ISSN 2011-799X
Artículo recibido: 10/07/2022
Artículo aceptado: 05/06/2022
doi: 10.17533/udea.mut.v16n1a02Translating Invisible Lives: Paul Bowles’
Rewritings of his Moroccan Storytellers
Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte
africa@usal.es
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0521-6906
University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain
Abstract
This article aims to examine Paul Bowles’ translations as a space where major and minor cultures
clash or come together. These translations are the result of his long and well-known stay in Tangier.
They are based on the narrations of his Moroccan male friends. These translations are not at all or-
thodox translations. This article intends to answer a series of questions to prove this point: What is
the source text? Who is the author? What literature does the manuscript written in Maghrebi belong
to? Bowles’ rewritings of the stories told by his Moroccan friends have as many supporters as critics.
They reveal Bowles’ identity on multiple fronts including sexuality and nationality. But they are also
political since they reveal that translations can be at the centre of asymmetrical encounters of peoples
and cultures.
Keywords: identity, Paul Bowles, postcolonialism, power; queer, Tangier, translation
Traduciendo vidas invisibles: Paul Bowles reescribe a sus narradores marroquíes
Resumen
Este artículo se propone analizar las traducciones de Paul Bowles como un espacio de choque o de en-
cuentro de culturas mayores y menores. Esas traducciones son el resultado de su prolongada y bien co-
nocida estadía en Tánger. Se basan en los relatos de sus amigos marroquíes. Estas no son en absoluto
traducciones ortodoxas. El presente artículo busca responder una serie de preguntas para demostrar-
lo: ¿Cuál es el texto fuente? ¿Quién es el autor? ¿A qué literatura corresponde el manuscrito redactado
en magrebí? La reescritura que hace Bowles de los relatos contados por sus amigos marroquíes tiene
tantos defensores como detractores. Revelan la identidad de Bowles en múltiples frentes, incluidas
la sexualidad y la nacionalidad. Pero a la vez son políticos en cuanto revelan que las traducciones
pueden estar en el centro de encuentros asimétricos entre personas y culturas.
Palabras claves: identidad, Paul Bowles, poscolonialismo, poder, queer, Tánger, traducción
Artículo recibido: 10/07/2022
Artículo aceptado: 05/06/2022
doi: 10.17533/udea.mut.v16n1a02Translating Invisible Lives: Paul Bowles’
Rewritings of his Moroccan Storytellers
Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte
africa@usal.es
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0521-6906
University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain
Abstract
This article aims to examine Paul Bowles’ translations as a space where major and minor cultures
clash or come together. These translations are the result of his long and well-known stay in Tangier.
They are based on the narrations of his Moroccan male friends. These translations are not at all or-
thodox translations. This article intends to answer a series of questions to prove this point: What is
the source text? Who is the author? What literature does the manuscript written in Maghrebi belong
to? Bowles’ rewritings of the stories told by his Moroccan friends have as many supporters as critics.
They reveal Bowles’ identity on multiple fronts including sexuality and nationality. But they are also
political since they reveal that translations can be at the centre of asymmetrical encounters of peoples
and cultures.
Keywords: identity, Paul Bowles, postcolonialism, power; queer, Tangier, translation
Traduciendo vidas invisibles: Paul Bowles reescribe a sus narradores marroquíes
Resumen
Este artículo se propone analizar las traducciones de Paul Bowles como un espacio de choque o de en-
cuentro de culturas mayores y menores. Esas traducciones son el resultado de su prolongada y bien co-
nocida estadía en Tánger. Se basan en los relatos de sus amigos marroquíes. Estas no son en absoluto
traducciones ortodoxas. El presente artículo busca responder una serie de preguntas para demostrar-
lo: ¿Cuál es el texto fuente? ¿Quién es el autor? ¿A qué literatura corresponde el manuscrito redactado
en magrebí? La reescritura que hace Bowles de los relatos contados por sus amigos marroquíes tiene
tantos defensores como detractores. Revelan la identidad de Bowles en múltiples frentes, incluidas
la sexualidad y la nacionalidad. Pero a la vez son políticos en cuanto revelan que las traducciones
pueden estar en el centro de encuentros asimétricos entre personas y culturas.
Palabras claves: identidad, Paul Bowles, poscolonialismo, poder, queer, Tánger, traducción
Translating Invisible Lives: Paul Bowles’ Rewritings of his Moroccan Storytellers19Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°1, 2023, enero-junio,pp.18-35
Traduire des vies invisibles : Paul Bowles reécrit ses raconteurs marocains
Résumé
Cet article vise à analiser les traductions par Paul Bowles comme une espace de dispute ou de ren-
contre de cultures majeures et mineures. Ces traductions sont le résultat de sa prolongée et bien connue
séjour à Tanger. Ils se sont basés dans les rapports de seus amis marocains, mais il ne s’agit en aucun
cas de traductions orthodoxes. Cet article tente de répondre à une série de questions pour le démon-
trer : Quel est le texte source ? Qui en est l’auteur ? À quelle littérature appartient le texte maghrébin
rédigé en arabe? Les réécritures par Bowles des histoires racontées par ses amis marocains comptent
autant d’adeptes que de détracteurs. Elles révèlent ainsi de multiples facettes de l’identité de Bowles,
telles que sa sexualité et sa nationalité. Mais elles sont également politiques dans la mesure où elles
révèlent que les traductions peuvent être au cœur de rencontres asymétriques entre des personnes et
des cultures.
Mots-clef : identité, Paul Bowles, post-colonialisme, pouvoir, queer, Tanger, traduction
Traduire des vies invisibles : Paul Bowles reécrit ses raconteurs marocains
Résumé
Cet article vise à analiser les traductions par Paul Bowles comme une espace de dispute ou de ren-
contre de cultures majeures et mineures. Ces traductions sont le résultat de sa prolongée et bien connue
séjour à Tanger. Ils se sont basés dans les rapports de seus amis marocains, mais il ne s’agit en aucun
cas de traductions orthodoxes. Cet article tente de répondre à une série de questions pour le démon-
trer : Quel est le texte source ? Qui en est l’auteur ? À quelle littérature appartient le texte maghrébin
rédigé en arabe? Les réécritures par Bowles des histoires racontées par ses amis marocains comptent
autant d’adeptes que de détracteurs. Elles révèlent ainsi de multiples facettes de l’identité de Bowles,
telles que sa sexualité et sa nationalité. Mais elles sont également politiques dans la mesure où elles
révèlent que les traductions peuvent être au cœur de rencontres asymétriques entre des personnes et
des cultures.
Mots-clef : identité, Paul Bowles, post-colonialisme, pouvoir, queer, Tanger, traduction
Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte20Re-sentir lo queer/cuir en la traducción iberoamericana
Introduction
Paul Bowles is known above all as the author
of The Sheltering Sky (1949) and other literary
works and also because of his relationship with
the Beat Generation and his representations
of sexual identity (Mullins, 2002). Considered
nowadays to be one of the most representative
20th-century expatriate American writers, he was
“a sort of queer among queers who defied defi-
nition on multiple fronts, including sexuality,
nationality, and artistic specialisation” (Hubbs,
2004, p. 102). In this context, although many
aspects could be addressed, there is one feature
of his work that stands out from all the oth-
ers: the “coming together” in his translations
of “major” and “minor” cultures which is the
result of his long and well-known stay in Tang-
ier (1947–1999).
The coming together or “clash” between world-
views has been examined from postcolonial
theories, but not from the viewpoint of transla-
tion studies. As we will see, Bowles is accused
of being a colonialist but also of bringing to
light, through his translations of the minori-
tised, the oral histories of those who, until then,
had never had a voice.
This article aims to examine that facet of Bowles
as a translator, which has not been widely stud-
ied by critics. Attention has been paid to analys-
ing his stories but not the autobiographies (e.g.,
Maier, 1996; Hibbard, 2018; Sabil, 2012; Pat-
teson, 1992; Rountree, 1986). I find this subject
fascinating because he produced many transla-
tions that were methodologically avant garde,
as they dealt with questions that are crucial to
contemporary translation studies, for instance,
those related to representation, the original/
translation, or the author/translator dichot-
omy. Besides, these translations are a clear
example that “translation has been at the cen-
tre of the encounters of peoples and cultures
whether for trade, negotiations, diplomacy,
conflict resolution or ‘clashes of civilisations’”
(Bandia, 2018, p. 243).
Bowles translated from Arabic into English the
oral narrations of Moroccan male friends. He
told stories, which are based on orality, with-
out referring to “official” or “reliable” sourc-
es. The rewritings Bowles made are interesting
and revealing because they reflect the coming
together of two completely different world-
views. His translations, perhaps more than his
novels, were journeys that allowed him to be in
two places at once, mixing spaces and languag-
es. By translating, he became emotionally and
intellectually involved, showing, as he wrote in
A Distant Episode (Bowles, 1947), that he can
be there and here, which is something reflect-
ed in his use of language considering that his
translations included many words in Spanish,
French, and Maghrebi1. This is also portrayed
in hybrid, strange expressions for native En-
glish speakers like those found in his transla-
tion of Mrabet’s (1976) novella Look & Move
On, for instance, “that daughter of a whore”
(p. 15), “That’s for between my toes” (p. 37),
“You’re very sympathetic” (p. 39). This way of
using language in his translations has meant
that “Bowles has come as close as possible to
the ontologically impossible point of being
both American and Moroccan, both ‘here’ and
‘there’, and his translations mark the ultimate
stage in his imaginative assimilation and in-
terpretation of Moroccan culture” (Patteson,
1992, p. 181).
Bowles’ translations are located in that “in-be-
tween” space defended by contemporary
postcolonial translation scholars like Homi
Bhabha (1994) or Gayatri Spivak (1990; 1995).
This is precisely the main idea of one of the
most interesting recent books on Bowles (Ben-
lemlih, 2018, pp. 26–28. It focuses on Bowles’
liminality and deconstruction of binaries and
understands his translations as contact zones
1 This mixture of French, Spanish and
Maghrebi words in the English translations
reflects the linguistic complexity of Tangier.
For an analysis of why Bowles retains the
use of maricón [faggot] in Spanish “as a cate-
gory of difference against which masculinity
is defined”, see Mullins (2002, p. 131).
Introduction
Paul Bowles is known above all as the author
of The Sheltering Sky (1949) and other literary
works and also because of his relationship with
the Beat Generation and his representations
of sexual identity (Mullins, 2002). Considered
nowadays to be one of the most representative
20th-century expatriate American writers, he was
“a sort of queer among queers who defied defi-
nition on multiple fronts, including sexuality,
nationality, and artistic specialisation” (Hubbs,
2004, p. 102). In this context, although many
aspects could be addressed, there is one feature
of his work that stands out from all the oth-
ers: the “coming together” in his translations
of “major” and “minor” cultures which is the
result of his long and well-known stay in Tang-
ier (1947–1999).
The coming together or “clash” between world-
views has been examined from postcolonial
theories, but not from the viewpoint of transla-
tion studies. As we will see, Bowles is accused
of being a colonialist but also of bringing to
light, through his translations of the minori-
tised, the oral histories of those who, until then,
had never had a voice.
This article aims to examine that facet of Bowles
as a translator, which has not been widely stud-
ied by critics. Attention has been paid to analys-
ing his stories but not the autobiographies (e.g.,
Maier, 1996; Hibbard, 2018; Sabil, 2012; Pat-
teson, 1992; Rountree, 1986). I find this subject
fascinating because he produced many transla-
tions that were methodologically avant garde,
as they dealt with questions that are crucial to
contemporary translation studies, for instance,
those related to representation, the original/
translation, or the author/translator dichot-
omy. Besides, these translations are a clear
example that “translation has been at the cen-
tre of the encounters of peoples and cultures
whether for trade, negotiations, diplomacy,
conflict resolution or ‘clashes of civilisations’”
(Bandia, 2018, p. 243).
Bowles translated from Arabic into English the
oral narrations of Moroccan male friends. He
told stories, which are based on orality, with-
out referring to “official” or “reliable” sourc-
es. The rewritings Bowles made are interesting
and revealing because they reflect the coming
together of two completely different world-
views. His translations, perhaps more than his
novels, were journeys that allowed him to be in
two places at once, mixing spaces and languag-
es. By translating, he became emotionally and
intellectually involved, showing, as he wrote in
A Distant Episode (Bowles, 1947), that he can
be there and here, which is something reflect-
ed in his use of language considering that his
translations included many words in Spanish,
French, and Maghrebi1. This is also portrayed
in hybrid, strange expressions for native En-
glish speakers like those found in his transla-
tion of Mrabet’s (1976) novella Look & Move
On, for instance, “that daughter of a whore”
(p. 15), “That’s for between my toes” (p. 37),
“You’re very sympathetic” (p. 39). This way of
using language in his translations has meant
that “Bowles has come as close as possible to
the ontologically impossible point of being
both American and Moroccan, both ‘here’ and
‘there’, and his translations mark the ultimate
stage in his imaginative assimilation and in-
terpretation of Moroccan culture” (Patteson,
1992, p. 181).
Bowles’ translations are located in that “in-be-
tween” space defended by contemporary
postcolonial translation scholars like Homi
Bhabha (1994) or Gayatri Spivak (1990; 1995).
This is precisely the main idea of one of the
most interesting recent books on Bowles (Ben-
lemlih, 2018, pp. 26–28. It focuses on Bowles’
liminality and deconstruction of binaries and
understands his translations as contact zones
1 This mixture of French, Spanish and
Maghrebi words in the English translations
reflects the linguistic complexity of Tangier.
For an analysis of why Bowles retains the
use of maricón [faggot] in Spanish “as a cate-
gory of difference against which masculinity
is defined”, see Mullins (2002, p. 131).
Translating Invisible Lives: Paul Bowles’ Rewritings of his Moroccan Storytellers21Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°1, 2023, enero-junio,pp.18-35
in Mary Louise Pratt’s sense (Benlemlih, 2018,
p. 33) or as territories traversing border spaces
between languages and cultures. In this article,
after analysing different opinions generated
by his translations, I will try to show, based
on concepts like Deleuze or Guattari’s minor
literature or Jacques Derrida’s hospitality, that
Bowles inhabits a dialogic space between, a
threshold between two cultures.
Bowles opted for the kind of translations in
the “in-between” defended by Bhabha (1994)
or Spivak (1990), whose starting point is the
fact that, like language, identities are not pure
and that this is enriching for all human beings.
Bowles stated in an interview that the transla-
tor “transports” meanings, and that translators
never leave texts intact (Caponi, 1993, p. 199),
which is similar to how many contemporary
scholars describe translation.
Translation is today a discipline that raises
questions of representation and asymmetrical
power between cultures and translations are
no longer expected to be the neutral reproduc-
tion of the original. That is why I believe that
Bowles translated ahead of his time, unaware
of poststructuralist translation theories like the
one claiming that: “there are, in one linguistic
system, perhaps several languages or tongues
[…] There is impurity in every language” (Der-
rida, 1982/1985, p. 100). As a result, translation
is no longer simply a linguistic operation that
consists in transporting meaning from one
language to another […] it is an operation of
thought through which we must translate our-
selves into the thought of the other language,
the forgotten thinking of the other language.
