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Five Eyes
English, Arabic (translation)
148 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1979
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 15, 2008
I had the great luck of finding a first edition hardback of this in Albuquerque for fairly cheap. Signed by Bowles and three of the Moroccan writers. I don't know what it is about Mrabet and these writers, but I'm really loving their writing the last few years. Part surrealism, part hard edged street lit, steeped in strange strange folklore.
February 13, 2010
Bizarrely, I really didn't like this collection of translations by Bowles of Moroccan writers, mostly from the Mohegrebi (a colloquial, unwritten form of Arabic spoken in Morocco).
Bowles was the American champion of the Moroccan oral tradition, at least insofar as bringing it to the West. I've loved just about everything else I've read from Bowles, both translations and his own writing, so I was kind of blown away at how thoroughly my eyes glazed over while reading this collection.
However, I think the problem is that most of the stories fall heavily in the folklore realm stylistically, and I've never been that crazed for folklore, actually. Seems weird to say, but I prefer magical tales (ie, fairy tales) or fiction over folklore. There are some magical elements here but they feel sort of murky to me. The storytelling was hard to follow in the manner of other examples I've read of North African folklore -- with my Western mind, I think I just don't get the sort of magical sensibility that exists in Morocco's oral tradition.
The exceptions, and the stories I really loved, are the ones by Mohammed Choukri (sometimes spelled "Shukri"), who writes in Classical Arabic. I read Bowles's translation of Choukri's autobiography For Bread Alone and loved it. Classical Arabic is a language Bowles does not understand, so the introduction to the Black Sparrow Press edition of that book has a very interesting piece about how the two worked together on a two-stage translation.
Choukri's stories, like his autobiography, read to me almost like a North African re-imagining of the style of American detective fiction -- like what Camus was trying to do, except from a native Moroccan perspective, rather than a French-Algerian one. Or maybe that style's just because they're streetwise and hard-edged from their depictions of poverty, and feel kind of magical-mystical woo-woo to me as a Western reader because of the formality of translation and the sort of alien sensibilities in the rhythms. Or maybe Bowles introduced the style I'm perceiving, though from how hard it sounds like Choukri busted his chops as he translated, I have to think that Bowles worked to stay true to the original rhythms of the work as much as possible. There's a great short paragraph about how they worked together -- kind of armed camps on the opposite side of the room, in opposition over commas. I have to love that level of ownership in a translation.
Whatever, whyever, Choukri's writing is beautiful and I loved it.
Given how much you have to pay or how much work you have to do to get a copy of this out-of-print work, however (I tracked it down through my local library's Link+ system, and it took forever), I'm very sad to say I don't think it was worth it. If you haven't read Choukri, better to start with the brilliant "For Bread Alone"; I'm currently reading the sequel, Choukri's Streetwise and it was equally hard to track down but so far is proving much more rewarding.
If you haven't read Bowles, well, The Sheltering Sky is of course the place to start, and if you liked The Sheltering Sky and want to read more of Bowles's work about North Africa, Let It Come Down is also brilliant.
As for Moroccan storytellers, I found Bowles's translation of The Lemon by Mohammed Mrabet to be much more satisfying than any of the stories here (except Choukri's).
Bowles was the American champion of the Moroccan oral tradition, at least insofar as bringing it to the West. I've loved just about everything else I've read from Bowles, both translations and his own writing, so I was kind of blown away at how thoroughly my eyes glazed over while reading this collection.
However, I think the problem is that most of the stories fall heavily in the folklore realm stylistically, and I've never been that crazed for folklore, actually. Seems weird to say, but I prefer magical tales (ie, fairy tales) or fiction over folklore. There are some magical elements here but they feel sort of murky to me. The storytelling was hard to follow in the manner of other examples I've read of North African folklore -- with my Western mind, I think I just don't get the sort of magical sensibility that exists in Morocco's oral tradition.
The exceptions, and the stories I really loved, are the ones by Mohammed Choukri (sometimes spelled "Shukri"), who writes in Classical Arabic. I read Bowles's translation of Choukri's autobiography For Bread Alone and loved it. Classical Arabic is a language Bowles does not understand, so the introduction to the Black Sparrow Press edition of that book has a very interesting piece about how the two worked together on a two-stage translation.
Choukri's stories, like his autobiography, read to me almost like a North African re-imagining of the style of American detective fiction -- like what Camus was trying to do, except from a native Moroccan perspective, rather than a French-Algerian one. Or maybe that style's just because they're streetwise and hard-edged from their depictions of poverty, and feel kind of magical-mystical woo-woo to me as a Western reader because of the formality of translation and the sort of alien sensibilities in the rhythms. Or maybe Bowles introduced the style I'm perceiving, though from how hard it sounds like Choukri busted his chops as he translated, I have to think that Bowles worked to stay true to the original rhythms of the work as much as possible. There's a great short paragraph about how they worked together -- kind of armed camps on the opposite side of the room, in opposition over commas. I have to love that level of ownership in a translation.
Whatever, whyever, Choukri's writing is beautiful and I loved it.
Given how much you have to pay or how much work you have to do to get a copy of this out-of-print work, however (I tracked it down through my local library's Link+ system, and it took forever), I'm very sad to say I don't think it was worth it. If you haven't read Choukri, better to start with the brilliant "For Bread Alone"; I'm currently reading the sequel, Choukri's Streetwise and it was equally hard to track down but so far is proving much more rewarding.
If you haven't read Bowles, well, The Sheltering Sky is of course the place to start, and if you liked The Sheltering Sky and want to read more of Bowles's work about North Africa, Let It Come Down is also brilliant.
As for Moroccan storytellers, I found Bowles's translation of The Lemon by Mohammed Mrabet to be much more satisfying than any of the stories here (except Choukri's).
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