Foreword
by Roger Allen
When Adnan Haydar and I decided in the late 1970s, as I now recall, to translate into English Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s novel, al-Safīna (1970), we were both already abundantly aware of the fact that the author was himself a superb and renowned translator of the most challenging of English literary works into Arabic – Shakespeare’s tragedies and sonnets, for example, and, equally complex in a different way, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Soon after we started the translation project, Jabra happened to be paying a visit to New York. We both went up to see him at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. During discussions of translation, Jabra was eager to point out to us that, while he was comfortable translating English works into Arabic, the reverse was not the case. H
