On 4 April the home of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra was destroyed in a car bomb in Baghdad: Denys Johnson-Davies remembers a dear friend It's a rare experience for someone whose main interest in life has been the renaissance that came about in Arabic literature early in my career to find the name of a close friend and one of the great figures in that renaissance being mentioned on the front page of a leading English-language paper. But so it happened that, last week, reading a rather boring item about yet another bomb exploding in Baghdad, I was about to turn to another page when the name Jabra caught my eye, and so I read on.It seems that the house in which Jabra Ibrahim Jabra had lived with his wife and family in Baghdad for so many years and which contained so many treasures in the shape of books in Arabic and English, and so many reproductions of the work of the modern artists, Arab and European -- Jabra himself was also a painter -- about which Jabra was so well informed, and the stacks of the music of his favourite composers, like Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven etc. etc. had, with the house itself, been destroyed.It was for me a home in Baghdad. Jabra, however, had already entered my life much earlier than that. We had overlapped at Cambridge University, with him taking a degree in English and coming out of it with a complete command of the language, while I had found that the Arabic language I had chosen to study was infinitely more difficult than the Latin and Greek I had so much disliked at schoolWhile Jabra and I were still in London at the beginning of the war we would spend evenings together, he with his English girlfriend and I with the Egyptian who endeared me to her country and its language. Then came the time when, working as the Middle East representative for a company, I found myself in Baghdad. I put up in the cheapest hotel I could find and made immediate contact with Jabra, and it was through him that I became friends with such literary figures as the poet Boland Al-Haidari who -- though he was later to make his home in London -- didn't at that time know a word of English and was delighted to find a young Englishman with whom he could converse in Arabic. Jabra was later to introduce me to his friend Yahya Thneyan, who ran a printing press in Baghdad which printed the oil company's magazine of which Jabra had become the editor. Yahya, who had been in the Iraqi air force and had taken a leading part in the revolt against the British presence in the country, later had to flee Iraq and spend the war years in Turkey. He and I became close friends until later, for some reason that remained unknown to him, Yahya fell foul of Saddam Hussein's regime and was imprisoned and horribly tortured. Jabra played an important role in my life. Once he was visiting Cairo when I was to give a lecture on Translation. Jabra asked if he could attend my lecture and of course I agreed. At the end of the lecture I made the point that the translator should always make a point of translating into his mother tongue. One of the men in the audience, an Egyptian who was a professor of English, challenged me on this. Why shouldn't someone who knew two languages well translate from and into each language? I was about to stand up to give a convincing answer to this question when Jabra signalled to the person who was in control of the discussion that he had something to say on the subject. Jabra then explained that he had taken a degree in English literature from Cambridge, that he had translated some half a dozen plays by Shakespeare, also novels by such writers as Faulkner; he had also written a novel in English ( Hunters in a Narrow Street ) and a couple of volumes of poetry in English -- all this in addition to several novels in Arabic, also short stories and poetry -- yet when it came to translating something from Arabic into English: "That," he said, "I would leave to my good friend Denys." Jabra also played a part in rescuing me from a period of deep depression that I was going through while in London in 1969. I had been to my doctor -- the same doctor who had seen my friend Yahya Thneyan after he had been tortured in Saddam's prison, also the great Iraqi poet Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab who was suffering from an incurable illness. The great thing about my doctor was that he was utterly frank with his patients. To me he said that I could either have electric shock treatment (which he didn't advise), I could go and have several sessions with a psychologist (which he also felt would be a waste of time and money), or I could change my life completely. But how to change my life completely when it revolved round an office for Arabic translation that I had set up several years ago? Then came a note from my friend Jabra telling me that he was coming to London shortly and would be giving a lecture at London University about modern Arabic literature and how some of it was getting translated into English and that of course he would like me to be there. Though I was in no mood to attend a lecture and mix with people, I of course went and was even obliged, at Jabra's request, to say something at the end of his lecture about the business of translating modern Arabic fiction into English and the difficulties of finding publishers for such books. But as the Qur'an says: "Maybe there is something you dislike and it is best for you..." My attendance at Jabra's lecture resulted in my meeting someone there and being offered the job of director of an Arabic radio station in Dubai. And so, once again , I was able to take a new turning and follow the seemingly impossible cure for my depression suggested by my doctor, that of making a complete change in my life. More recently, I had a note from Jabra saying that he would be coming to Cairo for a few days. I met up with him at a hotel and remember asking him how things were going in Baghdad and his answering by looking up at the corners of the room -- I had forgotten in what a police-state he was living. We therefore waited till we were outside before we began our conversation. I recollect his telling me that one had to be careful in Baghdad as to what you said and whom you said it to. He told me, for example, that someone had told him that it was a real pity that, among all the pictures he had, he didn't have as a centrepiece a good portrait of Saddam Hussein. The last thing Jabra wanted, among all his lovely reproductions of Matisse and others, was a portrait of one of the world's most bloodthirsty dictators. But such a suggestion should not be taken lightly and soon a large portrait of Saddam Hussein occupied a place of honour on his living room wall. Shortly before he left Cairo I introduced him to my wife Paola and the three of us had dinner together, and it was not long after he returned to Baghdad that I had news of his death through a heart attack. There is no other person who played a part in my life for so many years, and the name Jabra Ibrahim Jabra will live on in the books that recall how, all of a sudden, Arabic literature turned its back on its prestigious past and started to move in a different direction.
