Cairo: The National Center for Translation is organizing a symposium entitled ‘Naguib Mahfouz in the Languages of the World,’ commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Nobel laureate’s passing and revisiting his literary career from a fresh perspective that examines how his works transcended linguistic and geographical boundaries, reaching readers from diverse cultures around the globe.

According to National Iraqi News Agency, twenty years after his death, Naguib Mahfouz remains a prominent figure on the global cultural scene, not only as the author of an exceptional literary work, but also as a writer whose world has been carried into other languages through translation. His stories of Cairo, its characters, and its profound human questions have thus transcended their local context, offering readers worldwide a new opportunity to discover humanity through his literature.

The symposium will feature Dr. Mustafa Riad, Professor of English Literature at Ain Shams University; Tarek El-Taher, Supervisor of the Naguib Mahfouz Museum; and Dr. Hassanein Fahmy, Head of the Chinese Language Department at the Faculty of Languages, Ain Shams University. The event will be moderated by Dr. Mohamed Nasr El-Gebaly, Head of the National Center for Translation. The symposium will offer a multifaceted reading of Naguib Mahfouz’s experience, his presence in the world’s languages, and the impact of translations of his works on the global reception of Egyptian and Arabic literature.

The symposium will be held on September 1st in the Taha Hussein Hall at the Center’s headquarters in the Cairo Opera House. This gathering, two decades after the Nobel laureate’s passing, underscores that for some writers, their stories do not end with their death; rather, another journey begins when translation carries them from language to language, from country to country, and from the memory of one generation to the memory of the world.