عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
Culture

'For Bread Alone' by Mohamed Choukri Has Not Lost its Charm

Arabia cover of "For Bread Alone" by Mohammad Choukri
Arabia cover of "For Bread Alone" by Mohammad Choukri
TT
20
TT

'For Bread Alone' by Mohamed Choukri Has Not Lost its Charm

Arabia cover of "For Bread Alone" by Mohammad Choukri
Arabia cover of "For Bread Alone" by Mohammad Choukri

El-Fanak Press, Casablanca, has released again the masterpiece of Mohamed Choukri "For Bread Alone" one of the writer's most popular and controversial novels as part of a book series adopted by the publishing house to provide books for all people.

"For Bread Alone" has once again proved its position as one of the most creative Moroccan novels in the Arab region and worldwide, especially after the record numbers it hit in terms of sales and languages it has been translated to, not to mention the myriads critical readings and the huge impact it left in the Arabic cultural scene. The novel gained international fame and was translated to 39 languages including English by Paul Bowles in 1973 and French by Taher bin Jelloun in 1981.

The novel was written in 1972 but wasn't published in Arabic until 1982. It makes part of the Tangier novelist's biography, along with the "Time of Mistakes," and "Faces."

Choukri was encouraged to write the "The Bread alone" by US writer Paul Bowles who lived in Tangier at the time. The novel was translated into French by Taher bin Jelloun. When released for the first time, it made a significant echo. Some Arab countries even banned it because of its unfamiliar boldness.

The French version of the novel took the same title, but the English translation was entitled "For Bread Only."

Critics have agreed that Choukri's novel "depicts the misery and marginalization that dominated large categories of the Moroccan society in the middle of the past century."

Late Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo said Choukri "looked at his country's situation from the bottom, and he saw what rulers cannot see."

Arab writers said "the novel was a slap on the face and succeeded where many other writers failed. He managed to become both the hero and the writer of his writings."

For his part, Choukri said: "I aimed not to beautify the ugliness, in my life and the life of others. I wanted to highlight the distortion of the community."

Most Viewed

 
Culture

Three Rivers, One Bridge: Mahfouz’s Last Dreams Revisited

By using black and white, Matar sought to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s Cairo. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)
By using black and white, Matar sought to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s Cairo. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)
TT
20
TT

Three Rivers, One Bridge: Mahfouz’s Last Dreams Revisited

By using black and white, Matar sought to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s Cairo. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)
By using black and white, Matar sought to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s Cairo. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)

With refreshing honesty, the Libyan British novelist Hisham Matar begins his translation of Naguib Mahfouz’s last dreams with a confession.

During their only meeting in the 1990s, Matar asked Mahfouz how he viewed writers who write in a language other than their mother tongue. The question reflected the concerns of a young writer born in America, raised partly in Cairo, and later sent to a British boarding school under a false identity to evade persecution by Gaddafi’s regime, which had disappeared his dissident father.

Naguib Mahfouz on the balcony of his café overlooking Tahrir Square in Cairo, 1988. (AFP)

Mahfouz’s reply was as concise and sharp as his prose: "You belong to the language you write in."

Yet Matar admits that, in later recollections of this exchange, he often caught himself embellishing Mahfouz’s words, adding an unspoken elaboration: "Every language is its own river, with its own terrain and ecology, its own banks and tides, its own source and destinations where it empties, and therefore, every writer who writes in that language must swim in its river."

In this sense, I Found Myself... The Last Dreams, published by Penguin's Viking last week, attempts to be a bridge between three rivers: the Arabic in which Mahfouz wrote his original text, the English into which Matar translated it, and the visual language of the American photographer Diana Matar; the translator’s wife whose images of Cairo are interspersed throughout the book.

No easy task. Mahfouz’s translations have often sparked debate—whether over inaccuracies, neglected context, or occasional editorial interference.

A touch of this affects Matar’s attempt without ruining it. For instance, in translating Dream 211, where Mahfouz finds himself facing Saad Zaghloul, leader of the 1919 revolution, alongside "Umm al-Masriyyin" (Mother of the Egyptians)—a title referring to Zaghloul’s wife, Safiya—Matar misinterprets the epithet as a symbolic allusion to Egypt itself, rendering it "Mother Egypt."

Beyond this, however, the first published translation by Pulitzer-winning Matar flows smoothly, matching the simplicity of his project’s origin story: it began one morning over coffee at the kitchen table, where he translated a few dreams for his wife, only to find himself having done dozens—eventually deciding to publish them as his first major translation.

The images complement the dreamlike atmosphere without attempting to directly translate any of them. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)

Perhaps the concise, economical language of Mahfouz’s final dreams made the task easier.

Between dreams, Diana Matar’s photographs of Cairo—Mahfouz’s city and muse—appear shrouded in shadows, dust, and fleeting impressions, sometimes ghostly in detail, complementing the dreamscapes without directly illustrating them. Here, she joins Mahfouz in her love for Cairo, which became her "muse" after accompanying her husband to that summer meeting with the Arab world’s sole Nobel laureate in literature. Relying on black-and-white imagery and abstraction where possible, Diana seems to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz’s.

Diana Matar took most of the book's photographs between the late 1990s and early 2000s. (Courtesy of Diana Matar)

In his introduction’s closing lines, Hisham Matar imagines Mahfouz flipping through the translation and remarking, in his trademark brevity: "Of course." But perhaps closer to the truth is that he would repeat his original verdict: "You belong to the language you write in."

Perhaps we must accept that translation—not just of this book, but in general—is a bridge, not a mirror. And that is enough.