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

The shifts from past to future tense, from third to first person, and from statement
to question and exclamation provide grammatical markers of the move from
reported thought to stream-of-consciousness. The author, however, chose not to
use quotation marks to distinguish the voice of the narrator from the thoughts of
the protagonist, a decision that has the effect of making the reader hear these
thoughts as though they issued from the reader's mind. This technique challenges
the binary representations of thought as either interior or verbalized, and of ideas
and words as attributable to the author or the character.
La Baroudeuse offers complex re-readings of Moroccan culture that
complicate the ideas of history, class, and gender in the political and domestic
world of mid-century Morocco. This post-colonial narrative tends to subvert the
power structure of language and culture relationships. It offers the non-Arabic
speaking reader the role of a visitor in this foreign context, obliged to translate
words and cope with cognitive gaps. The tensions inherent in the experience of
reading a post-colonial narrative call on the translator to recognize and respect
these effects and decide to what extent to duplicate or domesticate them in the
translation. To find answers to this fundamental dilemma of post-colonial
translation, I spoke with the author, read other translations of postcolonial
narratives by Muslim Arab women, corresponded with other translators, and
received comments on the translation from readers.
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