Translation from French to English of pages 9-12 of Tombéza, 1984, by Rachid Mimouni

Rachid Mimouni: Tombéza 1984

            Depuis midi je suis dans cette pièce qui fait office de débarras, de lieu d’entreposage des balais et produits d’entretien, et aussi de W.C. où les parents des malades grabataires ou impotents viennent vider les pots de chambre en plastique dans un bidet antédiluvien. Les infirmières de passage ne font qu’entrouvrir la porte, avant de refluer, rapidement suffoquées par les miasmes de merde et d’urine rance que je respire.

            La nuit tombe, et l’obscurité envahit lentement la salle. Je perçois déjà l’horrible gratouillis des pattes rêches des cancrelats qui se préparent à quitter leur abri diurne. Ils vont bientôt envahir toute la chambre, et les plus gros, antennes en alerte, émergeront un à un de l’orifice du bidet avant de s’aventurer le long des couloirs du pavillon. Ces cafards pansus semblent avoir une prédilection pour le bloc opératoire situé à quelques mètres de l’endroit où je repose. Est-ce le sang qui les attire ?

            C’était couru ! je sens le chatouillement itinérant du premier animal qui se promène sur mon cou nu. Un autre débarque sur mon front, teste l’obstacle de mon sourcil droit qu’il préfère finalement contourner, débouche sur ma pommette, excellent poste d’observation, traverse la joue et s’arrête à la commissure des lèvres. Emerge son suçoir à la recherche d’une trace de salive à aspirer. Un troisième vient rejoindre son compagnon. Bientôt mon corps grouillera de ces bêtes qui grimpent par les pieds du chariot brinquebalant sur lequel je suis allongé.

            Les multiples bruits familiers du pavillon ont décru, se sont espacés, avant de s’évanouir. Même les cris des femmes de salle qui s’interpellent d’un bout de couloir à l’autre, les rires tonitruants des hommes provoqués par quelque grossière plaisanterie, tout s’est tu, et un grand silence envahit le pavillon. Je sais : c’est l’heure du repas du soir. Il n’est pas bon pour un malade ou blessé d’arriver à l’hôpital a ce moment. Parce qu’il aura  à attendre longtemps, allongé sur la paillasse de faïence blanche face à la porte de la salle des urgences. J’en ai connu beaucoup, du temps où j’y travaillais, des blessés, qui sont morts à attendre le médecin ou l’infirmière qui n’a pas encore fini son repas. Quand je me promène dans la ville et que j’entends le hululement des sirènes d’ambulances, je ne peux m’empêcher de sourire. Se hâter ainsi, tenter de se faufiler adroitement parmi ces monstrueux camions bardes d’acier qui ressemblent plus à des engins de guerre qu’à des véhicules de transport, et dont les conducteurs se fichent comme d’une guigne de ces petits têtards qui grenouillent à leurs pieds, frôler mille fois l’accident et la mort pour aller déposer un blessé sur le lit de faïence où il restera à agoniser, à consommer des montagnes de patience et de douleur. Car à cette heure-là, les infirmières es les femmes de salle se réunissent dans une vaste pièce et attendent l’arrivée de la serveuse qui ramène les plateaux des repas sur son chariot. On sort alors des placards des razzias opérées auprés des malades, après le départ des visiteurs qui arrivent toujours les bras chargés de douceurs et de victuailles. Tournées nécessairement fructueuses : le malade comprend vite qu’il est de son intérêt de partager, surtout s’il se trouve dans un état grave, immobilisé ou invalide. Sans cela, il risque de gros ennui : d’être éjecté de son lit, dans un établissement toujours surpeuplé, pour dégager une place à quelqu’un d’autre qui vous est lié ou dont les parents sont plus compréhensif, qui savent glisser la pièce, ou à la mère de ce gendarme qui se comporte comme chez lui et engueule tous les bipèdes en blouse blanche, c’est ainsi, que voulez-vous, il faut quelqu’un  pour surveiller la perfusion, changer la bouteille vide, découder le tuyau de plastique pour laisser circuler à nouveau le liquide, il faut quelqu’un pour venir à votre secours quand, dans un état semi-comateux, vous avez replié votre bras sur l’aiguille de perfusion qui vous déchire la veine, et gicle par flots votre sang vermeil, et puis pire, humiliante extrémité à laquelle vous refusez de céder, qui viendra à votre aide quand votre vessie distendue à éclater vous fait souffrir le martyre ou que vous êtes sur le pont de relâcher votre sphincter anal, quelle aide-soignante fera le geste, si vous refusez d’être rançonné, et puis, surtout, surtout, quand la nuit tombe, que les médecins sont partis, qu’il n’y a plus que l’infirmière de garde, que ta tête bourdonne, que ta vue se voile, que ta gorge se noue, que l’angoisse t’étreint parce que tu sens venir la mort, qu’une peur panique s’empare de toi, qui appeler, Bon Dieu, tu auras beau gueuler à t’éclater les cordes vocales, elle ne viendra pas la salope d’infirmière, elle est en train de roupiller là-bas, au fond du couloir, porte fermée à double tour…

