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Denys Johnson-Davies. Memories in Translation: A Life between the Lines of Arabic Literature. Naguib Mahfouz, foreword- Cairo / New York. American University in Cairo Press. 2006. 139 pages + 12 plates. $19.95. ISBN 977-424-938-0
AFTER A CAREER of some sixty years in translation from Arabic into English, Denys Johnson-Davies has written an interesting memoir about his experience as a translator and about the Arab authors he translated. Following the narrative of his experience, one is struck by the fortuitous turns in the life of the boy he was in an English public school who abandoned the study of Greek and Latin-to study Arabic in Cairo, then London and Cambridge-and who eventually became "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time," as Edward Said described him, and the...