We must translate ourselves into it and not
make it come into our language. It is necessary
to go toward the unthought thinking of the
other language. (Derrida, 1982/1985, p. 115)
As mentioned above, Bowles’ translations have
attracted as much criticism as praise because
he translated with a very heterodoxical meth-
odology that highlights the fact that
Translation by its very nature is asymmetri-
cal and oppositional. In a way, the quality of
dualism, binarism, dichotomy or asymmetry
inherent to translation makes the practise a
fertile ground for investigating issues related
to conflict and various forms of confronta-
tion. There is always an implied “us” versus
“them”, a tendency to penetrate or violate oth-
er cultural spaces. Add to this a nagging feeling
of (and practice of) injustice and power in-
equality in the context of globalisation where
some languages and cultures are more equal
than others; translation is often (correctly or
incorrectly) assumed to play a role of media-
tion and bridge-building in contexts rife with
mistrust, political and socioeconomic anx-
ieties and thus a fertile ground for conflict.
In this context translation loses any platonic
sense of innocence characterised by the naive
view of translation as neutral, transparent and
located at an equidistant in-between position
between mediated language cultures. Indeed,
the notion of conflict is ever-present in transla-
tion, whether linguistic, cultural or ideological,
which raises the question why it took so long
for this symbiotic relation (between translation
and conflict) to emerge as an important field of
inquiry in translation studies. (Bandia, 2018,
pp. 244–245)
Taking all this as our starting point, the follow-
ing section deals with Bowles’ translations of
Moroccan oral stories. It shows how he rewrote
Yacoubi, Choukri, Layachi, and Mrabet. Sec-
tion 3 will address some problems with Bowles’
translations stemming from the fact that these
translations cannot be verified since the tapes
containing the stories were destroyed by Bowles
himself. Section 4 discloses some opinions
against Bowles’ rewritings. Lastly, these transla-
tions are presented as in-between spaces which
give voice to the subaltern.
1. Paul Bowles’ Translations
Bowles’ first translation was published in 1952.
He translated a story by his lover and protégé
Ahmed Yacoubi. His next translation was
the novel A Life Full of Holes by Layachi Larbi
(1964), and he also rewrote other oral stories
in Mary Louise Pratt’s sense (Benlemlih, 2018,
p. 33) or as territories traversing border spaces
between languages and cultures. In this article,
after analysing different opinions generated
by his translations, I will try to show, based
on concepts like Deleuze or Guattari’s minor
literature or Jacques Derrida’s hospitality, that
Bowles inhabits a dialogic space between, a
threshold between two cultures.
Bowles opted for the kind of translations in
the “in-between” defended by Bhabha (1994)
or Spivak (1990), whose starting point is the
fact that, like language, identities are not pure
and that this is enriching for all human beings.
Bowles stated in an interview that the transla-
tor “transports” meanings, and that translators
never leave texts intact (Caponi, 1993, p. 199),
which is similar to how many contemporary
scholars describe translation.
Translation is today a discipline that raises
questions of representation and asymmetrical
power between cultures and translations are
no longer expected to be the neutral reproduc-
tion of the original. That is why I believe that
Bowles translated ahead of his time, unaware
of poststructuralist translation theories like the
one claiming that: “there are, in one linguistic
system, perhaps several languages or tongues
[…] There is impurity in every language” (Der-
rida, 1982/1985, p. 100). As a result, translation
is no longer simply a linguistic operation that
consists in transporting meaning from one
language to another […] it is an operation of
thought through which we must translate our-
selves into the thought of the other language,
the forgotten thinking of the other language.
We must translate ourselves into it and not
make it come into our language. It is necessary
to go toward the unthought thinking of the
other language. (Derrida, 1982/1985, p. 115)
As mentioned above, Bowles’ translations have
attracted as much criticism as praise because
he translated with a very heterodoxical meth-
odology that highlights the fact that
Translation by its very nature is asymmetri-
cal and oppositional. In a way, the quality of
dualism, binarism, dichotomy or asymmetry
inherent to translation makes the practise a
fertile ground for investigating issues related
to conflict and various forms of confronta-
tion. There is always an implied “us” versus
“them”, a tendency to penetrate or violate oth-
er cultural spaces. Add to this a nagging feeling
of (and practice of) injustice and power in-
equality in the context of globalisation where
some languages and cultures are more equal
than others; translation is often (correctly or
incorrectly) assumed to play a role of media-
tion and bridge-building in contexts rife with
mistrust, political and socioeconomic anx-
ieties and thus a fertile ground for conflict.
In this context translation loses any platonic
sense of innocence characterised by the naive
view of translation as neutral, transparent and
located at an equidistant in-between position
between mediated language cultures. Indeed,
the notion of conflict is ever-present in transla-
tion, whether linguistic, cultural or ideological,
which raises the question why it took so long
for this symbiotic relation (between translation
and conflict) to emerge as an important field of
inquiry in translation studies. (Bandia, 2018,
pp. 244–245)
Taking all this as our starting point, the follow-
ing section deals with Bowles’ translations of
Moroccan oral stories. It shows how he rewrote
Yacoubi, Choukri, Layachi, and Mrabet. Sec-
tion 3 will address some problems with Bowles’
translations stemming from the fact that these
translations cannot be verified since the tapes
containing the stories were destroyed by Bowles
himself. Section 4 discloses some opinions
against Bowles’ rewritings. Lastly, these transla-
tions are presented as in-between spaces which
give voice to the subaltern.
1. Paul Bowles’ Translations
Bowles’ first translation was published in 1952.
He translated a story by his lover and protégé
Ahmed Yacoubi. His next translation was
the novel A Life Full of Holes by Layachi Larbi
(1964), and he also rewrote other oral stories
Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte22Re-sentir lo queer/cuir en la traducción iberoamericana
by Abdesslam Boulaich or Mohammed Mra-
bet, with whom he had a long, close friend-
ship. From 1964 to 1992 Bowles translated “no
fewer than fifteen volumes of fictional work by
local Moroccan storytellers […] All, except for
Choukri, were illiterate and worked solely in
the oral tradition; thus, his mode of translation
(usually from tape) was unconventional” (Hib-
bard, 2018, p. 20).
The translation of Moroccan oral stories was a
Bowles’ attempt to preserve “those voices that
would take on new accents in postcolonial Mo-
rocco” (Edwards, 2005a, p. 231). Moroccan
orality needed to be kept
from Euro-American thinking based on sci-
ence and reason […] The more than twenty
volumes that make up Bowles’s Moroccan
translation are the translator’s attempt to un-
derstand Moroccan culture from within. They
reveal Moroccan social relations, their image
of the other […] Bowles’s translations of Mo-
roccan oral stories are important in the ways
that they reveal Bowles’s effort to let the il-
literate Moroccan voice speak. (Benlemlih,
2018, pp. 26, 27)
In fact, as Bowles pointed out himself, Yacou-
bi’s stories had held interest for him ever since
they met in 1947 when Yacoubi was a waiter
at Palais Jamai Hotel in Fez. But it was not un-
til 1952 that Bowles realised “that [he] might
be instrumental in preserving at least a few of
them […] One day, as Yacoubi began to speak,
[Bowles] seized a notebook and rapidly scrib-
bled the English translation of a story across
its pages” (Bowles, 1979, p. 7).
Yacoubi’s oral stories increased Bowles’s psychic
mobility [...] because they placed him close to
a culture other than his own. Yacoubi taught
Bowles Moroccan Arabic. Bowles noted that
Yacoubi did not speak “any French, any Span-
ish, and […] no English […] He spoke a very
strange Darija [a Moroccan dialect]” [...]
In this context, Yacoubi’s narratives com-
ing from the margins of the Arab-Muslim
world proved to be particularly trying for
Bowles since they led his yearning to preserve
Moroccan voices in danger of disappearing.
Bowles recounted that he came upon the
young Moroccan in Fez in the late 1940s,
“took him under his wing and encouraged
him to paint. Later Bowles took him on trips
to Sri Lanka [then Ceylon] and Istanbul. It is
generally assumed that the two were, at one
point at least, lovers”. (Hibbard, 2018, p. 22)
In all cases except for Choukri, Bowles chose
to translate nonliterate storytellers. Apart from
Yacoubi, another example is the previously
mentioned Larbi Layachi. He was a poor fish-
erman working as the guard of a café at Mer-
kala Beach in Tangier when Bowles met him
in 1962. Another collaborator was Mrabet, a
bartender and fisherman. Illiteracy was a “pre-
requisite” for Bowles, “infused with a childlike
innocence associated with the premodern, a
relation to life and story unmediated by writ-
ing” (Hibbard, 2018, p. 22). Bowles’ preference
for oral performance “is an indicator of much
that has changed in the Western view of the
non-Western world” (Maier, 1996, p. 214). He
was convinced of the value of these oral tales
“as a repository of cultural memories” (Ben-
lemlih, 2018, p. 37). In “Notes on the Work of
the Translator,” published as a preface to “Five
Eyes” (Bowles, 1979), Bowles showed his ad-
miration for oral storytelling such as that he
heard in the cafes of Tangier. In fact, all the
spoken texts included in that book were non-
stop performed in a single sitting.
Bowles was disgusted by cultural imperialism
and by the longing on the part of the educated
minorities from non-Western societies to be-
come Westerners. That is why he wanted to let
“the other speak” (Maier, 1996, p. 215) in the
stories he translated, not from written sources
but from his recordings of oral performances.
Archives housed in the University of Texas
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
and the University of Delaware Special Col-
lections show how Bowles worked on drafts
of works by his illiterate friends, “editing with
careful attention to language and storyline.
Translation, thus, can be seen as an important
supplement to or extension of his own writ-
ing” (Hibbard, 2018, p. 25).
by Abdesslam Boulaich or Mohammed Mra-
bet, with whom he had a long, close friend-
ship. From 1964 to 1992 Bowles translated “no
fewer than fifteen volumes of fictional work by
local Moroccan storytellers […] All, except for
Choukri, were illiterate and worked solely in
the oral tradition; thus, his mode of translation
(usually from tape) was unconventional” (Hib-
bard, 2018, p. 20).
The translation of Moroccan oral stories was a
Bowles’ attempt to preserve “those voices that
would take on new accents in postcolonial Mo-
rocco” (Edwards, 2005a, p. 231). Moroccan
orality needed to be kept
from Euro-American thinking based on sci-
ence and reason […] The more than twenty
volumes that make up Bowles’s Moroccan
translation are the translator’s attempt to un-
derstand Moroccan culture from within. They
reveal Moroccan social relations, their image
of the other […] Bowles’s translations of Mo-
roccan oral stories are important in the ways
that they reveal Bowles’s effort to let the il-
literate Moroccan voice speak. (Benlemlih,
2018, pp. 26, 27)
In fact, as Bowles pointed out himself, Yacou-
bi’s stories had held interest for him ever since
they met in 1947 when Yacoubi was a waiter
at Palais Jamai Hotel in Fez. But it was not un-
til 1952 that Bowles realised “that [he] might
be instrumental in preserving at least a few of
them […] One day, as Yacoubi began to speak,
[Bowles] seized a notebook and rapidly scrib-
bled the English translation of a story across
its pages” (Bowles, 1979, p. 7).
Yacoubi’s oral stories increased Bowles’s psychic
mobility [...] because they placed him close to
a culture other than his own. Yacoubi taught
Bowles Moroccan Arabic. Bowles noted that
Yacoubi did not speak “any French, any Span-
ish, and […] no English […] He spoke a very
strange Darija [a Moroccan dialect]” [...]
In this context, Yacoubi’s narratives com-
ing from the margins of the Arab-Muslim
world proved to be particularly trying for
Bowles since they led his yearning to preserve
Moroccan voices in danger of disappearing.
Bowles recounted that he came upon the
young Moroccan in Fez in the late 1940s,
“took him under his wing and encouraged
him to paint. Later Bowles took him on trips
to Sri Lanka [then Ceylon] and Istanbul. It is
generally assumed that the two were, at one
point at least, lovers”. (Hibbard, 2018, p. 22)
In all cases except for Choukri, Bowles chose
to translate nonliterate storytellers. Apart from
Yacoubi, another example is the previously
mentioned Larbi Layachi. He was a poor fish-
erman working as the guard of a café at Mer-
kala Beach in Tangier when Bowles met him
in 1962. Another collaborator was Mrabet, a
bartender and fisherman. Illiteracy was a “pre-
requisite” for Bowles, “infused with a childlike
innocence associated with the premodern, a
relation to life and story unmediated by writ-
ing” (Hibbard, 2018, p. 22). Bowles’ preference
for oral performance “is an indicator of much
that has changed in the Western view of the
non-Western world” (Maier, 1996, p. 214). He
was convinced of the value of these oral tales
“as a repository of cultural memories” (Ben-
lemlih, 2018, p. 37). In “Notes on the Work of
the Translator,” published as a preface to “Five
Eyes” (Bowles, 1979), Bowles showed his ad-
miration for oral storytelling such as that he
heard in the cafes of Tangier. In fact, all the
spoken texts included in that book were non-
stop performed in a single sitting.
Bowles was disgusted by cultural imperialism
and by the longing on the part of the educated
minorities from non-Western societies to be-
come Westerners. That is why he wanted to let
“the other speak” (Maier, 1996, p. 215) in the
stories he translated, not from written sources
but from his recordings of oral performances.
Archives housed in the University of Texas
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
and the University of Delaware Special Col-
lections show how Bowles worked on drafts
of works by his illiterate friends, “editing with
careful attention to language and storyline.
Translation, thus, can be seen as an important
supplement to or extension of his own writ-
ing” (Hibbard, 2018, p. 25).
Translating Invisible Lives: Paul Bowles’ Rewritings of his Moroccan Storytellers23Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°1, 2023, enero-junio,pp.18-35
After the complicated improvisation/tran-
scription of the stories related to him by
Yacoubi, Bowles started to work with the tape
recordings of oral narrations of his illiterate
collaborators (tape recording machines ar-
rived in Morocco in 1956). The collaboration
between Bowles and Mohammed Mrabet, for
example, was extremely intense and the lon-
gest of all (from 1967 to 1993). Together, they
published 12 works, Mrabet’s autobiography,
and a series of stories and tales: “Love with
a Few Hairs” (1967), “The Lemon” (1969),
“M’Hashish” (1969), “The Boy Who Set the
Fire” (1974), “Hadidan Aharam” (1975), “Look
and Move On” (1976), “Harmless Poisons,
Blameless Sins” (1976), “The Big Mirror” (1977),
“The Beach Café and the Voice” (1980), “The
Chest” (1983), “Marriage with Papers” (1986),
“Chocolate Dreams and Dollars” (1993), and
Mrabet’s contribution to the collection “Five
Eyes” (1980).2
Mrabet was attracted by Layachi’s collabora-
tions with Bowles. He wondered how Layachi
could have published a book since he was il-
literate like himself. He asked Bowles whether
he had got money for narrating his stories and
Bowles answered: “Of course […] He made
enough to get married”. Bowles met Mrabet
after watching the young man, strong and
athletic, doing acrobatics on Merkala Beach
in Tangier. As the story goes, Mrabet heard
about Layachi’s book, and proposed a similar
project to Bowles, saying he had many sto-
ries to tell. The relationship between the two
lasted from the 1960s into the 1990s, when
apparently tensions rose, during the last years
of Bowles’s life. In Look and Move On, Mrabet
describes the translations: “Some were tales
I have heard in the cafés, some were dreams,
some were inventions I made as I was record-
ing, and some were about things that had actu-
ally happened to me”. (Hibbard, 2018, p. 22)
Mrabet competed with Layachi. He would
make tapes for money “and concoct stories
2 See Mrabet (2004).
that would surpass the tales Larbi had devised.
Thus, Bowles offered a market for storytell-
ing in Tangier and opened an inter-individual
competition among storytellers” (Benlemlih,
2018, p. 43).
