Denys Johnson-Davies: The Translator Who Rushed in Where Angels Feared to Tread

Notes

1. On the occasion of Johnson-Davies's ninetieth birthday and official retirement, the British magazine Banipal published a special feature in its 2012 Spring issue no. 43 (to which this author contributed a personal testimonial on him).

2. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 38; and Halim Barakat, The Arab World: Society, Culture, and State (University of California Press, 1993), 13–15, 19.

3. See Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), 198.

4. Ibid., 72-83.

5. E. L. Ranelagh, The Past We Share: The Near Eastern Ancestry of Western Folk Literature (London: Quartet Books, 1979), xi.

6. Ibid., 1.

7. Ibid., 163ff.

8. Edward W. Said (1990), “Embargoed Literature”. Reprinted in The Politics of Dispossession: Self-Determination 1969-1994 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 374.

9. Quoted in YousefAbdel-Aziz, “Poetess SalmaAl-KhadraAl-Jayyusi Did the Job of an Organization,” Al-Hayat newspaper (London), March 30, 2008. (In Arabic—my translation).

10. Ibid.

11. In an interview on Dubai Satellite Channel's “Meeting Barween Habeeb” (April 20, 2008), Jayyusi reiterated the same accusation against the Zionist lobby.

12. Said, “Embargoed Literature,” 377.

13. Denys Johnson-Davies, Memories in Translation: A Life between the Lines of Arabic Literature (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2006), 9. Henceforward abbreviated as Memories, all references to this work will be cited in the text.

14. See Said, Orientalism , 19, 52.

15. Patai, The Arab Mind , 174–175.