Raphael Cohen was born in 1965 in Brighton and grew up in south London. My mother’s native tongue was Swiss German and my father (born under Ottoman rule in Haifa) slipped between quotations from the Bible in Hebrew, the Qur’an in Arabic, and Molière in French.

After finishing school, I went in search of my ‘identity’ to Israel. I learned some Hebrew and basic Arabic. At university in Oxford I took a BA in Oriental Studies, studying both classical and medieval Hebrew and classical and modern standard Arabic. In the summer of 1987, I first came to Egypt, to improve my woeful Arabic. After my BA, I was privileged to be awarded a Century Fellowship at the University of Chicago. I went on to learn much from the late Farouk Abdel-Wahhab and the great Jaroslav Stetkevych, who instilled the hope that (classical) texts in Arabic could be more than just a philological puzzle to be deciphered.

After gaining my MA I spent 1993 and 1994 in Cairo. I worked as an editor and translator for the English language Al-Ahram Weekly. Aside for the usual news and comment pieces, I was also able to have my first literary translations published in the paper, including poetry by Amal Dongool and Ahmed Taha. In the heated atmosphere around the Oslo Accords, I learned that translators work in contexts that they may not fully comprehend, and I ended up successfully suing the Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat for libel, after they wrote that I was working to polarize Egyptian culture and had been deported by the Egyptian authorities.

After becoming a father for the first time in 1998, I took a break from the hand-to-mouth existence of the freelance translator, and worked as a computer programmer and a criminal defence paralegal.

From 2002 to 2006 I was active in the London branch of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and made two trips to Palestine, spending a month in the West Bank (2002) and in the Gaza Strip (2003).

In 2006, I returned to Egypt, after having been refused admission into Israel, where I hoped to live as a peace activist. From that time on, I have built my life in Cairo. I was lucky enough to be paid to read the dictionary, both Arabic to English and English to Arabic in my long stint working with Dar Elias, the renowned Egyptian publishers, whose first bilingual dictionary goes back to 1913.

Over the last years, I have worked as a freelance translator in the fields of politics, development and literature. Published translations include the novels So You Can See by Mona Prince (AUC Press 2011) Ahlem Mostaghanemi’s Bridges of Constantine (Bloomsbury, 2014) and George Yarak’s Guard of the Dead (AUC Press, 2019), the poetry collection Poems of Alexandria and New York by Ahmed Morsi (Banipal Books, 2021), and the non-fiction The Jewish Agency and Syria During the Arab Revolt in Palestine by Mahmoud Muhareb (I. B. Taurus, 2023). I was a contributing editor of Banipal Magazine, for which I first translated Marwan Makhoul.

Image by Nouri al-Jarah.