2010/42
Paul Bowles: Een man moet niet te veel moslim zijn (202p.)
By Paul Bowles (the great American existentialist) I have read The Sheltering Sky, The Spider’s House, and Let It Come Down, three equally brilliant novels out of which I couldn’t pick a winner. I’m only missing Up Above the World as Bowles wrote four novels in total.
Besides novels, Bowles wrote short stories, poetry, letters, travelogues, autobiographies, and translated (specifically noteworthy are his translations of stories from the oral tradition of native Moroccan storytellers – Paul Bowles lived 53 of his 88 years in Tangier, Morocco). Bowles also composed music, chamber music, stage music, an opera (Yerma), and was a pioneer in the field of North African ethnomusicology with his field recordings of traditional Moroccan music for the US Library of Congress. In short, a life well led.
Een man moet niet te veel moslim zijn was originally published as Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue, and is a travelogue mainly but not exclusively consisting of Bowles’ travels in Morocco, searching for recordable folk music. Een man moet niet te veel moslim zijn isn’t of the same order as his novels, but any Bowles can be picked up at random for a great read. One of my favorite writers.
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November 22, 2010 at 12:41 am
tbd
I prefer the Dutch title to the original (it’s intriguing). Did the translator (or the editor) take a sentence of the book, or did they invent it themselves?
November 22, 2010 at 9:26 am
Hardie
There’s a chapter in the book that carries the same title, and although here and there Bowles comments on the habits of Muslims, there’s no systemic or overt criticism of the Islam anywhere. I’d have to study the original to be able to measure the influence of the translator.
November 22, 2010 at 9:33 am
Hardie
Thinking of it some more, I bet there was translational freedom involved…