From Voice to Text: Untranslated Orality in Paul Bowles’s Moroccan Collaborations

This article explores how Paul Bowles’s translations of Ahmed Yacoubi’s “The Night Before Thinking” (1979), Larbi Layachi’s A Life Full of Holes (1964), and Mohammed Mrabet’s The Boy Who Set the Fire (1974) retain untranslated elements of Moroccan oral storytelling. In each of these texts, orality is not merely evoked but structurally embedded. The translations retain paratactic syntax, rhythmic patterns, formulaic expressions, and mnemonic devices. Notably, the absence of quotation marks collapses distinctions between narration and dialogue, sustaining the fluidity of live storytelling within the written form. Bowles resists standardized literary conventions, allowing oral features to remain deliberately intact. Drawing on the concept of untranslatability from postcolonial translation theory, this article argues that this deliberate choice reflects a stylistic and cultural commitment to maintaining orality. In resisting domestication, the texts retain the spontaneity, tone, and narrative presence of the original performances, transforming the act of reading into an encounter with living, spoken tradition.