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By Hanna Alwine

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I was first introduced to Mohamed Choukri’s Al-Khubz al-Hafi through Tahar Ben Jelloun’s French translation. The book begins with his brother’s death—murdered at the hands of his father.

Il se précipite sur mon frère et lui tord le cou comme on essore un linge. Du sang sort de la bouche. Effrayé, je sors de la pièce pendant qu’il essaie de faire taire ma mère en la battant et en l’étouffant. Je me suis caché. Seul. Les voix de cette nuit me sont proches et lointaines. Je regarde le ciel. Les étoiles viennent d’être témoins d’un crime. (Tahar Ben Jelloun, Le pain nu)

He rushes towards my brother and twists his neck as if wringing a cloth. Blood comes from his mouth. Terrified, I leave the room while he tries to silence my mother by beating and choking her. I hid. Alone. The voices of that night feel, at once, close and far away. I look at the sky. The stars have just witnessed a crime. (my translation)

Tahar Ben Jelloun’s French translation is, by turn, troublingly violent and beautifully reverent. Scenes plucked from Choukri’s life growing up in poverty in a Morocco under occupation are rendered in such excruciating detail that, at times, the genre feels more like auto-fiction than memoir. Though pulled from his own life, Choukri describes the figures that inhabit this narrative as “characters” (Ghazoul and Harlow, 220). His life story goes beyond autobiography, acting instead as a critique of the failed socio-political structures that defined his youth.

Al-Khubz al-Hafi follows Mohamed from an early childhood in the rural, mountainous Rif region of Morocco, to an adolescence stretched between Oran and Tetouan, to an autonomous life in Tangiers where he begins his journey to literacy at twenty years old. The book forces the reader to engage with the painful reality of young Mohamed’s life—his brother’s murder, his abusive father, the quotidian violence that slips its way into his sexual fantasies. Choukri grapples with themes of grief and belonging, violence and tenderness, family and country.

The book exists under three titles—the Arabic source text Al-Khubz al-Hafi, the English translation For Bread Alone, and the French translation Le pain nu. Written by Choukri in Arabic, his autobiography was simultaneously translated into English and published by Paul Bowles in 1973. Seven years later, it was translated into French by Tahar Ben Jelloun. The Arabic text wasn’t published until 1982 when it was promptly banned in Morocco until 2000 for its explicit depictions of sex, drug and alcohol use, and its biting critique of the father and familial structures. Nonetheless, the book circulated covertly, becoming a defining piece of Moroccan national literature.

This unique translation and publication trajectory can partially be traced to Morocco’s history of linguistic confluence and overlap. Along with the country’s two official languages—Modern Standard Arabic and Tamazight—common vernaculars like Moroccan Arabic, or Darija, French, and Spanish are widely used. Choukri wrote this book in Tangiers, designated an international zone during the 50 plus years of French and Spanish imperial presence in the country. In the 1970s and 1980s the city became a literary attraction as Western modernists flocked to Tangiers.

It was during this period that Choukri began writing alongside many of these expat writers—Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet, and, notably, Paul Bowles. In 1972 Bowles and London publisher Peter Owen claim to have solicited Choukri’s autobiography, though the writer maintains that this encouragement was merely a catalyst for a project he already had the intention of writing “after [he’d] gained some literary glory.” When the opportunity presented itself, he took it: “To tell you the truth, I wanted to publish my book at any price to prove to myself that I was a writer” (Ghazoul and Harlow, 222). When Bowles solicited the translation, the book was not yet finished. As such, the book was written and translated simultaneously, a process to which Choukri claims Bowles was oblivious. Choukri had told Bowles that the book was finished by the time they began translation, but this was not the case—“I used to write every day, and Paul Bowles would translate at night” (Ghazoul and Harlow, 224).

The transition of this text from Arabic to English was not a smooth one and remains contentious into the present day, complicated by the fact that Bowles was not fluent in Modern Standard Arabic. In his introduction to For Bread Alone, he claims that the text was “first reduced to Darija” by Choukri, though the author remembers this differently, claiming the intermediary languages used were primarily French and Spanish.

