The not so pleasant journey into the mind of the character

When one starts reading Naguib Mahfouz's The Thief and the Dogs the weird use of italics in the middle of the text come across as one of the most intriguing parts. In these words, the narration suddenly shifts into a First Person narration that is practically being delivered as a monologue by Said towards some characters that are completely unknown to the reader. And yet, despite this unconventional break in the narration structure of the  novel, Mahfouz manages to convey his story in an extremely effective way that remains intuitive right off the first paragraph that does this, when the only context that is given is that he just came out of prison and that the weather's hot.

The stream of consciousness in Mahfouz's novel is perhaps the most natural and fluid progression ever. The author jumps around from one point in time to another inside the stream but it still seems perfectly natural. In a sense, the flow of Said's thoughts in The Thief and the Dogs is modeled after the way the human mind records and remembers events. We do not remember things in a linear progression, but rather we tend to recall things at different times in different order, the memories are all cut up, split up and distorted and this shows through in Said's stream of consciousness. He rarely recalls a memory on a specific person fully from the start. It is not until episode ten that we hear the story of how he fell in love with Nabawiyya and it's in episode ten that we learn of how his father died; both of these memories are revealed much after Said makes a first mention of them during the first and second episode respectively. Said recalling his memories in a scattered and discontinuous manner does not throw off the reader because it is natural for us to do that kind of remembering. Replaying a scene from our past in our heads comes natural, and Mahfouz uses this to his advantage to capture the reader and make his novel interesting.

One of the most interesting aspects of the stream of consciousness however, has to do with how the discontinuity and brokenness of his thoughts as well as the progression of the wrath he feels evolves throughout the story. Throughout the first chapters his thoughts are usually coherent and don't vary from one topic to another too suddenly.

Translations... Traducciones... Traductions...

There's a certain charm in the foreign, something that we never voluntarily seek to fully comprehend, but whenever it lands in our lives we can't help but be fascinated. We find it extremely intriguing that foreign human beings - who are always portrayed as an oversimplified out-group in our own media, in our own languages - could have such a striking resemblance to us in the aspects we least expect. Their core human aspects, the ones that we inherently know form a part of our daily lives, but are buried under the layer of politeness that culture spreads upon our lives. 

Texts in another language are the most genuine representation of a person's personal world. The language itself contains an entirely different culture, in their feel and their ideas and expressions. But unfortunately, language is a frontier that is not so easily crossed. Crossing it requires time and understanding, learning a new language to the point where one can connect with it and understand the culture that is engrained within the particular text. However, there is a short-cut to this understanding, albeit a perilous one where a lot must be sacrificed in order to cross over. That is the route of translation.

A work in translation will NEVER feel like the original. Try to translate any poem into any language and you will notice that it doesn't feel like the original. The concepts and ideas transmitted in the translation will lack the essence of the language. Translating from spanish to english causes the roughness and simplicity of the Spanish language to disappear, while going the other way around makes the English language's elegance and sophistication vanish. This type of sacrifice that has to be made in order to trespass the cultural frontiers in texts and gain basic understanding of the ideas. But in a constantly globalizing world where cultures become more and more easily connected with each passing year, learning a new language and experiencing other cultures first hand is easier than ever. So the question has to be asked, is the sacrifice truly worth it? Wouldn't it be better to simply learn the new language and experience the culture first hand? 

Personally, I'd say yes and yes. It would be better, but the sacrifice allows for a connection that would otherwise be hard to create.