On the other hand, Bowles’ collaboration with
Mohamed Choukri was completely different.
Choukri, who had also been illiterate, eventu-
ally became a Professor of Arabic Literature
at the Ibn Batuta College in Tangiers. Choukri
had published his For Bread Alone (1996) before
meeting Bowles. He worked with Bowles on
the final version of his texts, written initially
in classical Arabic, a language Bowles neither
read nor wrote (Walonen, 2011); that is why
he made Choukri translate “his text” to Mo-
roccan Arabic punctuated with French and
Spanish (Sabil, 2012). Indeed, Bowles felt con-
strained by Choukri since he checked the final
translations. It is interesting to point out that
Choukri (1996) claimed in Paul Bowles wa ‘uzla
Tanya (Paul Bowles and the Solitude of Tangier)
that Spanish was the language he mostly used
in his work with Bowles. But in For Bread Alone
(1996) by Choukri, Bowles contended that he
had worked with Choukri mostly in Moroc-
can Arabic. In the introduction to this work
Bowles wrote:
Because I have translated several books from
the Arabic I want to make a clear differen-
tiation between the earlier volumes and the
present work. The other books were spoken
onto tape and the words were in the collo-
quial Arabic called Maghrebi. For Bread Alone
is a manuscript, written in classical Arabic,
a language I do not know. The author had
to reduce it first to Moroccan Arabic for me.
Then we used Spanish and French for ascer-
taining shades of meaning. Although exact,
the translation is far from literal. (Choukri,
1993/2010, p. 5)
Choukri had decided that Bowles should trans-
late his work into English because of the repu-
tation he had gained thanks to his translations
of Layachi’s and Mrabet’s stories. The forego-
ing work and two books published with Bowles
after that awarded him international fame but
After the complicated improvisation/tran-
scription of the stories related to him by
Yacoubi, Bowles started to work with the tape
recordings of oral narrations of his illiterate
collaborators (tape recording machines ar-
rived in Morocco in 1956). The collaboration
between Bowles and Mohammed Mrabet, for
example, was extremely intense and the lon-
gest of all (from 1967 to 1993). Together, they
published 12 works, Mrabet’s autobiography,
and a series of stories and tales: “Love with
a Few Hairs” (1967), “The Lemon” (1969),
“M’Hashish” (1969), “The Boy Who Set the
Fire” (1974), “Hadidan Aharam” (1975), “Look
and Move On” (1976), “Harmless Poisons,
Blameless Sins” (1976), “The Big Mirror” (1977),
“The Beach Café and the Voice” (1980), “The
Chest” (1983), “Marriage with Papers” (1986),
“Chocolate Dreams and Dollars” (1993), and
Mrabet’s contribution to the collection “Five
Eyes” (1980).2
Mrabet was attracted by Layachi’s collabora-
tions with Bowles. He wondered how Layachi
could have published a book since he was il-
literate like himself. He asked Bowles whether
he had got money for narrating his stories and
Bowles answered: “Of course […] He made
enough to get married”. Bowles met Mrabet
after watching the young man, strong and
athletic, doing acrobatics on Merkala Beach
in Tangier. As the story goes, Mrabet heard
about Layachi’s book, and proposed a similar
project to Bowles, saying he had many sto-
ries to tell. The relationship between the two
lasted from the 1960s into the 1990s, when
apparently tensions rose, during the last years
of Bowles’s life. In Look and Move On, Mrabet
describes the translations: “Some were tales
I have heard in the cafés, some were dreams,
some were inventions I made as I was record-
ing, and some were about things that had actu-
ally happened to me”. (Hibbard, 2018, p. 22)
Mrabet competed with Layachi. He would
make tapes for money “and concoct stories
2 See Mrabet (2004).
that would surpass the tales Larbi had devised.
Thus, Bowles offered a market for storytell-
ing in Tangier and opened an inter-individual
competition among storytellers” (Benlemlih,
2018, p. 43).
On the other hand, Bowles’ collaboration with
Mohamed Choukri was completely different.
Choukri, who had also been illiterate, eventu-
ally became a Professor of Arabic Literature
at the Ibn Batuta College in Tangiers. Choukri
had published his For Bread Alone (1996) before
meeting Bowles. He worked with Bowles on
the final version of his texts, written initially
in classical Arabic, a language Bowles neither
read nor wrote (Walonen, 2011); that is why
he made Choukri translate “his text” to Mo-
roccan Arabic punctuated with French and
Spanish (Sabil, 2012). Indeed, Bowles felt con-
strained by Choukri since he checked the final
translations. It is interesting to point out that
Choukri (1996) claimed in Paul Bowles wa ‘uzla
Tanya (Paul Bowles and the Solitude of Tangier)
that Spanish was the language he mostly used
in his work with Bowles. But in For Bread Alone
(1996) by Choukri, Bowles contended that he
had worked with Choukri mostly in Moroc-
can Arabic. In the introduction to this work
Bowles wrote:
Because I have translated several books from
the Arabic I want to make a clear differen-
tiation between the earlier volumes and the
present work. The other books were spoken
onto tape and the words were in the collo-
quial Arabic called Maghrebi. For Bread Alone
is a manuscript, written in classical Arabic,
a language I do not know. The author had
to reduce it first to Moroccan Arabic for me.
Then we used Spanish and French for ascer-
taining shades of meaning. Although exact,
the translation is far from literal. (Choukri,
1993/2010, p. 5)
Choukri had decided that Bowles should trans-
late his work into English because of the repu-
tation he had gained thanks to his translations
of Layachi’s and Mrabet’s stories. The forego-
ing work and two books published with Bowles
after that awarded him international fame but
Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte24Re-sentir lo queer/cuir en la traducción iberoamericana
also local ones because his works were written
in Arabic. (Charhady and Mrabet’s intellectual
success was, on the other hand, quite different;
see Sabil, 2012). However, in Paul Bowles and
the Solitude of Tangier, Choukri (1996) criti-
cised Bowles heavily for showing a colonialist
and disdainful attitude towards the Moroccans
and stealing their royalties. He also attacked
Bowles
for exploitation of Moroccan men, claim-
ing to know Arabic better than he did, and
loving Morocco while hating Moroccans. A
distinctly sexual component is woven into the
fabric of this dynamic, firmly lodged within
an Orientalist erotics as well as an economy
and politics of post-colonialism. (Hibbard,
2018, p. 28)
Bowles never made any reference to these at-
tacks (Elghandor, 1994a, p. 17).
2. Problems in Bowles’ Translations
Criticism of Bowles’ translations stems from
the very important fact that there is no possibil-
ity of comparing and verifying them because
the tapes containing the stories were destroyed
by Bowles as soon as he rewrote them (Sabil,
2012, p. 92). Another controversial topic is that
of the authorship of these works, Bowles’ real
role, and the role of those who narrated the
stories:
Bowles did not read written Arabic and these
authors (with the exception of Choukri) did
not write Arabic; they could only author fic-
tions orally in Moroccan Arabic, which is a
spoken, not a written, language. Yacoubi,
Layachi and Mrabet each “told” their sto-
ries, novels, and memoirs to Bowles, using a
combination of Moroccan Arabic and Span-
ish, and Bowles then translated the tales into
English. There are no originals to compare
to the translations; the books appeared first
in English. They are best understood as col-
laborations, since Bowles’s presence was
necessary not only as translator but also as
instigator and editor and audience […] From
1967 to 1993, Mrabet and Bowles published a
dozen books together. Compelling narratives
marked by Mrabet’s distinct voice. Or is it
Bowles’s narrative voice portraying Mrabet’s
voice? Impossible to say, since we read Mra-
bet’s tales in Bowles’s rendering. (Edwards,
2005b, p. 21)
Concerning the difficulty of defining Bowles’
real role in the translations, it is interesting to
note that the first British edition of Love with
a Few Hairs (1967) mentioned the following:
“Taped and translated from the Moghrebi by
Paul Bowles” (n.p.) On the other hand, the first
American edition of the same work published
in 1968 changed slightly: “Translated from
the tape in Maghrebi by Paul Bowles” (n. p.).
This change is important for the question of
authorship:
Note that the second formulation places the
taping in a third space, an action whose au-
thorship is left ambiguous. According to both
Mrabet’s and Bowles’s accounts, the second
formulation would seem more accurate. But
not because Bowles didn’t do the taping; in-
deed it was Bowles’s tape recorder employed
at Bowles’s home. The second formulation
leaves ambiguous an element that some
may consider crucial: whether Bowles did or
could move directly from Moroccan darija to
English. According to Mrabet, whom I inter-
viewed over several days in June 1999 on the
subject of his work with Bowles, Paul had lit-
tle a command of Moroccan Arabic to com-
plete this translation without Mrabet using a
fair amount of Spanish (a language both were
comfortable speaking) in order to translate
his taped narrative. Such a situation would
seem to be covered by the Braziller formula-
tion, even if that formulation is a bit vague
or misleading. Mrabet’s own role in creating
Love with a Few Hairs would seem to be more
than what is stated (authorship) and include a
partial role as translator. Indeed, when The
Lemon was published a couple of years later,
in 1969, by Peter Owen, the formula was al-
tered to: “Translated from the Maghrebi and
edited by Paul Bowles in collaboration with
Mohammed Mrabet”. Mrabet was named
twice: as author of the narrative and as col-
laborator in its translation and editing. If this
also local ones because his works were written
in Arabic. (Charhady and Mrabet’s intellectual
success was, on the other hand, quite different;
see Sabil, 2012). However, in Paul Bowles and
the Solitude of Tangier, Choukri (1996) criti-
cised Bowles heavily for showing a colonialist
and disdainful attitude towards the Moroccans
and stealing their royalties. He also attacked
Bowles
for exploitation of Moroccan men, claim-
ing to know Arabic better than he did, and
loving Morocco while hating Moroccans. A
distinctly sexual component is woven into the
fabric of this dynamic, firmly lodged within
an Orientalist erotics as well as an economy
and politics of post-colonialism. (Hibbard,
2018, p. 28)
Bowles never made any reference to these at-
tacks (Elghandor, 1994a, p. 17).
2. Problems in Bowles’ Translations
Criticism of Bowles’ translations stems from
the very important fact that there is no possibil-
ity of comparing and verifying them because
the tapes containing the stories were destroyed
by Bowles as soon as he rewrote them (Sabil,
2012, p. 92). Another controversial topic is that
of the authorship of these works, Bowles’ real
role, and the role of those who narrated the
stories:
Bowles did not read written Arabic and these
authors (with the exception of Choukri) did
not write Arabic; they could only author fic-
tions orally in Moroccan Arabic, which is a
spoken, not a written, language. Yacoubi,
Layachi and Mrabet each “told” their sto-
ries, novels, and memoirs to Bowles, using a
combination of Moroccan Arabic and Span-
ish, and Bowles then translated the tales into
English. There are no originals to compare
to the translations; the books appeared first
in English. They are best understood as col-
laborations, since Bowles’s presence was
necessary not only as translator but also as
instigator and editor and audience […] From
1967 to 1993, Mrabet and Bowles published a
dozen books together. Compelling narratives
marked by Mrabet’s distinct voice. Or is it
Bowles’s narrative voice portraying Mrabet’s
voice? Impossible to say, since we read Mra-
bet’s tales in Bowles’s rendering. (Edwards,
2005b, p. 21)
Concerning the difficulty of defining Bowles’
real role in the translations, it is interesting to
note that the first British edition of Love with
a Few Hairs (1967) mentioned the following:
“Taped and translated from the Moghrebi by
Paul Bowles” (n.p.) On the other hand, the first
American edition of the same work published
in 1968 changed slightly: “Translated from
the tape in Maghrebi by Paul Bowles” (n. p.).
This change is important for the question of
authorship:
Note that the second formulation places the
taping in a third space, an action whose au-
thorship is left ambiguous. According to both
Mrabet’s and Bowles’s accounts, the second
formulation would seem more accurate. But
not because Bowles didn’t do the taping; in-
deed it was Bowles’s tape recorder employed
at Bowles’s home. The second formulation
leaves ambiguous an element that some
may consider crucial: whether Bowles did or
could move directly from Moroccan darija to
English. According to Mrabet, whom I inter-
viewed over several days in June 1999 on the
subject of his work with Bowles, Paul had lit-
tle a command of Moroccan Arabic to com-
plete this translation without Mrabet using a
fair amount of Spanish (a language both were
comfortable speaking) in order to translate
his taped narrative. Such a situation would
seem to be covered by the Braziller formula-
tion, even if that formulation is a bit vague
or misleading. Mrabet’s own role in creating
Love with a Few Hairs would seem to be more
than what is stated (authorship) and include a
partial role as translator. Indeed, when The
Lemon was published a couple of years later,
in 1969, by Peter Owen, the formula was al-
tered to: “Translated from the Maghrebi and
edited by Paul Bowles in collaboration with
Mohammed Mrabet”. Mrabet was named
twice: as author of the narrative and as col-
laborator in its translation and editing. If this
Translating Invisible Lives: Paul Bowles’ Rewritings of his Moroccan Storytellers25Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°1, 2023, enero-junio,pp.18-35
description is accurate, though cumbersome,
it was nonetheless dropped from their later
books. (Edwards, 2005a, p. 237)
Bowles noted that his translations “[were] not
exactly collaborations. [He] only [got] the au-
thors to talk” (Caponi, 1993, p. 53). He insist-
ed that the stories were their own. His function
was only “to translate, edit, and to cut” (Ca-
poni, 1993, p. 53). Yet, there was an exception
to this. Bowles was interested in authenticity.
He wanted to preserve Moroccan culture and
at the same time make foreign texts available
to Westerners. Although he repeated in the
introduction to A Life Full of Holes (1964) that
the translation was a literal one, he described
how Layachi wanted to delete a section of one
chapter but he disagreed because it was a story
that illustrated
the persistence of a pre-Islamic belief that
has been grafted onto Islam. Bowles found
this phenomenon interesting and wanted to
relate it to the reader. The disagreement be-
tween Layachi and Bowles points to the dif-
ferent desires each of them brought to their
collaboration: Layachi wanted to tell his life
story, but Bowles wanted to have something
told about Morocco and Moroccan lives in
general […] In overruling Layachi and in-
cluding the tomb episode in the published
autobiography, Bowles acted the part of the
anthropologist/translator who places his
own fascinations with and interpretations of
Moroccan culture above those of his infor-
mant. (Mullins, 2002, p. 118)
Despite Bowles’ insistence that “I only get the
authors to talk, you see” (Caponi, 1993, p. 53),
we should also ask ourselves whether Mrabet’s
collaboration in translating some or all of the
text into Spanish for Bowles modified the rela-
tionship of the “translator” with the “original”
text. In a similar fashion, we ought to question
whether, as a result, these texts are “properly
considered translations at all, or are they lit-
erary collaborations that occurred in a variety
of tongues with a single product?” (Edwards,
2005a, p. 238).
We should also bear in mind that the authors
of these stories told oral stories in a very differ-
ent dialect to the regional ones of Arabic used
by Bowles’ illiterate storytellers like Yacoubi
or Layachi. The aftermath of this is that the
stories translated by Bowles were only acces-
sible through the English translations, which
became the “originals” and the only texts ac-
cessible by any readership, especially given the
fact that the taped oral narrations had disap-
peared. Consequently, and paradoxically, the
“originals”, the oral stories narrated in the
Maghrebi dialect, were inaccessible to their
“authors”, who did not speak English.
