Khalil Kalfat (1941-2015)
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. He was the author of several landmark dictionaries, most notably the Elias-Harrap Business Dictionary.
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.
He started his career as a critic, publishing his articles in Al-Messa newspaper. His fondness of Latin American literature was evident in his translation of works by Brazilian Machado de Assis and Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges.
Kalfat was one of a small group of people that worked to unify secret leftist groups in 1968, leading to the founding of the Communist Egyptian Labor Party. The party would dissolve in 2000. His leftist political activism led to multiple imprisonments. His landmark literary productions were written under the pen name Saleh Mohamed Saleh, which his fans attributed to his concern with security persecution.
He 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.
Kalfat’s last article was published in the state-run newspaper Al-Ahram and was an analysis of the Russian Metro Jet crash in Sinai on October 31