In Bowles’ introduction to a collection of translated short stories, Five Eyes, he describes the process: “When we were translating his autobiography For Bread Alone, he sat beside me, in order to see that I was making a word-for-word translation of his text. If he noticed an extra comma he demanded an explanation. I was driven to reiterating: but English is not Arabic! Finally, we devised a modus operandi, which involved our sitting on opposite sides of the room” (Tanoukhi, 133-134). Though an exact translation of any text is a technically impossible task, faithfulness and the preservation of truth in a translation becomes increasingly complex when translating, not a work of literary fiction, but an autobiography.

The process is further complicated by Bowles’ own position as an American expatriate. Translating and writing in Morocco from 1947 until his death in 1999, Bowles has been criticized for his translations of North African oral narratives. His constructed romanticization of these storytellers’ illiterate position has been critiqued as stemming from his “modernist vision of Moroccan culture as embodying a primitive sublime” (Tanoukhi, 128).

Bowles’ conception of the ways illiteracy impacts memory and storytelling bleed into his translation of Al-Khubz al-Hafi. In his introduction to his translation, Bowles identifies Choukri as a unique case whose memory has been transformed by his years of illiteracy. Though it is true that Choukri did not learn to read and write until he was 20 years old, Choukri and Bowles’ relationship developed after he’d already published several short stories in Moroccan literary journals.

In Bowles’ English translation we see the presence of his hand, not only in Choukri’s diction and punctuation—as is typical—but also in the narrative itself. He deletes scenes, adds dialogue, and makes large-scale edits to Choukri’s own recorded memory. A dream sequence in which young Choukri watches a line of men castrated while naked women weep, a scene that emphasizes the surreal, political content of the narrative, is entirely removed from the English iteration. At another point in the narrative, an incarcerated Choukri has a conversation with his cell mate who is carving a poem by Qassen Chabbi into the wall. In Arabic, this dialogue is a catalyst for Choukri’s journey to literacy, an opening up of a path forward out of the poverty of his youth. In Bowles’ language, the scene is significantly altered:

Choukri’s Arabic: (Khubz, 192)

Literal English translation:  “Yes, you’re lucky.”“Why?”“Because you know how to read and write.”“You too can learn if you wish.”

Bowles’ English translation:  “You’re lucky, because you know how to read and write.” “So I can read and write…what good is it? Here I am in this room. Who knows what they’re going to accuse me of? Things I’ve done? Things I haven’t done?” (Bread 127)

Through Bowles the emancipating power of literacy is undermined. Though it might be possible to ascribe some of these differences to the fallibility of oral translation, Bowles seems acutely aware of his heavy hand in the formation of this text, introducing it as “faithful, if far from literal” (Bowles, 5). Though modern translation theory has tended towards the visibility and presence of a translator within a translated text, a focus which allows one to view translation as a quasi-creative act, this conception of translator as writer or editor becomes complicated when it is not a fictitious work being translated, but an account of someone’s life. In a publishing relationship clearly influenced by colonial power structures, would Choukri have been able to get his book published without the backing of a well-known English author? And what gives Bowles the right to rewrite Choukri’s narrative?

Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Moroccan writer and critic of Bowles’ projection of Morocco as “promoting an image of the country as a land of primitivism, drugs, and unlimited sex” would appear to have similar doubts. In his introduction to his 1980 translation, he references Bowles’ text just once in a footnote: “L’écrivain américain Paul Bowles a adapté le récit de Choukri et l’a publié en 1973 aux éditions Peter Owen à Londres sous le titre For Bread Alone” (“The American writer Paul Bowles adapted Choukri’s account and published it with Peter Owen from London in 1973 under the title For Bread Alone,” my translation, Ben Jelloun, 9). Refusing to use the verb “translate” Ben Jelloun opts for “adapt,” a subtle dig at Bowles’ revisionist practice.

Though both Bowles and Ben Jelloun’s texts retain Choukri’s difficult subject matter, it was the beauty and clarity of Ben Jelloun’s language that pulled me through the book’s harsh realities “Le soleil se leva. Il était d’un rouge vif : un œuf renversé dans un plat bleu” (“The sun rose. It was a vibrant red: an egg turned over on a blue plate,” Ben Jelloun, 31).  From a content perspective, Choukri’s account is hard to read; his first-person narration shoves the reader into an experience of his own consciousness. The violence of which Choukri is both a victim and a perpetrator forces the reader to reevaluate their own identification with and ascription of morality to the author. How should we interact with this account—not a fictional representation, but a narrative pulled from real life? Who carries the burden of responsibility for these cycles of physical and sexual violence?

