War and Peace, school, work and society, country and world, and Pamuk pointed out that Tolstoy thought that ultimately the cosmos. thenovel. center Writing of his about novel Tolstoy’s was the role of the individual in history, which the Russian author fully discussed in learned philosophical terms, be that the freedom and social justice he championedOne of Mahfouz’s must insights be in the might “details actually of everyday onto the end of the narrative after showing us Pierrein the novel’sand Natasha final chapter, happily anmarried. essay he Pamuk tacked are not freedom or justice at all, but simply life” (to use Pamuk’s words), otherwise they claimed it was not that at all: something you talk about at school, read about in books, and hear assertively proclaimed [T]he center and main idea of War and at public events. And freedom and justice as Peace is not the subject Tolstoy discusses at universal rights and absolute principles have the end of the novel—the point of history no meaning if they are not “all-encompassing” and the role of the individual in history— (another word used by Pamuk), that is, if they but the intense and compassionate are only for the few or even for just a majority. attention the characters give to the details of everyday life, and the clear, all- Therein lies the painful awareness, for example, encompassing gaze that unites the various of the young man Kamal in the Cairo Trilogy,

When Kamal was a baby and toddler, his when he rebels against his parents’ ignorance. inlife our stories mind in is the not novel. history When and we’veits meaning, father would delight in playing with him, but butfinished our thoughts reading the on thebook, fragility what remainsof human as soon as he outgrew his early childhood life, the immensity of the world, and our and turned into a boy, his father became stern place in the universe. and forbidding, referring to him in the third person as “that son of a bitch.” When his father The same can be said of Mahfouz. When he would leave the house to work, the child was interviewed in 1992, he suggested that Kamal would jump up to put on a show for the subject of his writing was freedom:

his mother, imitating his father’s vanity and SOURCE | Summer 2017 11 Mahfouz with his two daughters (left Umm Kalthum) “He was different from other parents because of his age. He married late. If we didn’t agree with his opinion, we could discuss our differences. If we couldn’t convince each other, he wouldn’t say this is right or wrong. He was open minded.” —Faten Mahfouz (right)

pompousness, twirling a fake moustache in of itself and to itself is usually far removed from front of a mirror and leaning on an imaginary what it actually is, and this is true in America, walking stick with head held high, although in Europe, Asia, Africa, everywhere and true for his mind the love and respect he had for his individuals as well. Mahfouz believed in the father was absolute, albeit mixed with fear and power of the novel to foster change by puzzlement. He would later realize that his showing what can be changed, to such an any true superiority, knowledge, tradition, or versions of his books for younger readers evenfather’s authority, authoritarianism nor was it wasaimed not at based instilling on andextent schools, that he11 sowould they even could write learn simplified about their any kind of resilience or discipline; it was country, history, and culture. selfish, convenient, hypocritical, and toxic. Middlemarch, mordantly opined that it was Virginia Woolf, after reading George Eliot’s drinking,And his mother’s and cruelty, loving and kindness her constant concealed a “one of the few English novels written for peacemakingtraumatic denial was of also her a husband’s sign of passivity philandering, grown-up people.” The same can be said of invites us, but without mordancy, to grow Mahfouz’s entire work, which, in a nutshell, ofand the anxiety country over as confrontation.well. The family’s up. When Mahfouz died in 2006, had it not ambiguities and contradictions reflected those been for severe government restrictions Another insight might be that, although prompted by fears of large-scale protests and Mahfouz used many literary genres, techniques, bottlenecks, his funeral would no doubt have and devices, ultimately what he was seeking been accompanied by crowds of mourners was truth, the truth embedded in the world he lived in. And it is only possible to change the world when you know it well to begin with. The payno smaller tribute thanto his those genius. attending Dostoevsky’s image a culture or society or country projects funeral in 1881 or Victor Hugo’s in 1885 to

SOURCE | Summer 2017 12 Notes

1 Although Mahfouz had planned to write no less 9 Orhan Pamuk, The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist: than 30 historical novels to cover the thousands of Understanding What Happens When We Write and years of Egypt’s past, he ended up writing only 3 Read Novels, Norton Lectures Harvard University, at the beginning of his career, none of which were trans. Nazim Dikbas (New York: Vintage, 2010), 162- published in English until the twenty-first century 163 (trans. Raymond Stock). 10 “Naguib Mahfouz,” interviewed by Charlotte El 2 Naguib Mahfouz, Cairo Modern, trans. William M. Shabrawy, The Art of Fiction No. 129, The Paris Hutchins (New York: Anchor Books and Doubleday, Review, issue 123, Summer 1992 https://www. 2008). theparisreview.org/interviews/2062/naguib-mahfouz- the-art-of-fiction-no-129-naguib-mahfouz 3 Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy, trans. William M. Hutchins and others (New York: Anchor Books and 11 Rym Ghazal, “Arabic Treasures: how the Cairo Doubleday, 1990-1992). The trilogy consists of three Trilogy is a family saga for the ages,” The National, books: Palace Walk (498 pages), Palace of Desire February 21, 2017, https://www.thenational.ae/arts- (422 pages), and Sugar Street (308 pages). culture/arabic-treasures-how-the-cairo-trilogy-is-a- family-saga-for-the-ages-1.66785 4 Raymond Stock in the December 14, 2011 interview “Q&A with Naguib Mahfouz Biographer Raymond The American University in Cairo Press, as Naguib Stock: On the Author’s Life,” by Marcia Lynx Qualey Mahfouz’s primary English-language publisher for the blog Arabic Literature (in English), https:// and worldwide agent for all translation rights, arablit.org/2011/12/14/qa-with-mahfouz-biographer- is a rich source of information and online links raymond-stock-on-the-authors-work-archives/ on Mahfouz: http://www.aucpress.com/t-NM. aspx and http://www.aucpress.com/t-aboutnm. 5 Naguib Mahfouz Obituary by Sabry Hafez in The aspx?template=template_naguibmahfouz Independent, August 30, 2006, with the anecdote

