Al-Fergani Publishing has released the Arabic edition of The Young Maronite by the Italian writer of Syrian origin Basil Shafik Khuzam, known in literary circles as Alessandro Spina, translated by Muawiya Abdel Majid. The work recalls the memory of Benghazi and the transformations of Libyan society during Ottoman dominance and Italian colonial rule, as part of a broader fictional project covering the history of Libya and Cyrenaica from the Italian invasion in 1911 to the emergence of oil and its impact on society.
Publisher Ghassan Al-Fergani said he first became acquainted with Spina’s project in 2014, when a translator working from Italian into English contacted him and introduced him to the writer’s works published under his pen name.
He explained that the project consisted of a series of 11 works, totalling more than 1,000 pages, recounting Libya’s history, with a particular focus on Cyrenaica, across extended historical periods. Al-Fergani added that the publishing house managed at that stage to publish two volumes in English, but failed to find translators to render the works directly from Italian into Arabic, and the period specified in the rights contract therefore expired.
After returning to Libya in 2021 and adopting a new editorial policy focused on novels, the publishing house decided to reacquire the Arabic rights to the project. It then contacted Muawiya Abdel Majid after he was recommended for the task on the basis of his previous work.
The publishing house’s efforts to reacquire the rights to Spina’s project
Spina’s works relating to Libya began appearing in Italian in the early 1960s, and his first novel, Time and Corruption, was published in 1962.
In 2006, his work on modern Libyan history, titled The Borders of Shadow, was published. It consists of three novels, including The Young Maronite, which the publishing house chose to introduce this literary world to Arab readers. Abdel Majid recalls that he first became involved with the project in 2022, as he remembers, when Ghassan Al-Fergani told him about Alessandro Spina’s life and works.
He said the writer’s story excited him from the outset because of his exceptional life and its direct connection with the city of Benghazi and the period of Italian colonial rule. He then asked to read the entire novel, adhering to his practice of examining any work before committing to translate it.
Spina’s life between Benghazi and Italy
The writer, whose real name was Basil Shafik Khuzam, was born in Benghazi in 1927, midway through the period of Italian colonial rule in Libya. He came from a Syrian family of Maronites from Aleppo. His father, Shafik George Khuzam, moved to Benghazi to work in trade and established a textile factory in 1929. According to Abdel Majid, the city’s residents still call the area associated with the factory “Khuzam Factory”.
Khuzam attended Italian schools before moving to Milan, where he studied literature at the city’s university and graduated with a thesis on the writer Alberto Moravia. He later returned to Benghazi to manage the family’s property until 1979, when the Gaddafi regime seized those assets.
He then moved to Italy, whose nationality he held, opened businesses there and settled down to write novels, most of which focused on the atrocities of Italian colonial rule in Libya. Abdel Majid said that, from the moment he began reading The Young Maronite, he found himself facing a different world, and that this may have been the first time he admitted that translating a work he had been enthusiastic about from the outset would be difficult.
He added that the novel was one of the few works he was inclined to describe explicitly as a “literary work”, owing to its linguistic and dialogic construction, which forced him to confront unusual difficulties in rendering it into Arabic. He said what attracted him most was Spina’s ability to change the tone of dialogue according to the characters’ identities and positions.
Conversation between Italians in Italy differs entirely from a dialogue between two young Maronites in Libya, just as it differs from an exchange between an Italian colonial officer and a Maronite merchant living in the country. Preserving these distinctions in the Arabic edition was among the translator’s main challenges. Abdel Majid described Spina’s dialogue as theatrical and structurally weighty, and even as “elitist”, because it does not offer easy reading and places the reader before something resembling a trial.
He also noted that the novel was written and published in the 1970s, before what he called the “machinery of globalisation” took shape. In his view, it was written for literature and published for reading, rather than in response to the demands of a later global literary market.
The challenges of conveying the characters’ voices in Arabic
The translator believes the novel allows Arab readers to encounter a new and unfamiliar perspective on the period of Italian colonial rule in Libya, while writers and critics can benefit from its measured style and distinctive approach to addressing known events and facts. In his view, its value is not confined to its historical subject, but also extends to its dialogue techniques, character development and incorporation of documentary material into the fictional events.
Despite his prolonged engagement with the memory of Benghazi during the translation, Abdel Majid said he had never visited the city or Libya, although he hoped to do so. He explained that literature can reshape the image even of cities one knows and in which one was born and lived, so this is all the more true of a city viewed through a text dealing with a bygone era, after Libya had passed through many periods and events and life there had changed substantially.
He added that he imagined Benghazi in the novel as though it were a black-and-white photograph: a city where trade flourishes and which invaders covet, so it resists and endures, then breaks and rises again.
Benghazi as a mirror of transformations in Libyan society
He explained that these transformations emerge not only through descriptions of the place, but also in the city’s own characters and in those who arrive to occupy it and subjugate its inhabitants, so that the characters’ circumstances become a means of seeing Benghazi’s circumstances. The novel traces transformations in Libyan society over half a century under Ottoman dominance and then Italian colonial rule.
Abdel Majid said that the interweaving of periods was one of the reasons the work was difficult, because Spina does not place direct or sharp temporal divisions between them. Instead, he allows the periods to overlap gradually, so that the reader does not notice the transition until some time has passed as the events develop.
To deal with this structure, Abdel Majid reread what he translated as he went along, then decided to let the temporal transitions proceed as the author had shaped them, without imposing divisions that did not exist in the original.
At the same time, he undertook extensive reading on the historical periods covered by the novel and researched everything he could find about Spina himself, seeking to understand his temperament and the way he constructed his fictional world. The translator concluded from his reading that the main focus was the maturation of the Maronite character, who passes through all these transformations while experiencing an understandable sense of alienation, alongside the evolution of the Italian coloniser’s choices.
Libyan society ultimately appears as the framework within which the main character’s transformations and the colonial power’s choices unfold, rather than as a mere setting for the events. The Young Maronite does not rely solely on literary narration; it also incorporates press material, historical documents, dialogues and quotations drawn from sources dating to the period it depicts.
Abdel Majid explained that readers encounter these materials as part of the novel’s structure, but the translator also sees them as texts excerpted from other works whose language differs from Spina’s style. This makes it necessary to convey that difference in the Arabic translation.
He said that merging those texts into a single style would have made them appear as though the author had written them himself, so he took care to preserve their stylistic independence. He also believed that respect for translators who had previously rendered some of these works into Arabic required restoring their names, as an acknowledgement of their contribution and an appreciation of what they had provided to Arab readers.
This task led him on an independent research journey in search of earlier Arabic translations of the press material, historical documents, books and novels from which Spina had quoted. He managed to find most of them, though not all, and recorded the names of the translators and publishers in the notes.
When he encountered quotations that had not previously been translated into Arabic, he translated them himself and tried to vary the style to suit the nature of the original quoted text and distinguish it from the novelist’s voice.
At the same time, Abdel Majid stressed that the documentary character of these texts did not remove them from the heart of the novel. They are an essential and integral part of the story, and reading them is necessary to understand what happened and what will happen later. In this way, the documents, press material and quotations shift from historical evidence appended to the narrative into active elements of the fictional events themselves.
