Prose Editor Amine Mohammed Bit sat down with Libyan-American novelist, essayist, and memoirist Hisham Matar to discuss his latest work, a translation of Naguib Mahfouz’s dream journal entitled I Found Myself…The Last Dreams, which he co-edited with Diana Matar. Hisham Matar is the author of five books, including The Return, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, as well as numerous essays, articles, reviews, and short stories. Diana Matar is Distinguished Artist at Barnard College Columbia University, New York and teaches photography in the Comparative Literature program at Barnard College. Her most recent book, My America, was published by GOST Books in 2024, and is an archive and memorial for Americans who died in encounters with their police.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

I. On the “In-Between”

AB (The Columbia Review): I wanted to start with the photos associated with the dream journals. I found them so fitting to the experience of reading the book, considering the visual resonance between dreams and photographs. What was the vision that you and Diana had for how this contribution would fit into the book?

HM (Hisham Matar): That’s a good way to put it. We knew, early on, that we didn’t want the dreams to illustrate the images, or the images to illustrate the dreams. We didn’t think of one as subservient to the other. We wanted them to have a relationship that we’ve only glimpsed here and there, whereby active resonance is created.

AB: A lot of these photos are from Diana Matar’s collection Barzakh, which refers to the intermediate realm between life and death in Islamic belief. Could you speak more about the kind of “intermediacy” of this work?

HM: So yes, she has been thinking—and she is in a much better place to answer this but this is my reading—for quite a number of years about ways in which photography can capture something that is not declared. Obviously, in order to photograph something, something has to be there, and a photograph is by its nature—at least its claim—is that it’s explicit, that it is a piece of evidence, or at least historically it was. The image, of course, since then has become contested, because now we are able to doctor images. But I think this question, of how a photograph can alight on physical reality, as well as conjure or suggest something that isn’t declared or physical, or even evidenced in the photograph, is a throughline that runs through Diana’s work.

So it’s just such a wonderful coincidence that she has been, for a time, meditating over the in-between, the barzakh, the isthmus—a place of waiting. A place that is both conscious of history, everything that has happened, but also a place that is in willful anticipation. Which is, at least, one definition of what a dream-state is, right? Dreams, at least we assume, arise from everything that has happened to us and that we’ve perceived. But also, I think, we harbor a hope, or superstition, or fear, that dreams contain information about the future. That they are, at some level, prophetic and intuitive.

AB: I think intuitive is the right word. There is in photographs, I think, a certain level of intuition and encounter just as there is in dreams. This text is also a kind of encounter with Mahfouz. You get this strong sense of personality, and so I wanted to ask you, shifting the subject slightly, about some of the language in this text. What isn’t noticeable in the English, but is in the Arabic, is Mahfouz’s shrewd way of writing the language’s formal register. What do you make of this translation that takes place in how he writes fusha, as well as between his dreams and his writer’s voice?

HM: I think Mahfouz, with every bone in his body, resisted pomposity, or any sense of “needing a license to enter here.” This virtue is in his writings but was also in his person: easily detectable in his interviews and conversations. He often found the simplest way to articulate what he wanted to say, and the thing that he wanted to say was often elegant and interesting, and not at all simple.

AB: There is such a capacity for him to hold this smallness but also an appetite for social life, as well as this strong sense of mature subjectivity in the work. Did you ever feel as though, in translating these dreams, that you found yourself filling this space between Mahfouz the prose and Mahfouz the person?

HM: I found his voice very easy to emulate, to shadow his sentences. It was somewhat effortless. All I had to do was follow his voice. One of the things that I found so interesting is that, here’s a writer who is a great practitioner of realism, who wrote realist novels where consequence was always at the heart of things. Even in novels where he tried to break that up, like in Miramar, where he tells the story from four different points of view, nonetheless there’s a real coherence. Here, I wonder if one of Naguib Mahfouz’s enthusiasms behind this text is not only to document and record his dreams, but to come up with a way of creating a mosaic of meaning and references. It’s hard to read them and not feel as though he enjoyed that—jumping from one thing to another. Diana and I were talking about it the other day, at a public event that marked the book’s publication. We realized, on the train on the way to the festival, that neither of us are really quite decided about what’s going on in Mahfouz’s dreams: whether they are dreams, faithfully documented; or, as I sometimes felt while translating them, dreams that the novelist entered and tried to encapsulate or tie up in some way; or, yet again, entire inventions, made-up or wakeful dreams?

