CAIRO, Dec 8 (NNN-MENA) – Helwan University held a symposium yesterday, to mark the birth anniversaries of Egypt’s late Nobel laureate, novelist Naguib Mahfouz, and China’s noted writer Ba Jin, focusing on the similarities between the lives and works of the two literary giants.
Held at the university’s faculty of arts, the symposium was attended by professors, experts and students from the departments of Arabic and Chinese languages, in Helwan and Cairo universities.
The discussions shed light on the biographies and trilogies of Mahfouz and Ba, as well as, how they influenced the contemporary literature in their own countries.
Yousra Kamel, director of Helwan University’s Chinese-Egyptian Research Centre and a professor at the Chinese department, said that, the seminar was proposed by the centre “as a cultural bridge connecting the Egyptian and Chinese cultures.”
“The literary works of Mahfouz and Ba have a lot of similarities, as their trilogies tell about the feudal communities in Egypt and China in the past, as well as, the customs and traditions of the Egyptian and Chinese societies,” Kamel said.
He added that, the seminar aimed to let the students know about the similarities between both novelists and their societies in the early 1900s.
Mahfouz was born in 1911 and died in 2006, while Ba was born in 1904 and died in 2005.
The speakers at the seminar included professors of Arabic literature from Helwan and Cairo universities, who spoke of how the works of both renowned authors were studied and analysed in each other’s cultures.
“Naguib Mahfouz himself was interested in Chinese literature,” said Hussein Hammouda, professor of Arabic literary criticism at the Faculty of Arts of the Cairo University, pointing out that, most of Naguib Mahfouz’s works were translated into Chinese.– NNN-MENA