In Choukri’s Arabic, the violence is representative of a colonial struggle, his arc towards literacy a means to garner political power. In his analysis of Bowles’ translation, critical theorist Nirvana Tanoukhi asserts that this struggle against violence is depicted more as an individual failing or deviancy without the support of a colonial critique. Held up against Ben Jelloun’s French, Bowles’ translation is simple; reading as if a stream of consciousness narration it reiterates Bowles’ understanding of Choukri as a writer marked by an illiterate past. His version eliminates quotation marks and jumps between past and present then back again within a single scene. His addition of a glossary of Arabic words paired with his own subjective definitions—“surah (pl. surat) : a version of the Koran,” “zigdoun : a woman’s garment, akin to a Mother Hubbard,” “alpargatas : old-fashioned Spanish canvas slippers”—delineates Bowles’ intended audience, a group grounded in a specific time and place separate from Choukri’s Morocco. 

In her essay “Translation as a Practice of Acceptance” Anita Raja concludes that “The translator brings her historical context to bear on the text, along with her class, her gender, and her own accumulated knowledge and emotion.” Rather than a text that is reflective of Choukri’s voice or intentions, Bowles’ version may be better read as a portrait of the period, the relationship between Moroccan and American writers in Tangiers, or, simply, himself.

Though written in another language, Ben Jelloun’s French should be received as an expansion to the literary lineage of Al-Khubz al-Hafi in translation, expanding its scope of reception, moving it back towards Choukri’s original intentions, and recodifying the work in the context of the Moroccan novel. Read in tandem, Bowles’ and Ben Jelloun’s interpretations give a bilingual reader a fuller understanding of the original Arabic text, both its reception and its intention. But readers who do not have access to the French find their understanding of the work relegated to Bowles’ translation. Though this is often the case with works in translation—access to the original is typically unavailable to the average Anglophone reader—in the case where the work has been so heavily impacted by the translator’s own hand, there is a sense that the loss incurred through Bowles’ translation process is too great to simply dismiss.

It’s been over 50 years since the book was originally published in Bowles’ English. As translations of Arabic works within the Anglophone world have increased over the past ten years, it is worth considering the importance and place of retranslation as a process born of a desire for a more complete understanding of a work. The Anglophone public needs and deserves a new translation of Choukri’s seminal work.

This call is not to assert that For Bread Alone is a poor translation. Instead, for a book whose translations have been so hotly contested and so politically bound, the more perspectives available for an Anglophone audience, the better these complexities can be elaborated and explored. To expect a single translation to capture every facet of a work is to set it up for failure, but Bowles’ alteration of Choukri’s nuanced critique of colonial violence and its impact on the everyday realities of Moroccan communities and individuals is not a loss the Anglophone readership should be expected to sustain. Whereas a single translation acts as a lens through which we view a slightly altered work, the existence of many translations promise to render this lens kaleidoscopic.

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Hanna Alwine studies Comparative Literature, Literary Translation, and Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She translates from French and is interested in the complex relationships between languages that share a nation.

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Works Cited:

Choukri, Mohamed. Le Pain Nu. Translated by Tahar Ben Jelloun, Librairie Francois Maspero, 1980.

Choukri, Mohamed. For Bread Alone. Translated by Paul Bowles, Telegram, 2006.

Choukri, Mohamed. Al Khubz al-Hafi. Dar al-Saqi. 2006.

Ghazoul, Ferial J., and Barbara Harlow. The View from Within. American University in Cairo Press, 1994.

Nirvana Tanoukhi. “Rewriting Political Commitment for an International Canon: Paul Bowles’s ‘For Bread Alone’ as Translation of Mohamed Choukri’s ‘Al-Khubz Al-Hafi.’” Research in African Literatures, vol. 34, no. 2, 2003, pp. 127–44.

Raja, Anita. “Translation as a Practice of Acceptance – Asymptote.” www.asymptotejournal.com/criticism/anita-raja-translation-as-a-practice-of-acceptance/