What Gets Lost in Translation: An Analysis of Political Discourse and the Periphery in Mohamed Choukri’s For Bread Alone By: Yasmeen Atassi With tragedy abruptly setting the tone of the novel, For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri portrays a jarring personal narrative focused not on creating the perception of idealized nationhood and national struggle, but instead on Choukri’s experience of its shortcomings. Much like other popular works of Arabic literature, For Bread Alone, or Al-Khubz Al-Hafi, was made accessible to the Western literary sphere through an English translation, but unlike other Arabic novels, this novel was published in English translation before publication in Arabic. Through the tragic first-person narrative of Mohamed Choukri, For Bread Alone exposes the horrific realities of poverty and social marginality in Morocco under the Spanish Protectorate and challenges assumptions about political dispositions by representing the narrator’s forced social ignorance. For Bread Alone further demonstrates the problematic nature of these assumptions through the implications of the novel’s English translation, as compared to the authentic narrative of Mohamed Choukri.
voice through which these sentiments are portrayed and, therefore, the motive that inspires them, are adjusted to reconfigure the dynamics of power. The language of struggle and pain, and frank grotesqueness, carries the potential to elevate the reality of poverty at the fringe of Moroccan society. Through the work he puts forward in For Bread Alone as well as his testimonies in The View from Within, Choukri testifies that this rather fervent narration was not told in vain, but rather in a deliberate effort to create a space for the unwelcome and the indigestible.1 It is through his narrative as a socially detached individual throughout his childhood and early adolescence that he critiques Moroccan society and the political irresponsibility that created his circumstances. For Bread Alone emerges from both the oral tradition, and Mohamed Choukri’s narration of his personal memoirs to the translator Paul Bowles.2 Given the unique and complex process of its first transcription, For Bread Alone has literary and—most importantly—cultural significance in its process of publication and popularization. Between the difficulty presented by the multiple linguistic passages that the novel initially underwent and the positionality of the translator, For The expression of personal narrative in the pop- Bread Alone faced many challenges in how the translation was conceptualized and produced. ularized English edition of Choukri’s For Bread Alone Given these challenges, the narrative of struggle passes through a filter of translation that is, consequentis portrayed differently by Paul Bowles than the original ly, heavily informed by the Orientalist expectations of its Moroccan text because of Bowles’ conceptualization of translator, Paul Bowles. The significance of Bowles’s the novel was formulated through his preconceived contributions to the novel lies largely in his cultural and notions about the illiteracy of Moroccan society. In the scholarly predispositions as an American author and introduction of For Bread Alone, Bowles highlights the translator who dedicated most of his life and work to “beautiful illiteracy” which he believes to be instrumen3 Tangiers. His motivations in bringing Choukri’s narra- tal to the raw emotional appeal of the novel. He implies that this illiteracy in itself allows for a narrative tive to English-reading readers, consequently, produces like this to emerge, as illiterates, “not having learned to a story meant for an English-reading audience. By ex- classify what goes into [their] mind, remember everyploring the process of translation, the dichotomy be- thing.”4 As Bowles brings his fascination with tween the meaning embedded by the author, and the “illiteracy” to the experiences of an adolescent Choukri, meaning—or presumption—superimposed by the trans- the tone of the novel shifts from being heartwrenching, to critical. As Choukri bares his most vullation becomes obvious and cannot be ignored in a ho- nerable experiences to the readers for the sake of politilistic and intersectional critique of the novel’s transla- cal commentary, Bowles’s fascination with an Orientaltion. Though the overarching sentiment of unglorified ist portrayal of the subaltern creates a narrative that no longer reproduces to Choukri’s central purpose of unstruggle is present throughout Choukri’s narrative, the glorification.5 At the outset of the novel, Choukri lives 40