Therefore, Bowles’ translations of the histo-
ry of Morocco based on the narrations of his
Moroccan friends were not at all orthodox and
lead us to ask a series of questions: What is
the source text? Who is the author? What lit-
erature does the original written in Maghrebi
belong to? Not to Moroccan literature, written
in Modern Standard Arabic; and not to Amer-
ican literature, because in theory the author
making it accessible to a Western readership is
in reality the translator:
Listening to nonliterate Moroccan storytell-
ers, recording their voices, translating their
culture into a form of printed text, into a
tradition that developed a certain kind of
“realistic fiction”, Paul Bowles has formed
a curious kind of hybrid text. Authorship
[…] is not the simple process—an individual
drawing on individual experience to produce
a work—that the West has considered some-
how fundamental to the very notion of litera-
ture […] Larbi Layachi and Ahmed Yaboubi
are, ironically, more likely to be considered
“authors” in the English-speaking world
than in the Arab-Muslim world, since they
have not mastered Modern Standard Arabic.
(Maier, 1996, pp. 227–228)
3. Against Bowles’ Translations
Bowles’ fairly unorthodox translations can be
seen as an attempt at recovering a history of
the Other which is not considered to be a part
description is accurate, though cumbersome,
it was nonetheless dropped from their later
books. (Edwards, 2005a, p. 237)
Bowles noted that his translations “[were] not
exactly collaborations. [He] only [got] the au-
thors to talk” (Caponi, 1993, p. 53). He insist-
ed that the stories were their own. His function
was only “to translate, edit, and to cut” (Ca-
poni, 1993, p. 53). Yet, there was an exception
to this. Bowles was interested in authenticity.
He wanted to preserve Moroccan culture and
at the same time make foreign texts available
to Westerners. Although he repeated in the
introduction to A Life Full of Holes (1964) that
the translation was a literal one, he described
how Layachi wanted to delete a section of one
chapter but he disagreed because it was a story
that illustrated
the persistence of a pre-Islamic belief that
has been grafted onto Islam. Bowles found
this phenomenon interesting and wanted to
relate it to the reader. The disagreement be-
tween Layachi and Bowles points to the dif-
ferent desires each of them brought to their
collaboration: Layachi wanted to tell his life
story, but Bowles wanted to have something
told about Morocco and Moroccan lives in
general […] In overruling Layachi and in-
cluding the tomb episode in the published
autobiography, Bowles acted the part of the
anthropologist/translator who places his
own fascinations with and interpretations of
Moroccan culture above those of his infor-
mant. (Mullins, 2002, p. 118)
Despite Bowles’ insistence that “I only get the
authors to talk, you see” (Caponi, 1993, p. 53),
we should also ask ourselves whether Mrabet’s
collaboration in translating some or all of the
text into Spanish for Bowles modified the rela-
tionship of the “translator” with the “original”
text. In a similar fashion, we ought to question
whether, as a result, these texts are “properly
considered translations at all, or are they lit-
erary collaborations that occurred in a variety
of tongues with a single product?” (Edwards,
2005a, p. 238).
We should also bear in mind that the authors
of these stories told oral stories in a very differ-
ent dialect to the regional ones of Arabic used
by Bowles’ illiterate storytellers like Yacoubi
or Layachi. The aftermath of this is that the
stories translated by Bowles were only acces-
sible through the English translations, which
became the “originals” and the only texts ac-
cessible by any readership, especially given the
fact that the taped oral narrations had disap-
peared. Consequently, and paradoxically, the
“originals”, the oral stories narrated in the
Maghrebi dialect, were inaccessible to their
“authors”, who did not speak English.
Therefore, Bowles’ translations of the histo-
ry of Morocco based on the narrations of his
Moroccan friends were not at all orthodox and
lead us to ask a series of questions: What is
the source text? Who is the author? What lit-
erature does the original written in Maghrebi
belong to? Not to Moroccan literature, written
in Modern Standard Arabic; and not to Amer-
ican literature, because in theory the author
making it accessible to a Western readership is
in reality the translator:
Listening to nonliterate Moroccan storytell-
ers, recording their voices, translating their
culture into a form of printed text, into a
tradition that developed a certain kind of
“realistic fiction”, Paul Bowles has formed
a curious kind of hybrid text. Authorship
[…] is not the simple process—an individual
drawing on individual experience to produce
a work—that the West has considered some-
how fundamental to the very notion of litera-
ture […] Larbi Layachi and Ahmed Yaboubi
are, ironically, more likely to be considered
“authors” in the English-speaking world
than in the Arab-Muslim world, since they
have not mastered Modern Standard Arabic.
(Maier, 1996, pp. 227–228)
3. Against Bowles’ Translations
Bowles’ fairly unorthodox translations can be
seen as an attempt at recovering a history of
the Other which is not considered to be a part
Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte26Re-sentir lo queer/cuir en la traducción iberoamericana
of the official history of the country (Patteson,
1992, p. 181; Edwards, 2005a, pp. 228–230
Walonen, 2011, p. 60). His translations can
also be seen as a manipulation so great on the
part of Bowles that the narrators end up saying
what he wanted them to see, so that Moroccan
culture adapts to Western expectations, with
all the stereotyped charge of the West opposite
the Other. Bowles was attracted to the exotic
and primitive, thereby, his friends tended to
craft their stories according to his tastes:
They knew what I liked from the beginning.
When they began to record things for me,
they saw my reactions, they saw that I liked
certain things, such as violence, and blood-
shed and hatred, and so on. So they special-
ised in that, in general. I don’t think Choukri
did that, no. His long novel I translated, For
Bread Alone, had enough of violence and
unpleasantness to please me. (Elghandor,
1994b, p. 340)
Thus, the narrations consolidated the exotic or
coloristic image of the original text culture and
encapsulated the different features of Bowles’
identity and his own biased vision of the coun-
try. For example, when A Life Full of Holes was
published in 1964, the British and American
press published many reviews, but many Mo-
roccan intellectuals like Abdallah Laroui criti-
cised the novel, refusing to accept that Bowles
had captured the essence of the authentic Arab
way of life (Edwards, 2005a, p. 234). Similarly,
in 1972 when the French translation of Love
with a Few Hairs (1967) came out, Tahar Ben
Jelloun called the novel “pseudo-literature”
and “bastard literature”, adding that, in his
opinion, Bowles had manipulated Moroccan
reality (Jelloun, 1999). He even claimed in the
review published in Le Monde that the author
did not exist because it was a mere invention
of Bowles. He also asserted that when a friend of
Mrabet asked him to withdraw that statement,
he said, “even if Bowles doesn’t write all this
crap […] clearly he is simply [giving] Ameri-
cans—above all in English—an idea of Moroc-
co which is completely uncivilised” (Edwards,
2011, pp. 202–203). In a similar critical vein,
one of the academics who criticises Bowles’
translations is Abdelkader Sabil, Professor at
the Chouaib Doukkali University in Morocco.
Sabil contends that Bowles chose poor illiter-
ates because it made it easy for him to exercise
power and reconstruct a narrative that the Oth-
er cannot control:
The question that poses itself here is: Why
does he choose to translate illiterate Moroc-
cans and not any other Moroccan writers?
For Bowles, to translate the latter would
be “just a waste of time” because “he who
writes in French is perforce going to produce
French literature, and in truth I was not pre-
pared to translate French literature”. What
Bowles fails to express here is that his illiter-
ate informants/storytellers, unlike those who
write in French, cannot contest him as he is
the master and also they are easy to manip-
ulate since he perfectly knows their motives.
Of course, the motives are purely material.
They are all of very poor background and
make do with whatever amount of mon-
ey Bowles gives him. In short, he has been
exploiting ignorance using them, to borrow
from Edward Said, as “a province of learn-
ing”. (Sabil, 2012, p. 94)
From this perspective, Sabil argues that
Bowles’ translations constructed a history of
Tangier based on his Western ideology and his
own experience of Moroccan reality, and did
not reflect what his collaborators/narrators
actually said: they were merely subordinates
Bowles gave voice to according to his own ste-
reotyped expectations:
Bowles, then, has managed to manipulate his
literary informants to tell him what he needs
to know about Morocco and Moroccans. He
has a priori expectations or desires that can
be spoken only through illiterate and margin-
alised people. He, in a sense, has used and
abused their being marginalised and illiterate
to voice his own grievances. Coming from the
periphery, Choukri, Mrabet and Charhady
give justification to Bowles’ quest for the “au-
thentic” or “primitive” that is lost to Moroc-
co. The “Authentic” or the “primitive” are
only retrievable through Bowles’ translation/
of the official history of the country (Patteson,
1992, p. 181; Edwards, 2005a, pp. 228–230
Walonen, 2011, p. 60). His translations can
also be seen as a manipulation so great on the
part of Bowles that the narrators end up saying
what he wanted them to see, so that Moroccan
culture adapts to Western expectations, with
all the stereotyped charge of the West opposite
the Other. Bowles was attracted to the exotic
and primitive, thereby, his friends tended to
craft their stories according to his tastes:
They knew what I liked from the beginning.
When they began to record things for me,
they saw my reactions, they saw that I liked
certain things, such as violence, and blood-
shed and hatred, and so on. So they special-
ised in that, in general. I don’t think Choukri
did that, no. His long novel I translated, For
Bread Alone, had enough of violence and
unpleasantness to please me. (Elghandor,
1994b, p. 340)
Thus, the narrations consolidated the exotic or
coloristic image of the original text culture and
encapsulated the different features of Bowles’
identity and his own biased vision of the coun-
try. For example, when A Life Full of Holes was
published in 1964, the British and American
press published many reviews, but many Mo-
roccan intellectuals like Abdallah Laroui criti-
cised the novel, refusing to accept that Bowles
had captured the essence of the authentic Arab
way of life (Edwards, 2005a, p. 234). Similarly,
in 1972 when the French translation of Love
with a Few Hairs (1967) came out, Tahar Ben
Jelloun called the novel “pseudo-literature”
and “bastard literature”, adding that, in his
opinion, Bowles had manipulated Moroccan
reality (Jelloun, 1999). He even claimed in the
review published in Le Monde that the author
did not exist because it was a mere invention
of Bowles. He also asserted that when a friend of
Mrabet asked him to withdraw that statement,
he said, “even if Bowles doesn’t write all this
crap […] clearly he is simply [giving] Ameri-
cans—above all in English—an idea of Moroc-
co which is completely uncivilised” (Edwards,
2011, pp. 202–203). In a similar critical vein,
one of the academics who criticises Bowles’
translations is Abdelkader Sabil, Professor at
the Chouaib Doukkali University in Morocco.
Sabil contends that Bowles chose poor illiter-
ates because it made it easy for him to exercise
power and reconstruct a narrative that the Oth-
er cannot control:
The question that poses itself here is: Why
does he choose to translate illiterate Moroc-
cans and not any other Moroccan writers?
For Bowles, to translate the latter would
be “just a waste of time” because “he who
writes in French is perforce going to produce
French literature, and in truth I was not pre-
pared to translate French literature”. What
Bowles fails to express here is that his illiter-
ate informants/storytellers, unlike those who
write in French, cannot contest him as he is
the master and also they are easy to manip-
ulate since he perfectly knows their motives.
Of course, the motives are purely material.
They are all of very poor background and
make do with whatever amount of mon-
ey Bowles gives him. In short, he has been
exploiting ignorance using them, to borrow
from Edward Said, as “a province of learn-
ing”. (Sabil, 2012, p. 94)
From this perspective, Sabil argues that
Bowles’ translations constructed a history of
Tangier based on his Western ideology and his
own experience of Moroccan reality, and did
not reflect what his collaborators/narrators
actually said: they were merely subordinates
Bowles gave voice to according to his own ste-
reotyped expectations:
Bowles, then, has managed to manipulate his
literary informants to tell him what he needs
to know about Morocco and Moroccans. He
has a priori expectations or desires that can
be spoken only through illiterate and margin-
alised people. He, in a sense, has used and
abused their being marginalised and illiterate
to voice his own grievances. Coming from the
periphery, Choukri, Mrabet and Charhady
give justification to Bowles’ quest for the “au-
thentic” or “primitive” that is lost to Moroc-
co. The “Authentic” or the “primitive” are
only retrievable through Bowles’ translation/
Translating Invisible Lives: Paul Bowles’ Rewritings of his Moroccan Storytellers27Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°1, 2023, enero-junio,pp.18-35
rewriting. Such retrieval/salvage is possible
only through Bowles’ capacity to write an
oral culture on the verge of vanishing. (Sabil,
2012, p. 6)
Furthermore, Bowles’ translations, but also his
photographs of Yacoubi and Mrabet, pointed
to “a fantasy of desirable otherness” (Boone,
2014, p. 392). His storytellers had in many in-
stances “high, unrealistic expectations of mon-
etary return, and blamed Bowles for cheating
them when those expectations for compensa-
tion were not met” (Hibbard, 2018, p. 28).
As well known, Tangier was, during the 1950s,
promiscuous and licentious. It was an inter-
national zone where multiple languages and
nationalities coexisted (Hibbard & Tharaud,
2010). Tangier was a city linked to free curren-
cy, lack of productivity, and male homosexual
sex: “a city that became a mecca for European
and American bohemians and homosexuals in
the 1950s” (Aldrich, 2014, p. 165). Its tolerance
to unorthodox ways of living was portrayed
by many American journalists and writers
in the 1950s. Tangier was for many Western-
ers “a Promised Land flowing with junk and
boys” as described by William Burroughs to
Jack Kerouac in his Letters (Burroughs, 2009,
p. 261). Westerners’ privileged position made
them sometimes stop sympathising with the
local population “that suffered at the hands
of the expatriate community’s licentious-
ness” (Hemmer, 2009, p. 68). Tangier was a
space of tensions between aesthetics and eth-
ics. Many questions arise around the kind of
interactions some American writers had with
Moroccans and how aware they were of their
position of privilege. Much has been debated
on this, for instance, Burrough’s relationship
with Moroccan boys and Bowles’ exploitative
relationships with his storytellers (Hibbard &
Tharaud, 2010).
As Mullins (2002) posits in his chapter “Trans-
lating Homosexuality”, the way Layachi,
Mrabet, and Choukri narrated their experi-
ences of colonial sexuality was quite different
from the pervasive melancholia and nostalgia
in Bowles’ representations of colonial desire.
Rather, they told
realistic stories that [emphasised] the eco-
nomic dimensions of sexuality in Tangier
[…] their texts [represented] sexual relations
with foreign men in the context of poverty,
prostitution, homosocial bonds among Mo-
roccan men, male adolescence, and marriage
as a rite of passage into adulthood. (Mullins,
2002, pp. 111–112)
Bowles’ translations were the result of literary
encounters between Moroccans and a foreign-
er and this can lead us to understand them as
“the exploitation of one nation or one race by
another (Mullins, 2002, p. 113). Understood in
this way, Bowles’ translations were far from hy-
bridity and that third space defended by Homi
Bhabha, far from the free will of the translator
to descend to a territory that is strange to him
and far from the in-between:
For a willingness to descend into that alien
territory […] may reveal that the theoretical
recognition of the split-space of enunciation
may open the way to conceptualising an inter-
national culture, based not on the inscription
and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that
end we should remember that it is the “inter”
–the cutting edge of translation and negoti-
ation, the in-between space- that carries the
burden of the meaning of culture. It makes
it possible to begin envisaging national, an-
ti-nationalist histories of the “people”. And
by exploring this Third Space, we may elude
the politics of polarity and emerge as the oth-
ers of our selves. (Bhabha, 1994, pp. 38–39)
However, Mullins (2002) also underlines the
importance of approaching the matter careful-
ly, “for the exercise of power in the interzone
is not as transparent or simplistic as it might
seem” and goes on to analyse Bowles’ transla-
tions beyond binary oppositions:
A simplistic analysis of Tangier’s sexual
economy could construe all sexual relations
between Moroccan and foreign men as acts
rewriting. Such retrieval/salvage is possible
only through Bowles’ capacity to write an
oral culture on the verge of vanishing. (Sabil,
2012, p. 6)
Furthermore, Bowles’ translations, but also his
photographs of Yacoubi and Mrabet, pointed
to “a fantasy of desirable otherness” (Boone,
2014, p. 392). His storytellers had in many in-
stances “high, unrealistic expectations of mon-
etary return, and blamed Bowles for cheating
them when those expectations for compensa-
tion were not met” (Hibbard, 2018, p. 28).