            Les tintements des couteaux et fourchettes sur l’aluminium des plats me parviennent maintenant noyés dans la musique émise par le poste de télé. Nous sommes à la veille du dixième anniversaire d’un grand jour, généreusement chômé et payé, et le peuple attend le grand discours promis. Voici les gonds de la porte qui se mettent à grincer. Qui est-ce ? Une femme de salle prise d’un urgent besoin, qui n’a pas le temps d’aller jusqu’au bout du couloir pour se soulager ? Un pot de chambre qu’on vient vider ? Non, dans le contre-jour du couloir éclairé par une lumière sale, je vois se dessiner les moustaches luxuriantes du vieil Aïssa, le concierge borgne de l’hôpital. Il pénètre dans la salle à pas retenus. Que vient-il faire ici, en cette heure où il est assuré de ne rencontrer personne ? Il s’approche du chariot déglingué sur lequel je suis étendu et m’observe longuement en hochant la tête, un vaste sourire éclairant son visage sauf à l’entour de l’œil mort. Puis il se détourne et va saisir une chaise bancale et repoussante de crasse qui traînait dans la salle. Il la pose à mon chevet avec précaution afin d’éviter de faire crisser sur le carreau ses pieds de fer qui ont perdu depuis longtemps leurs ronds de caoutchouc. A-t-il l’intention de s’installer et me tenir compagnie pour la nuit ? Est-il venu me confier quelques croustillants secrets ? Non, le voilà qui met son pied sur le siège. Que veut-il faire ? Debout sur la chaise, il déboutonne sa braguette et sort son sexe. Le salopard ! Il est en train de me pisser sur le visage !

            Le vieux forban ! Il aura finalement tenu la promesse qu’il m’avait un jour lancée à la face, qu’il se répétait chaque matin en me regardant franchir le portail d’entréé, son œil orphelin planté sur ma nuque. Il n’a pas oublié, malgré les longues années. Sans doute, le projet de sa haineuse vindicte l’aura-t-il aidé à vivre, à se supporter. Quelle puissante force qu’un désir de vengeance, et comme la haine fournit une solide raison de vivre ! Ah ! je l’ai bien connue, longtemps savourée, cette rare satisfaction, et je ne peux pas me résoudre à détester ce vieux paysan au visage parcheminé. Il va sortir en exultant de joie, mais comme le fer rouge que n’entretient plus le brasier, sa satisfaction ne fera que refroidir, et je sais qu’il rentrera chez lui à pas pesant, comme s’il se trouvait brusquement vidé de toute sa substance, je sais que de nouveau le désarroi le submergera, qu’il ne saura plus quoi faire de ses mains, de sa vie, de sa hargne… Je reste les yeux fermés, le visage baigné d’urine, et la porte refermée sur cette pièce nauséabonde, au fond de ma poitrine je sens naître de sourds sanglots. Est-ce l’effet de la rage impuissante, ou serais-je en train de m’apitoyer sur mon sort ? Et brusquement, sans que rien l’ait laissé prévoir, les hoquets se transforment en un rire intérieur d’une formidable intensité. Il m’a suffi de songer à cette histoire en train de prendre les allures d’une farce grandguignolesque.

Rachid Mimouni: Tombéza 1984

I’ve been in this small storage room since midday, surrounded by brooms and other maintenance equipment. I also share it with the W.C, where the parents of bedridden and invalid patients come to empty plastic bed pans into an antediluvian bidet. The nurses on their rounds only have to move the handle of the door before recoiling, repulsed by the noxious odour of rancid shit and urine that I am forced to inhale.

