Paul Bowles: Translating from Tangier

Allen Hibbard

doi:10.5007/2175-7968.2018v38n1p19

Authors

Allen Hibbard Middle Tennessee State University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2018v38n1p19

Abstract

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.

Author Biography

Allen Hibbard, Middle Tennessee State University

Hibbard teaches courses in Modern American literature, criticism, backgrounds of modern literature, the modern novel, postmodernism, and Middle-Eastern literature and culture. He is the author of a book on Paul Bowles’ short fiction and is completing a biography of Alfred Chester. From 1992 to 1994, he was a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Damascus, Syria. Murfreesboro, USA. Email: allen. hibbard@mtsu.edu

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