The Essential Yusuf Idris

Description

A selection of the most important works of Egypt's leading short story writer
Yusuf Idris (1927 91), who belonged to the same generation of pioneering Egyptian writers as Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim, is widely celebrated as the father of the Arabic short story. He studied and practiced medicine, but his interests were in politics and the support of the nationalist struggle, and in writing and his writing, whether in his regular newspaper columns or in his fiction, often reflected his political convictions. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature more than once, and when the prize went to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, Idris felt that he had been passed over because of his outspoken views on Israel. In all, Yusuf Idris wrote some twelve collections of superbly crafted short stories, mainly about ordinary, poor people, many of which have been translated into English and are included, along with an extract from one of his novels, in this collection of the best of his work.

Sujets

• Short Stories
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617971679
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2009 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com
“The Cheapest Nights,” “You Are Everything to Me,” “The Errand,” “Hard Up,” “The Funeral Ceremony,” “All on a Summer’s Night,” “The Caller in the Night,” “The Dregs of the City,” “Did You Have to Turn on the Light, Li-Li?,” “Death from Old Age,” “The Shame,” from The Cheapest Nights and other stories, translated by Wadida Wassef (London: Peter Owen Ltd, 1978). Copyright © 1978 by Peter Owen Ltd/UNESCO. By permission of Peter Owen Ltd.
“His Mother,” translated by Catherine Cobham, from The Edinburgh Review , no. 72, 1986. Copyright © 1986 by Catherine Cobham. By permission of Catherine Cobham.
“An Egyptian Mona Lisa,” translated by Roger Allen and Christopher Tingley, from Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthology , edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by Columbia University Press. By permission of Salma Khadra Jayyusi.
“The Chair Carrier,” from Arabic Short Stories , translated by Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Quartet Books, 1983). Copyright © 1983 by Denys Johnson-Davies.
“Rings of Burnished Brass,” from Rings of Burnished Brass and other stories , translated by Catherine Cobham (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1990). Copyright © 1984 by Catherine Cobham. By permission of Catherine Cobham.
“The Shaykh Shaykha,” translated by Ragia Fahmi and Saneya Shaarawi Lanfranchi, from Flights of Fantasy , edited by Ceza Kassem and Malak Hashem (Cairo: Elias Modern Publishing House, 1985, 1996). Copyright © 1985, 1996 by Elias Modern Publishing House. By permission of Elias Modern Publishing House.
“It’s Not Fair,” from Under the Naked Sky: Short Stories from the Arab World , translated by Denys Johnson-Davies (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2000). Copyright © 2000 by Denys Johnson-Davies.
“House of Flesh,” from Egyptian Short Stories , translated by Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978). Copyright © 1978 by Denys Johnson-Davies.
“Farahat’s Republic,” from Modern Arabic Short Stories , selected and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). Copyright © 1967 by Oxford University Press. By permission of Oxford University Press.
“The Greatest Sin of All,” translated by Mona Mikhail, from In the Eye of the Beholder: Tales of Egyptian Life from the Writings of Yusuf Idris, edited by Roger Allen (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1978). Copyright © 1978 by Bibliotheca Islamica. By permission of Mona Mikhail.
City of Love and Ashes , translated by R. Neil Hewison (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1999). Copyright © 1999 by the American University in Cairo Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Dar el Kutub No. 16149/08
eISBN: 978 161 797 167 9
Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson-Davies, Denys
The Essential Yusuf Idris / Edited by Denys Johnson-Davies.—Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2008
p. cm.
eISBN: 978 161 797 167 9
1. Arabic fiction I. Johnson-Davies, Denys (ed.)
892.708
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14 13 12 11 10 09
Designed by Sally Boylan
Printed in Egypt
Contents

Introduction
The Cheapest Nights
You Are Everything to Me
The Errand
Hard Up
The Funeral Ceremony
All on a Summer’s Night
The Caller in the Night
The Dregs of the City
Did You Have to Turn on the Light, Li-Li?
Death from Old Age
The Shame
His Mother
An Egyptian Mona Lisa
The Chair Carrier
Rings of Burnished Brass
The Shaykh Shaykha
It’s Not Fair
House of Flesh
Farahat’s Republic
The Greatest Sin of All
from City of Love and Ashes
Introduction

