ABSTRACT
This chapter situates the translations of the American novelist, music composer and translator Paul Bowles (1910–1999) within the framework of translation as activism in the light of Tymoczko’s definition of translation as both a form of resistance and engagement. I reveal the translator’s agency embodied in his choices and strategies, mainly his selective approach to Moroccan culture in his representation of the culture as well as in his selection of the oral stories of Tangier, a Moroccan port on the Strait of Gibraltar, for translation. I discuss how Bowles’s translations of the oral stories of Tangier communicate the translator’s resistance to mainstream representations of culture and literature both at home (US) and in exile (Morocco). In addition, the chapter discusses how these translations constitute a main tool used by the translator to communicate his dissatisfaction with the standards of modern life during a critical time in the history of both source (post-independence Morocco) and target (US post World War II) cultures. Concurrently, they enhance alternative modes of existence outside the post-war US celebrated in the oral stories that Paul Bowles encouraged and translated.
