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

nonetheless an outsider whose perspective on the narrative's cultural context
corresponds more closely to that of a Westerner. In translating this narrative from
Arabic to English, Catherine Cobham uses only one italicized word fully
explained in context: an American woman "talking in Arabic, murdering the letter
tha, sticking out her tongue and swallowing the words like a fish swallowing her
young in the face of danger" (19). By contrast, the narrator in Bakr’s The Wiles of
Men speaks from within the culture, and Denys Johnson-Davies has chosen to
transcribe and italicize several Arabic words. The context makes clear that
basbousa refers to a culturally significant food in the sentence "Fawz took it upon
herself to deliver a plateful of basbousa [. . .] from the dish her mother had made
in celebration of her contentment and happiness on this memorable day" (50).
Italics are conventionally used to mark a foreign word in a narrative, but in
Djebar’s Fantasia the author and the translator use italics extensively for a variety
of purposes. In many instances, the translator's use of italics stems from the
author's choices, for example: to indicate titles and epigraphs or mark discursive
difference. The use of italics for titles of publications and epigraphs is standard
practice, but the author creates more extensive and scholarly intertextuality than
most readers would expect in narrative fiction. The author also italicizes whole
passages to signal that they should be read and experienced not as fiction but as
first person narrative or soliloquy (46, 218), poetic, musical interludes (122, 109)
artistic revisions of history (151, 176), or as internal dialogue (201, 219). Many
words of Arabic origin in the glossary of this translation, however, are not
italicized in the text, for example: amir, bey, beylik, burnous, caliph, dey,
janizary, jebel, kasbah, marabout, sheikh, spahis, thuya, wadi, and yatagan. All of
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