Open to interpretation

Denys Johnson-Davies has made his name as a prolific and knowledgeable interpreter of fiction.

"What I think about this book," explains Denys Johnson-Davies, "is that people who live there now, and who live the life of old Riley and think that this is great, should know that there was something there before - that people didn't really have enough to eat et cetera et cetera, but that they had their own culture." The book in question is In a Fertile Desert, a collection of Emirati short stories which Johnson-Davies selected and translated from Arabic. The "there" is the territory of the UAE, which the author visited in 1950, worked in as a broadcaster in the late 1960s and where, in 2007, he received the first Sheikh Zayed prize for Personality of the Year.

When I met him in March, prior to the book's publication he explained that the idea behind the project had been to express his gratitude. "I just thought it would be a nice thing to repay this in some way by doing a volume of stories," he said. It turned out to require more digging than he had bargained for. "Little did I realise," he said, "I know this person, Muhammad al Murr - but apart from him I really didn't know anybody."

Al Murr needs little introduction. Both as the author of The Wink of an Eye and as vice chairman of the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority, he is perhaps the UAE's best-known literary figure. He also contributes the collection's most polished story. Two Neighbours recounts the conversation of a pair of charmingly well-spoken newborns as they lie side by side in a maternity ward, comparing their families and likely destinies.

It's a droll conceit which becomes the vehicle for a surprisingly resonant essay on the accidents which shape character. There are other familiar names on the contents page, too. Nasser al Dhaheri, the former editor of Al Ittihad, supplies a tale called The Little Tree, in which the shifting social role of a lotus tree serves as an emblem for wider historical upheavals. Abdul Hamid Ahmed, the editor of Gulf News, offers a jazzy exercise in dirty realism with A Slap in the Face, in which a young man is arrested for propositioning a woman in the street. All the same, many of the stories come from unknowns and first-time authors.

To discover them Johnson-Davies had to trawl the web for unpublished work, solicit manuscripts and generally use up a good deal of shoe leather. "It took a lot of exploration for me to find 20 stories," he said. "I went to the internet and found a lot of stuff there, most of which was not very good... What one needs, really, is somebody who decides whether to publish something or not to publish it. On the internet, I gather you just put it there and there you are."

When I call him this week, however, he concedes that he had a bit of help. "Well, you know," he explains from his flat in the south of France, "the whole world there was looking around, knowing that Denys was looking for short stories." That might sound rather grand, but Johnson-Davies is certainly a major figure in Arabic literature. Born in Canada in 1922 and raised in Sudan, he has had an intimate connection with the Arabic-speaking world all his life. He studied Arabic at Cambridge at 15, returned to the East at the earliest opportunity and was exempted from military service on account of his talents as a translator.

When the influence of European literary models such as Flaubert and de Maupassant first started to be felt thanks to a wave of Arabic editions, he was among the earliest westerners to take an interest in the results. In time he became the friend and translator of icons such as Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfik Hakim, assisting in their literary development and introducing their work to western readers. Edward Said called him "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time", which, though not an unambiguous compliment coming from the great critic of Orientalism, at least gives an idea of Johnson-Davies' stature.

I ask him what his selection criteria had been for the UAE collection. "I was looking for stories about the sea," he says. "I knew that these people were pearl fishers, they were making a living out of ordinary fishing and so on and so forth. That they had their birds, their hawks and all this, and that this was their traditional life. And I found it very attractive..." In other words, he started out with a principled aversion to stories about urban life in the Emirates.

As it turned out, though, he didn't find many examples to exclude. "And I'm not surprised," he snorts. "I find it very difficult to think that people are today writing short stories with somebody living in the flat in the 74th storey of a building, about a girl who he's in love with in the 94th storey next door." The world of gleaming towers does make its presence felt throughout the collection, however. In Ibrahim Mubarak's Grief of the Night Bird, a young man causes a commotion when he takes his hawk to a nightclub. Ashamed, he concludes that the bird's loyalty is worth more to him than his fairweather companions and resolves never to return. There's a subtler weighing of the claims of the old world and the new in Maryam al Saedi's The Old Woman. The title character, unnamed - indeed a relic from a time when "she was 'the woman' and was not known by any name" - is an illiterate sheep herder, whose sheep are more precious to her than her own children.

