Renowned Egyptian writer, translator, and well-known leftist activist Khalil Kalfat, died in Cairo on Monday. He was 72.
He was well known for his smooth, eloquent translations into Arabic, as well as his leftist political activism, which led to multiple imprisonments.
Kalfat was born in Nubia in Aswan on 9 April 1941. He became a well-known literary critic, writer of short stories, and a translator who translated works on a multitude of subjects into Arabic, including works by Jorge Luis Borges, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Machado de Assis.
Kalfat's translations won him the Rifaa Tahtawy prize in translation from the Egyptian National Centre for Translation in March 2013, with the judging panel describing his translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the French Revolution as accurate and eloquent.
The leftist activist was opposed to the Mubarak regime and supported the January 25 Revolution, but in the years following 2011 he was quoted as saying that the revolution wasn't a political revolution as power stayed in the hand of the capitalists, who he described as the centre of the counter-revolution.
The writer of the "Palestinian Disaster," was one of those who tried to theorise the problem of the Egyptian leftist movement, and he hoped that the 2011 revolution would bring the left back to the centre of the Egyptian political scene.
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