of D.J. Taylor interviewing Mahfouz after he won the In addition to the above, much information on Nobel Prize, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/ Mahfouz for this article has been gleaned from obituaries/naguib-mahfouz-414043.html the following article: Marie Francis-Saad, “Naguib 6 Edward Said, “Naguib Mahfouz and the Cruelty Mahfouz. Du fils du pays à l’homme universel,” of Memory,” Counterpunch, December 15, 2001 Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée, https://www.counterpunch.org/2001/12/15/naguib- No. 59-60, 1991. Des ethnies aux nations en Asie mahfouz-and-the-cruelty-of-memory/ centrale, sous la direction d’Olivier Roy, 241-252. http://www.persee.fr/doc/remmm_0997-1327_1991_ 7 Raymond Stock, December 14, 2011, “Q&A with num_59_1_2682 Naguib Mahfouz Biographer Raymond Stock,” by Marcia Lynx Qualey, Arabic Literature (in English), https://arablit.org/2011/12/14/qa-with-mahfouz- biographer-raymond-stock-on-the-authors-work- archives/

8 From the Japanese movie Rashomon (1952) by Akira Kurosawa, which tells four different versions of an event involving murder, highlighting the fears and self-serving needs of the four narrators. The unreliable narrator usually involves one or several persons providing a highly biased and even counterfactual account of events, requiring the reader (or the omniscient writer) to figure out the truth. Detective and mystery stories are popular examples, whereas Henry James’ The Turning of the Screw is a more sophisticated literary example.

SOURCE | Summer 2017 13 ONLINE RESOURCES AND RECOMMENDED READING FOR ARAB LITERATURE

The American University in Cairo Press Banipal: Magazine of Modern http://www.aucpress.com/ Arab Literature The American University in Cairo Press is http://www.banipal.co.uk/ Banipal magazine showcases contemporary academic book publisher. Its mission is to Arab authors in English translation, from the Middle East’s leading English-language wherever they are writing and publishing. to a global readership in line with the main An independent magazine, founded 19 teachingaccurately and reflect research Egypt interests and the ofMiddle the American East University in Cairo. (publisher) and Iraqi author Samuel Shimon (editor-in-chief),years ago, in 1998, Banipal by Margaret Obank Drawing on an international author and editor present both established and emerging Arab community, the AUC Press publishes—in both writers through poems, short’s three stories issues a year digital and print formats—reviewed scholarly or excerpts of novels, plus the occasional features of LITERARY INFLUENCES, TRAVELLING TALE. The magazine features books, fiction (through a separate imprint: books, Egypt-focused books, and general interviews with authors, publishers and http://hoopoefiction.com/ ), Arabic teaching interest publications. The Press currently translators, book reviews and photo-reports of literary events. Since Banipal 41 – Celebrating Adonis, each issue includes a Guest Literature produces up to 80 new books each year, and for distribution worldwide through Oxford or Guest Writer feature on non-Arab, non- Universitymaintains aPress backlist (North of some America) 800 titles and I.B. mainly Tauris Arabic literature as part of Banipal’s mission (rest of world, excluding North America). It also to promote intercultural dialogue. Each issue operates six bookstores in Cairo, including a has a main theme, as well as being illustrated throughout with author photographs. Today the AUC Press publishes books in flagship store in Tahrir Square. Banipal takes its name from Ashurbanipal, twelve main categories: Arabic Language last great king of Assyria and patron of the Learning, Archaeology & Ancient Egypt, Art arts, whose outstanding achievement was to & Architecture, Business, Economics, and assemble in Nineveh, from all over his empire, Environmental Studies, Coptic and Islamic Studies, Egypt Guidebooks, Fiction the ancient Middle East. The thousands of clay in Translation, History, Literary Criticism, tabletsthe first of systematically Sumerian, Babylonian organised and library Assyrian in Middle East Studies, Middle East Travel, and writings included the famous Mesopotamian Naguib Mahfouz. epics of the Creation, the Flood, and Gilgamesh, many folk tales, fables, proverbs, prayers and omen texts. (Source: Encyclopædia Britannica)

