The Egyptian author Albert Cossery, who wrote in French, provides a raw, timeless and yet devoid of orientalism view of Cairo society which is unique in Arab literature, and has garnered him unanimous appreciation in France. However, the reception of Cossery’s recently published works in the United States reveals a transatlantic cultural gap, both in terms of criticism and literary analysis. While the Anglo-Saxon world tends to view the work from a postcolonial and politically contemporary perspective, on the French side a more individual and history-grounded approach prevails, as attested by the interest literary genetics arouses in France. The translation of some passages likely to shock in Cossery’s novels thus raises the issue of fidelity to the author’s voice, which resonates differently as it is decontextualized and distanced from Cossery’s personal history. The American translators have displayed openness to the writer’s vision and empathy with his characters; nevertheless, they have carried out some smoothing out of a moral nature in these problematic passages, possibly in an attempt to resolve the tension between the adequacy and social acceptability of the translation as defined by Gideon Toury (1995/2004).