By Mahmoud Kamel
Professor of Linguistics
In the old Cairo cafés, night truly began the moment the rababa poet entered. He carried his modest instrument as a knight might carry his sword and settled into a corner that felt less like a seat and more like a throne of memory. With the first pull of the string, stories awakened—heroes rose from the smoke of coffee and shisha, and the figures of Antar and Abu Zayd al-Hilali seemed to step once again into the world. His voice rose and fell like the Nile in its slow, eternal rhythm, and the patrons sat entranced, as though bound by an invisible thread of narration.
In the world of Naguib Mahfouz, especially in works such as Zuqāq al-Midaqq [or Midaq Alley] and Al-Thulāthiyya [The Cairo Trilogy], this rababa poet appears as more than a performer. He is a custodian of collective memory, a humble man who nevertheless commands the attention of a roomful of strangers. He owns little in the world—perhaps only his instrument, a worn voice, and a treasury of inherited tales—yet he possesses something greater than ownership: the rare power to gather fragmented lives around a single shared dream.
Then came the radio.
It arrived in the café as a small wooden box placed upon a shelf, like an uninvited guest who nevertheless refuses to leave. At first, the rababa poet regarded it with suspicion, then with a quiet, almost dignified sorrow. The patrons began to listen elsewhere—to distant songs, to news of faraway wars and governments—while the rababa lay silent upon the table, like a bird whose wings had forgotten how to remember flight. Gradually, without scandal or farewell, the poet of the rababa disappeared from cafés, not expelled by force but erased by the gentle cruelty of convenience.
Today, the simultaneous interpreter stands in a similar twilight.
He sits in a glass booth, wearing headphones as though they were a second nervous system, translating words at a speed that borders on exhaustion. He emerges from conferences drained, as if he had fought invisible linguistic battles on behalf of others. Yet on the horizon, new applications and software promise a world where language itself may no longer require human passage. Real-time translation now flows through written platforms and conferencing systems, where tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams grow more fluent with every update, quietly eroding the necessity of the human interpreter.
There is, in this transformation, a curious mixture of melancholy and amusement. Melancholy, because every profession carries within it a human story—like that of the rababa poet who once kept entire cafés awake until dawn with nothing but sound and memory. And amusement, because humanity has always been industrious in its pursuit of efficiency, forever inventing devices that save time by subtracting the human cost of time itself.
Perhaps one day, conference halls will echo without booths or headsets, and languages will cross one another like obedient streams of light. The interpreter may sit at home, remembering the frantic elegance of his former craft as the rababa poet once remembered the fading glory of his songs.
Yet a doubt remains.
Machines may translate words, but they do not hear the heartbeat behind them. They may render sentences with precision, but they do not smile at irony or hesitate before sorrow. And so it may be that, even as technology grows ever more eloquent, humanity will continue to seek the presence of another human voice—imperfect, tired, but alive.
And somewhere, perhaps, the rababa poet smiles in silence, as though to say: do not worry too much. Stories do not die when instruments are replaced. They merely change their way of being heard.