SOURCE | Summer 2017 14 Banipal have been: 1) that Arab literature is “Literary translation has such an anFrom essential the first part issue, of world the three culture cornerstones and human of inspirational power to develop civilisation; 2) that dialogue between different dialogue and interaction between cultures needs to be continually deepened; and cultures; the moment a reader starts 3) that the joy and enlightenment to be gained to read a translation dialogue begins.” from reading beautiful poetry and imaginative writing is an integral part of human existence. These three points have guided Banipal Arabic Literature (in English) translation and promotion of contemporary https://arablit.org/ Arab literature. Literary translation has ’ssuch an inspirational power to develop dialogue This well-designed, easy-to-read website/blog, and interaction between cultures; the moment abundantly illustrated with photos of writers a reader starts to read a translation dialogue and book covers, is an essential reference begins. Banipal sees itself as a vehicle for for all those interested in Arabic Literature intercultural dialogue and exchange that translated into English. It is truly up-to-date opens a window for UK and other Western and provides a wealth of information and audiences on the realities of Arab culture in news about the Arabic literary community all its diversity and vibrancy, enabling fruitful worldwide, including interviews, in-depth discourse to develop, that will lead to further articles, featured categories, such as poetry, exchange, mutual respect, new writings, deeper understanding, and Arab literature taking its and individual countries, as well as an events rightful place in the canon of world literature. calendartranslation, and international dozens of links prize to forother Arab blogs, fiction, websites, references, articles, etc. It is also open is a magazine for lovers of literature, Banipal to submissions from contributors (https:// of world literature, to encourage a wider arablit.org/about/arablit-contributors- readership of Arab writers and poets for their submissions/ ) own sake, and for both the particularity and the universality of their voices. Banipal publishes The person behind the blog, M. Lynx Qualey, is a Arab writers and poets who write in French, reader and writer based in Cairo Egypt. She can English or German as well as the main Arabic be contacted at [email protected] language, presenting the reality of literature

AL-BAB: An open door to the Arab world literaturefrom the Arab by Arab world authors and naming not written it ‘Arab’ in Arabic http://al-bab.com/ –rather and consequently than ‘Arabic’ literaturemany great (which Arab writers).excludes AL-BAB has been in existence since the early Banipal is distributed in the UK and the rest of days of the internet. Originally intended to be a Europe by Central Books (www.centralbooks. com). Copies of the magazine can be bought as “Yemen Gateway”. Its web address, al-bab. direct from Banipal (http://www.banipal. com,website alluded about to Yemen, Bab al-Yemen it began (also in February known as1998 co.uk/), from our distributors, who include “al-bab”), the famous gateway leading into the Inpress Books, or can be ordered from bookshops in the UK and the rest of Europe. The magazine also welcomes submissions: http:// whichold city was of Sana’a. to provide At the an same electronic time, gatewaythis choice to www.banipal.co.uk/submissions/ informationof name also about highlighted Yemen. the site’s purpose,

SOURCE | Summer 2017 15 At the time I was working on a PhD thesis (uncompleted) about Yemeni politics. In the process I had amassed a lot of documents and to obtain information about Yemen, I decided toother make material. them more Knowing widely how available difficult by it postingcan be them on the internet. I added to this a collection of links to material about Yemen which could be found elsewhere on the internet, with the intention of creating a comprehensive information resource for researchers, students, journalists and anyone else who wanted to know more about the country. Shortly afterwards, I decided to extend this idea of an information resource to include the other Arab countries (“Arab”—for the purposes of the belong to the League of Arab States). In the late 1990swebsite—being information defined about as the those Arab countries countries that was still in its infancy) and al-bab consisted mainlywas both of scarcelinks aimed and hard at making to find whatever online (Google was available more accessible. During the last few years the amount of basic information about the Arab countries that is available online has grown enormously and, thanks to search engines, has become Fourteenth-century Islamic calligraphy, the Qur’an much more accessible. In parallel with that, the function of al-bab has evolved; it now focuses Fordham University’s Internet History less on providing collections of links and more on Sourcebooks Project providing background information and context. http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/Halsall/ —Brian Whitaker, British journalist and index.asp founder of al.bab Sourcebooks Project is a vast collection of In addition to its many articles, informative publicFordham domain University’s and copy-permitted Internet History historical sections, daily news, references, and links, texts presented cleanly (without advertising or the blog provides introductions to Islamic excessive layout) for educational use. Designed and Arab art, culture, architecture, literature, and maintained by its editor, Paul Halsall, the poetry, music, and the Arabic language. It is Internet History Sourcebooks Project is one of truly an online encyclopedic “gateway.” (http:// the most visited pedagogical sites in the world al-bab.com/arts-and-culture/arab-and-islamic- and has received numerous accolades from architecture, http://al-bab.com/arts-and-culture- teachers and scholars. Its Main Sourcebooks liiterature-section/literature, http://al-bab.com/ are “Ancient,” “Medieval,” and “Modern”, which liiterature-section/arabic-poetry) in turn have Subsidiary Sourcebooks, ranging from “Africa” to “Women.”

