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Under the Naked Sky: Short Stories from the Arab World
Drawing on an intimate knowledge of modern Arabic writing, Denys Johnson-Davies brings together in this collection a colorful mosaic of life as lived and portrayed by Arabs from Morocco to Iraq. From a diverse area of the world with the common factor of a written language, these thirty stories tell of an old Moroccan peasant woman who kills snakes; an Iraqi soldier who returns home as a stranger after years as a prisoner-of-war; a repairer of lost virginities in a Tunisian village; a typically Mahfouzian start to a train journey; the steamy meeting of two women and a cat at the height of an Iraqi summer; the ill-fated attraction of a boy to a magical bird in the Tuareg deserts of Libya; and a novel way of hunting ducks in the Nile Delta. The purveyors of this strange and delightful cornucopia of fictions include Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, Gamal al-Ghitani, and Mohamed El-Bisatie from Egypt; Fuad al-Takarli and Mohamed Khudayyir from Iraq; Zakaria Tamer from Syria; Hanan al-Shaykh from Lebanon; and Ibrahim al-Kouni from Libya.
- GenresFiction
252 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
About the author
Denys Johnson-Davies
100 books50 followersDenys Johnson-Davies (Arabic: دنيس جونسون ديڤيز) (1922-2017) was an eminent Arabic-to-English literary translator who has translated, inter alia, several works by Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, Sudanese author Tayeb Salih, Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish and Syrian author Zakaria Tamer.
Davies, referred to as “the leading Arabic-English translator of our time” by the late Edward Said, has translated more than twenty-five volumes of short stories, novels, plays, and poetry, and was the first to translate the work of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. He is also interested in Islamic studies and is co-translator of three volumes of Prophetic Hadith. He has also written a number of children’s books adapted from traditional Arabic sources, including a collection of his own short stories, Fate of a Prisoner, which was published in 1999.
Born in 1922 in Vancouver Canada to English parentage, Davies spent his childhood in Sudan, Egypt, Uganda, and Kenya, and then was sent to England at age 12. Davies studied Oriental languages at Cambridge, and has lectured translation and English literature at several universities across the Arab World. In 2006, he published his memoirs. In 2007, he was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award "Culture Personality of the Year", a valued at about $300,000.
Davies lives in and divides his time between Marrakesh and Cairo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denys_Jo...
Davies, referred to as “the leading Arabic-English translator of our time” by the late Edward Said, has translated more than twenty-five volumes of short stories, novels, plays, and poetry, and was the first to translate the work of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. He is also interested in Islamic studies and is co-translator of three volumes of Prophetic Hadith. He has also written a number of children’s books adapted from traditional Arabic sources, including a collection of his own short stories, Fate of a Prisoner, which was published in 1999.
Born in 1922 in Vancouver Canada to English parentage, Davies spent his childhood in Sudan, Egypt, Uganda, and Kenya, and then was sent to England at age 12. Davies studied Oriental languages at Cambridge, and has lectured translation and English literature at several universities across the Arab World. In 2006, he published his memoirs. In 2007, he was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award "Culture Personality of the Year", a valued at about $300,000.
Davies lives in and divides his time between Marrakesh and Cairo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denys_Jo...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 12, 2013
Overall,I can't judge the book as a one unite because it is a collection of different short stories written by several witters from the Arab word,but the good thing is I was introduced to a plenty of good Arab witters that I did not have any idea about before..There were a lot of fantastic deep stories while there where a lot of incomprehensible stories...The book is a good introduction to the Arab short stories and the Arab writers.
January 12, 2023
participating in Helmet's Reading Challenge
18. A book that was originally published inChinese, Hindi, English, Spanish or Arabic
my reaction seemed to be the same whenever i finish a short story: huh?
maybe it's the way it's translated? of course the translations can't be perfect every time and it may not mean exactly as it is originally. nonetheless, im disappointed.
18. A book that was originally published in
my reaction seemed to be the same whenever i finish a short story: huh?
maybe it's the way it's translated? of course the translations can't be perfect every time and it may not mean exactly as it is originally. nonetheless, im disappointed.
July 11, 2009
This is no proper review. It doesn't make sense to give a review of a collection of stories by different authors. And I didn't even read all the stories.
I had an ulterior motive: I am trying to get in touch with an Arabic voice, in order to write stories about people in Arabia. There seems to be something strangely formal about all the Arabic I've seen translated into English, this book being no exception. I guess I'll never know how much of that is the nature of the translation and how much is something true about the language itself. But for the record, these stories were all translated by the same guy, Denys Johnson-Davies. Perhaps that's why they all seem to speak with one voice, even though some of them are very different stories. But it's a good voice; I'll totally borrow it.
I feel like I'm missing a lot with some of these, like there's some well-known symbolism to the tale of the old woman who hunts snakes, that I'd immediately get if I lived in the Middle East. Of the many stories, I think my favorite was It's Not Fair by Yusuf Idris, because it illustrates the unique style of corruption I keep hearing about in certain Arab cities.
I had an ulterior motive: I am trying to get in touch with an Arabic voice, in order to write stories about people in Arabia. There seems to be something strangely formal about all the Arabic I've seen translated into English, this book being no exception. I guess I'll never know how much of that is the nature of the translation and how much is something true about the language itself. But for the record, these stories were all translated by the same guy, Denys Johnson-Davies. Perhaps that's why they all seem to speak with one voice, even though some of them are very different stories. But it's a good voice; I'll totally borrow it.
I feel like I'm missing a lot with some of these, like there's some well-known symbolism to the tale of the old woman who hunts snakes, that I'd immediately get if I lived in the Middle East. Of the many stories, I think my favorite was It's Not Fair by Yusuf Idris, because it illustrates the unique style of corruption I keep hearing about in certain Arab cities.
October 25, 2017
Stories are very interesting and worth reading, skip the 1st story as its quite bizarre.
May 15, 2015
The short stories are mystical and emotional; I felt happy, sad, disappointed, and love through the pages of this book, and every page left me eager for more. The endings are usually open with so many possibilities to ponder over. Even though I am not a fan of translated books because lots of words lose its meaning in the process, I find that Denys had done a good job keeping the stories intact and meaningful, and curated an amazing collection of Arabic short stories and delivered them in a very sophisticated way.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews