Translators From Egypt

"This paper's first aim is to investigate the theme of death and related to it death-penalty, in More's utopia. Secondly by the way of comparison it will simply explore these themes in some modern utopia novels. On the occasion of the 450th anniversary of More's death-penalty the subject almost imposes itself. Although utopia is generally concerned with this world, with the here and now even when it has an eye on the future, and is, thus, a kind of paradise on earth, while death is a matter of the hereafter, yet death and the death- penalty figure, in some form or other, in many a utopia piece of writing. The choice of representatives samples was no difficult matter. Five fairly well known novels have been selected. First Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) one of the two novels generally thought to have greatly contributed to the rise of utopia vague in the modern period (the other being Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race). Then, Anthony Trollope's The Fixed Period (1882), William Morris's News From Nowhere (1892), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and finally George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). To forestall objections to my using the term utopia in reference to works which have come to be widely,and rightly perhaps, described as 'dystopias',let me point out that I am using it as a sort of generic term to cover both the positive pictures of an ideal world and the negative or satiric projections of the present or the future, no less than works of fantasy of the same genre. I rely for support on More himself, whose mixture of the ideal and the satiric in Utopia still baffles many a reader."

"Maybe not a hydra because that’s really, really nasty. I think there was almost a false head: we ripped open the packaging and now we’re faced with the real thing that’s there in the box…"

"…A work of fiction lives by empathy – the extending of my self into another's, the willingness to imagine myself in someone else's shoes. This itself is a political act: empathy is at the heart of much revolutionary action…"

"…In Egypt, in the decade of slow, simmering discontent before the revolution, novelists produced texts of critique, of dystopia, of nightmare. Now, we all seem to have given up – for the moment – on fiction."

"…Most people are content to live their lives within prescribed and personal boundaries. But one of the points of artists surely is that they live outside their skin. That they're connected. That they hurt with the hurt of their fellow humans. How, then, can they disengage? How can you – if your task, if your gift, is narrative – absent yourself from the great narrative of the world?..."