under the naked sky: short stories from the arab world

Amercain University in Cairo Prees, 2000 - Fiction - 243 pages

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.

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• The Pilot: 7
• The IllOmened Golden Bird: 14

About the author

Denys Johnson-Davies was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on June 21, 1922. He received a degree in Arabic from St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. During World War II, he joined the Arabic section of the BBC. After the war, he moved to Cairo and taught translation at the British Institute. He translated more than 30 Arabic novels, short-story collections, and anthologies including Modern Arabic Short Stories, The Time and the Place and Other Stories, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, Arabian Nights and Days, Echoes of an Autobiography, Under the Naked Sky: Short Stories from the Arab World, and Homecoming: 60 Years of Egyptian Short Stories. He also wrote books for children, a memoir entitled Memories in Translation: A Life Between the Lines of Arabic Literature, and a collection of his own writing entitled Fate of a Prisoner and Other Stories. He died on May 22, 2017 at the age of 94.

Bibliographic information

• Title: under the naked sky: short stories from the arab world; Dar el kutub; Modern Arabic writing
• Translated by: Denys Johnson-Davies
• Publisher: Amercain University in Cairo Prees, 2000
• Original from: the University of California
• Digitized: Mar 19, 2008
• ISBN: 9774246047, 9789774246043
• Length: 243 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Anthologies (multiple authors); Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary; Literary Criticism / General