Stories in Translation – Alive in Tangier: Selections from the Paul Bowles Papers Supplement

Paul Bowles was a prolific literary translator throughout his lifetime. His early translations aligned with his interest in surrealism and included works by Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Ferry, Paul Magritte, Ramón Sender, and Jorge Luis Borges. In 1958, Bowles produced the first English-language version of Jean Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos (No Exit). Later in life, Bowles translated works by Guatemalan author Rodrigo Rey Rosa and the late-19th century European expatriate author Isabelle Eberhardt.

Living in Tangier in the 1950s, Bowles became interested in the Moroccan oral story tradition and began recording and translating the stories of several Moroccan storytellers he had encountered in his social circles. These included Larbi Layachi (under the pseudonym Driss ben Hamed Charhadi), Mohamed Choukri, Mohammed Mrabet, and Ahmed Yacoubi. Of these, Bowles translated stories by Mrabet most frequently, and between 1967 and 1986, eleven collections of Mrabet’s stories, translated by Bowles, were published.

Bowles’s Moroccan translations have a complex legacy. In their published form, the stories brought the lived experiences of Moroccans to international readers. However, Bowles’s role as a Western translator working from a relative position of power, as well as the complex relationships with the storytellers he recorded, have been the subject of examination and critique. The broader implications of translating and inscribing oral traditions of Morocco, which carry nuance in their original verbal context and native language, have also been the subject of scholarship and debate.