Creative antagonisms

Reviewed by Mursi Saad El-Din

After the excellent translation of "Maze of Justice" by Abba Eban who was then still a British subject, "Pot Luck" was probably the first English translation of a work by Tawfiq Al-Hakim. Al-Hakim had already been translated into French, but most of the translated work were either plays or novels.

A collection of translated short stories by this great writer is a welcome thing indeed. I do not intend to discuss at length the quality of the translation. The measure of the success of a translation, not less of a creative effort than the writing of the original, is its readability in the rendered language. And I must say that I enjoyed reading this collection on its own merit, forgetting all the time that it is a translation of Arabic texts.

As Hutchins mentions in his excellent introduction to the collection, Tawfiq Al-Hakim is remembered for "his role in creating a viable theatre tradition in Arabic literature". His novels, "especially 'Return of the Spirit' and 'Maze of Justice', are landmarks of twentieth century Arabic literature and still enjoyable reading." I would go even further to say that "Return of the Spirit" was the forerunner of Naguib Mahfouz's "Trilogy", while "Maze of Justice" was the source of inspiration for countless Egyptian writers who attempted, in fiction, to address social issues.

There is no doubt that Al-Hakim was a master of the written word. Being an avid reader of foreign literature and philosophy, he combines in his style the erudition of the West with the fluency of Arabic. Although dealing with mundane day-to-day issues, he, nonetheless, reflects a certain nobility of style reminiscent of the writings of Yeats, Synge or Lady Gregory.

The translator has succeeded in selecting truly representative samples of Al-Hakim's short stories, dealing with a variety of subjects. A short story is a tough test of a writer's ability. All these stories are distinctively humorous and, no matter how long, never boring. Al-Hakim's masterful dramatic sense, moreover, comes across clearly in the dialogue.

Al-Hakim, as Hutchins says in his introduction, "was not motivated by merely personal ambition when it came to art, but by a sense of his duty as an artist". In Al-Hakim's own words: "All higher forms of human life rest on spiritual principles, which we label freedom, thought, justice, truth and beauty."

Tawfiq Al-Hakim was, in his own way, a revolutionary. He was also a great innovator. When he embraced writing for the theatre he believed, and correctly so, that he was an innovator. The theatre as an art form was new to Egypt. He writes about this: "Any contemporary playwright, belonging to a European culture has his feet strongly settled on two thousand years of experience... carried over from one generation to another. They embodied all kinds of creativities and tendencies, trying to solve artistic, linguistic and literary problems. But in our country, our language and our literature have a limited and contrite experience in theatre. Arabic literature has only in recent years recognised theatre as a literary form."

Going through Al-Hakim's works, including his short stories, one can detect a reflection of his often expressed opinion that all through their history Egyptians were preoccupied with resurrection. This is most apparent in plays like "Isis", "Sheherezade" and "People of the Cave" as well as in his novel "Return of the Spirit".

I find interesting the comparison the translator makes in his introduction between Al-Hakim and Virginia Woolf. They both, Hutchins writes, "found the novel overly dependent on a potentially tedious form of analysis and thought in less concentration than other forms of art".

Again, in all Al-Hakim's works one can perceive his antagonistic stand vis-a-vis the state. Although, or possibly because he worked as a civil servant in different areas, he criticised what he called "state interference in the field of the arts".

Going through these excellent translations, one gets the feeling that Tawfiq Al-Hakim wrote the short stories as a kind of recreation between novels and plays. His short stories do not necessarily follow the rules of the genre. They vary from vignettes to what Hutchins calls "dramatised essays", and all reflect a happy combination of reality and imagination.

In his beautiful, longish story "Boats of the Sun", based on a Pharaonic legend about the love of a boat builder for the queen, Al-Hakim underlines these principles. He ends the story with the following: "Thus ends the story which history has not recorded for us, since it rarely uses its letters and stone inscriptions for anything but news of kings. The death of these two martyrs of the sun boats were not carved in stone, but seeds from these vents germinated over centuries and generations, their growth recorded in blood. Grown tall abroad, these plants have yielded fruit in the form of individuals who seek freedom for thought and freedom for people."

Certainly Al-Hakim was one of those individuals.