Translating Nouzha Fassi Fihri's La Baroudeuse: A Case Study in ...

The one who wins will take you
Ana-na my beloved
You-you-you...
Swinging high in the rope swing turned the world upside-down for the
party-makers. Their hearts leapt in their chests when sky and earth changed places
before their eyes and the rapturous melody carried them away in the languor of
unrequited love.
The mulatto leaned against a tree trunk and watched them, letting her
thoughts roam free. She had been called "the mulatto" since the day they had
found her crouching behind a gateway to the old city, half dead from hunger and
cold. They had given her this name because of her wide nose and thick lips, signs
of her Negro blood in spite of her white skin, the useless legacy of her worthless
father who had sold his pregnant slave to drown his soon-to-be-born bastard in
anonymity. They had taken her in, first putting her to work in the basement
kitchen where she scrubbed pots all day and slept in a corner by the fireplace.
Then she had been brought into the household as an all-purpose maid, and as
Dada grew feeble with age, she had become Dada's right hand. She watched the
young people of the well-to-do family and dreamed what her life would have been
if her mother had been a free woman.
Off to themselves, the three old people daydreamed as they passed around
a box of tobacco. They watched the young people swing, and nostalgically
remembered a whole world that had disappeared, the world of their own youth.
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