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

on a continuum of writers and re-writers. 25 All three are professional readers who
approach the text in a "writerly" fashion.
Octavio Paz proposes a different view of the relationship between
language activities.
When we learn to speak, we are learning to translate; the child who asks
his mother the meaning of a word is really asking her to translate the
unfamiliar term into the simple words he already knows. In this sense,
translation within the same language is not essentially different from
translation between two tongues. . . .No text can be completely original
because language itself, in its very essence, is already a translation: first
from the nonverbal world and then because each sign and each phrase is a
translation of another sign, another phrase. However, the inverse of this
reasoning is also entirely valid. All texts are originals because each
translation has its own distinctive character. Up to a point, each translation
is a creation and thus constitutes a unique text. 26
According to Paz, all instances of language use are in essence equally creative and
translational. Speaking is the act of translating perceptions into language.
Individuals speaking and writing the same language are translating their
understanding for each other. Every instance of language use is creative but never
entirely original in that it makes use of previously existing words and structures.
Though I agree with this assertion, I nevertheless see the translator as obligated to
reproduce an original text and therefore subject to more constraints than are most
poets and novelists.
25 André Lefevere, "Why Waste Our Time on Rewrites? The Trouble with
Interpretation and the Role of Rewriting in an Alternative Paradigm," The
Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, ed. Theo Hermans
(New York: St. Martins Press, 1985) 235.
26 Octavio Paz, "Translation: Literature and Letters," trans. Irene del Corral,
Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, eds.
Rainer Schulte and John Giguenet (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992) 152-154.
53