Read an interview with the “two-headed cartoon beast,”  Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot, published in metabunker.

Read Gauvin’s interview with The Comics Journal, in which he explains how he got his start as a translator:  “Year Abroad. Dumb luck. Decent Taste.”  

Read a young Bedouin tour guide’s thoughts on Bedouin history and culture, published on the independent news site Egyptian Streets.

Then, listen to Bedouin songs from the Smithsonian’s music collection.

Look at a modern mural that invokes the pharaohs to commemorate people who died during a soccer match—and read about the artist who made it.

Mural, Egypt, 2013, photographed by stttijn. License: CC-BY 2.0.

To learn more about Egypt’s history, read the BBC’s timeline of key events from 7000 BCE to 2018.

Read Barrel of Monkeys, also by Ruppert and Mulot.

Read Gauvin’s other work for Words Without Borders, of which he is a contributing editor. We especially recommend his translation of the comic “Crocodiles are Everywhere” and his essay on his own work being translated. 

Or visit Gauvin’s YouTube playlist of videos related to his work, including a reading of his translation of the story of a man who “sort of flies,” below.

Read about a modern encounter between Western tourists and Bedouin guides, from the perspective of the tourist.

• Find out which ancient pharaoh you most resemble in this National Geographic quiz
• Read the poem “The Sphinx Speaks,” by Francis Saltus Saltus
• Then, read Wordsworth’s poem about the retreat of the armies of Napoleon, whom some compared to a pharaoh: “By Moscow Self-Devoted to a Blaze” 
• Take a look at Tobias Wolff’s In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War, a Vietnam War memoir 
• Listen to Dre Murray’s song “Pharaoh,” about the materialism of “modern day Pharaohs,” and read the lyrics.

You’ll find the word being used, with conscious and unconscious irony, in such poems as: 

• Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” 
• Hamlin Garland’s “Do You Fear the Wind?” 
• The poem “The West Indies” by British abolitionist James Montgomery. 

The tourists in this story call their tour guides “savages.” Read another story from Egypt, in which a grandmother is only ever referred to as “The Guest.” 

Read selections from Taxi, Khaled Al Khamissi’s nonfiction collection of stories of Cairo’s cab drivers—their experiences are, in some ways, similar to those of the tour guides in “The Pharaohs of Egypt.” One of the cab drivers asks, “What do you think, sir, am I a human being or an old shoe?”