Y usuf Idris was born in 1927, the eldest son of a man whose work required him to be away from home most of the time. Idris endured a lonely childhood controlled by parents and grandparents who seem to have been strict and undemonstrative to a boy who craved love and attention. His student years at university coincided with the era of British occupation, and these years were followed by the period of King Farouk’s rule, a time marked by rampant corruption. Yusuf Idris, a medical student, was active in politics and this interest remained with him throughout his life. However, he found himself always to be against those who were in power. Even Gamal Abd al-Nasser whom, like most other Egyptians, Idris had supported in his revolution, fell out of Idris’s favor, for it wasn’t long before he became aware that few of the aims pronounced so eloquently by the new leader had in fact been accomplished. Inevitably, Idris was arrested for his political activities and, like so many other intellectuals, spent time in prison.
Creative writing occupied the mind of the young Yusuf Idris from his early student days, his first short story being published in 1951 and his first collected volume, The Cheapest Nights , in 1954, with an introduction from no less a scholar than Taha Hussein, the blind student from a lowly background who, having completed his studies in Paris, was to become Egypt’s minister of culture and the leading personality in the field of scholarship and letters. Yet it was against such figures as Taha Hussein that Yusuf found himself rebelling. He felt that Arabic literature had become stagnant, that it required a revolution, and that it was no good simply adding to the culture of the past, much of which he described as being “crammed with nonsense.” He was also acutely aware of the vast gulf that separated the educated classes from the man in the street, a gulf brought about by divisions of language, since the educated classes were versed in the classical language, of which the vast majority of Egyptians were ignorant or at best ill-informed. For this reason, Yusuf Idris quickly became a fervent supporter of colloquial Arabic.
In 1960 Idris made the decision to give up medicine to pursue a career as a writer and journalist. Despite his great talents and general recognition as one of the Arab world’s leading writers, certainly as the short-story writer with the greatest authority and imagination, Idris lived his whole life under the impression that he had not been adequately rewarded or appreciated. This feeling came to a head when, having been nominated for the Nobel prize, he was passed over for the award in favor of Naguib Mahfouz. This should not have come as a surprise to him, since Mahfouz had produced an output, particularly of novels, which far exceeded his own. Mahfouz had also attracted the attention of translators who had translated many of his novels into English and French, and it was in these two languages that the Nobel prize committee could judge the work of potential nominees. Few translators had devoted any time to rendering Yusuf’s large volume of work, mostly in the form of short stories, into the major languages. In fact, while much of his work in Arabic found its way into collected volumes of short stories, many of his stories remained virtually ignored in the magazines in which they had originally appeared. It was therefore understandable that he should not have received the same attention from translators as Mahfouz.
I feel that his stories speak for themselves and show how he differed in his approach to literature from most of his contemporaries. He had a special concern for the underdog, his works revealing a sympathetic knowledge of the disadvantaged that was mostly lacking in other writers. Much of what he felt about the way many of his fellow Egyptians were treated can be summed up in the title of the very first of his stories that I translated, “It’s Not Fair.” * It is one of his shorter stories, but it is no less effective for that, as it underlines the cruel differences that separate rich from poor in Egypt, differences that seem to remain no matter what the regime in power. Yusuf Idris, more than other Egyptian writers, was outspoken in his contempt for the rich and powerful and their heartless exploitation of the less fortunate and of the various forms of hypocrisy that this gave rise to. I also point out this story in particular because it is one that I have not come across in the many volumes of short stories compiled by various translators over the years; it shows, perhaps, that prolific as Idris was, especially in his earlier years, not a few of his stories have simply fallen by the wayside.
In the 1960s the BBC Arabic service decided to hold a short-story competition and asked me to be one of the judges. The other two judges were the Palestinian poet and critic Salma Khadra Jayyusi and the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih. An initial shortlist of the stories submitted was put together by the Arab staff at the BBC, so that we the judges were left with twenty stories to read, from which we were required to choose three prize winners. I was intrigued by a rather short story entitled, if my memory serves me correctly, “The Dog.” As usually happens on these occasions, the judges differed in their opinions of the twenty stories, and many arguments ensued between us. I, however, was adamant that “The Dog” should at the very least earn one of the prizes, if not first prize; in the event, it won second. I was astonished to learn later that, with the announcement of the results, none other than the Arab world’s number one sho