The Obituary of the Prof. Dr. Ahmed Etman, by Lorna Hardwick
In Memoriam: Professor Ahmed Etman (1945–2013)
Classical Receptions Journal 2014 6: 175
In Memoriam: Professor Ahmed Etman (1945–2013)
We record with great sadness the death in August 2013 of Professor Ahmed Etman, who was from its inception a member of the International Advisory Board of the Classical Receptions Journal. Until his recent retirement, Ahmed Etman was a Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Cairo. He also served as Chairman of the Egyptian Society of Graeco-Roman Studies and the Egyptian Society of Comparative Literature. From the start of his career he had extensive interests in the comparative histories of classical texts, both within antiquity and subsequently. He was an international authority on the history of classical scholarship in Egypt and on the role of the transmission of Greek texts through Latin and Arabic translations. In recent years, he contributed extensively on those topics to conferences in the UK and other western European countries.
Ahmed Etman had special skills in setting up large projects and bringing them to fruition. A highlight of his career was his leadership over a period of six years of the team of scholars who translated Homer’s Iliad into Arabic. This prose translation was published in 2004 and was accompanied by the reissue of a paperback edition of Soliman El_Bostany’s popular 1904 verse translation. The publication of the new translation was marked by a conference in Cairo on ‘Translation and Cultural Interaction’. Professor Etman was then under considerable pressure to facilitate a translation into Arabic of Homer’s Odyssey and in the meantime devoted attention to overseeing translation into Arabic of recent Anglophone scholarship, the publication of which he planned to launch at a conference in Cairo in the spring of 2014.
In addition to his scholarly work, Professor Etman was also a playwright, working mainly from classical figures and themes. Several of his plays were broadcast on Egyptian radio. His Cleopatra Worships Peace (1984) was translated into English, French, Greek, and Italian and The Goats of Oxyrynchus into English and French. Most recently, his play A Belle in the Prison of Socrates was published in an English translation by Professor Fawzia El-Sadr (2008). The play took the figure of Socrates as ‘gadfly’ to the democracy, presenting a collage of ancient sources in a theatrical setting. It proved prescient in its phantasmagoria on the elusive presence of demokratia at a time of internal and external conflict in ancient Athens.
Ahmed Etman’s sadly premature death has cut short his plans to use his retirement to promote cross-cultural exchange through discussion of the histories of classical scholarship and translation. We shall miss his energy and humour and especially his courteously ironic and even-handed dismissal of simplistic polarities between ‘orientalism’ and ‘occidentalism’.