As well known, Tangier was, during the 1950s,
promiscuous and licentious. It was an inter-
national zone where multiple languages and
nationalities coexisted (Hibbard & Tharaud,
2010). Tangier was a city linked to free curren-
cy, lack of productivity, and male homosexual
sex: “a city that became a mecca for European
and American bohemians and homosexuals in
the 1950s” (Aldrich, 2014, p. 165). Its tolerance
to unorthodox ways of living was portrayed
by many American journalists and writers
in the 1950s. Tangier was for many Western-
ers “a Promised Land flowing with junk and
boys” as described by William Burroughs to
Jack Kerouac in his Letters (Burroughs, 2009,
p. 261). Westerners’ privileged position made
them sometimes stop sympathising with the
local population “that suffered at the hands
of the expatriate community’s licentious-
ness” (Hemmer, 2009, p. 68). Tangier was a
space of tensions between aesthetics and eth-
ics. Many questions arise around the kind of
interactions some American writers had with
Moroccans and how aware they were of their
position of privilege. Much has been debated
on this, for instance, Burrough’s relationship
with Moroccan boys and Bowles’ exploitative
relationships with his storytellers (Hibbard &
Tharaud, 2010).
As Mullins (2002) posits in his chapter “Trans-
lating Homosexuality”, the way Layachi,
Mrabet, and Choukri narrated their experi-
ences of colonial sexuality was quite different
from the pervasive melancholia and nostalgia
in Bowles’ representations of colonial desire.
Rather, they told
realistic stories that [emphasised] the eco-
nomic dimensions of sexuality in Tangier
[…] their texts [represented] sexual relations
with foreign men in the context of poverty,
prostitution, homosocial bonds among Mo-
roccan men, male adolescence, and marriage
as a rite of passage into adulthood. (Mullins,
2002, pp. 111–112)
Bowles’ translations were the result of literary
encounters between Moroccans and a foreign-
er and this can lead us to understand them as
“the exploitation of one nation or one race by
another (Mullins, 2002, p. 113). Understood in
this way, Bowles’ translations were far from hy-
bridity and that third space defended by Homi
Bhabha, far from the free will of the translator
to descend to a territory that is strange to him
and far from the in-between:
For a willingness to descend into that alien
territory […] may reveal that the theoretical
recognition of the split-space of enunciation
may open the way to conceptualising an inter-
national culture, based not on the inscription
and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that
end we should remember that it is the “inter”
–the cutting edge of translation and negoti-
ation, the in-between space- that carries the
burden of the meaning of culture. It makes
it possible to begin envisaging national, an-
ti-nationalist histories of the “people”. And
by exploring this Third Space, we may elude
the politics of polarity and emerge as the oth-
ers of our selves. (Bhabha, 1994, pp. 38–39)
However, Mullins (2002) also underlines the
importance of approaching the matter careful-
ly, “for the exercise of power in the interzone
is not as transparent or simplistic as it might
seem” and goes on to analyse Bowles’ transla-
tions beyond binary oppositions:
A simplistic analysis of Tangier’s sexual
economy could construe all sexual relations
between Moroccan and foreign men as acts
Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte28Re-sentir lo queer/cuir en la traducción iberoamericana
either of betrayal on the part of Moroccans
or exploitation on the part of the foreigners.
But literary representations of male homo-
sexuality in Tangier challenge such binary,
rigid modes of interpretation. (p. 112)
Whatever our interpretation of Bowles’ trans-
lations may be, what is most certainly true is
that being in command of a dominant lan-
guage gives power: “the mastery of language
guarantees and isolates a new power […] that
of making history” (De Certeau, 1988/1984,
p. 138). So as informers do not speak English,
they are not likely to know if the representation
made of their history is correct. A history
they need to make known so that, in the case
of Charhady in A Life Full of Holes (1964) or
Choukri in For Bread Alone (1971), people are
made aware of the extremely difficult experi-
ences they have had to endure, which are the
same experiences of violence and deprivation
suffered by many children in cosmopolitan
cities of the so-called Third World. Charhady
and Choukri’s novels talk about children who
were raised on the streets of Tangiers living in
extreme conditions of poverty and violence.
These children reached adulthood too ear-
ly through homosexual commercial transac-
tions with Western tourists or marriages that
had nothing to do with love but with business.
Much has been written about Western sex
tourism in Tangiers and about the excesses and
permissiveness there when it was an Interna-
tional Zone (Sabil, 2012, pp. 186–193).
4. In Defence of Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles’ rewritings of the history of Mo-
rocco based on the oral narrations of his col-
laborators are, without question, representations
in the most philosophical sense of the word.
Through language, Bowles enters the Other’s
space, the other space, and this also involves a
certain amount of violence: “Yes, because it is
perhaps the first violence which the foreigner
undergoes: to have to claim his rights in a lan-
guage he does not speak” (Derrida, 2005, p. 7).
In my opinion, Bowles translated to understand
the Other but also to understand himself and his
own voluntary exile. That is why I believe that
Chambers’ (1994) excellent definition in his now
classic work is particularly appropriate here:
to refer to translation or memory is always to
speak of the incomplete. The never fully deci-
pherable. It is to betray any hope of transpar-
ency. For to translate is always to transform.
It always involves a necessary travesty of any
metaphysics of authenticity or origins. We
find ourselves employing a language that is
always shadowed by loss, an elsewhere, a
ghost: the unconscious, an “other” text, an
“other” voice, an “other” world; a language
that is powerfully affected by the foreign
tongue.
For the nomadic experience of language,
wandering without a fixed home, dwelling
at the crossroads of the world, bearing our
sense of being and difference, is no longer the
expression of a unique tradition of history,
even if it pretends to carry a single name.
Thought wanders. It migrates and requires
translation. (p. 4)
Some studies on Paul Bowles, for instance,
those by Hibbard (2018) and Benlemlih (2018),
see his translations as working in two ways, re-
ciprocally, and not as a one-way transaction:
an equation of mutual benefit, or mutual
exploitation in which power does not re-
side simply in one or the other participant.
Still, without question, these interactions are
fraught with all kinds of issues attendant to
the postcolonial scene in which they play
out. Like Benlemlih I see Bowles’s transla-
tion work as part of his attempt to negotiate
the “in-between” liminal space of exile, traf-
ficking between native and adoptive homes
(us and Morocco), between one cultural scene
and another, between one language and an-
other. In addition to Bakhtin, Benlemlih
draws on Mary Louis Pratt’s notion of the
“contact zone”, both concepts being relevant
to our considerations here as we think about
translation and exile. (Hibbard, 2018, p. 29)
Mrabet, Yacoubi, and others, as well as their
stories, are known today thanks to Bowles’
translations. Their stories reached us. They
either of betrayal on the part of Moroccans
or exploitation on the part of the foreigners.
But literary representations of male homo-
sexuality in Tangier challenge such binary,
rigid modes of interpretation. (p. 112)
Whatever our interpretation of Bowles’ trans-
lations may be, what is most certainly true is
that being in command of a dominant lan-
guage gives power: “the mastery of language
guarantees and isolates a new power […] that
of making history” (De Certeau, 1988/1984,
p. 138). So as informers do not speak English,
they are not likely to know if the representation
made of their history is correct. A history
they need to make known so that, in the case
of Charhady in A Life Full of Holes (1964) or
Choukri in For Bread Alone (1971), people are
made aware of the extremely difficult experi-
ences they have had to endure, which are the
same experiences of violence and deprivation
suffered by many children in cosmopolitan
cities of the so-called Third World. Charhady
and Choukri’s novels talk about children who
were raised on the streets of Tangiers living in
extreme conditions of poverty and violence.
These children reached adulthood too ear-
ly through homosexual commercial transac-
tions with Western tourists or marriages that
had nothing to do with love but with business.
Much has been written about Western sex
tourism in Tangiers and about the excesses and
permissiveness there when it was an Interna-
tional Zone (Sabil, 2012, pp. 186–193).
4. In Defence of Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles’ rewritings of the history of Mo-
rocco based on the oral narrations of his col-
laborators are, without question, representations
in the most philosophical sense of the word.
Through language, Bowles enters the Other’s
space, the other space, and this also involves a
certain amount of violence: “Yes, because it is
perhaps the first violence which the foreigner
undergoes: to have to claim his rights in a lan-
guage he does not speak” (Derrida, 2005, p. 7).
In my opinion, Bowles translated to understand
the Other but also to understand himself and his
own voluntary exile. That is why I believe that
Chambers’ (1994) excellent definition in his now
classic work is particularly appropriate here:
to refer to translation or memory is always to
speak of the incomplete. The never fully deci-
pherable. It is to betray any hope of transpar-
ency. For to translate is always to transform.
It always involves a necessary travesty of any
metaphysics of authenticity or origins. We
find ourselves employing a language that is
always shadowed by loss, an elsewhere, a
ghost: the unconscious, an “other” text, an
“other” voice, an “other” world; a language
that is powerfully affected by the foreign
tongue.
For the nomadic experience of language,
wandering without a fixed home, dwelling
at the crossroads of the world, bearing our
sense of being and difference, is no longer the
expression of a unique tradition of history,
even if it pretends to carry a single name.
Thought wanders. It migrates and requires
translation. (p. 4)
Some studies on Paul Bowles, for instance,
those by Hibbard (2018) and Benlemlih (2018),
see his translations as working in two ways, re-
ciprocally, and not as a one-way transaction:
an equation of mutual benefit, or mutual
exploitation in which power does not re-
side simply in one or the other participant.
Still, without question, these interactions are
fraught with all kinds of issues attendant to
the postcolonial scene in which they play
out. Like Benlemlih I see Bowles’s transla-
tion work as part of his attempt to negotiate
the “in-between” liminal space of exile, traf-
ficking between native and adoptive homes
(us and Morocco), between one cultural scene
and another, between one language and an-
other. In addition to Bakhtin, Benlemlih
draws on Mary Louis Pratt’s notion of the
“contact zone”, both concepts being relevant
to our considerations here as we think about
translation and exile. (Hibbard, 2018, p. 29)
Mrabet, Yacoubi, and others, as well as their
stories, are known today thanks to Bowles’
translations. Their stories reached us. They
Translating Invisible Lives: Paul Bowles’ Rewritings of his Moroccan Storytellers29Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°1, 2023, enero-junio,pp.18-35
have not been silenced (Benlemlih, 2018,
p. 55). As Caponi (1994) argues, in giving
voice to the subalterns Bowles created “what
Edward Said has longingly described as a cul-
tural counterpoint, in which several voices
weave through and around each other, no one
voice more privileged than any other” (p. 215).
Bowles gave voice to the subalterns but also lis-
tened to them in Spivak’s sense (Spivak, 1999,
pp. 373, 386).
On the other hand, Bowles’ translations “kept
his name in circulation and brought modest
monetary rewards” (Spivak, 1999, p. 386) and
also influenced his later literary work, which is
more “Moroccan” since it
displays of violence and revenge, transforma-
tive capacities of kif (a cannabis derivative),
negotiations of sexuality and power, tensions
between tradition and modernity, the pres-
ence of djinn, superstition, magic potions, and
spells. Bowles’s translation work and his fic-
tion, thus, bleed into one another. (Hibbard,
2018, pp. 29–30)
This nomadic way of understanding lan-
guage, writing, and translation leads to (or
is a consequence of) a way of life, a way of
being-in-the-world:
This inevitably implies another sense of
“home”, of being in the world. It means to
conceive of dwelling as a mobile habitat,
as a mode of inhabiting time and space not as
though they were fixed and closed structures,
but as providing the critical provocation of
an opening whose questioning presence re-
verberates in the movement of the languag-
es that constitute our sense of identity, place
and belonging. So, I finally come to experi-
ence the violence of alterity, of other worlds,
languages and identities, and there finally
discover my dwelling to be sustained across
encounters, dialogues and clashes with other
histories, other places, other people […] Mi-
grancy […] involves a movement in which
neither the points of departure nor those of
arrival are immutable or certain. It calls for
a dwelling in language, in histories, in iden-
tities that are constantly subject to mutation.
Always in transit, the promise of a home-
coming—completing the story, domesticat-
ing the detour—becomes an impossibility.
(Chambers, 1994, pp. 4–5)
Bowles re-presents history, presents history
again, a history which is firstly that of the nar-
rator. He does so by complying with the norms
of what we now call intercultural theory which
understands that translating and also con-
structing history is making a representation of
reality that is never neutral. He is presenting
again, from a specific point of view, the orig-
inal text. This is because Bowles’ translations
never destroy the Other. He did not eliminate
from the oral histories what the Other said
against the West. He never silenced in their sto-
ries their references to poor backgrounds, eco-
nomic hardships, and imbalanced relationships
with Western expatriates. The desperate pov-
erty in which Layachi, Mrabet, and Choukri
were raised is narrated in Layachi’s A Life Full
of Holes (1964), Mrabet’s The Lemon (2004), and
Choukri’s For Bread Alone (1993/2010), and
among others. In Love with a Few Hairs (1967),
for example, Mohammed
negotiates a relationship with a young Mo-
roccan woman and with Mr. David, an ex-
patriate with whom he sleeps. In scenes such
as these, binaries between homosexuality and
heterosexuality are deconstructed at the same
time disparities between native Moroccans
and Western outsiders are heightened. (Hib-
bard, 2018, p. 31)
It is interesting to mention here Mrabet’s reply
(in Bowles’ translation) when he met Maria in
a café and she offered, in a very paternalistic
way, to take him to America (where he ended
up going later):
We want to treat you as though you were our
son, she said.
I laughed. Maria, I can drink a bottle of whis-
key without even getting dizzy. So don’t tell
me you think of me as your son. That’s not
what you mean. You mean you both like to
have me with you in bed, that’s all. And I like
have not been silenced (Benlemlih, 2018,
p. 55). As Caponi (1994) argues, in giving
voice to the subalterns Bowles created “what
Edward Said has longingly described as a cul-
tural counterpoint, in which several voices
weave through and around each other, no one
voice more privileged than any other” (p. 215).
Bowles gave voice to the subalterns but also lis-
tened to them in Spivak’s sense (Spivak, 1999,
pp. 373, 386).
