Khalil Kalfat, 72, took leave on Monday of all of us, leaving his shiny smile in the mind of everyone who was lucky to know that great Egyptian intellectual. Kalfat is a Nubian leftist thinker. He was born in November 26, 1942. After he finished his secondary school education in the early 1960, Kalfat moved to Cairo to join the business college. Soon he left the university and pursued another route. At the time, the Egyptian left was flourishing rapidly, although it was at severe confrontation with President Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime. Kalfat was influenced by that political movement in the Egyptian street. "I built my knowledge of Marxism in my own way... I used to listen to the discussions between intellectuals until I joined the Egyptian Communist Workers Party," Kalfat said about himself. Away from the political life, Kalfat is also well known among Arab literature readers and writers for his massive contribution since the second half of the sixties in enriching the cultural life in Egypt and the Arab world. He was known as the Father of Latin Literature for his early interest in major Latin American writers, the Brazilian Machado de Assis and Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. He translated dozens of shorts stories by both. He also translated Machado's leading novel, Dom Casmurro, in addition to a novella, The Psychiatrist. Kalfat also translated many critical studies about the Latin American literature, one of Paul B. Dixon's Retired Dreams: Dom Casmurro (known as the Brazilian Othello), Myth and Modernity, the other containing selected essays on Borges. Moreover, he spent many years after that in preparing dictionaries and glossaries, which are indispensable for any researcher, the most famous (Alias- Commercial Harab, and the Lexicon of conjugations, etc.). Kalfat is believed to be the most important modern linguist in the Arab world generally. Many of his works were published in the two magazines: Intellectual Issues and Ibn Arouse. Those studies explained the linguistic taxation between standard Arabic language and the vernacular, as well as the development issue of Arabic grammar to get rid of all obstacles that hinder its growth among other live languages. Kalfat was known among his colleagues and friends for his optimistic views about the future. He always said in his beautiful Nubian accent, "Yes there is hope." After Jan. 25th Revolutions, Kalfat said that it is important to establish our democracy from the bottom up. He contended that this is happening in Egypt through independent unions and elections in many places.
