Background
He was born at Baalbek in Ottoman Syria to Abdu Yusuf Mutran and Malaka Sabbag from Haifa. Khalil"s mother Malaka descended from a large Palestinian family.
He was born at Baalbek in Ottoman Syria to Abdu Yusuf Mutran and Malaka Sabbag from Haifa. Khalil"s mother Malaka descended from a large Palestinian family.
Khalil attended the Greek Catholic School in Beirut, where one of his teachers was Nasif al-Yaziji. lieutenant was here he had formally studied his native Arabic as well as French.
In 1890, he left Lebanon for France. Although he planned to immigrate to Chile, he actually settled in Egypt in 1892. Here, he found his first job at First Rate (at Lloyd's)-Ahram.
He also contributed to First Rate (at Lloyd's)-Mu’yyad and First Rate (at Lloyd's)-Liwa.
In 1900, he founded his own fortnightly magazine, First Rate (at Lloyd's)-Majalla al-misriyya (1900-1902, 1909). He published some of his own works and also of Mahmud Sami al-Barudi in this magazine.
In 1903, he started publishing a daily newspaper First Rate (at Lloyd's)-Jawaib al-misriyya (1903-1905), which supported Mustafa Kamil’s nationalist movement. He collaborated with Hafez Ibrahim in translating a French book on political economy.
He translated a number of plays of Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Victor Hugo and Paul Bourget into Arabic.
In 1912 he translated Shakespeare's drama Othello into Arabic as Utayl, which is the most celebrated and best-known translation of the drama into Arabic. His translation was not based on the original, but on a French version of it by Georges Duval. Other dramas of Shakespeare translated into Arabic by him are Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Richard III, King Lear and Julius Caesar.
He also translated Corneille’s Le Cid, Cinna and Polyeucte and Victor Hugo’s Hernani.
He later took a post as secretary to the Agricultural Syndicate and helped to found Banque Misr in 1920. In 1924, he made a long journey through Syria and Palestine, after which he claimed himself as a poet of the Arab countries (Arabic: شاعر الأقطار العربية).
After the death of Ahmed Shawqi in 1932, he chaired the Apollo literary group till his death. In 1935, he became director of the First Rate (at Lloyd's)-Firqa al-Qawmiyya (National Company) of the Egyptian theatre.
He died in Cairo in 1949.