By Mohamed Salmawy A Spanish visitor asked Naguib Mahfouz about what Echoes of a Biography, a Mahfouz book recently translated into Spanish, means for him. Mahfouz: As you can tell from the title of the book, it's a light-hearted autobiography. I wasn't writing a biography, but only my biographical impressions, so to speak. Spaniard: Why, if I may ask, didn't you want to write an autobiography as many writers do? Mahfouz: The ones who write autobiographies perhaps have something in their lives that interests the public. My life, however, is quite ordinary. I don't have any extraordinary things to talk about. So I just chose some moments, meaningful ones, and presented them in a literary form. Spaniard: By doing so, you have created a genre that is totally new in the West. Have you copied, perhaps, some old Arabic literary tradition? Mahfouz: No, I haven't copied that style from anyone. Spaniard: So you invented this genre. Mahfouz: Any literary work, however faithful to earlier tradition, is an invention. Otherwise, it wouldn't deserve to be called a work of art. The reader doesn't read a novel or a poem because it repeats things he has already read. The reader expects to find something new, something unexpected. Spaniard: Spanish critics and readers believe that you've surprised us in Echoes of a Biography ; that you've offered something unexpected. We've heard of Dreams, which is available in English and French but not yet in Spanish. But from what we hear, Dreams also uses the same vignette-like style you employed in Echoes. Mahfouz: That's right. Dreams followed naturally on the footsteps of Echoes. I don't know when Dreams will appear in Spanish. The AUC Press, which acts as my literary agent in overseas publishing, gives me a statement of what is being translated and published abroad, but I don't follow the process. Spaniard: In the current stage of your writing, the vignettes tend to be more lucid than the full-length novels you used to write. How do you see the various phases of your literary life? Mahfouz: It's all part of the same process. One changes from one phase to another. One's vision changes, and so does one's literary style. As Victor Cousin once said, "style is the man". Therefore, artistic style changes with every change that happens to the writer. You cannot say that the first phase is better than the next or the last better than the one before. We're talking about change, not evolution.