SOURCE | Summer 2017 16 Notably, among its Subsidiary Sourcebooks, it includes the Internet Islamic History of the Arabian Nights: http://www.sacred-texts. Sourcebook (http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ com/neu/burt1k1/Sir Richard Burton’s translation Halsall/islam/islamsbook.asp ), which provides dozens of web pages with hundreds of primary The Poets of Arabia, Selections: http:// historical, cultural, government, religious, sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/source/ arabianpoets1.asp documents from Arabia, but also from Persia andtheological, Turkey, philosophical,the caliphates andranging scientific from thesource ATA Arabic Language Division (ALD) seventh century to the Renaissance, and the http://www.ata-ald.org/ Byzantine, Ottoman, and Mughal empires, including web pages on Arab, Persian, and As many of us know, Arabic is a language Turkish literature and poetry (for example spoken by millions of people around the world, and Mughal ghazals and diwans, Moorish Nations, and has become of crucial importance poetry),Rumi and translated the Sufis, intoOmar English Khayyam, and withOttoman brief inis onethe Unitedof the six States official today. languages The Arabic of the Language United informative introductions. Division (ALD) of the American Translators Association (ATA) was created in 2012 to facilitate communication among its members. about ancient and classical Arab literature, includingThe following examples, web pages excerpts, specifically and sometimes for reading full works, are highly recommended: dealIt provides with the information Arabic Language. and services We hope in specific to bringfields togetherof interested a community related to of translations professional that Pre-Islamic Arabia: The Hanged Poems, translators and interpreters who can share before 622 CE: http://sourcebooks.fordham. resources, experience, and expertise that edu/halsall/source/640hangedpoems.asp

The Poetry of the Spanish Moors, Selections: network,will benefit to all.help We grow also their hope businesses, to create an and to http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/ keepenvironment up with forthe professionalsnew trends and in theever field changing to source/moorishpoetry.asp technological advances in this our profession. In addition, we hope that ALD will create a forum Al Hariri of Basrah (446-516 A.H./1054-1122 where Arabic translators and interpreters can CE): Maqamat, (The Assemblies), c. 1100 CE: develop best practices. All ALD members are http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/ invited to join the ALD listserv, a discussion basis/1100Hariri.asp forum open to all ALD members Thousand and One Nights: http://sourcebooks. For more information, please contact: fordham.edu/halsall/med/1001.asp ALD Administrator: Sam Fatima The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor: ALD Assistant Administrator: Heather Knight http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lang1k1/ Wiersema tale15.htm

SOURCE | Summer 2017 17 Poets of Arabia

On Fatalism Not always wealth, not always force splendid destiny commands; The lordly vulture gnaws the corpse That rots upon yon barren sands.

Nor want, nor weakness still conspires To bind us to a sordid state;

Sips honey from the royal plate. The fly that with a touch expires —The Holy Imam Shafay (767-820)

To the Caliph Haroun Al-Rashid

ItsReligion’s feeble texture gems can soon ne’er would adorn tear AndThe flimsygive those robe jewels by pleasure to the worn;air.

Of peace and pleasure in their God! WhoThrice spurn happy the they world, who its seek joys th’ despise, abode And grasp at bliss beyond the skies.

—Prince Ibrahim Ben Adham (died 777)

SOURCE | Summer 2017 18 The Tabula Rogeriana, a book of maps drawn by The original Tabula Rogeriana was destroyed not the Arab geographer Muhammad Al-Idrisi for King long after its creation and a second abbreviated Roger of Sicily and published in 1154, is drawn in work of the Tabula Rogeriana was created by Al- such a way as to put Mecca at its very center, in Idrisi, so that the closest thing to one of the original line with Islamic belief that Mecca is the center of maps is a page from that book, copies of which can the world. Asia is to the left, prominently featuring be found in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, China, and Europe is a blurry squiggle in the lower right-hand corner. For the Western world, it is an upside-down map, with Africa pointing upward availableEngland’s in Bodleian this cleaner Library, version. and Istanbul, although and northern Europe and Russia downward. it was in turn copied in the fifteenth century and is

SOURCE | Summer 2017 19 ADD ARABIC AND SIMMER FOR EIGHT CENTURIES By A brief account of the origins and Tony evolution of the Spanish language Beckwith

