Don Herdeck

By Lynn Teo Simarski

The single, cramped loft-like room that houses Three Continents Press in downtown Washington, DC belies both the press's expansive name and the solid reputation it enjoys among Middle East scholars. The press is the brainchild of Donald Herdeck, a Renaissance man of the developing world's literature, who publishes, in association with Norman Ware, one of the most significant US lists—in English—of Middle Eastern fiction, poetry, and literature studies.

Middle Eastern books comprise less than a third of the press's catalog but account for half of its sales. "For me it's surprising and gratifying that our Middle Eastern list is doing better than our other books," Herdeck says. "Increasingly, I'm signing up Arab, Persian, and Maghrebian books, because I think this is an untapped market."

The press's Middle Eastern bestseller is Midaq Alley, a novel about life in a traditional Cairo street by the celebrated Egyptian author, Naguib Mahfouz. Another Mahfouz novel comes in second: Miramar, set in an Alexandria boarding house during the Nasser era. The third bestseller is Tawfiq Yusif Awwad's Death in Beirut. "Because of Lebanon's problems, professors are increasingly using that title in classes," Herdeck says.

Herdeck: Professor and Publisher

When Herdeck, a lively and energetic former foreign service officer, founded the press in 1973, he did not envision it becoming a premier US pipeline of translated Middle East fiction. When health problems forced him to return to the US to stay, Herdeck became a humanities professor at Georgetown University. He taught African literature, and to give his students the best examples, he began publishing African and Caribbean books himself. "From the beginning, our goal was to bring as many titles as possible into English from other languages," he says. "Basically, we wished to fill the gaps and dig about to find rare and worthy titles not yet in print."

Not long after he started publishing, some friends took Herdeck to task about the absence of Middle Eastern titles in his catalog. "I said, 'Well, why not?'" he recalls, "and I started looking at some books from the region. But I was in uncharted territory—nobody was doing this."

His first Middle Eastern venture was The Little Black Fish and Other Modern Persian Stories, by Iranian author Samed Behrangi—"sort of like Hans Christian Andersen as written by Karl Marx," as Herdeck puts it. The press soon took on more Middle East titles from Heinemann in London, followed by works of its own not published before.

Most readers of Three Continents' books are university students in non-Western literature courses. "But we've even had some success at getting Middle Eastern literature into high schools," Herdeck says. A display of the press's books in Princeton, for example, attracted New Jersey teachers, some of whom later organized Middle Eastern studies programs.

One of the press's more intriguing listings, not yet in print, is Contemporary Prose by Saudi Women, being edited and translated by Aman Mahmoud Attieh, an Arab-American woman who teaches in Saudi Arabia. "She had a class of older women interested in creative writing," Herdeck explains. "Many had studied abroad, so they were aware of what short stories are. Attieh has been collecting their own stories—crudely-drawn, personal, and quite exciting."

"Nobody had thought before to go to Saudi women and ask them to take an incident and write a story," he said.

Another unique publishing frontier for the press is literature from the Maghreb. "We've published the first Algerian novel in English (originally written in French): Mohammed Dib's Who Remembers the Sea," Herdeck says.

Ignorance of Third World a Problem

Ignorance, even on the part of academics well-versed in Third World literature, is a major barrier to the North African books' success, according to Herdeck, who just retired from Georgetown University. "If you ask an ordinary scholar who's interested in non-Western literature, 'Is there writing coming from Morocco?' he'd probably say, 'Yes, there must be,' without knowing a single detail," Herdeck maintains.

Cultural bias on the part of those who award the Nobel Prize for literature also limits exposure to non-Western writers. "There's still no Arabic, Persian, or Chinese winner, although an Israeli won the prize," Herdeck points out. "I think once in a while it ought to be a writer from the Arab world—after all, they've had writing for more than 1300 years!"

Herdeck's personal favorite from his Middle East selections is Mahfouz's Miramar. "It's a genial, warm, valedictory kind of novel—not dry, discouraged, or dusty," he explains. "It's also a look at different generations in Egypt, and the new woman who represents the new spirit of Egypt—she refuses to marry anyone." The same independent spirit, fortunately for US readers interested in excellent and unusual fiction, inhabits Three Continents Press.

Lynn Teo Simarski is a Washington, DC-based free-lance writer specializing in Middle East topics.