Rewriting Political Commitment for an International Canon: Paul Bowles's For Bread Alone as Translation of Mohamed Choukri's Al-Khubz Al-Hafi

This paper examines a concrete instance of the appropriation of non-Western literary texts by theoretical paradigms operating as mechanisms of "selective admission." Through a comparative study of Mohamed Choukri's Al-Khubz Al-Hafi (1982) and its English translation, For Bread Alone (1973), by Paul Bowles, the author shows how the interaction between the two texts provides a unique case study in the interpretation of a non-Western text for a horizon of "third world literature." A comparison of the Arabic and English versions of the title shows that Bowles's translation suppresses Choukri's investment in a literate, rational, and modem nation, by presenting Al-Khubz Al-Hafi as a celebration of the oral, irrational, and primitive. The ideological trajectories of author and translator clash as the translation struggles to accommodate the original's passage into the realm of what is expected by English readers from a "third world" work of literature. The paper eventually demonstrates how Bowles's translation operates as an interpretative apparatus that attempts to rewrite Choukri's original work into a "third world" African text for a foreign, academic horizon of expectation