AB: I wanted to ask, very frankly, if your own dreams ever colored your translation of these works. You speak, in the introduction to I Found Myself, about how you translated these dreams in the morning?

HM: Well, I translated the first eight or so one Sunday morning. But I usually do my own writing in the mornings. So, as the project developed, I worked on these in the afternoon. But dreams have always been important to me. I remember this novelist once telling me that I’ve broken one of the central rules of novel writing: ‘You’re only supposed to have a maximum of three dreams across all of your books,’ he said. I sometimes have more than that in one book. I’m clearly interested in dreams and in recalling them. I’m also interested in the obvious truth about them, which is that notwithstanding all of our scientists and poets, the various people who have dedicated time and thought to researching the meaning and nature of dreams, they still remain by and large mysterious. We don’t really know where they come from, or what they are telling us.

I grew up in an environment where everyone, no matter how serious, how educated, or how unsuperstitious they are, was interested in dreams, had an opinion about them. One of the quickest ways to capture my family’s attention when I was a child was to say, “You know what I dreamt last night?”

AB: Absolutely. I remember one time, being at home in Morocco, and my cousin said he felt sick in the morning to which my aunt responded “did you have a nightmare?” There is this kind of interplay between dreams and the working world, as well as psychic and physical health which is so fascinating to me.

HM: Your question brings to mind this particular enthusiasm my aunts used to have when I was a boy, where they would say “tell me your dream and I will tell you what it means.” They don’t say “How did it make you feel?” or “What do you associate this word or detail in the dream with?” which is what a psychoanalyst might say. And their interpretations are informed by codes. All the books—there are several across languages—that claim to decipher dreams. People can be pretty sure that, for example, fish is bad luck, the sea is life, and if it’s high it’s trouble, and if it’s calm… and so on. A dead fish is really terrible. Even though I don’t believe in these things, my intuition about dreams being that everything you’re dreaming about is yours (in my case, I really like fish), nonetheless these definitions enter one’s consciousness and they become facilities for our dreams. Now, for me, fish are not just fish, they’ve been touched by this interpretation.

One of the things that’s involved in this ambition to decipher the dream is to rescue or reclaim you from the subconscious to the waking world, to give you a station or a location. As if we realize that within dreams we are lost. The most frightening thing about a dream is that you have no control over it. And here, for Mahfouz, this is where I think the writer comes in.

II. Mahfouz’s Dreams

AB: In this book, as a reader, we are able to almost piece together Mahfouz’s character I think even better than if we were to ask him directly. Did you ever feel a certain kind of intimacy with the way Mahfouz presents himself in this book? With the way he exists in this prose?

HM: I felt close to him, if that’s the right way to put it. But what I was aware of most was that I was inside those sentences. I didn’t feel as though it was my place to presume whether these were his dreams or not his dreams—I was trying to just be faithful to the sentences: their rhythm, their explicit and the shadow meanings. I also think they contain in them so much variety that I found translating them fun. I enjoyed it. I was observing a performance, and moving it into another language.

Something interesting happened while I was translating it. I went and gave a reading from one of my books at Harvard University, and before the reading there was a small cocktail party. A writer whom I knew a little suddenly decided to share a dream that he had the night before. I had mentioned nothing about Mahfouz’s dreams. He just said “I had the wildest dream last night,” and proceeded to tell us the dream. I noticed that the moment he started, the atmosphere got heavier. Everyone was waiting for him to be done telling the dream. There was this sense of “why am I listening to this elaborate dream, I’d rather know what you had for breakfast. Something concrete and real.” You could easily lose people’s attention telling them your dreams, unless you’re interested in the subject like I am, but even I, who was interested in this man’s dream—the dream just kept going on and I became bored. It started to become meaningless.

I think dreams, like stories, can be good or bad. If someone says, “Gamel Abdel Nasser came to me in a dream and said ‘Why aren’t you returning my calls?’” Now, that’s interesting. Or that, ‘Suddenly, the lover from my youth turned up and helped me carry the suitcases that my wife and I couldn’t manage.’ There is something about those kinds of dreams that, narratively, hooks you.

AB: When people share dreams, there’s always a certain kind of indulgence that you accept from the narrator. But Mahfouz, when he tells these dreams, you’re almost left wanting more. There’s almost a sense of formality and reservation in telling these dreams—that level of indulgence feels absent, and I was wondering how that comes off to you?