On the other hand, Bowles’ translations “kept
his name in circulation and brought modest
monetary rewards” (Spivak, 1999, p. 386) and
also influenced his later literary work, which is
more “Moroccan” since it
displays of violence and revenge, transforma-
tive capacities of kif (a cannabis derivative),
negotiations of sexuality and power, tensions
between tradition and modernity, the pres-
ence of djinn, superstition, magic potions, and
spells. Bowles’s translation work and his fic-
tion, thus, bleed into one another. (Hibbard,
2018, pp. 29–30)
This nomadic way of understanding lan-
guage, writing, and translation leads to (or
is a consequence of) a way of life, a way of
being-in-the-world:
This inevitably implies another sense of
“home”, of being in the world. It means to
conceive of dwelling as a mobile habitat,
as a mode of inhabiting time and space not as
though they were fixed and closed structures,
but as providing the critical provocation of
an opening whose questioning presence re-
verberates in the movement of the languag-
es that constitute our sense of identity, place
and belonging. So, I finally come to experi-
ence the violence of alterity, of other worlds,
languages and identities, and there finally
discover my dwelling to be sustained across
encounters, dialogues and clashes with other
histories, other places, other people […] Mi-
grancy […] involves a movement in which
neither the points of departure nor those of
arrival are immutable or certain. It calls for
a dwelling in language, in histories, in iden-
tities that are constantly subject to mutation.
Always in transit, the promise of a home-
coming—completing the story, domesticat-
ing the detour—becomes an impossibility.
(Chambers, 1994, pp. 4–5)
Bowles re-presents history, presents history
again, a history which is firstly that of the nar-
rator. He does so by complying with the norms
of what we now call intercultural theory which
understands that translating and also con-
structing history is making a representation of
reality that is never neutral. He is presenting
again, from a specific point of view, the orig-
inal text. This is because Bowles’ translations
never destroy the Other. He did not eliminate
from the oral histories what the Other said
against the West. He never silenced in their sto-
ries their references to poor backgrounds, eco-
nomic hardships, and imbalanced relationships
with Western expatriates. The desperate pov-
erty in which Layachi, Mrabet, and Choukri
were raised is narrated in Layachi’s A Life Full
of Holes (1964), Mrabet’s The Lemon (2004), and
Choukri’s For Bread Alone (1993/2010), and
among others. In Love with a Few Hairs (1967),
for example, Mohammed
negotiates a relationship with a young Mo-
roccan woman and with Mr. David, an ex-
patriate with whom he sleeps. In scenes such
as these, binaries between homosexuality and
heterosexuality are deconstructed at the same
time disparities between native Moroccans
and Western outsiders are heightened. (Hib-
bard, 2018, p. 31)
It is interesting to mention here Mrabet’s reply
(in Bowles’ translation) when he met Maria in
a café and she offered, in a very paternalistic
way, to take him to America (where he ended
up going later):
We want to treat you as though you were our
son, she said.
I laughed. Maria, I can drink a bottle of whis-
key without even getting dizzy. So don’t tell
me you think of me as your son. That’s not
what you mean. You mean you both like to
have me with you in bed, that’s all. And I like
Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte30Re-sentir lo queer/cuir en la traducción iberoamericana
to play games in bed. But it’s not very import-
ant to me. I like to drink and smoke kif, but I
don’t think much about love. Love ruins you
faster than anything else. Half the Europeans
who live here in Tangier like to live with young
Moroccans. When the old English ladies go
back to London they leave their boy-friends be-
hind, and you see the boys wandering around
the streets looking like ghosts. They have mon-
ey in their pockets but their health is gone. And
it doesn’t come back. (Mrabet, 1976, p. 22)
On the other hand, later in the novel, it is rele-
vant to see how Bowles described Mrabet’s re-
sistance to Western customs when he was with
Maria and Reeves in the United States. This is
especially notorious when Reeves took him to
Iowa to meet his family, whose way of life not
only Mrabet could not adapt to, and he tried to
impose his own way of life on them.
In general, this question of resistance and
self-assertion is a major motif in many of Mra-
bet’s narratives translated by Bowles that deal,
directly or indirectly, with cultural encounters
between Moroccans and Westerners. For ex-
ample, in the story titled “What Happened
in Granada”, translated by Bowles, Mrabet
(2004) recounted his clashes with Western-
ers during a short visit to Spain (exactly like
what had happened in the novel when he went
to Iowa), a clash that some authors have in-
terpreted as a direct answer to the traditional
ethnocentric attitude of the West: “Instead of
feeling embarrassed or being at least calmly
polite as a guest or foreigner there in Granada,
he rather adopts a self-assertive and potential-
ly counter-hegemonic attitude vis-à-vis all the
people he meets there” (Elkouche, 2008, p. 4).
Examples of clashes between the two cultures
can be found in his narrative again and again,
but at one point, when the Spaniards warned
him about his dangerous driving, he said:
I yelled at them: I shit on your ancestors and
your whole race! I kept walking along, push-
ing through them. Barking dogs don’t bite, I
told them. A very fat woman came by. She
called me a moro, and I called her a Christian
pig. (Mrabet, 2004, p. 14)
Later, Mrabet used Arabic to insult the Span-
iards (Mrabet, 2004): “Inaal din d’babakum”
(p. 21). This use of Arabic, and precisely the
fact that it was not translated, is interesting
here: Mrabet did this in many other stories and
novels, in titles like “M’hashish,” “Hdidan Ah-
ram,”, and “The Ghoula,” etc. Some of them
are names, but they have cultural significance
or symbolic implications that Mrabet consid-
ered to be untranslatable and, that he thought
Western readers would be unable to grasp.
Bowles always respected this:
and though some of them have synonyms in
[English], Bowles seemed to be reluctant to
use translated English words lest Mrabet’s
tales could lose their sense of authenticity and
local colour. One can even assert that Bowles
was often so overpowered by the compelling
and mesmerising effect of Mrabet’s tales that
he simply transcribed such words instead
of attempting to translate them. (Elkouche,
2008, p. 4)
Another element we have to take into account
with regard to Bowles is the language he used
and talked about in some of his own translated
novels. For example, he himself and Jane ap-
peared at the end of Look & Move On (1976) and
the translation process in some pages became
part of Mrabet’s narration (1976, pp. 90–91.
Bowles rewrote the histories of the subordi-
nates, of those who have no voice because they
have no material or intellectual means, in the
strongest of the strong languages.
At this point, I think one way of defending this
vision in favour of Bowles the translator I am
presenting here is by looking at the distinction
Deleuze and Guattari (1986/1975, p. 19) make
between major and minor languages in relation
to what they call “minor literature”:
How many people today live in a language
that is not their own? Or no longer, or not
yet, even know their own and now poorly the
major language that they are forced to serve?
This is the problem of immigrants, and es-
pecially of their children, the problem of mi-
norities, the problem of a minor literature,
to play games in bed. But it’s not very import-
ant to me. I like to drink and smoke kif, but I
don’t think much about love. Love ruins you
faster than anything else. Half the Europeans
who live here in Tangier like to live with young
Moroccans. When the old English ladies go
back to London they leave their boy-friends be-
hind, and you see the boys wandering around
the streets looking like ghosts. They have mon-
ey in their pockets but their health is gone. And
it doesn’t come back. (Mrabet, 1976, p. 22)
On the other hand, later in the novel, it is rele-
vant to see how Bowles described Mrabet’s re-
sistance to Western customs when he was with
Maria and Reeves in the United States. This is
especially notorious when Reeves took him to
Iowa to meet his family, whose way of life not
only Mrabet could not adapt to, and he tried to
impose his own way of life on them.
In general, this question of resistance and
self-assertion is a major motif in many of Mra-
bet’s narratives translated by Bowles that deal,
directly or indirectly, with cultural encounters
between Moroccans and Westerners. For ex-
ample, in the story titled “What Happened
in Granada”, translated by Bowles, Mrabet
(2004) recounted his clashes with Western-
ers during a short visit to Spain (exactly like
what had happened in the novel when he went
to Iowa), a clash that some authors have in-
terpreted as a direct answer to the traditional
ethnocentric attitude of the West: “Instead of
feeling embarrassed or being at least calmly
polite as a guest or foreigner there in Granada,
he rather adopts a self-assertive and potential-
ly counter-hegemonic attitude vis-à-vis all the
people he meets there” (Elkouche, 2008, p. 4).
Examples of clashes between the two cultures
can be found in his narrative again and again,
but at one point, when the Spaniards warned
him about his dangerous driving, he said:
I yelled at them: I shit on your ancestors and
your whole race! I kept walking along, push-
ing through them. Barking dogs don’t bite, I
told them. A very fat woman came by. She
called me a moro, and I called her a Christian
pig. (Mrabet, 2004, p. 14)
Later, Mrabet used Arabic to insult the Span-
iards (Mrabet, 2004): “Inaal din d’babakum”
(p. 21). This use of Arabic, and precisely the
fact that it was not translated, is interesting
here: Mrabet did this in many other stories and
novels, in titles like “M’hashish,” “Hdidan Ah-
ram,”, and “The Ghoula,” etc. Some of them
are names, but they have cultural significance
or symbolic implications that Mrabet consid-
ered to be untranslatable and, that he thought
Western readers would be unable to grasp.
Bowles always respected this:
and though some of them have synonyms in
[English], Bowles seemed to be reluctant to
use translated English words lest Mrabet’s
tales could lose their sense of authenticity and
local colour. One can even assert that Bowles
was often so overpowered by the compelling
and mesmerising effect of Mrabet’s tales that
he simply transcribed such words instead
of attempting to translate them. (Elkouche,
2008, p. 4)
Another element we have to take into account
with regard to Bowles is the language he used
and talked about in some of his own translated
novels. For example, he himself and Jane ap-
peared at the end of Look & Move On (1976) and
the translation process in some pages became
part of Mrabet’s narration (1976, pp. 90–91.
Bowles rewrote the histories of the subordi-
nates, of those who have no voice because they
have no material or intellectual means, in the
strongest of the strong languages.
At this point, I think one way of defending this
vision in favour of Bowles the translator I am
presenting here is by looking at the distinction
Deleuze and Guattari (1986/1975, p. 19) make
between major and minor languages in relation
to what they call “minor literature”:
How many people today live in a language
that is not their own? Or no longer, or not
yet, even know their own and now poorly the
major language that they are forced to serve?
This is the problem of immigrants, and es-
pecially of their children, the problem of mi-
norities, the problem of a minor literature,
Translating Invisible Lives: Paul Bowles’ Rewritings of his Moroccan Storytellers31Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°1, 2023, enero-junio,pp.18-35
but also a problem for all of us: how to tear
a minor literature away from its own lan-
guage, allowing it to challenge the language
and making it follow a sober revolutionary
path? How to become a nomad and an im-
migrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own
language? (p. 19)
It is neither a question of bilingualism or mul-
tilingualism nor two languages blending in a
balanced homogeneous system. Bowles did
not mix two languages, not even a major and
a minor language, but he showed a minor use
of the major language. That, according to
Deleuze, is what great writers do (and great
translators too) who are always strangers in
their own language.
“Minor” literature, in the sense of Deleuze
and Guattari, evokes the history of a previous
denomination and deals with problems of eth-
nicity, gender, and deterritorialisation. More
importantly, minor literature does not refer
to specific literatures but to the revolutionary
conditions of every literature within the so-
called literary canon. Minor literature is de-
territorialised and political literature; it fosters
collective rather than individual utterances: a
minor language use evokes the history of dom-
ination. It is probably the literature of many
Moroccan writers after decolonisation because
they believed that they had to tell their history
themselves. Bowles told subordinates’ stories
in English, thus contributing to making the his-
tory widely known, even if, at the same time, it
is true that there was a clear asymmetry in this
clash or coming together of cultures:
Must a distinction then be made between two
kinds of languages, “high” and “low,” major
and minor? The first would be defined pre-
cisely by the power (pouvoir) of constants, the
second by the power (puissance) of variation.
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1986[1975], p. 101)
The aim is neither the major nor the minor, but
making the major minor:
minor languages are not simply sublanguag-
es […] but potential agents of the major
language’s entering into a becoming-minori-
tarian of all of its dimensions and elements.
We should distinguish between minor lan-
guages, the major language, and the becom-
ing-minor of the major language. Minorities,
of course, are objectively definable states,
states of language, ethnicity or sex with their
own guetto territorialities, but they must
also be thought of as seeds, crystals of be-
coming whose value is to trigger uncontrol-
lable movements and deterritorialisations of
the mean or majority. (Deleuze & Guattari,
1986[1975], p. 106)
The language of the other and his histories,
such as Moroccan dialect used by Mrabet and
others, require very careful treatment. And
that “of ” in the expression “language of the
other” means “not so much property as prove-
nance: language is for the other, coming from
the other, the coming of the other” (Derrida,
1998, p. 68). Thus, in a seminal text, Milles pla-
teaux (capitalisme et schizophrénie) (in English, A
Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia, 1980), Deleuze and Guattari consider
again the relation between major and minor
languages and aim to deterritorialise “major”
languages as understood by the West:
The unity of language is fundamentally polit-
ical. There is no mother tongue, only a pow-
er takeover by a dominant language that at
times advances along a broad front, and at times
swoops down on diverse centres simultaneous-
ly (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987[1980], p. 101).
The authors warn us that “major” and “mi-
nor” do not qualify two different languages but
rather two usages or functions of languages:
Minor languages are characterised not by
overload and poverty in relation to a stan-
dard or major language, but by a sobriety
and variation that are like a minor treatment
of the standard language, a becoming minor of
the major language. The problem is not the dis-
tinction between major and minor language;
it is one of a becoming. It is a question not
of reterritorialising oneself on a dialect or a
patois but of deterritorialising the major lan-
guage […]. Minor languages do not exist
but also a problem for all of us: how to tear
a minor literature away from its own lan-
guage, allowing it to challenge the language
and making it follow a sober revolutionary
path? How to become a nomad and an im-
migrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own
language? (p. 19)
It is neither a question of bilingualism or mul-
tilingualism nor two languages blending in a
balanced homogeneous system. Bowles did
not mix two languages, not even a major and
a minor language, but he showed a minor use
of the major language. That, according to
Deleuze, is what great writers do (and great
translators too) who are always strangers in
their own language.
“Minor” literature, in the sense of Deleuze
and Guattari, evokes the history of a previous
denomination and deals with problems of eth-
nicity, gender, and deterritorialisation. More
importantly, minor literature does not refer
to specific literatures but to the revolutionary
conditions of every literature within the so-
called literary canon. Minor literature is de-
territorialised and political literature; it fosters
collective rather than individual utterances: a
minor language use evokes the history of dom-
ination. It is probably the literature of many
Moroccan writers after decolonisation because
they believed that they had to tell their history
themselves. Bowles told subordinates’ stories
in English, thus contributing to making the his-
tory widely known, even if, at the same time, it
is true that there was a clear asymmetry in this
clash or coming together of cultures:
Must a distinction then be made between two
kinds of languages, “high” and “low,” major
and minor? The first would be defined pre-
cisely by the power (pouvoir) of constants, the
second by the power (puissance) of variation.
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1986[1975], p. 101)
The aim is neither the major nor the minor, but
making the major minor:
minor languages are not simply sublanguag-
es […] but potential agents of the major
language’s entering into a becoming-minori-
tarian of all of its dimensions and elements.
We should distinguish between minor lan-
guages, the major language, and the becom-
ing-minor of the major language. Minorities,
of course, are objectively definable states,
states of language, ethnicity or sex with their
own guetto territorialities, but they must
also be thought of as seeds, crystals of be-
coming whose value is to trigger uncontrol-
lable movements and deterritorialisations of
the mean or majority. (Deleuze & Guattari,
1986[1975], p. 106)
The language of the other and his histories,
such as Moroccan dialect used by Mrabet and
others, require very careful treatment. And
that “of ” in the expression “language of the
other” means “not so much property as prove-
nance: language is for the other, coming from
the other, the coming of the other” (Derrida,
1998, p. 68). Thus, in a seminal text, Milles pla-
teaux (capitalisme et schizophrénie) (in English, A
Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia, 1980), Deleuze and Guattari consider
again the relation between major and minor
languages and aim to deterritorialise “major”
languages as understood by the West:
The unity of language is fundamentally polit-
ical. There is no mother tongue, only a pow-
er takeover by a dominant language that at
times advances along a broad front, and at times
swoops down on diverse centres simultaneous-
ly (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987[1980], p. 101).