The strength of a language does not lie in was the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066. rejecting what is foreign but in assimilating it Another was the Moorish invasion of the Iberian —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Peninsula in 711 A.D. Who were the Moors? And where were they from? Before answering those Language is history. Words have been our constant companions on the long journey of of the land they conquered. human evolution, capturing the prosaic and questions let us very briefly review the history the sublime, conveying the tangible and the Neanderthals, of course, roamed the Iberian ephemeral, expressing the essence of our Peninsula about 32,000 years ago, long before existence. In the natural order of things, words our story begins. Far closer in time to our are assimilated and discarded as times change, period, the area was inhabited by Iberians, Celts, people move, and cultures overlap. Like us, our Celtiberians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and languages are organic; like us, our languages Greeks, among others. The region was called evolve or die. Hispania when it became a province of the Roman Empire, and the language spoken there Sometimes the assimilation involves just a during that period was a variation of the Vulgar word or two; a convenient expression crosses Latin imposed by the Romans over existing local a linguistic frontier to take root in a different dialects. The Empire collapsed in about 476 language and, after a period of time, loses its and Hispania was subsequently taken over by “foreign-ness” and is granted “native” status. the Visigoths—Germanic tribes that ruled the Words like paparazzi, glasnost, and geisha Peninsula until they were defeated by the Moors. come to mind. These Moorish invaders were nomadic Muslims In other cases, a whole collection of words is who crossed the western Mediterranean at its borrowed when a new technology of some kind narrowest point, the Straits of Gibraltar, then is introduced from one culture to another, as swept across the rugged Iberian terrain in wave we have recently seen with the migration of after conquering wave that carried them as computer-related terms from English to other far as the Ebro River in the north. They were languages. Something similar occurred many mainly Berbers and Arabs from North Africa years ago when the French brought their cuisine but their inspiration was the Islamic faith which to Great Britain, doing wonders for the British was born almost a century earlier many miles diet and enriching the English language with to the east in Mecca. During the late 7th century words like au gratin, canapé, and roux. the Muslim empire rippled out from the desert kingdoms of the Arabian Peninsula to hold sway And then there are loans and transfers on a over a vast territory that stretched from India in the east to the Pyrenees in the west. Arab it a breadth of expression and depth of nuance horsemen rode as far west as they could across thatmassive it never scale had that before. influence One a example language of and this give

SOURCE | Summer 2017 20 The Alhambra and sunset in Granada

Northern Africa, converting those in their path domain in the southern portion of the Iberian to Islam, and then turned north. In 711 they Peninsula. By the 10th century, Córdoba was landed in Gibraltar and were soon masters of considered the most populous city in the this southwestern tip of Europe, which they world, and was also the intellectual capital controlled for the next eight hundred years. of Europe. It was a widely acknowledged art and architecture, a profound respect for study and translate documents dealing with learning,They brought and theirwith language:them a refined Arabic. sense of science,center of philosophy, learning, where mathematics, scholars astrology,flocked to medicine, and education. This was truly a The Moors established many centers of trade, golden age of translation! Here, as in Damascus civil administration, and scholarship in their and Baghdad—the other great centers of the new territory, most notably in the cities Muslim empire—classical and canonical Greek of Córdoba, Toledo, Granada, and Sevilla. and Roman texts were translated into Arabic Córdoba, the ancient city on the banks of the and preserved for posterity, providing a link Guadalquivir River that had been an Iberian to past knowledge that was all but lost when settlement and an important metropolis in Europe slipped into the Dark Ages. Roman and Visigoth times, became the capital of the Islamic Caliphate that ruled Al-Andalus (known today as Andalucía), the Moorish belonged to the Semitic subgroup of the The Arabic that flourished in medieval Spain

SOURCE | Summer 2017 21 Afro-Asiatic family of languages. It was closely These dialects were quickly absorbed and related to Hebrew, Aramaic, and Phoenician, replaced by Castilian, which in turn embarked and was thus directly linked to the earliest on a massive borrowing spree, assimilating languages spoken by mankind. Over the Arabic grammar and vocabulary and course of many centuries it had evolved into transforming itself into the forerunner of the an eloquent, poetic language with a vast Spanish that is spoken today. As a result of this vocabulary, making it ideally suited to the task of transforming the Romance dialects of of Cervantes” became rich in synonyms. Spanish speakersdual Latin can and thus Arabic refer influence, to the olive the in “language their of the Renaissance. martini with an Arabic word, aceituna, or a southern Europe into the flowering languages Latin one, oliva. Similarly, to warn of a lurking This Arabic was the language that percolated scorpion they can say alacrán or escorpión. throughout the Iberian Peninsula during the When arranging appointments they can consult eight centuries of Muslim rule. It was spoken mainly by those living in the southern region of Al-Andalus, and was learned by the many European scholars who came to do research in the libraries and universities established in Toledo and Córdoba. Over time, it seeped into the Latin dialects that were still spoken among Christian populations living in northern Spain. How, precisely, did that happen? The Christian monarchs of the old Spanish kingdoms, of course, had never accepted the Muslim conquest and, ever since the Moorish lands they had lost—a campaign that lasted forinvasion centuries had beenand was fighting known to reconqueras La Reconquista the . king of León and Castilla. Córdoba fell to FerdinandToledo was III taken of Castilla in 1085 in by1236. Alfonso Málaga VI, wasthe armies of a recently united Christian Spain followingtaken in1487 the marriageafter being of besieged Isabella Iby of theCastile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, the Catholic the last Moorish stronghold in Al-Andalus, surrenderedMonarchs. And and finally, an extraordinary early in 1492 period Granada, in history came to an end. During the Reconquista, as the Christian forces moved gradually south, towns and cities that had been under Moorish rule for who spoke a variety of Romance dialects, the mostgenerations durable were of which flooded was with Castilian. northerners Christians living in Moorish territory had, by and large, developed hybrid dialects such as Mozarabic, a combination of Romance languages and Arabic.

