They don't say hindsight is 20/20 for no reason...

            Professor Elsherif made me realize something that should have been obvious for this novel, and the rest of the novels we have read this semester as well. Quite frankly, I regret not keeping this thought in the back of my mind, at the very least, for each novel assigned to us in this class. Palace Walk was translated into English from Arabic, of course the native language of Naguib Mahfouz. I had not thought much about this fact, although it was mentioned in the beginning of the semester, I admit. This question began nagging at me after guest speaker Professor Elsherif showed a snippet of the movie version of Palace Walk, and the actor spoke the word, “hawa” which means both “love,” or “affection,” and “air.” In the movie, or originally the book, it created a play on words and made a joke that the English version of this novel totally lost. I even presented the question in class, how much Professor Elsherif thought an American, or any non-Arabic speaker lost reading an English version of this novel. His answer was that honestly, we lost quite a bit simply because we don’t come from that culture. It should have seemed obvious to me, but hearing the truth was so discouraging. Palace Walk has seemed to be the most realistic novel we have read, at least in my opinion, since it is following a family and to a point, deals with issues many of us can relate to, such as sibling rivalry, realizing one’s parents aren’t perfect, and love. The same reasoning made me want to get everything I could out of the novel, politically and culturally. On one hand, I know I will not ever be able to read this with the same understanding and perspective that a person from Egypt that has grown up with a background in the culture. On the other hand, I believe it is my responsibility, if only to myself, to make this an opportunity to educate myself about a history and a whole culture I quite frankly do not know anything about. It is wonderful to read Edgar Allen Poe, John Steinbeck, and Mark Twain, because I don’t think anybody knows everything there is to know about even their own history and culture. However, I believe that pushing yourself to read about something you have no prior knowledge of, is invaluable, but only if you make an honest effort to know the perspective of the author or culture that he or she is writing about. It may be impossible to understand some of the nuances, especially after being translated from another language, but I have learned that not all is lost; one can still learn so much about a new culture or event in history, and the perspective of others.