By Mursi Saad El-Din And yet another conference on translation has just ended. It was the umpteenth conference dealing with this rather perennial problem. This conference, however, was special since it was held to celebrate the publication of the 1,000th book in the National Translation Project, initiated and carried out by the Supreme Council of Culture (SCC). The figure 1,000 seems to have a certain attraction in our translation world. In the early 1950s Taha Hussein started the One Thousand Book Project of translation. It was not surprising that our great writer, immersed as he was in the Arab and French cultures, should envisage such a scheme that would give the Egyptian reader the chance to access and enjoy the treasures of Western culture. At that time there was no Ministry of Culture or SCC. The project came under the aegis of the Department of Culture of the Ministry of Education which, incidentally, was also responsible for the Opera House and the Arts. Besides, there was a translation department at the Ministry of Education headed by Mohamed Badran, one of the key figures in translation at the time. On his demise, the post was taken over by my father Abdel-Hamid Hamdi. This probably accounts for my early interest in translation. With the formation of the Higher Council of Arts and Literature, the forerunner of the present SCC, the One Thousand Book Project became the occupation of the Translation and Cultural Exchanges Committee whose rapporteur was Taha Hussein. I had the honour of working with him as both a member of the committee and its secretary. Among the committee members was Fouad Andarous who was responsible for the One Thousand Book Project. As far as I remember about 600 books were published before the project was taken over by the General Egyptian Book Organisation which, instead of continuing with the it, started what came to be called the Second One Thousand Book Project. A project of the Higher Council of Arts and Literature was the translation of samples of modern Egyptian literature into English and French. The Translation Committee selected 12 novels by such leading writers as Taha Hussein, Abbas Mahmoud El-Aqqad, Ibrahim El-Mazni, Soheir El-Qalamawi and others. The English translation was made by university professors like Magdi Wahba, Lewis Awad and Nour Sherif, while Raouf Kamel was responsible for the French translations. The translations were printed on stencil since at that time photocopying and computers were not known. I was responsible for marketing the English translations. I took the stencilled manuscripts and went to London where I visited a number of publishing houses. The publishers were quite interested in the project, but explained to me that there were several problems related to publishing translated works -- problems that in fact still face translators today. A translated book has to take its chance on the market along with other volumes, and it is normally handicapped from the start by a number of factors, including the strangeness of the content, and the style which, however good, cannot carry the flavour of an original work. Besides, the translation process is mortgaged by the need to pay both the author and the translator. When I told the publishers that the Council was ready to buy copies of the translated works, their answer was that if they became convinced of the value of the book, they would publish it regardless of our offer to purchase copies. Here I would like to go back to the first interest in translating our modern literature. In the late 1940s or early 1950s Denys Johnson-Davies translated a collection of Mahmoud Teymour's short stories. It was published by Al-Nahda Bookshop under the title Tales from Egypt. Later Denys convinced Heinemann to publish a series of Arabic literature which they did. But, somehow, the project fell through after a few titles. During the 1950s the Egyptian Institute in London was publishing a magazine called The Bulletin. Every issue contained an Egyptian short story translated by me. Besides, AJ Arberry with Abdel-Qader El-Qot translated and published a collection of modern Egyptian poems, and Desmond Stewart translated and published Fathi Ghanem's The Man Who Lost His Shadow.
