Issue No. 596
Culture
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25 - 31 July 2002 Issue No. 596 Culture |
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In progress: Deciphering the Hyksos
Humphry Davies is a Cambridge-educated Arabist, translator and activist who has lived intermittently in the Arab world since 1965. He has represented Oxford University Press and the Ford Foundation in the Middle East and North Africa, doing voluntary work with such humanitarian organisations as Save the Children and the Palestinian foundation "Mattin". Davies has done numerous translations, notably of Colloquial Arabic texts, but perhaps his most notable achievement is Youssef El-Sherbini's Hazz Al-Quhouf bi-Sharh Qasid Abi Shadouf (Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shadouf Expounded), the 17th-century classic of which he has produced a critical edition of the Arabic text, an English translation and lexicon of late 17th-century Egyptian Arabic, and the subject of his University of California at Berkeley PhD thesis.
At the moment I'm working on this translation of Kifah Tiba (The Struggle of Thebes) for the AUC Press, which is one of the last three books of Naguib Mahfouz to be translated. Apparently in the 1940s this one was subject to a major review by Sayed Qutb, in which he said Naguib Mahfouz was the only novelist worth reading. And he said that he brought Pharaonic life to the reader in a vital and immediate way. I didn't even know he was a literary critic, but this is what Hamdi El-Sakkout tells me. He reviewed a bunch of novelists and was completely dismissive about their work; El-Sakkout tells me he was very authoritative. Tawfik El- Hakim, who was one of the novelists reviewed, apparently never wrote a novel after that. In a certain way I suppose you could say it is deftly written, Kifah Tiba, but at the same time completely full of stereotyped characters and things, and weird undertones of race and sex. The tone is totally level, all the characters say exactly what you expect them to say, when and in the way you expect them to say it. All the time. Are they suspect undertones? Yes, at least to a late 20th-century reader like myself. Not a great book, though in some ways perhaps a great book. At any rate it has that historical interest, being the one novel that Sayed Qutb hailed in the 1940s. It is interesting not merely from a literary point of view but to the student of politics. One thing that definitely arrested me was the way in which he writes about the Pharaonic royal family, which takes refuge in the Nubia of the time in flight from the Hyksos. In many ways it's unexpectedly amusing, because he writes of them as if they were a nicely middle-class family from England, living a sedate, six-o'clock-tea life and always posing, as it were, for family portraits. The Hyksos were an ethnic group that invaded Egypt twice during Pharaonic times, and both times they established relatively brief dynasties. I believe that they're thought to be from Anatolia. But in the novel of course they stand for the British. Or do they? Because the novel shows Mahfouz's skill as a writer in that he wrapped up a very subtle and ambiguous critique of the monarchy under which he was writing (their Turkish origins and everything) into this concept of the Hyksos. I also wonder whether the novel, which is a set text for school children, was actually revised to give intimations of the officers' revolt, which Mahfouz couldn't possibly have known about at the time. Either he was remarkably prescient or the text was subsequently retouched, as it were. I think the challenge for the translator is to stay in character with a book like that. Every novel has a taste and this one has such a taste as a novel; the taste of a strongly didactic novel without any irony or humour, with the ethos of a British schoolboy book written in the 1940s. You have to adopt a consistent tone gleaned from childhood readings of such books and of books written a generation or two before my childhood that were still around at the time.
Before I got to working on that I'd been for a month in the States to see my children and then visiting my future publisher for the Sherbini book in Belgium and my brother in England. What did I find? In the States I found the appalling seductiveness of the apparently lavish ease of life in an eminently civilised university community like Berkeley, California, which seems so out of tune with the United States as we have to deal with it here. Especially when it comes to things like a discussion of the Palestine issue. Approaching the Palestine issue is so difficult in the US because you often really don't know where to begin. In England there is a little more tangible public support; for example I was in attendance during the launching of a national petition at the House of Commons calling on the government to do what it can to end the occupation, dismantle settlements, recognise the right of return, etc. So in Europe there is a little more awareness than in the States, although talking to people at Berkeley you would think that it was a different country. Belgium is fabulous, on the other hand. I was in Flanders, which I'd never been to before. And with all due allowances for the brevity of my three-day stay, I would say that if there was one country of all the ones I've been to in which I would like to live, Flanders would be the one -- just in terms of the ability to lead a civilised life including reasonably priced excellent food. One thing I'll remember fondly, for example, is walking along the city centre in the evening and the only thing I could hear being bird song.
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