Paul Bowles: Translating from Tangier

• Main Author: Allen Hibbard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2018-01-01
• Series: Cadernos de Tradução
• Subjects: Exile; Translation; Postcolonial condition; Paul Bowles; Contemporary Moroccan literature
• Online Access: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/traducao/article/view/52367

This essay examines the complex relationships between American writer Paul Bowles and Moroccan writers/storytellers whose works he translated (Ahmed Yacoubi, Larbi Layachi, Mohammed Mrabet, and Mohamed Choukri), with attention to reasons for Bowles’s turn to translation, the unique character of his translations of oral stories, the status of the “original” in these cases, as well as the surrounding postcolonial and Orientalist contexts of this translation activity. It advances the notion that Bowles’s translation activity is at once collaborative, dialogic, and mutually beneficial, motivated by the translator’s genuine interest in preserving and making more widely available local cultural production that might otherwise have gone unnoticed and unrecorded.