- Person
- Elias Canetti
- Lived
- 1905–1994
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Bulgarian-born British
The story
In 1954 Elias Canetti, then living in London, was invited by the film producer Aymer Maxwell to accompany an English film crew to Marrakesh in Morocco. The crew, directed by Gavin Lambert, was shooting a film called Another Sky. Canetti stayed about three weeks. It was the only journey of his life outside Europe.
He spoke no Arabic or Berber, hired no interpreter and read no guidebooks beforehand. Instead he deliberately let the city remain foreign, listening to its cries and calls without trying to translate them. Among the locals he passed as an English visitor, but in the mellah, the Jewish quarter, he made himself known as a fellow Jew.
He wrote nothing substantial at the time. Fourteen years later, working from memory and just three pages of notes, he produced a series of short, independent sketches, published in German in 1967 as Die Stimmen von Marrakesch and translated into English by J. A. Underwood in 1978 as The Voices of Marrakesh. The chapters visit a camel market where the animals are led to slaughter, the souks, the repeated cries of blind beggars, storytellers and public letter-writers, a family at home, and a ragged figure who sits motionless on the great square making a single sound. In the longest chapter he walks through the mellah, from shops of fine cloth to poorer lanes, visits a school where a teacher shows off his pupils, and is led through the Jewish cemetery.
Running through the book is the struggle to survive, a theme that connects it to Canetti's lifelong argument against death. The Swedish Academy praised the keen eye it showed for life on the poor outskirts of existence, and the critic François Bondy wrote that through it Canetti becomes something like a trusted friend to the reader.
Short as it is, The Voices of Marrakesh became one of Canetti's most popular works and is still widely read as a model of attentive, humane travel writing. It has been issued in illustrated editions and audiobooks, including a recording of Canetti himself reading it.
Why it matters
The Voices of Marrakesh shows how close, patient attention to strangers can become an act of respect, and it remains a classic of travel literature.
About Elias Canetti
Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria who wrote in German, author of Auto-da-Fé, Crowds and Power and a celebrated memoir trilogy; Nobel Prize in Literature, 1981.
More about Elias Canetti
- Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé became a modernist classicElias Canetti's only novel, Die Blendung (1935), known in English as Auto-da-Fé, came to be recognised as a major work of European modernism.
- Elias Canetti sketched 50 characters in EarwitnessIn Earwitness: Fifty Characters (1974), Elias Canetti revived the ancient art of the character sketch with fifty brief, comic portraits of human types.
- Elias Canetti wrote Kafka's Other TrialIn Kafka's Other Trial (1969), Elias Canetti used Franz Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer to illuminate the inner life behind The Trial.
- Canetti's memoirs portrayed Vienna between the warsElias Canetti's later memoirs, The Torch in My Ear (1980) and The Play of the Eyes (1985), portray the intellectual life of Vienna and Frankfurt before the Second World War.
- Elias Canetti spent 30 years writing Crowds and PowerElias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1960), the fruit of decades of thought, is a much-cited study of how crowds form and how rulers wield power.
- Elias Canetti's notebooks became The Human ProvinceElias Canetti kept notebooks of reflections for decades; a selection from 1942 to 1972 was published as The Human Province.
- Canetti's memoir preserved a lost Sephardic worldElias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free (1977) preserved the vanished world of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in his Bulgarian birthplace, Ruse.
Sources
- Elias Canetti Wikipedia
- Elias Canetti Jewish Virtual Library
- Elias Canetti EBSCO Research Starters
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