Abstract
This paper examines hybridity in the literary collaboration between American writer Paul Bowles and Moroccan storytellers Larbi Layachi and Mohammed Mrabet. Their collaborative translation project illustrates hybridity through characters navigating across heterogeneous spatio-temporal spaces. This paper falls within postcolonial translation studies, a field that emerged in the 1990s to recognize that translation transcends linguistic conversion encompassing sociocultural, historical, and political dimensions. Bowles’ translations of Layachi’s Yesterday and Today and Mrabet’s Love with a Few Hairs demonstrate hybridity through three key aspects. First, linguistic hybridity manifests in the incorporation of Moroccan Arabic vocabulary without paratextual elements or annotations. Second, sociocultural hybridity emerges through the preservation of untranslated cultural traditions that foreignize the target text. Third, economic hybridity appears in the characters’ movement across various economic environments, particularly through multi-job holding. These characters navigate hybrid spaces, notably twentieth-century Tangier—a metropolitan hub known for cross-cultural exchanges. The narration and translation of these stories become sites of hybridity themselves, as each target text serves simultaneously as a story and translation. The hybrid landscapes in Yesterday and Today and Love with a Few Hairs transform these narratives into heterogeneous compositions of hybrid storytelling and translation. It is through this transformation that Bowles, Mrabet, and Layachi craft their fluid identities in this collaborative process.
Presenters
Inass EssrhirStudent, Visiting Scholar - Doctoral Research, University of Delaware, Delaware, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Postcolonial Translation, Postcolonial Studies, Hybridity, Paul Bowles, Moroccan Storytelling, Identity
