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

hovel" ("Ta bouche est une masure dévastée" [87]). Here again, my choice of
words is intended to convey the experience of reading the strange and harsh
imagery of the original passage.
Metaphors and metonyms can be used to create connections that arrest the
reader's attention, but such usage may risk adverse reaction. Two readers had
dissimilar reactions to the phrase "pot belly" in the following sentence, for
example.
Il dormait dans une position obscène (. . . ), les jambes écartées pour faire
place à un ventre rebondi, se soulevant au rythme de ses ronflements. (7)
He was sleeping in an obscene position (. . .), his features loose, his legs
spread to accommodate a pot belly which rose to the rhythm of his
snoring.
I felt that this metaphor and phrasing recreated the humorous visual and auditory
image of the original, and one reader agreed while another questioned the
appropriateness of the word “pot.” One reader paused at the use of the word
“blind” as an adjective for boots in the phrase: “they trampled them with blind
boots" ("On les piétina avec des bottes aveugles" [78]). Though this image is
incongruent, I maintained the metonym the author had chosen to use, implying
that the wearers of the boots were blind to human suffering.
Readers expressed a desire to know who is speaking and to whom and if
the words on the page represent expressed words or stream-of-consciousness
thoughts. The original, however, does not make these distinctions evident. My
first response was to consider the effects of the author’s techniques. Not
attributing speech to one identifiable character or another makes the dialogue part
of the ambient discourse issuing not from one or more individuals but from the
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