PAUL BOWLES: TRANSLATING FROM TANGIER

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2018v38n1p19 PAUL BOWLES: TRANSLATING FROM TANGIER Allen Hibbard Middle Tennessee State University. Department of English, Murfreesboro, USA. Abstract: This essay examines the complex relationships between American writer Paul Bowles and Moroccan writers/storytellers whose works he translated (Ahmed Yacoubi, Larbi Layachi, Mohammed Mrabet, and Mohamed Choukri), with attention to reasons for Bowles’s turn to translation, the unique character of his translations of oral stories, the status of the “original” in these cases, as well as the surrounding postcolonial and Orientalist contexts of this translation activity. It advances the notion that Bowles’s translation activity is at once collaborative, dialogic, and mutually beneficial, motivated by the translator’s genuine interest in preserving and making more widely available local cultural production that might otherwise have gone unnoticed and unrecorded. Keywords: Exile. Translation. Postcolonial condition. Paul Bowles. Contemporary Moroccan Literature. PAUL BOWLES: TRADUIRE DEPUIS TANGER Résumé: Cet essai examine les relations complexes existant entre l’écrivain américain Paul Bowles et les écrivains ou conteurs marocains, notamment Ahmed Yacoubi, Larbi Layachi, Mohammed Mrabet, and Mohamed Choukri, dont Bowles a traduit les textes. Tout en prenant en compte les contextes postcoloniaux et orientalistes qui président à cette traduction, l’auteur de cet essai porte une attention particulière aux raisons ayant amené Bowles à la traduction, au caractère unique de ses traductions d’histoires orales, et au statut d’“originaux” de ces textes. Cet essai propose que l’activité de traduction de Bowles est à la fois collaborative, dialogique, et mutuellement avantageuse, ainsi que motivée par l’intérêt Esta obra utiliza uma licença Creative Commons CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/lice Allen Hibbard sincère du traducteur de préserver et de disseminer cette production culturelle locale qui sinon aurait pu demeurer inaperçue et non documentée. Mots-clés: Exil-Traduction-Condition postcoloniale-Paul Bowles-Littérature marocaine contemporaine. “I think translations are as difficult to do as invention.” Paul Bowles, Interview The Cage Door Is Always Open (documentary, dir. Daniel Young, 2013) American writer Paul Bowles lived in Tangier, Morocco more or less continuously from 1947 until his death in 1999. During the first couple of decades in exile, Bowles devoted most of his creative energies to his own fiction, producing dozens of stories and several novels set in North Africa (The Sheltering Sky 1949; Let It Come Down 1952; and The Spider’s House 1956). By the 1960s, however, the writer was turning his attention more and more to translation projects. From 1964 to 1992, he translated no fewer than fifteen volumes of fictional work by local Moroccan storytellers and writers, including Ahmed Yacoubi, Larbi Layachi, Mohammed Mrabet, and Mohamed Choukri. All, except for Choukri, worked solely in the oral tradition; thus his mode of translation (usually from tape) was unconventional. My focus here is on Bowles’s turn to translation, with attention to the complicated issues (practical, political, erotic, economic) surrounding his translation activity, the status of “original” text, the effect of his translation on his own work, and—more broadly—the wider cultural scenes, all revolving around the condition of exile. It is my hope that this exploration will lead to a deeper understanding of the particularities of Bowles’s own translation enterprise as well as the important relationship between translation and exile. As well, this focus on his work in translation enriches our appreciation of the breadth of Bowles’s creative endeavors, allowing us to see integral connections between his musical composition, his writing, his recordings of found sound and Moroccan music, and his translations. Cad. Trad., Florianópolis, v. 38, nº 1, p. 19-35, jan-abr, 2018 20 Paul Bowles: Translating from Tangier A number of contributing factors help explain Bowles’s move toward translation, including his wife Jane’s declining health (following a stroke in the late 1950s), development of friendships with Moroccan storytellers, and (some have speculated) a drying up of the well of his own imagination. His interest in storytellers in the oral tradition was consistent with his attraction to a pre-modern Morocco that he saw jeopardized by postcolonial nationalism and forces of modernization, a philosophy that, as John Maier puts it, was “an indicator of much that has changed in the Western view of the non-Western world” (214). Bowles translated because, in his words, “I thought it would perhaps shed light on the culture that was much despised. I thought it probably did” (qtd. in Bejjit, 119). His translation projects thus seem to have been motivated by the same kinds of concerns and interests that lay behind his interest in preserving indigenous Moroccan music. In 1959, around the time he began to turn his attention to translation, Bowles traveled around Morocco recording local, traditional music of various traditions and genres. At the time he felt an urgent need to preserve this music that was threatened by popular, mass-produced music in both the Arab world and the West. These ethnomusicological and translation projects, significantly, both relied on the use of the tape recorder. In a piece titled “The Rif, to Music,” in Their Heads are Green Their Hands are Blue, Bowles describes some of the ordeals and adventures that accompanied the taping of indigenous music, as Bowles, his Canadian artist friend Christopher Wanklyn, and their Moroccan assistant Mohammed Larbi traveled through back roads and mountainous terrain of northern Morocco in Wanklyn’s VW Beetle. The crew captured around 250 examples of music from 22 locations on their Ampex 601 recording machine, selections which recently have been reproduced in a 4-CD set, Music of Morocco. And at about the same time (probably about a year earlier, in 1958), Bowles’s innovative experimentation with the tape recorder led to the creation of a superb example of musique concrète, available in a recent re-release of the CD, The Pool, K III. All of these Cad. Trad., Florianópolis, v. 38, nº 1, p. 19-35, jan-abr, 2018 21 Allen Hibbard productions—both in music and translation—owe their existence to a fortuitous confluence of elements involving Bowles, the local scene in Morocco, and use of available technology. Bowles’s translation work, particularly with storytellers, was rooted in personal connections made possible only because of his life as an exile in Tangier. First among these local collaborators was Ahmed Yacoubi, one of the writers included in Five Eyes, a collection of stories from five Moroccan storytellers that contains some of Bowles’s earliest translations. Bowles recounts how he came upon the young Moroccan in Fez in the late 1940s, took him under his (...truncated)