Among his translations from Arabic to English was a selection of the Surahs (chapters) of the Holy Quran.
According to al-Yawm al-Sabi website, he was buried in the Egyptian city of Faiyum, located 100 kilometers (62 miles) southwest of Cairo, as he had wished.
Davies, referred to as "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time” by the late Edward Said, translated more than twenty-five volumes of short stories, novels, plays, and poetry, and was the first to translate the work of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz.
He was also interested in Islamic studies and is co-translator of three volumes of Prophetic Hadith. He also wrote a number of children’s books adapted from traditional Arabic sources, including a collection of his own short stories, Fate of a Prisoner, which was published in 1999.
Born in 1922 in Vancouver, Canada to English parentage, Davies spent his childhood in Sudan, Egypt, Uganda, and Kenya, and then was sent to England at age 12. He studied Oriental languages at Cambridge, and lectured translation and English literature at several universities across the Arab World.
In 2007, he was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award "Culture Personality of the Year".
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source : IQNA
Wednesday
24 May 2017
2:03:14 PM
831660
(AhlulBayt News Agency) - Denys Johnson-Daviesan an eminent Arabic-to-English literary translator who translated different works from Arabic to English died on Monday.