And You Thought English Was Translation Poor…

A post by bear_bull on the blog Книжный Слог says that not one novel on the Arab Writers Union list of 105—not even Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy—has been translated into Russian.

I haven’t been in Russia since…1994?…so it’s hard for me to say, and my Russian’s grown too atrophied for me to really dig into this issue. The Russian Wikipedia entry on Mahfouz seems to back up bear_bull’s claim, although apparently Mahfouz’s Autumn Quail was translated by В. Э. Шагаль и Н.Рабиновичем.

*I can’t seem to link to the Russian Wikipedia entry; WordPress apparently doesn’t like Cyrillics.