Ultimately, however, what interests us in Wedding Song is not this forbidding motif or the plight of mankind, but how four very different kinds of minds and temperaments apprehend and deal with the realities that surround them. There is reason to believe that Abbas’s sense of triumph at the end of the book is by no means illusory. Unlike the other characters, he has been able to transform his own life; and he has also transformed theirs, through a creative power exercised almost unawares. It is his dawning consciousness of this power, which Mahfouz describes in the last pages of the book’s final section, that provides us with a masterful portrait of the mind of an artist.

It is this portrait, which undoubtedly includes elements of Mahfouz’s own vision of himself, that the translator has sought above all to liberate from the limitations imposed by barriers of culture and language.

MURSI SAAD EL DIN

TARIQ RAMADAN THE ACTOR

September. The beginning of autumn. The month of preparations and rehearsals. In the stillness of the manager’s office, where the closed windows and drawn curtains allow no other noise to intrude but the soft hum of the air conditioner, the voice of Salim al-Agrudy, our director, erupts, scattering words and ideas, sweeping through the scaffolding of our silent attentiveness. Before each speech his glance alerts the actor or actress who will be playing the part and then the voice goes on, sometimes soft, sometimes gruff, taking its cue from whether the part is a man’s or a woman’s. Images of stark reality rush forth, overwhelming us with their brutal directness, their daunting challenge.

At the head of an oblong table with a green baize top, Sirhan al-Hilaly, our producer, sits in command, following the reading with his hawklike features fixed in a poker face, staring at us while we crane in al-Agrudy’s direction, his full lips clamped around a Deenwa cigar. The intensity of his concentration makes any interruption or comment impossible; the silence with which he ignores our excitement is so arctic that it compels us to repress it.

Doesn’t the man understand the significance of what he’s reading to us?

The scenes that unroll before my imagination are tinged with bloodshed and brutality. I’d like to start talking with someone to break the tension, but the thick cloud of smoke in the room deepens my sense of alienation; and I am sodden with some kind of fear. To hold back panic, I pin my eyes to the impressive desk in the rear of the room or a picture on the wall—Doria as Cleopatra committing suicide with the viper, Ismail as Antony orating over the body of Caesar—but my mind shows me the gallows. I feel devils inside me carousing.

Salim al-Agrudy utters the words “Final curtain,” and all heads turn toward Sirhan al-Hilaly in bewilderment, as he says, “I’d like to know what you think of it.”