SOURCE | Summer 2017 22 Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, Spain Home furnishings: alfombra (carpet); almohada (pillow); sofá (sofa). Food and beverage: azúcar (sugar); limón (lemon); café (coffee); azafrán (saffron). Building and architecture: alcoba (bedroom); adoquín (paving stone); azulejo (tile). Mathematics: cero (zero); álgebra (algebra); cenit (zenith). As the Reconquista inexorably advanced, Castilian advanced with it to become the lingua franca of Spain—a Romance language generously seasoned with Arabic. King Alfonso X of Castilla, known as Alfonso el Sabio (Alfonso the Wise), prompted the creation of a standardized form of written Castilian in the 13th century by assembling a group of scribes at his court to transcribe an extensive collection of works on history,

knowledge. astronomy, the law, and other fields of The Spanish Royal Academy was founded in 1713, essentially for the purpose of preserving the “purity” of the language.

in six volumes between 1726 and 1739, The Academy published its first dictionary

La Giralda, originally a Moorish minaret built in 1187- and its first grammar book in 1771. 1198, now the bell tower of the Cathedral of Seville countries. When the United Nations was establishedSpanish is now in 1945, the official Spanish language was one of of 21 the

English, French, and Russian. Interestingly, their almanaque or calendario, and both mean five official languages, along with Chinese, calendar. It helps to remember that most Spanish the UN in 1973. nouns that begin with al Arabic became the sixth official language of article) were borrowed from the Moors. —(the Arabic definite The list of Arabic words that migrated into Spanish of Moorish rule with the Reconquista of Spain finally shook off eight centuries during that period is far too long to include here. Granada in 1492. Later that same year, But, as a matter of interest, let us look at just a Christopher Columbus was commissioned few examples, grouped in categories for ease of by Queen Isabella to set sail westward, and reference. Many of these words ultimately found his voyage not only changed the world—it their way into other European languages as well, opened up a whole new chapter in the including English. evolution of the Spanish language. But Civil administration: alcalde (mayor); barrio (neighborhood); aduana (customs). that’sAdd Arabic another and Simmer story. for Eight Centuries was originally published in Source, Fall 2012, and reprinted in the The ATA Chronicle in March 2013.

SOURCE | Summer 2017 23 “She said she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but maybe she was speaking with a forked tongue.”

SOURCE | Summer 2017 24 SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2017

NORMAN DI GIOVANNI, THE MASTER’S TRANSLATOR* By Andrew Graham-Yooll Former editor-in-chief of the Buenos Aires Herald, Andrew Graham-Yool, pays tribute to a true friend.

Norman Thomas di Giovanni will be remembered by friends in Buenos Aires for his wit and for his brash manner in all that he set out to do. He must also be remembered for his brilliant literary training, his high quality as a translator and his capacity to move from his hard-knocks managerial style to his kindness as a friend to all of his friends and for his often excessive generosity. Di Giovanni wanted to help the whole world. He was a sponge for attention and affection from all those he befriended or was close to at any one time. However, Di Giovanni would probably want to be remembered simply as the best translator that Jorge Luis Borges ever had. Di Giovanni died last week, on February 15. He had reached the respectable

southern England. He had been unwell for some time with heart and kidney age of 83 last October 3. He died in his sleep, in hospital at Bournemouth, in not worked well. Norman was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1933, and wasproblems, named and after had the difficulty leader walkingof the US in Socialistpart due Party,to a knee Presbyterian surgery which minister had

College, a studies centre he remained linked to through its excellent literary magazine,Norman Thomas The Antioch (1883-1968). Review, for Di several Giovanni decades. graduated in 1955 from Antioch Shortly after graduation, Di Giovanni started to work with Spanish poet Jorge

Guillén (1893-1984), then at Harvard to deliver the Eliot Norton lectures in into1957 a andtrenchant, 1958. Normanbut still kindwas andthe editorpatient and editor. translator He was into amusing English to watchof 50 ofat work,Guillén’s squinting poems at with the ascreen group (or of paper translator-poets. in times of Fromtypewriters), that start ready he to grew be distracted by every woman that passed his way. Ten years later, in 1967, Norman was to meet Jorge Luis Borges who, in turn, was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard and proposed

SOURCE | Summer 2017 25 Borges returned to Buenos Aires and suggested that they work together. First publishedthat they collaborate in The New in Yorker a style, the like translations the bilingual appeared production in bookof Guillén’s form in poetry. 1972 as Selected Poems, 1923-1967 with the Spanish and English versions on facing pages. Di Giovanni and his wife and their two sons, Derek and Tom, were to spend two years in Argentina. The Herald in Buenos Aires were tempted to call a “Johnson-Boswell” arrangement. However, thewas monumental a direct and volume early beneficiary of the posthumously of the association, published which diaries some of Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999) knocks down that bit of gossip. Among the early translations completed by the author and translator was The Book of Imaginary Beings, a selection of which the Herald published in 1970, illustrated

