For Bread Alone

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Because I have translated several books from the Arabic I want to make a clear differentiation between the earlier volumes and the present work. The other books were spoken onto tape and the words were in the colloquial Arabic called Maghrebi. For Bread Alone is a manuscript, written in classical Arabic, a language I do not know. The author had to reduce it first to Moroccan Arabic for me. Then we used Spanish and French for ascertaining shades of meaning. Although exact, the translation is far from literal.

It has been my experience that the illiterate, not having learned to classify what goes into his memory, remembers everything. This too is a technique. Total recall is like perfect pitch: it means nothing in itself, but it can be extremely helpful to the writer who uses it professionally. It seems almost a stroke of good luck that Choukri’s encounter with the written word should have come so late, for by then his habits of thought were already fully formed; the educative process did not modify them. As a writer, then, he is in an enviable position, even though he paid a high price for it in suffering.

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