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.
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.
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.
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.