Kodama, and Sabat in 2006. Another piece of gossip held that in an interview by Hermenegildo Sabat, and reprinted by permission of Borges’ widow, María

originals.at the Massachusetts Funny, I had heard Institute Borges, of Technology, not Norman, in say April that 1980, he thought Borges some said ofthat his Norman poems sounded di Giovanni better claimed in English his translationsthan in the Spanish were better original. than Probably Borges’ each had misquoted the other. In 1971, Norman and family left Buenos Aires for England. His feeling was that Argentina was stumbling toward chaos. He was divorced and, later, with his second wife, Susan Ashe, formed a literary translation partnership that includes several books, among them Hand-in-Hand Beside the Tracks (Constable, London, 1992), a collection of contemporary stories by Argentine writers, and many more translations, of course.

went on a collision course, with legal arguments and much unpleasantness. After the death of Borges in 1986, Norman’s relationship with María Kodama Celeste Goes Dancing and other stories (Constable

andNorman’s The Lesson books ofincluded: the Master, On Borges and his Work (Continuum 2003), among1989), translatedothers. He withalso hasSusan three Ashe, books the above-mentioneddue to come out this collection year, one of stories,a novel he wrote years ago, an autobiographical book about his life in Boston as a young man, and the last a collection of short pieces about the place where he grew up in Boston in the 30s and 40s. Di Giovanni also wrote the novel Novecento, published in the US and UK in 1976, based on the similarly titled

filmHe led by aBernardo rich and Bertolucci.productive life and his style of charm and friendship will be missed by those who knew and worked with him.

*Reprinted with the author’s permission

SOURCE | Summer 2017 26 THE VARMINT AND ME: A REMEMBRANCE OF NORMAN THOMAS By Michele DI GIOVANNI Aynesworth

whichNorman was Thomas originally di Giovanni’s published life in theand Buenos career Aireshave beenHerald on Februaryeloquently 26th. covered In the in followingAndrew Graham-Yooll’s essay, I offer a close-uppreceding of article, di Giovanni as a friend, mentor, and master craftsman. I affectionately called him “Varmint.” He was colorful and crusty, a short, muscular man with an outsized personality.

Argentine writer and linguist Fernando Sorrentino. At the time,We first my met only by important email, when publication I was doing was some Mad Toytranslating, an English for El juguete rabioso. So Fernando suggested I send an email to di Giovanni and ask him to take a version of Roberto Arlt’s novel look at a draft I’d been working on.

Norman’s first response was typically crusty. TheHe said Lesson my of thetranslating Master certainly could benefit from some advice, but I should first buy his recently published book, works into, English.about the translating lessons he’d learned from his collaboration with Borges on translations of the latter’s With Borges: Lesson of the Master [cover] Italian and decided my name, Michele, indicated I was a guy. After a session with Borges, I would MyWhen email Norman address, received micheletexas@, that first email, in fact, he was was a thinking turn-off infor return home and type out what we him. He suggested I call him, then quizzed me closely on my had gone over together, then set to work shaping and polishing the sentences and paragraphs, this time Norman, named after the socialist Norman Thomas, had gone trying to supply the exact words. Now I politics, as Texans aren’t noted for their liberal views, and so far as to abandon the US in disgust and become a British would refer back to the Spanish only for citizen. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that, instead of checking rhythms and emphases. The concern would be with matters of tone and tension and style. To anyone who “Babylonianbeing a good Blues,” ol’ boy withredneck, a sung I was refrain: a left-leaning female. To constructs a piece of prose and cares prove my bona fides, I sent him a copy of a poem I’d written, about style, this amounts to a slow and painstaking search for meanings to fit With tanks in the desert, choppers on the tarmac, the sound patterns one keeps turning My brother Joe’s gone to fight in Iraq, and turning in one’s head. (Since good prose is written with the ear, music Well, weOh became Lord, is friends he ever after comin’ that. back. Over the years, Norman emerges before meaning.) was not just a friend but a mentor, critiquing my translations as well as my own poems and prose. He generously placed (The Lesson of the Master, p.167)

SOURCE | Summer 2017 27 one of my poems, “The Dependable Blackness of Ink,” on his website.1 for his encouragement and comments on my I’m especially grateful recently published as Season of Infamy. translation of Charles Rist’s World War II diary, Norman trained me to avoid excess, to “free the sentences of cumbersome or indirect locutions” (Master, 167). And he taught me to value the drama of sentences and paragraphs. In 2005, I spent three weeks in Keyhaven with him and his life partner, Susan Ashe, in order to pay Norman back a little by helping him sort through and catalogue his extensive collection Susie and Michele, Keyhaven, 2005 of memorabilia from his time with Borges. Below him, shafts of sunlight streamed down into the house, slicing the geometry of evenspaced ceiling joists and two by four studs in a slightly distorting diagonal and at the same time lighting up the pale

the intersecting joists. A fragrance of new lumberhemlock swam uprights up through and the thereddish remaining fir of foot of open roof. Reb kicked a bit of sawdust into the slant of light and watched

intoit fill the the dimness sunny air and like vanished. a tiny shower of gold. Before reaching the floor it passed (What about Reb

