Denys Johnson-Davies dead at 94: If you’ve read Naguib Mahfouz in English, odds are good it was translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. Same goes for Yusuf Idris and countless other Egyptian and Arab writers and poets. Johnson-Davies did more than most to make Arabic literature accessible in the English language. An obituary in Ahram Online reports that he died yesterday. Read Johnson-Davies’ obituary of Naguib Mahfouz for the Guardian, check out the Ahram Online obit, or have a look at how the New York Sun took note of his 2006 “The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction,” which was the first time we encountered the claim that “the first Arabic novel dates from 1929.”