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

emphasizes universally recognizable human reactions to power structures and
social pressures. He situates the author ideologically in relation to the imagined
audience by indicating the author's stance in relation to feminist discourses and
noting literary influences on the author's style. He prepares the reader to look for
political, social, and cultural issues, and to be edified as well as entertained.
Though Denys-Johnson Davies's introductions implicitly acknowledge audience,
they do not elucidate his approach to translation, the difficulties he encountered,
or the elements beyond the text that may have swayed his decisions.
The introductory material for Djebar’s Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade
that is attributable to the translator includes a six-page introduction, a three-page
glossary, and a three-page chronology. In the introduction, Dorothy Blair
discusses the difficulty of translating the author's "astonishing variety of
vocabulary" and "exuberance of metaphor," into English prose "with its normal
economy of imagery." She expected that this level of "verbal extravagance"
would "deter the English reader." These comments implicitly acknowledge but do
not elaborate on the tension the translator felt between the narrative’s post-
colonial counter-discursive qualities and her own readers' expectations. According
to Richard Terdiman, counter-discourse seeks to subvert the power of the
dominant discourse and is intended to change and denaturalize discursive
boundaries but can only exist in dialogue with dominant discourse. 10 Knowledge
of Terdiman’s paradigm allows the reader to recognize Blair’s implicit
10 Richard Terdiman, "Introduction: On Symbolic Resistance,"
Discourse/Counter-Discourse, The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in
Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 62.
28