The leading poet, Sarah Maguire, is the founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre. Her fourth collection of poems, The Pomegranates of Kandahar, will be published by Chatto & Windus in June 2007. A selection of her poems was translated into Arabic by Saadi Yousef; Haleeb Muraq was published by Dar Al-Mada in Damascus in 2003. Here she offers some pertinent insights into the complex process of translation poetry.

The author's proposition that Mahfouz's Echoes of An Autobiography is an interesting experiment in textual upheaval opens up the text to new critical reading. It shows how its struggle to bring to form to a fragmented mix of aphorisms, segments, nostalgic reflections from the past and a textual panorama of 'memory' shapes the typography of the text and becomes gradually inscribed within various layer of its structure. It also conveys a sense of resolution and resignation in the present - hence becomes more an 'echo' from the Mahfouzian body of works itself. The analysis employs the Bakhtinian chronotope to demonstrate the constant dialectics between the text's form and its presentation on the page.