Syrian-born Palestinian Saleh Almani was born in Homs, Syria in 1949. He was one of the most influential translators of Spanish literature into Arabic. He studied Spanish literature at university. He translated a whole library of Latin American literature including the works of Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Federico García Lorca, Isabel Allende, José Saramago and Jorge Luis Borges. He passed away in Madrid on December 3, 2019.
In 1970, he travelled to Barcelona to study medicine, but dropped out to study journalism, in which he lasted about a year. After that he worked at a port and mingled with vagabonds and people at the bottom of the social hierarchy. One day, he was hanging out at a cafe in Barcelona when he met a friend who had a book. His friend advised him to read it. The book was the first edition of Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude.
Almani was taken with the language, and decided to translate the book. He translated two chapters then forgot about it, after which he returned to Damascus and started translating short stories from Spanish for local newspapers.
He worked as a translator at the Embassy of Cuba in Damascus, at the Palestinian News Agency, and later at the Syrian Ministry of Culture and the Syrian General Authority. He was a member of the Arab Writers Union in Syria and actively contributed to several translation workshops.
He has received numerous awards and honours for his work from the School of Translators in Toledo (part of the University of Castilla-La Mancha, 2013); the Order of Culture, Science and Arts (for Creative Writing), the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, (2014); the Arab Writers Union in Tangiers, Morocco, and Abu Dhabi (2015); the International Gerard of Cremona Translation Prize (2015); and the Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Award for Translation (in the individual achievement category, 2016).