The feeling is mutual: as her sons go on to their various illustrious careers, her backwardness becomes a source of embarrassment. They make her give up her tent and her flock, install her in an air-conditioned room and try to get her to behave herself, but she can't get comfortable. The story is understated, ambiguous and sad. It's also al Saedi's first in print. Johnson-Davies read it in manuscript and was quickly convinced of a promising young talent.

"I particularly liked The Old Woman," he says, "because I felt that here it gave you the contempt in which this poor old woman, who is the only natural one among them, is held by the other members of the family... She had, I don't know, 14 sheep which she adored, but nobody's interested in that any longer." There's a mournful strain in this verdict which recurs throughout our conversation. One wonders if after his decades in the book business Johnson-Davies doesn't empathise with the old woman's loss a little.

Reflecting on the future of short fiction in Arabic, he says bleakly: "Everywhere, money is everything today. And unless one makes money out of a short story, do you write a short story?" He speaks amusingly of the hope that he'll live long enough to write his erotic novel, though he doubts whether it will ever see the light of day if he does finish it. "One of the great difficulties in life I have found," he announces, "is to find a publisher." Later he confesses: "My main occupation is writing children's books. I'm not interested in children's books at all. Or in children. But I can get them published."

He certainly can. Johnson-Davies claims to have 50 such titles on the market, most famously Goha the Wise Fool, adapted from Middle Eastern folk tales. Four similar works are due out within the next four months, each an illustrated book of animal fables drawing on the folk literature of the Arabic-speaking world. With a work rate like this, it's easy to see how familiarity might breed contempt. But it isn't true to say that Johnson-Davies has been ghettoised in children's literature. Three years ago, for instance, he put out a well-reviewed memoir of his life in translation, and in 1999 he published a book of his own short fiction, The Fate of a Prisoner, a restrained and ironic collection which took exile as its loose theme. He is also working with the religious scholar Ezzedin Ibrahim on a thematically arranged edition of the Quran - "a big job", he observes wanly, "it just goes on and on forever." Happy is the writer to whom publishers grant such latitude.

Johnson-Davies keeps his hand in as the pre-eminent translator of Arabic into English, too, notably rendering Mohammad Al Bisatie's Hunger, one of the titles shortlisted for the 2009 Arabic Booker. All the same, he takes a bleak view of the modern Arabic scene. "I find that most of the recent stuff isn't all that great," he tells me. "I'm working, actually, on a book of modern Egyptian short stories, and am just waiting to find yet another one which I think is worthwhile." Among contemporary names he singles out Alaa Al Aswany, the author of the hit satire The Yacoubian Building, for praise. "He has opened the door very much for the average reader," Johnson-Davies says. "Of course a lot of Egyptians aren't very happy about this because he doesn't paint a very pleasant picture of Egyptian life." He then chuckles.

Above all, Johnson-Davies seems concerned to assemble primers on the great Arabic authors he befriended decades before. He has edited collections of the essential work by Tawfik Hakim and Yusuf Idris, and wants to do the same for Tayeb Salih and Ghassan Kanafani. "He was somebody who was murdered by the Israelis," Johnson-Davies explains. "He was a personal friend of mine and I think he was a talented writer. I would like to do an Essential Ghassan Kanafani."

There is at least one young writer whose work he is excited about, though: al Saedi. "I wrote to her the other day," he tells me, "and said, 'You know, if you've got anything else, I'd like to know..." She hadn't got back to him at the time of our conversation, but Johnson-Davies sounds optimistic. It isn't like him at all.