The authors warn us that “major” and “mi-
nor” do not qualify two different languages but
rather two usages or functions of languages:
Minor languages are characterised not by
overload and poverty in relation to a stan-
dard or major language, but by a sobriety
and variation that are like a minor treatment
of the standard language, a becoming minor of
the major language. The problem is not the dis-
tinction between major and minor language;
it is one of a becoming. It is a question not
of reterritorialising oneself on a dialect or a
patois but of deterritorialising the major lan-
guage […]. Minor languages do not exist
Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte32Re-sentir lo queer/cuir en la traducción iberoamericana
in themselves: they exist only in relation to
a major language and are also investments
of that language for the purpose of making
it minor. One must find the minor language
[…] on the basis of which one can make
one’s own major language minor […]. Con-
quer the major language in order to delineate
in it as yet unknown minor languages. Use
the minor language to send the major language
racing. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, p 105)
An ethical translation is that one whose aim
is neither the major nor the minor, but the be-
coming-minor of the minor.
As we have seen, those who attack Bowles’
translations ask themselves whose voice they
are really listening to, whether it is Choukri’s,
Mrabet’s, or Charhady’s or whether they
enter the translations/writings as subordinate
and unvoiced. Although they speak, they do
so only as subaltern subjects and agencies.
It is Bowles’ voice which is heard and not
theirs. Their narrative style is that of Bowles
to the point that what is presented is the “I”
of Bowles not that of the storytellers. (Sabil,
2012, pp. 40–41)
However, if we understand Bowles’ transla-
tions as an example of the theories of Deleuze
and Guattari on the minor and the major, we
can reach the opposite conclusion:
Bowles saw in the Moroccan minor tales a
literary instrument to unsettle the grand na-
tionalist categorisation at home and experi-
ment with eccentric linguistic structures and
images. Bouchra Benlemlih (2009, p. 64) not-
ed in her dissertation that Bowles “translates
realities that have been rejected, repressed
and devalorised by the hegemonic centripetal
forces”. The resultant deterritorialised lan-
guage was hoped to reterritorialise American
English language and literature and hence
innovate the national literature. The exile
experience in Morocco sustained Bowles to
redefine the American self by contrasting
it with the other and eventually questioned
the civilisational superiority claimed by the
West. (Elboubekri, 2016, p. 422)
Besides, it is also true that it was thanks to
Bowles that certain histories were told. In this
regard, we must consider the difficult balance
between hospitality (Ricœur, 2005) and hostipi-
tality indicated by Derrida (2000/1997).
There is a certain paradox to be found in the
idea of hospitality: “a law of hospitality which
violently imposes a contradiction on the very
concept of hospitality in fixing a limit to it […]
the one who receives, lodges or gives asylum
remains the patron” (Derrida, 2000, p. 4). That
is why Derrida refers to hostipitality because it
brings together hostis and hospes, the contradic-
tion we want to cover up and hide:
he who receives, who is master in his house,
in his household, in his state, in his nation, in
his city, in his town, who remains master in his
house—who defines the conditions of hospi-
tality or welcome; where consequently there
can be no unconditional welcome. (Derrida,
2000, p. 4)
Hostipitality, therefore, is a better term to de-
scribe the situation than the contradictory con-
cept of hospitality. And perhaps translating the
Other, rewriting them in the strong language,
is the greatest of these contradictions. That is
why translation is the experience of hospital-
ity, “an enigmatic phenomenon or experi-
ence of hospitality, if not the condition of all
hospitality in general” (Derrida 2000, p. 6).
Translation is khôra, that place which Plato in-
terpreted in Timaeus as the space for possibility
and hospitality but also for contradiction be-
cause hospitality, the possibility of telling the
Other’s history, begins with the imposition of
a language, of the language of those who have
power:
Hospitality gives and takes more than once
in its own home. It gives, offers, holds out,
is the greeting which comprehends or let’s
come into one’s home, folding the foreign oth-
er into the internal law of the host […] which
tends to begin by dictating the law of its lan-
guage and its own acceptation of the sense of
words. (Derrida, 2000, p. 7)
in themselves: they exist only in relation to
a major language and are also investments
of that language for the purpose of making
it minor. One must find the minor language
[…] on the basis of which one can make
one’s own major language minor […]. Con-
quer the major language in order to delineate
in it as yet unknown minor languages. Use
the minor language to send the major language
racing. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, p 105)
An ethical translation is that one whose aim
is neither the major nor the minor, but the be-
coming-minor of the minor.
As we have seen, those who attack Bowles’
translations ask themselves whose voice they
are really listening to, whether it is Choukri’s,
Mrabet’s, or Charhady’s or whether they
enter the translations/writings as subordinate
and unvoiced. Although they speak, they do
so only as subaltern subjects and agencies.
It is Bowles’ voice which is heard and not
theirs. Their narrative style is that of Bowles
to the point that what is presented is the “I”
of Bowles not that of the storytellers. (Sabil,
2012, pp. 40–41)
However, if we understand Bowles’ transla-
tions as an example of the theories of Deleuze
and Guattari on the minor and the major, we
can reach the opposite conclusion:
Bowles saw in the Moroccan minor tales a
literary instrument to unsettle the grand na-
tionalist categorisation at home and experi-
ment with eccentric linguistic structures and
images. Bouchra Benlemlih (2009, p. 64) not-
ed in her dissertation that Bowles “translates
realities that have been rejected, repressed
and devalorised by the hegemonic centripetal
forces”. The resultant deterritorialised lan-
guage was hoped to reterritorialise American
English language and literature and hence
innovate the national literature. The exile
experience in Morocco sustained Bowles to
redefine the American self by contrasting
it with the other and eventually questioned
the civilisational superiority claimed by the
West. (Elboubekri, 2016, p. 422)
Besides, it is also true that it was thanks to
Bowles that certain histories were told. In this
regard, we must consider the difficult balance
between hospitality (Ricœur, 2005) and hostipi-
tality indicated by Derrida (2000/1997).
There is a certain paradox to be found in the
idea of hospitality: “a law of hospitality which
violently imposes a contradiction on the very
concept of hospitality in fixing a limit to it […]
the one who receives, lodges or gives asylum
remains the patron” (Derrida, 2000, p. 4). That
is why Derrida refers to hostipitality because it
brings together hostis and hospes, the contradic-
tion we want to cover up and hide:
he who receives, who is master in his house,
in his household, in his state, in his nation, in
his city, in his town, who remains master in his
house—who defines the conditions of hospi-
tality or welcome; where consequently there
can be no unconditional welcome. (Derrida,
2000, p. 4)
Hostipitality, therefore, is a better term to de-
scribe the situation than the contradictory con-
cept of hospitality. And perhaps translating the
Other, rewriting them in the strong language,
is the greatest of these contradictions. That is
why translation is the experience of hospital-
ity, “an enigmatic phenomenon or experi-
ence of hospitality, if not the condition of all
hospitality in general” (Derrida 2000, p. 6).
Translation is khôra, that place which Plato in-
terpreted in Timaeus as the space for possibility
and hospitality but also for contradiction be-
cause hospitality, the possibility of telling the
Other’s history, begins with the imposition of
a language, of the language of those who have
power:
Hospitality gives and takes more than once
in its own home. It gives, offers, holds out,
is the greeting which comprehends or let’s
come into one’s home, folding the foreign oth-
er into the internal law of the host […] which
tends to begin by dictating the law of its lan-
guage and its own acceptation of the sense of
words. (Derrida, 2000, p. 7)
Translating Invisible Lives: Paul Bowles’ Rewritings of his Moroccan Storytellers33Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°1, 2023, enero-junio,pp.18-35
5. Concluding Remarks
Bowles’ translations remind us that rewriting
can be the way to open our space to “some-
thing different” (De Certeau, 1988/1984,
p. 19), to allow us to be touched by the stories
of others, but also to change us into an accu-
mulation of solitudes, some alongside others,
even pushing together, and paradoxically iso-
lated. These rewritings bring together the two
symbols that, according to Soja (2001, p. 60),
characterised the city in Egyptian writing sys-
tems: the cross, representing the crossing of
paths and opposites, and the circle, represent-
ing the protection city walls offer citizens. In
short, the opposition between roots and routes
(Clifford, 1997). That is why I believe Bowles
never revealed a colonialist attitude when he
translated as we have seen in the examples
mentioned above. On the contrary, he was that
“translating agent” described by Cronin (2000):
The translating agent like the traveler strad-
dles the borderline between the cultures. A
nomadic theory of translation proposes the
translator-nomad as an emblematic figure
of (post)modernity by demonstrating what
translation can tell us about nomadism and
what nomadism can tell us about translation
and how both impinge on contemporary
concerns with identity (p. 2)
When we read Bowles’ translations of the nar-
rations of Mrabet, Choukri, and others, we
realise that he was very aware that space is nev-
er a mere static frame but a living being that
is always in progress and is never neutral (De
Certeau, 1988/1984; Lefebvre, 1991/1974), a
space inhabited by nomadic identities (Braidot-
ti, 1994) which create, in frontier spaces and
rhizomatic translations. Bowles rewrites in
that contact zone that was Tangiers, but he
was not at the service of imperialism. His texts,
rather, come from the Other’s space and lead
to texts which interact with things local, with
“local forms of narrative and is a revigorating
and positive global influence […] a continuous
life-giving and creative process” (Simon & St-
Pierre, 2000, p. 10). In his translations, we find
a rewriter who inhabits hybrid spaces and re-
veals the concept of convenientia, a concept that
helps us to understand the affinities between
those who live in contact zones (Pratt, 1992).
His translations constantly remind us that we
live in juxtaposition, touch each other, and mix
with each other. And that all this involves con-
tiguity between spaces, movement between the
inside and the outside, and the deconstruction
of the lines dividing it (Foucault, 1970, p. 20).
Perhaps this is why Bowles is beginning to be
made available to contemporary Moroccan au-
diences in a variety of forms. This is a demon-
stration of his subversive potential in circulating
these writers, at first marginalised in their
own countries then given enhanced credibil-
ity through the act of translation and pub-
lication in the West […] The contemporary
Tanjaoui playwright, Zubeir ben Bouchta,
for instance, has made a play, Nahr al ham-
ra, (The Red Fire) based on the Bowles trans-
lation of the Yacoubi story “The Before
Thinking,” one of the stories in Five Eyes.
And in 2004, the Moroccan Cultural Stud-
ies Center in Fez brought out (in English)
a new edition of Mrabet’s Love With a Few
Hairs (1967), with an introduction by Brian
Edwards. Now Moroccan colleagues tell
me that Abdel Aziz Jadir is working on an
Arabic translation of that novel. We can rea-
sonably expect this activity of translation
and publication in Morocco to continue in
the coming years. And with this, fresh anal-
yses and perspectives of these works will
no doubt emerge, ones that might possibly
critique the conditions of their production
(Hibbard, 2018, p. 31).
In his translations, the terms colonial and post-
colonial appear one as the différance of the oth-
er, as the other different and deferred in the
economy of the same, for here responses flow
from both sides (Spivak, 1995, p. 25). Bowles
is ahead of poststructuralist theories, making
translations that oblige us to “re-read the bi-
naries as forms of transculturation, of cultur-
al translation, destined to trouble the here/
there binaries forever” (Hall, 1996, p. 247).
5. Concluding Remarks
Bowles’ translations remind us that rewriting
can be the way to open our space to “some-
thing different” (De Certeau, 1988/1984,
p. 19), to allow us to be touched by the stories
of others, but also to change us into an accu-
mulation of solitudes, some alongside others,
even pushing together, and paradoxically iso-
lated. These rewritings bring together the two
symbols that, according to Soja (2001, p. 60),
characterised the city in Egyptian writing sys-
tems: the cross, representing the crossing of
paths and opposites, and the circle, represent-
ing the protection city walls offer citizens. In
short, the opposition between roots and routes
(Clifford, 1997). That is why I believe Bowles
never revealed a colonialist attitude when he
translated as we have seen in the examples
mentioned above. On the contrary, he was that
“translating agent” described by Cronin (2000):
The translating agent like the traveler strad-
dles the borderline between the cultures. A
nomadic theory of translation proposes the
translator-nomad as an emblematic figure
of (post)modernity by demonstrating what
translation can tell us about nomadism and
what nomadism can tell us about translation
and how both impinge on contemporary
concerns with identity (p. 2)
When we read Bowles’ translations of the nar-
rations of Mrabet, Choukri, and others, we
realise that he was very aware that space is nev-
er a mere static frame but a living being that
is always in progress and is never neutral (De
Certeau, 1988/1984; Lefebvre, 1991/1974), a
space inhabited by nomadic identities (Braidot-
ti, 1994) which create, in frontier spaces and
rhizomatic translations. Bowles rewrites in
that contact zone that was Tangiers, but he
was not at the service of imperialism. His texts,
rather, come from the Other’s space and lead
to texts which interact with things local, with
“local forms of narrative and is a revigorating
and positive global influence […] a continuous
life-giving and creative process” (Simon & St-
Pierre, 2000, p. 10). In his translations, we find
a rewriter who inhabits hybrid spaces and re-
veals the concept of convenientia, a concept that
helps us to understand the affinities between
those who live in contact zones (Pratt, 1992).
His translations constantly remind us that we
live in juxtaposition, touch each other, and mix
with each other. And that all this involves con-
tiguity between spaces, movement between the
inside and the outside, and the deconstruction
of the lines dividing it (Foucault, 1970, p. 20).
Perhaps this is why Bowles is beginning to be
made available to contemporary Moroccan au-
diences in a variety of forms. This is a demon-
stration of his subversive potential in circulating
these writers, at first marginalised in their
own countries then given enhanced credibil-
ity through the act of translation and pub-
lication in the West […] The contemporary
Tanjaoui playwright, Zubeir ben Bouchta,
for instance, has made a play, Nahr al ham-
ra, (The Red Fire) based on the Bowles trans-
lation of the Yacoubi story “The Before
Thinking,” one of the stories in Five Eyes.
And in 2004, the Moroccan Cultural Stud-
ies Center in Fez brought out (in English)
a new edition of Mrabet’s Love With a Few
Hairs (1967), with an introduction by Brian
Edwards. Now Moroccan colleagues tell
me that Abdel Aziz Jadir is working on an
Arabic translation of that novel. We can rea-
sonably expect this activity of translation
and publication in Morocco to continue in
the coming years. And with this, fresh anal-
yses and perspectives of these works will
no doubt emerge, ones that might possibly
critique the conditions of their production
(Hibbard, 2018, p. 31).
In his translations, the terms colonial and post-
colonial appear one as the différance of the oth-
er, as the other different and deferred in the
economy of the same, for here responses flow
from both sides (Spivak, 1995, p. 25). Bowles
is ahead of poststructuralist theories, making
translations that oblige us to “re-read the bi-
naries as forms of transculturation, of cultur-
al translation, destined to trouble the here/
there binaries forever” (Hall, 1996, p. 247).
Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte34Re-sentir lo queer/cuir en la traducción iberoamericana
His translations are in-between dialogic, and
liminal, territories that deconstruct crucial
notions to contemporary translation studies,
such as representation, the dichotomy origi-
nal/translation or author/translator.
