The AALITRA Review

The AALITRA Review

A JOURNAL OF LITERARY TRANSLATION No. 3, May 2011

Website: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~aalitra/

Mohamed Choukri’s Preface to Al Khbuz Al-Hafi / ﻲﻓﺎ ﺤﻟا ﺰﺒ ﺨﻟا (“For Bread Alone”)

Mahmoud Gewaily

To cite this Article:

Mahmoud Gewaily, “Mohamed Choukri’s Preface to Al-Khbuz Al-Hafi / ﻲﻓﺎ ﺤﻟا ﺰﺒ ﺨﻟا (“For Bread Alone”)”, The AALITRA Review: A Journal of Literary Translation, No.3 (Melbourne:

Monash University, 2011), pp.42-44.

Published by MONASH UNIVERSITY

© Monash University 2011

Mohamed Choukri’s Preface to Al-Khbuz Al- Hafi / ﻲﻓﺎ ﺤﻟا ﺰﺒ ﺨﻟا (“For Bread Alone”)

TRANSLATED BY MAHMOUD GEWAILY

Mohamed Choukri is a Moroccan writer who writes in classical Arabic. In his early years, having no money, he would live in mosques or sleep on the streets. Educated people helped him with Arabic, and a turning point in his life was his graduation, in his twenties, from colloquial Moroccan Arabic to classical Arabic. He became one of the most respected and widely read writers in North Africa. His novel Al-Khbuz Al-Hafi / ﻲﻓﺎ ﺤﻟا ﺰﺒ ﺨﻟا was written in classical Arabic but was first published in Arabic in 1982, later than its three other versions in translation. Choukri wrote a preface to the Arabic original. This preface is entitled ﺔ ﻤﻠآ and is dated 17 May 1982. In this preface, Choukri not only refers to three other languages into which the original was translated – English, French and Spanish – but also draws the attention of the Arab reader to the significance of the history of the untranslated Arabic preface. I shall elucidate below the significance of Choukri’s preface before giving my translation of it, in order to gauge whether to recommend the inclusion of the preface in Paul Bowles’s English version of the novel – should any revision of that translation be undertaken in the future.

The Arabic preface ﺔ ﻤﻠآ, specifically addressed to an Arab audience, is all the more important because the Moroccan Board of Censorship banned the Arabic text in 1983, a ban which remained in effect for seventeen years until the book was allowed to circulate freely in 2000, three years before Choukri’s death. The preface naturally focuses on the problem of the political and imaginative freedom of literature and the cultural and personal consequences of censorship. It is almost a cry of despair by Choukri at the problems of his time and at the misinterpretation of his original text.

The title of the Arabic original, ﻲﻓﺎ ﺤﻟا ﺰﺒ ﺨﻟا, means plain bread or bread without anything to go with it. The rendition of the title in its English version as For Bread Alone is highly consistent with the depth of the novel, because a literal translation of the original’s title is “The Bare-footed Bread”. Additionally, the Arabic original has a subtitle (Arabic) which may be translated as “An Autobiographical Novel 1935-1956”. For Bread Alone is the first volume of a fictional autobiography, and the second one is Streetwise. The main cover of For Bread Alone mentions the name of Paul Bowles as the translator, but the second page in the documentation mentions both Bowles and Choukri. Choukri probably never told Bowles that he should include the preface in the English version, but the preface was finally published in Arabic nine years after the publication of Bowles’s English version. The English translation For Bread Alone does not include this preface of course because it preceded the original. Since Bowles did not read classical Arabic, the preface had to be translated by Choukri into colloquial Moroccan Arabic (Mughelon), which Bowles did understand. It is possible that the

“Arabic version of the novel” already had a preface, when Choukri and Bowles cooperated, but that Choukri preferred not to have it translated into English. Perhaps Bowles ignored it because the version translated into Mughelon did not have the preface at that time, before the publication of the English version in 1973. Or perhaps the translator ignored it and replaced it with the translator’s “Introduction” (pp. 5-6).

Shades of meaning of words in Arabic were partly determined by the use of French and Spanish equivalents. It is in relation to his use of French and Spanish equivalents to help him

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44 Mahmoud Gewaily