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Naguib Mahfouz. The Harafish. Catherine Cobham, tr. New York. Doubleday. 1994 ((C) 1993). 406 pages. $22.95/L15.
The Harafish is an English translation of Malhamat al-Harafish (literally "The Epic of the Harafish"), which was originally published in Egypt in 1977. In 1935-76 I was on sabbatical in Egypt and had been in contact with Naguib Mahfouz several times concerning my translation of his earlier work, al-Maraya (1972), which was eventually published in English in 1977 as Mirrors. I can vividly recall one telephone conversation in which he told me that he had just finished a work about the "harafish" and was very happy with it. Subsequent comments by Mahfouz indeed make it clear that this is his personal favorite among all his works; it has certainly been at the top of his translation desiderata following his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1988 (see WLT 63:1, pp. 5-9).
The Harafish belongs to that group of fictional works by Mahfouz that make use of the allegory of "the quarter" (in Arabic,...