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

Les fleurs, comme une fantaisie de la nature, montraient leurs minois
veloutés aux endroits les plus inattendus, picorant aux pieds des arbres,
batifolant le long du ruisseau, jouant leur symphonie de couleurs en
chatouillant le chanvre. (63)
Like a fantasy of nature, the flowers showed their velvety faces in the most
unexpected places, nibbling at the foot of trees, gamboling along the
stream, playing their symphony of colors, tickling the reeds by the water.
Another passage paints a stark and graphic image of war.
Sur la pierre nue que la fumée des fours publics et de bains maures avait
marquée de son empreinte, venaient se superposer des étoiles
sanguinolentes, où s'accrochaient parfois des débris de chair humaine. (85)
The bare rock darkened by the wood smoke of public ovens and baths was
marked with stars of dripping blood and pieces of human flesh.
In other passages, the text relates current events in a journalistic and
historiographic style, and occasionally the authorial narrator interjects opinions.
Fassi Fihri's use of high register acts to confirm the literary status of the novel for
the author's primary audience: Moroccans educated in the French system. This
style and register help insure that the Moroccan literary community will receive
this work respectfully.
The author achieves another discernible effect through the use of a literary
register of French in reporting the speech of Lalla Kenza, Dada Marjana, and
townsfolk who have little or no education. Lalla Kenza complains of her lack of
education, but her reported speech and thoughts are as poetic and literary as those
of the educated men in her family (138, 170). Dada Marjana tells the fable of the
lion in terms worthy of Aesop (192-194). The talk of the people on the street in
Fez is reported without indications of regional or class accent (43). In this narrative
the use of consistently high diction and register acts as a unifying element that
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