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Two Centuries after Death…Napoleon's Life Remains Interesting Material for Thousands of Books

A visitor looks at "Napoleon I on his deathbed, one before to be buried" painting of Jean Baptiste Mauzaisse during a press visit of the exhibition "Napoleon in St Helena" in Paris, France, Tuesday, April 5, 2016. (AP/Francois Mori)
A visitor looks at "Napoleon I on his deathbed, one before to be buried" painting of Jean Baptiste Mauzaisse during a press visit of the exhibition "Napoleon in St Helena" in Paris, France, Tuesday, April 5, 2016. (AP/Francois Mori)
    London, Paris- Asharq Al-Awsat
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Two Centuries after Death…Napoleon's Life Remains Interesting Material for Thousands of Books

A visitor looks at "Napoleon I on his deathbed, one before to be buried" painting of Jean Baptiste Mauzaisse during a press visit of the exhibition "Napoleon in St Helena" in Paris, France, Tuesday, April 5, 2016. (AP/Francois Mori)
A visitor looks at "Napoleon I on his deathbed, one before to be buried" painting of Jean Baptiste Mauzaisse during a press visit of the exhibition "Napoleon in St Helena" in Paris, France, Tuesday, April 5, 2016. (AP/Francois Mori)

Although two centuries passed after his death, Napoleon Bonaparte still has a decent position, and his personal, political, and military life still represent a rich material for novels, movies, and biographies.

In an interview with AFP, Natalie Petiteau, a history professor at the University of Avignon, said Napoleon's personality "will always be inspiring because he had an exceptional individual fate that expresses all aspects of revolution."

The professor noted that the biographers who wrote about "the great romantic hero who died 200 years ago," drew a portrait of Napoleon that changes according to the dominant political currents.

In 2014, Historian Jean Tulard estimated that about 80,000 works had been written about Napoleon. This unverified number indicates that an average of over one book was issued every day about Bonaparte since his birth in Ajaccio, Corsica.

Tulard himself wrote many books about Napoleon. The most recent, "Marengo or the Strange Victory of Bonaparte," was published in March 2020. It revolves around a decisive battle that took place in 1800. It paved the way for two other books that were issued at the same time: "Napoleon and God" by Philippe Bornet, and "The Grand Atlas and Napoleon," published by Glénat and Atlas publishing houses respectively.

Search in the lists of the French national library showed that 18,000 books have the name "Napoleon" in their titles, including works related to his nephew, Napoleon III.

The emperor's modest roots, courage, geniality, kindness to people, and his protection of France's glory facing the obsolete monarchies, all are myths that Bonaparte intelligently maintained throughout his political and military life, and still exist until today.

However, Éric Anceau, who recently released a biography entitled "Napoleon (1769-1821)," believes that writing about Bonaparte is renewable, noting that "there are always new things to discover."

He said "this bicentenary is an opportunity to focus on the many times the emperor escaped death, his exile on the St. Helena Island, his death, and his memory."

Anceau, a professor at the Sorbonne University, recommended two new books about the emperor: "Napoleon in St. Helena" (the island located in South Atlantic Ocean, where he died on May 5, 1821) by Pierre Branda (released in January); and "Napoleon: The Last Witness Narrates" by David Chanteranne (released in March).

Petiteau explained that "Napoleon's sophisticated personality leads people to draw a contrasting picture of him. For this reason, there will always be some who hate him

and others who glorify him. Objective historians have always found it challenging to explain their point of view defying popular historians."

For instance, "Bonaparte (1976) and Napoleon (1968)," a two-volume book by famous writer André Castelot, is a best seller. The Napoleon Foundation recommends parents encourage their children to read it if they want to know the history of the emperor.

Young readers may prefer to read "I am Napoleon," a novel by Vincent Mottez and Bruno Wennagel. The accuracy of this work, in which the emperor himself speaks, was sealed with an introduction written by Thierry Lentz, director of the foundation, which also issued the 1000-page Historical Dictionary of the Napoleonic Era, in September.

Casterman recently republished all the volumes of a comic collection depicting Napoleon by Davoz, Jacques Martin and Jean Torton.

