SOURCE: “The Cruelty of Memory,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. XLVII, No. 19, November 30, 2000, pp. 42–47.

In the following essay, Said considers the problems of English translations of Mahfouz's work, arguing that they miss the distinctive and direct nature of his narrative voice.

1.

Before he won the Nobel Prize in 1988, Naguib Mahfouz was known outside the Arab world to students of Arab or Middle Eastern studies largely as the author of picturesque stories about lower-middle-class Cairo life. But even to them he did not seem to have a style or perspective of his own, partly because the few translations available were very uneven in quality and partly because he did not (and still doesn't) have one translator (and hence one voice) who made it a life's project to keep producing Mahfouz's prose masterpieces in English versions.

In 1980 I tried to interest a New York publisher who was then...