HM: I think they’re written for us.

AB: Lastly, I wanted to ask about the dream about Mahfouz holding Aladdin’s lamp. He uses it to resurrect a long lost lover, and this brings him back to a terrible alternative past. I couldn’t help but feel like this was about literature and how he understood the intellectual vocation in his career. That so much of his work was dedicated to everyday people, and that yet in his later years, he yearns for lost loves and for different presents that could have been. How do you feel this dream grapples with this conflict?

HM: That dream also affected me. One of the things it made me think of was that one of the reasons that you write is to find a way to manage your freedom. Because, given that you could do anything, of course within reason, why sit alone in a room and write one sentence after another, towards something that you have no clue what will come of it or whether anyone would read it? A friend of mine is a surgeon. Every day the world clearly requires him. All of us, no matter what we do, must decide I’m not going to do that other thing, I’m going to do this instead. Whether it’s to bake bread, be a surgeon, or be a writer. You have to somehow leave all of the other options that you have, and focus on this one thing—to say “I’m going to manage my freedom in this way.” But for writers, it’s perhaps more ambiguous, at least some of the time, if not all of the time. And your vocation is very much contested by all of the structures around you that define value in very specific ways.

People might admire you if you win a big prize, like Mahfouz did, but there’s very little evidence that the world finds what you’re doing meaningful or necessary. So, I think under that circumstance, for Mahfouz to devote himself to this routine where he makes sure—and of course I’m putting words in his mouth here—that his domestic life is stable, nurtured and precise. And that his job is manageable, not too demanding, and reliable. He gets a government job, clocks off at 2 P.M. He’s very good at what he does, and does it with great integrity. And then he writes in the afternoon. That’s the life he devised. He could have devised a different kind of life, and done one of any of the other things that writers do. That dream, Dream 272, is to me, thinking about all of this. Thinking about the space that he has created between his obligations and his freedoms.

It also reminds me a little bit of what Flaubert says about himself, about how, and again I’m paraphrasing here, he’s very bourgeois and unadventurous in his everyday life, but reserves all of his freedom and adventurousness for his writing. That dream by Mahfouz also seems to be thinking about this bind. To write these books, you need to have a very organized life. You can’t be traveling, partying, whatever the other cliché is. All of these clichés about writers: that we live on the edge, that we drink—all of those images of the writer sitting at a typewriter pouring himself or herself a whisky. I’ve always thought, what a ridiculous thing, you can’t work like that! For notwithstanding that myth, writing actually demands a great deal of stability.

Somebody like Ivan Turgenev has always fascinated me, because I love his work, but if you read his itinerary, it’s the itinerary of a man who doesn’t want to write. He always found ways to interrupt it. A great writer who never lived up to his talent. Whereas Flaubert, and they were both very close, for 14 years they wrote almost every week to each other (and they’re wonderful letters to read), just sort of said, “No, I’m going to live with my mom in the country, and do nothing, and see nobody, and travel nowhere.” And he managed well. Flaubert is one of those people, like Beethoven, that is an example of someone who completely fulfilled the potential of his talent. And I would count Mahfouz with Flaubert, in the sense that he did exceed all of the expectations of his talent. Looking at the first books he published, nobody expected 50 books to come of him. But he had somehow found a regimen.

No one, no matter what you do, is ever at ease in it. So, writers, such as Mahfouz, who successfully devote themselves to their vocation and fulfill the promise of their talent, they too, towards the end of their lives, express regrets about what they did not do, the loves they didn’t have, the adventures they didn’t undertake, etc. But also those other writers, such as Turgenev, but also James Baldwin, of course, who famously, towards the end, regretted that he didn’t write enough novels, that he was too distracted by activism and his essays, even though, well, where would we be without them? And to some extent Susan Sontag too expressed such regrets towards the end of her life. So, no one comes out unscathed, and that dream is thinking about all this.

AB: I think that’s a great place to conclude. Thank you so much for your time.

I Found Myself … : The Last Dreams, co-edited by Hisham and Diana Matar, was published by New Directions in July.

Those interested in reading more can see Bit’s review of I Found Myself…The Last Dreams, available on The Columbia Review website.

Hisham Matar: On the In-Between and Mahfouz’s Dreams

Srikanth Reddy: On Form and Figure-Ground Relationships