Ahmed Magdi, a pure lover of the Spanish language.

This Egyptian, named as the youngest qualified translator of his country, struggles with congenital deafness, works at a call center, and finds meaning in the world in the Spanish language. He has already translated García Márquez and Vila-Matas into Arabic, a veritable Atlas in the world of translation. 

 

Ever since he turned two, Ahmed Magdi has tried to disentangle the skeins of Arabic with the help of a pair of headphones.  “Learning it was so difficult that I became exasperated. I tried very hard and got no results. Arabic was resisting me,” says Magdi, now 26 years of age, and in a Spanish that he learned in the classrooms of an Egyptian university. “With Spanish it was different. The language sought me out. At first I was unable to distinguish the words but, suddenly, everything fell into place,” he affirms as if narrating the precise details of a miracle. Magdi suffers from an acute hearing loss since early childhood that was only mitigated by technological advances and a will of iron. “It’s my father’s fault. He never gave up. He would sit with me and would repeat to me all the words I could not decipher without losing his patience. He always treated me as he would a normal person and would not accept any error that I would commit.” It was an exercise in willpower that would produce results. Five years ago Magdi, an indomitable and demanding reader, earned a degree from one of the most august universities of the Egyptian capital. Today he alternates literary translation, his passion, with his job at the customer service center that Vodaphone Spain has established in the arid outskirts of a Cairo suburb. “As soon as I had the use of reason, I realized that I had no choice but to dedicate myself to translation, given my auditory difficulties,” explains Magdi, after being named the youngest qualified translator in the country by the prestigious National Center of Translation of Egypt. “The most complicated aspect about a translation from Spanish into Arabic,” he admits, “is maintaining the writer’s style, being faithful to the original text. I try to be literal and it seems that people understand it.”

 

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