References
Aldrich, R. (2014). Cultural encounters and homoero-
ticism in Sri Lanka. Sex and serendipity. Routled-
ge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315814704
Bandia, P. (2018). Translation, clashes and con-
flict. In S.-A. Harding & O. C.-Cortés,
(Eds.), Routledge handbook of translation and
culture (pp. 243–257). Routledge. https://doi.
org/10.4324/9781315670898-13
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture.
Routledge.
Benlemlih, B. (2018). Paul Bowles’s literary engagement
with Morocco. Poetic space, liminality, and in-be-
tweenness. Lexington Books.
Boone, J. A. (2014). The homoerotics of orientalism.
Columbia University Press. https://doi.
org/10.7312/boon15110
Bowles, P. (1979). Notes on the work of the translator.
Five eyes. Black Sparrow.
Bowles, P. (1949). The sheltering sky. John Lehmann.
Bowles, P. (1947). A distant episode. Partisan Review.
January-February.
Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic subjects. Columbia
University Press.
Burroughs, W. (2009). Letters 1945-1959. (O. Harris,
Ed.). Penguin.
Caponi, G. D. (1994). Paul Bowles: Romantic savage.
Southern Illinois University Press.
Caponi, G. D. (1993). Conversations with Paul
Bowles. University Press of Mississippi.
Certeau, M. de (1988/1984). The practice of every-
day life (Trans. S. F. Rendall). University of
California Press.
Chambers, I. (1994). Migrancy, culture, identity.
Routledge.
Choukri, M. (1993/2010). For bread alone (Trans. P.
Bowles). Telegram.
Choukri, M. (1996). Paul Bowles wa ‘Uzla Tanya.
Altopress.
Clifford, J. (1997). Routes. travel and translation in the
late twentieth century. Harvard University Press.
Cronin, M. (2000). Across the lines: Travel, language,
translation. Cork University Press.
Deleuze, G., & F. Guattari (1986 [1975]). Kafka:
Toward a minor literature. (Trans. D. Polan).
University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & F. Guattari (1987 [1980]). A thousand
plateaus. Capitalism and schizophrenia (Trans. B.
Massumi). University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. (1982/1985). The ear of the other. Otobi-
ography, transference, translation (Trans. P. Ka-
muf). University of Nebraska Press.
Derrida, J. (1998). Monolingualism of the other: Or,
the prosthesis of origin. (Trans. P. Mensah).
Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2000/1997). Of hospitality. (Trans. R.
Bowlby). Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2000). Hostipitality. Angelaki. Jour-
nal of the Theoretical Humanities, 5(3), 3–18.
(Trans. B. Stocker and F. Morlock). https://
doi.org/10.1080/09697250020034706
Derrida, J. (2005). The principle of hospi-
tality. Parallax, 11(1), 6–9. https://doi.
org/10.1080/1353464052000321056
Edwards, B. T. (2005a). Morocco bound. Disorienting
America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Mar-
rakech Express. Duke University Press. https://
doi.org/10.1215/9780822387121
Edwards, B. T. (2005b). The worlds of Paul
Bowles. Tingis: A Moroccan-American Maga-
zine of Ideas and Culture, 2(2), 14–22. https://
www.tingismagazine.com/wp-content/up-
loads/2018/05/tingis_spring2005.pdf
Edwards, B. T. (2011). The Moroccan Paul Bowles.
Michigan Quarterly Review, 50(2), 191–209.
Elboubekri, A. (2016). Issues of representation and
communication in recent translation studies:
Paul Bowles’s project of translating Moroc-
can culture. Journal of Multicultural Discourses,
11(4), 412–431. https://doi.org/10.1080/174
47143.2016.1251932
His translations are in-between dialogic, and
liminal, territories that deconstruct crucial
notions to contemporary translation studies,
such as representation, the dichotomy origi-
nal/translation or author/translator.
References
Aldrich, R. (2014). Cultural encounters and homoero-
ticism in Sri Lanka. Sex and serendipity. Routled-
ge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315814704
Bandia, P. (2018). Translation, clashes and con-
flict. In S.-A. Harding & O. C.-Cortés,
(Eds.), Routledge handbook of translation and
culture (pp. 243–257). Routledge. https://doi.
org/10.4324/9781315670898-13
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture.
Routledge.
Benlemlih, B. (2018). Paul Bowles’s literary engagement
with Morocco. Poetic space, liminality, and in-be-
tweenness. Lexington Books.
Boone, J. A. (2014). The homoerotics of orientalism.
Columbia University Press. https://doi.
org/10.7312/boon15110
Bowles, P. (1979). Notes on the work of the translator.
Five eyes. Black Sparrow.
Bowles, P. (1949). The sheltering sky. John Lehmann.
Bowles, P. (1947). A distant episode. Partisan Review.
January-February.
Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic subjects. Columbia
University Press.
Burroughs, W. (2009). Letters 1945-1959. (O. Harris,
Ed.). Penguin.
Caponi, G. D. (1994). Paul Bowles: Romantic savage.
Southern Illinois University Press.
Caponi, G. D. (1993). Conversations with Paul
Bowles. University Press of Mississippi.
Certeau, M. de (1988/1984). The practice of every-
day life (Trans. S. F. Rendall). University of
California Press.
Chambers, I. (1994). Migrancy, culture, identity.
Routledge.
Choukri, M. (1993/2010). For bread alone (Trans. P.
Bowles). Telegram.
Choukri, M. (1996). Paul Bowles wa ‘Uzla Tanya.
Altopress.
Clifford, J. (1997). Routes. travel and translation in the
late twentieth century. Harvard University Press.
Cronin, M. (2000). Across the lines: Travel, language,
translation. Cork University Press.
Deleuze, G., & F. Guattari (1986 [1975]). Kafka:
Toward a minor literature. (Trans. D. Polan).
University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & F. Guattari (1987 [1980]). A thousand
plateaus. Capitalism and schizophrenia (Trans. B.
Massumi). University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. (1982/1985). The ear of the other. Otobi-
ography, transference, translation (Trans. P. Ka-
muf). University of Nebraska Press.
Derrida, J. (1998). Monolingualism of the other: Or,
the prosthesis of origin. (Trans. P. Mensah).
Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2000/1997). Of hospitality. (Trans. R.
Bowlby). Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2000). Hostipitality. Angelaki. Jour-
nal of the Theoretical Humanities, 5(3), 3–18.
(Trans. B. Stocker and F. Morlock). https://
doi.org/10.1080/09697250020034706
Derrida, J. (2005). The principle of hospi-
tality. Parallax, 11(1), 6–9. https://doi.
org/10.1080/1353464052000321056
Edwards, B. T. (2005a). Morocco bound. Disorienting
America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Mar-
rakech Express. Duke University Press. https://
doi.org/10.1215/9780822387121
Edwards, B. T. (2005b). The worlds of Paul
Bowles. Tingis: A Moroccan-American Maga-
zine of Ideas and Culture, 2(2), 14–22. https://
www.tingismagazine.com/wp-content/up-
loads/2018/05/tingis_spring2005.pdf
Edwards, B. T. (2011). The Moroccan Paul Bowles.
Michigan Quarterly Review, 50(2), 191–209.
Elboubekri, A. (2016). Issues of representation and
communication in recent translation studies:
Paul Bowles’s project of translating Moroc-
can culture. Journal of Multicultural Discourses,
11(4), 412–431. https://doi.org/10.1080/174
47143.2016.1251932
Translating Invisible Lives: Paul Bowles’ Rewritings of his Moroccan Storytellers35Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción Vol. 16, N.°1, 2023, enero-junio,pp.18-35
Elghandor, A. (1994a). Atavism and civilization:
An interview with Paul Bowles. Ariel: A Re-
view of International English Literature, 25(2)
April, 7–30.
Elghandor, A. (1994b). Cross-cultural encounters
and the image of the other in Paul Bowles’ fiction.
(Ph.D. Dissertation). University of Ohio,
United States.
Elkouche, M. (2008). Space and place: Tangier speaks.
http://interactive-worlds.blogspot.com.
es/2008/03/tangier-speaks.html
Foucault, M. (1970). L’Ordre du discours. Gallimard.
Hall, S. (1996). When was “the post-colonial”? In
I. Chambers & L. Curti (Eds.), The post-colo-
nial question: Common skies, divided horizons
(pp. 242–260). Routledge.
Hemmer, K. (2009). “The natives are getting up-
pity: Tangier and Naked lunch.” In O. Har-
ris & I. MacFadyen (Eds.), Naked lunch @ 50.
Aniversary essays (pp. 65–72). Southern Illinois
University Press.
Hibbard, A. (2018). Paul Bowles: Trans-
lating from Tangier. Cad. Trad., 38(1),
19–35, Florianópolis. https://doi.
org/10.5007/2175-7968.2018v38n1p19
Hibbard, A., & Tharaud, B. (Eds.) (2010).
Bowles/Beats/Tangier. Collaborative Media
International.
Hubbs, N. (2004). The Queer composition of America’s
sound. Gay modernists, American Music, and na-
tional identity. University of California Press.
https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520937956
Jelloun, T. B. (1999). French hospitality. Racism
and North African immigrants (Trans. Barbara
Bray). Columbia University Press.
Layachi, L. (1964). A life full of holes. Grove Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1991/1974). The production of spa-
ce (Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith). Basil
Blackwell.
Maier, J. (1996). Desert songs. Western images of
Morocco and Moroccan images of the West. State
University of New York.
Mrabet, M. (1976). Look & move on (Trans. Paul
Bowles). Black Sparrow Press.
Mrabet, M. (2004). What happened in Granada.
Collected stories (Trans. P. Bowles). Annajah
Aljadida.
Mullins, G. (2002). Colonial affairs. Bowles, Burrou-
ghs, and Chester write Tangier. University of
Wisconsin Press.
Patteson, R. F. (1992). Paul Bowles/Mohmmed
Mrabet: Translation, transformation, and
transcultural discourse. The Journal of Narra-
tive Technique, 22(3), 180–190.
Pratt, M. L. (1992). Imperial eyes. Travel writing
and transculturation. Routledge. https://doi.
org/10.4324/9780203163672
Ricœur, P. (2005). Sobre la traducción (Trans. P.
Willson). Paidós.
Rountree, M. M. (1986). Paul Bowles: Translations
from the Moghrebi. Twentieth Century Literature,
32(3/4), 388–401. Paul Bowles Issue (Autumn–
Winter). https://doi.org/10.2307/441355
Sabil, A. (2012). Translating/rewriting the other. A
study of Paul Bowles’ translation of Moroccan
texts by Choukri, Mrabet and Charhadi. Lambert
Academic Publishing.
Simon, S., & P. St-Pierre (Eds.) (2000). Changing
the terms. Translating in the postcolonial era.
University of Ottawa Press. https://doi.or-
g/10.2307/j.ctt1ckpcz7
Soja, E. W. (2001). Postmetropolis. Critical studies of
cities and regions. Blackwell.
Spivak, G. C. (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason:
Towards a history of the vanishing present. Rout-
ledge. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjsf541
Spivak, G. C. (1995). Imaginary maps. Three stories
by Mahasweta Devi. Routledge.
Spivak, G. (1990). The post-colonial critic. Interviews,
strategies, dialogues. Routledge.
Walonen, M. K. (2011). Writing Tangier in the post-
colonial transition. Space and power in expatriate
and North African literature. Ashgate.
How to cite this article: Vidal-Claramonte, M. C. A. (2023). Translating invisible lives: Paul Bowles’
rewritings of his Moroccan storytellers. Mutatis Mutandis, Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción, 16(1),
18–35. https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.mut.v16n1a02
Elghandor, A. (1994a). Atavism and civilization:
An interview with Paul Bowles. Ariel: A Re-
view of International English Literature, 25(2)
April, 7–30.
Elghandor, A. (1994b). Cross-cultural encounters
and the image of the other in Paul Bowles’ fiction.
(Ph.D. Dissertation). University of Ohio,
United States.
Elkouche, M. (2008). Space and place: Tangier speaks.
http://interactive-worlds.blogspot.com.
es/2008/03/tangier-speaks.html
Foucault, M. (1970). L’Ordre du discours. Gallimard.
Hall, S. (1996). When was “the post-colonial”? In
I. Chambers & L. Curti (Eds.), The post-colo-
nial question: Common skies, divided horizons
(pp. 242–260). Routledge.
Hemmer, K. (2009). “The natives are getting up-
pity: Tangier and Naked lunch.” In O. Har-
ris & I. MacFadyen (Eds.), Naked lunch @ 50.
Aniversary essays (pp. 65–72). Southern Illinois
University Press.
Hibbard, A. (2018). Paul Bowles: Trans-
lating from Tangier. Cad. Trad., 38(1),
19–35, Florianópolis. https://doi.
org/10.5007/2175-7968.2018v38n1p19
Hibbard, A., & Tharaud, B. (Eds.) (2010).
Bowles/Beats/Tangier. Collaborative Media
International.
Hubbs, N. (2004). The Queer composition of America’s
sound. Gay modernists, American Music, and na-
tional identity. University of California Press.
https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520937956
Jelloun, T. B. (1999). French hospitality. Racism
and North African immigrants (Trans. Barbara
Bray). Columbia University Press.
Layachi, L. (1964). A life full of holes. Grove Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1991/1974). The production of spa-
ce (Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith). Basil
Blackwell.
Maier, J. (1996). Desert songs. Western images of
Morocco and Moroccan images of the West. State
University of New York.
Mrabet, M. (1976). Look & move on (Trans. Paul
Bowles). Black Sparrow Press.
Mrabet, M. (2004). What happened in Granada.
Collected stories (Trans. P. Bowles). Annajah
Aljadida.
Mullins, G. (2002). Colonial affairs. Bowles, Burrou-
ghs, and Chester write Tangier. University of
Wisconsin Press.
Patteson, R. F. (1992). Paul Bowles/Mohmmed
Mrabet: Translation, transformation, and
transcultural discourse. The Journal of Narra-
tive Technique, 22(3), 180–190.
Pratt, M. L. (1992). Imperial eyes. Travel writing
and transculturation. Routledge. https://doi.
org/10.4324/9780203163672
Ricœur, P. (2005). Sobre la traducción (Trans. P.
Willson). Paidós.
Rountree, M. M. (1986). Paul Bowles: Translations
from the Moghrebi. Twentieth Century Literature,
32(3/4), 388–401. Paul Bowles Issue (Autumn–
Winter). https://doi.org/10.2307/441355
Sabil, A. (2012). Translating/rewriting the other. A
study of Paul Bowles’ translation of Moroccan
texts by Choukri, Mrabet and Charhadi. Lambert
Academic Publishing.
Simon, S., & P. St-Pierre (Eds.) (2000). Changing
the terms. Translating in the postcolonial era.
University of Ottawa Press. https://doi.or-
g/10.2307/j.ctt1ckpcz7
Soja, E. W. (2001). Postmetropolis. Critical studies of
cities and regions. Blackwell.
Spivak, G. C. (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason:
Towards a history of the vanishing present. Rout-
ledge. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjsf541
Spivak, G. C. (1995). Imaginary maps. Three stories
by Mahasweta Devi. Routledge.
Spivak, G. (1990). The post-colonial critic. Interviews,
strategies, dialogues. Routledge.
Walonen, M. K. (2011). Writing Tangier in the post-
colonial transition. Space and power in expatriate
and North African literature. Ashgate.
How to cite this article: Vidal-Claramonte, M. C. A. (2023). Translating invisible lives: Paul Bowles’
rewritings of his Moroccan storytellers. Mutatis Mutandis, Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción, 16(1),
18–35. https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.mut.v16n1a02