Journeys with Arabic: James Scanlan

مَعْز

root: م-ع-ز / collective noun / definition: goats

After six hundred posts and more than five years, I think I can graciously forgive if you have tired of my (written) voice at any point.

I’ve been planning to introduce some other voices, here and there, to the blog for quite some time. And thanks to the generous cooperation of the man who walked from Morocco to England, we’re finally able to kick off this new series: Journeys with Arabic.

For this series of posts, I’m asking other Arabic enthusiasts to share their own journeys with the language—so perhaps you and I can nab some insights and inspiration.

My first encounter with James Scanlan was during my master’s at Exeter. He—as a now-award-winning Arabic-to-English translator—was giving advice to those hoping to follow a similar route.

During the online session, and to my uncontainable excitement, he recommended those in the virtual audience who were studying Arabic to check out The Arabic Pages. Jaw drop. It was as though a star had mentioned my informal little blog on a grand televised stage.

I ended up reaching out to him on LinkedIn and, from there, discovered his too-funny writings.

Now, from his home in Dahab that he shares with his wife, daughter, and—as he doesn’t neglect to mention—his goats (who I assume are kept outside?), James writes:

James Scanlan

The sun did not shine.

It was too wet to play.

So we sat in the house.

All that cold, cold, wet day.

So begins Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat.

So, too, began my journey with Arabic.

Well, sort of.

It began in September 2013 in a room above a student bar on a hill in Devon, in the rain. I sat there with al-Kitab. We sat there, we two. And I said, ‘How I wish we had something to do.’

Al-Kitab suggested we get to grips with some vocab lists and grammar constructions, because it was too cold to play ball. So we sat down with Maha and Khaled and al-Umam al-Mutahida, and we learnt about Arabic. We learnt about it all.

I spent the next four years studying Arabic between a hill in Devon and a hill in Jordan; occasionally snowed in, often sweating out.

I graduated with a Do Not Bend in Arabic from Exeter University in the summer of 2017 and decided then and there that I, James Scanlan BA, would become the newest resident of Cairo, Egypt.

I interned my way through a year at the AUC Press in Tahrir Square. I took the minutes at meetings for the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, blown away by (the late, renowned translator) Humphrey Davies’s effortless command of Arabic.

The way he kept coming out with the word نستبعد before casting aside yet another novel about a rural doctor who became a chicken as a symbol of social oppression.

This guy, I thought, really knows his way around Form X.

It’s now the summer of 2025 and I’ve been a freelance translator for four and a half years. (Marketing copy and the odd short story. Just finished a whole book. My first! Hurrah!)

I’m a resident of Dahab, South Sinai with my daughter who is three, and my wife who is not. Watching my daughter (half-Egyptian) effortlessly pick up Arabic phrases and use them straight away (in context, correctly) has made me approach the language a lot more flexibly (if competitively… with my daughter).

I spend my mornings removing em dashes from prospective translations. I spend my afternoons putting them back. I spend my evenings trying to enthral my daughter with Dr Seuss until she insists that her mother reads it instead, in Arabic.

And her mother does, translating the hilarious blend of repetition and rhyme off the top of her head, with unfuriating ease.

Every month or so I get the urge to sack it all in and retrain as a forester.

I haven’t completely ruled out that option #نستبعد, but I’m still having too much fun with Arabic.

Also, there’s not much call for foresters in South Sinai.

And that is that. Or as they say in Egypt:

توتة توتة خلصت الحدوتة، حلوة ولا ملتوتة؟

Ory ory that’s the end of my story; was it fun or was it boring?