Carpentry was a manual, 18) skill Norman was Norman and Michele at work proud of, a skill he relied on in later years to make money, a skill not unrelated to the craft In his obituary, Andrew Graham-Yooll of composition. The beauty in the passage mentions a forthcoming publication of “an above resides not just in the words, but in the autobiographical book about his life in Boston as a young man.” Norman sent me a digital copy of experience, the colors, the fragrance, the of the book several years ago. The title is What physicalyoung man’s connection, sensual asattention Reb kicks to thea bit details of About Reb, and an intro and excerpt can be sawdust into the slant of light. These are 2 found on his website. The blurb there quotes lessons of a master craftsman. an “anarchist thinker” characterizing the novel

Notes asWell, “anarchist beauty is fiction.” in the eye of the beholder. It was the music of the prose and the “golden ratio” of its 1 http://www.digiovanni.co.uk/among-friends/Michele- structure that stayed with me, not the anarchist McKay-Aynesworth/the-dependable-blackness-of- ink.htm story line. An example from Chapter 1 shows Reb, the young carpenter, having a Zen-like moment as 2 http://www.digiovanni.co.uk/work-in-progress/N-T- he works on the roof of a house being built: di-G/what-about-reb.htm

SOURCE | Summer 2017 28 “At the end of the day I’ll probably wish I had never heard of this really annoying expression.”

SOURCE | Summer 2017 29 CREDITS

Cover and was immortalized in The Book of One Thousand Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933),On the Way and One Nights. Persian miniature, source and between Old and New Cairo, Citadel Mosque of author unknown, from Wikimedia Commons https:// Mohammed Ali, and Tombs of the Mamelukes, 1872, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harun_Al-Rashid_ oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of George Foster and_the_World_of_the_Thousand_and_One_Nights.jpg Peabody, from Wikimedia Commons https://commons. Page 19 wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Louis_Comfort_Tiffany_On_ the_Way_between_Old_and_New_Cairo,_Citadel_ Fifteenth-century copy of one of the maps of the Mosque_of_Mohammed_Ali,_and_Tombs_of_the_ Tabula Rogeriana, drawn by the Arab geographer Mamelukes.jpg Muhammad al-Idrisi for King Roger of Sicily and published in 1154. https://commons.wikimedia. Page 7 org/wiki/File:1154_world_map_by_Moroccan_ Photo of Naguib Mahfouz in his twenties, published cartographer_al-Idrisi_for_king_Roger_of_Sicily.jpg here with the kind permission of the American Page 21 University in Cairo Press, http://www.aucpress.com/t- NM.aspx The Alhambra and sunset in Granada, with the Moorish fortress and palace (1333-1391) stretching Page 9 from left to right at the forefront and the Renaissance Khan el-Kahlili, a souk-market in Old Cairo, in the palace (1527) of the Spanish King Carlos V (Holy district of Al Gamaliya, the setting for the Cairo Trilogy Roman Emperor from 1519 to 1556), in the and the neighborhood where Mahfouz was born and center and background. Photographer Alejandro raised, photo by Joel Suganth, April 3, 2009, from Mantecón-Guillén, June 3, 2006, from Wikimedia Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/ Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ wiki/File:Khan_el_khalili.jpg File:Granada%27s_sunset.jpg

Page 12 Page 22 Photo of Naguib Mahfouz with his two daughters Mosque-Cathedral in Cordoba, Spain, also known as (around 1970), published here with the kind permission the Great Mosque of Córdoba, built from 784 to 986 of the American University in Cairo Press, http://www. over the site of a former Visigothic Christian church. aucpress.com/t-MahfouzPhotoGallery.aspx Photograph Ronny Siegel, June 13, 2014, from Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/ Page 14 wiki/File:Mezquita-Catedral_de_Cordoba_01.JPG Information on the American University in Cairo Press Page 23 drawn from its website with their kind permission. La Giralda at dusk, the tower of the Cathedral of Page 16 Seville, as viewed from the Plaza Virgen de los Reyes in Seville, Spain. Photo by David Iliff: CC-BY-SA Muhaqqaq script, Islamic calligraphy, fourteenth century 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons https://commons. folio from the Qur’an, Mamluk Dynasty, Egypt, ink, wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Giralda,_Seville,_Spain_-_ opaque watercolor, and gold on paper, from Wikimedia Sep_2009.jpg Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Folio_from_a_Qur%27an_(Mamluk_dynasty).jpg Page 27 Page 18 The Lesson of the Master, cover: Bloomsbury Academic (December 30, 2004) Both poems are from The Poets of Arabia, Selections, which is part of The Islamic History Sourcebook of Page 28 Fordham University’s Internet History Sourcebooks Project: http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/ Photo of Susan Ashe and Michele Aynesworth with a source/arabianpoets1.asp cane used by Jorge Luis Borges, courtesy of Michele Aynesworth Harun al-Rashid (Aaron the Just, A.D. 763-809) was the fifth and most famous Abbasid Caliph; his reign Photo of Norman di Giovanni and Michele Aynesworth coincided with the peak of the Islamic Golden Age at work, organizing di Giovanni’s papers relating to his time with Borges, courtesy of Michele Aynesworth

SOURCE | Summer 2017 30