Tag Archives: Hanna Alwine

One Man, Three Voices: A Case for an English Retranslation of Mohamed Choukri’s “Al-Khubz al-Hafi”

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.

Invisibility of the Foreign: The Double Life of Alessandro Baricco’s “Silk” in English Translation

Alessandro Barrico’s “Silk” is a story about the tension between Self and Other. Baricco’s main character Hervé Joncour travels repeatedly to Japan from his small, French town of LaVilleDieu in the 1860, to buy masses of silkworm eggs to replenish those at home struck by a silkworm-killing blight. Leaving his wife Hélène at home, he becomes secretly enamored with a young Japanese girl, whom he distinguishes for her eyes that “did not have an oriental slant” (19), a feature that immediately calls into question her otherness while nonetheless asserting her foreignness.