For those who see Napoleon as a tyrant, Swiss Historian Henri Guillemin's books have been revived on YouTube in recent years. They have always been considered a great reference, but their re-editing stopped years ago.

In April, the H&O Editions republished a sarcastic biography about the emperor entitled "Adventures of Napoleon" by the late sarcastic writer Francois Cavanna. It was first published in 1988.

For those who want to stay away from the controversy of Napoleon, and the pain of politics and war, they can take a look at the letters exchanged between Bonaparte and Joséphine de Beauharnais, to read "some of the most beautiful pages of love literary," according to its publisher, Le Passeur House.

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Three Rivers, One Bridge: Mahfouz’s Last Dreams Revisited

By using black and white, Matar sought to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s Cairo. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)
By using black and white, Matar sought to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s Cairo. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)
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Three Rivers, One Bridge: Mahfouz’s Last Dreams Revisited

By using black and white, Matar sought to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s Cairo. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)
By using black and white, Matar sought to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s Cairo. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)

With refreshing honesty, the Libyan British novelist Hisham Matar begins his translation of Naguib Mahfouz’s last dreams with a confession.

During their only meeting in the 1990s, Matar asked Mahfouz how he viewed writers who write in a language other than their mother tongue. The question reflected the concerns of a young writer born in America, raised partly in Cairo, and later sent to a British boarding school under a false identity to evade persecution by Gaddafi’s regime, which had disappeared his dissident father.

Naguib Mahfouz on the balcony of his café overlooking Tahrir Square in Cairo, 1988. (AFP)

Mahfouz’s reply was as concise and sharp as his prose: "You belong to the language you write in."

Yet Matar admits that, in later recollections of this exchange, he often caught himself embellishing Mahfouz’s words, adding an unspoken elaboration: "Every language is its own river, with its own terrain and ecology, its own banks and tides, its own source and destinations where it empties, and therefore, every writer who writes in that language must swim in its river."

In this sense, I Found Myself... The Last Dreams, published by Penguin's Viking last week, attempts to be a bridge between three rivers: the Arabic in which Mahfouz wrote his original text, the English into which Matar translated it, and the visual language of the American photographer Diana Matar; the translator’s wife whose images of Cairo are interspersed throughout the book.

No easy task. Mahfouz’s translations have often sparked debate—whether over inaccuracies, neglected context, or occasional editorial interference.

A touch of this affects Matar’s attempt without ruining it. For instance, in translating Dream 211, where Mahfouz finds himself facing Saad Zaghloul, leader of the 1919 revolution, alongside "Umm al-Masriyyin" (Mother of the Egyptians)—a title referring to Zaghloul’s wife, Safiya—Matar misinterprets the epithet as a symbolic allusion to Egypt itself, rendering it "Mother Egypt."

Beyond this, however, the first published translation by Pulitzer-winning Matar flows smoothly, matching the simplicity of his project’s origin story: it began one morning over coffee at the kitchen table, where he translated a few dreams for his wife, only to find himself having done dozens—eventually deciding to publish them as his first major translation.

The images complement the dreamlike atmosphere without attempting to directly translate any of them. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)

Perhaps the concise, economical language of Mahfouz’s final dreams made the task easier.

Between dreams, Diana Matar’s photographs of Cairo—Mahfouz’s city and muse—appear shrouded in shadows, dust, and fleeting impressions, sometimes ghostly in detail, complementing the dreamscapes without directly illustrating them. Here, she joins Mahfouz in her love for Cairo, which became her "muse" after accompanying her husband to that summer meeting with the Arab world’s sole Nobel laureate in literature. Relying on black-and-white imagery and abstraction where possible, Diana seems to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s.

Diana Matar took most of the book's photographs between the late 1990s and early 2000s. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)

In his introduction’s closing lines, Hisham Matar imagines Mahfouz flipping through the translation and remarking, in his trademark brevity: "Of course." But perhaps closer to the truth is that he would repeat his original verdict: "You belong to the language you write in."

Perhaps we must accept that translation—not just of this book, but in general—is a bridge, not a mirror. And that is enough.