N. J. Dawood

Nessim Joseph Dawood (27 August 1927 – 20 November 2014) was an Iraqi translator, who is best known for his translation of the Quran.

Nessim Joseph Dawood was born in Baghdad to a Jewish family.[1] His real surname was Yehuda. The name on his Iraqi ID card consisted of his own given name, plus those of his father and paternal grandfather, “Nessim Yosef [Joseph] David.” He changed "David" to "Dawood" when he applied for a passport. His nom de plume became N.J. Dawood.[2]

Bilingual in Arabic and English, he started tutoring schoolmates in English. He came to England as an Iraq state scholar in 1945, and studied English literature and Classical Arabic at the University of London in the first cohort of students to resume normal university studies after the Second World War.[3]

After graduating in 1949, he worked as a journalist and was invited by Sir Allen Lane – the founder of Penguin Books – to translate a selection of Tales from the Thousand and One Nights into English, to mark the publication of Penguin No. 1001 in 1954. This translation achieved a wide readership: an unexpurgated version that reflected the Arabic original – yet was effortlessly readable in contemporary English – appealed to a broad audience. Readings and dramatic adaptations from his translation of the Tales were broadcast on BBC radio. It was reissued in the Penguin Classics and a further selection (Aladdin and Other Tales) was published in 1957, also in the Penguin Classics. Both books were combined into a single volume (Tales from the Thousand and One Nights) in 1973.

The founder of the Penguin Classics was Dr. E. V. Rieu, CBE – a classicist and an accomplished Greek and Latin scholar who had translated inter alia the Iliad and the Odyssey.[4] Rieu revolutionized the art of translation, and became a mentor and key influence upon Dawood's approach to the translator's craft.

Rieu and Lane proposed a new translation of the Koran, which at that time was largely unknown to British readers. The only previous translations were in an archaic, literal style; the aim was to produce a modern translation that would be accessible to the English-speaking reader. The first edition was published in 1956 as Penguin No. L52. In this edition, Dawood rearranged the chapters (surahs) into more-or-less chronological order, to make them easier to understand, in line with the chronological approach found in the Old and New Testaments. Later revisions of his translation reverted to the traditional sequence of the surahs (beginning with the short surah Al Fātiḥah, but further roughly arranged in descending order of length).

His translation of the Koran is still thought to be the best-selling English language version – it has been reprinted at least 70 times, appearing in several revised editions and formats. For N J Dawood, the Koran was a lifelong “work in progress” – constantly revised and refined in the course of an entire career. Language and use of English change constantly over time: for example, terms such as “Men” and “Mankind” did not have the same gender-specific connotations for the reader of the 1950s that might apply today, so have been censored. Dawood's translation has never been out of print; a new revised edition was published in May 2014.

He died on 20 November 2014.[5]