Night falls and darkness slowly invades the room. I already sense the horrible itching of tiny but coarse cockroach legs as they prepare to exit their diurnal shelter. Soon they will have occupied the whole room. The biggest, with their antennas on full alert, will emerge one by one from the orifice of the bidet before crossing the length of the corridors of the ward. These bloated creatures seem to have a penchant for the operating room, situated a few metres away from where I rest. Is it the blood that attracts them?

It’s already upon me! I feel the solitary tickle of the first insect walking on my bare neck. Another lands on my forehead, testing the obstacle that is my right eyebrow before deciding to bypass it. He settles briefly on my cheekbone, an excellent observation post, crosses my cheek and stops at the corner of my lips. Out comes his sucker in search of a trace of saliva. A third comes to join his companion. Soon my body is swarming with the beasts, climbing up the legs of my rattling trolley.

The familiar sounds of the pavilion have diminished, the gaps between them increase before they disappear entirely. Even the cries of midwives calling each other from opposite ends of the corridor, the booming laughs of men as they share dirty jokes, everything is calm, an intense silence has invaded the ward. I know: it’s time for our evening meal. Now is not a good time for a sick or injured person to arrive at the hospital. They will have to wait a long time, strewn on the semi-concrete white beds in front of the door of the emergency room. I have quite a bit of experience of this myself from the days when I used to work here. Badly hurt people have often died waiting for a doctor or a nurse who has yet to finish their meal. When I walk in the streets and I hear the hooting of ambulance sirens I can’t help but smile. It reminds me of the urgency, of weaving skilfully in and out of lanes full of monstrous trucks decked in steel, resembling weapons of war more so than vehicles of transportation, with drivers who couldn’t care less about the fate of the tadpole sized ambulances at their helm.  I know too well how paramedics narrowly avoid death and dismemberment over and over again to deliver a patient to their straw mattress where they will remain in agony, enduring large amounts of patience and pain. They wait because at this time of the day nurses and midwives all meet in a huge room and await the arrival of the porter with his trolley full of meals. The day’s loot is first taken out from the cupboards: cakes, fruit and confectionary, the produce of raids carried out in plain view of the patients after the departure of visitors who come arms laden with candy and victuals. These raids have become increasingly fruitful: a sick person quickly understands that it is in their interest to share, especially if they are in a serious condition, of reduced mobility or an invalid. If they fail to cooperate they are taking a huge risk: they can be kicked out of their bed, in an already overcrowded hospital, to make room for another patient whose parents are more sympathetic and who understand the culture of donations, or their bed can be given to the mother of some gendarme who acts as if she were in her own home, telling everyone in a white overall off. One must also consider who will maintain your drip: change the empty bag, unblock the plastic tube to allow the liquid to continue circulating. You need someone to come to your aid when, in a semi-comatosed state, you have folded your arm on the drip’s needle, tearing your vein and causing your arm to spurt flows of ruby-red blood. In an even worse scenario of extreme humiliation, who will come to your aid when your bladder has burst or you’ve lost control of your sphincter muscle? What will you do if you refuse to be extorted? Especially, and especially, when night falls: the doctors have left, there is no nurse on-call, your head is ringing, your throat tightens, you are gripped by an overwhelming anxiety as you feel the approach of death, and you are overcome by fear. Who do you call? Good God, you can scream all you like but that bitch of a nurse isn’t coming, she’s asleep at the other side of the corridor with the door slammed shut.

The clinking of knives and forks against the aluminium plates is now being drowned out by the music coming from the TV set. It is the day before the tenth anniversary of a hugely important day, a day of paid leave, and the people await the great speech that has been promised them. The hinges of my door begin to creak. Who is it? A midwife with an urgency to relieve herself but without the time to make it to the other end of the corridor? Someone coming to empty a bed pan? No, in the back light of the corridor, lit up by a faulty light, I can make out the untamed moustache of old Aïssa, the hospital’s one-eyed concierge. He enters the room at a slow pace. What is he doing here, at this time of night when he is sure to be meeting no one? He approaches my rickety trolley where I am laid out. He observes me at length, shaking his head with a broad smile that gives definition to his face, except for the area around his dead eye. He turns and grabs a wobbly chair, kicking the dirt that covers the floor of the room. He places it at my bedside, taking care not to scrape his steel shoes, by now relieved of their rubber exterior, on the tiles. Does he intend to stay and keep me company for the night? Has he come to share with me some saucy secrets? He stands on the chair, unbuttons his pants and takes out his penis. The bastard! He’s pissing on my face!

The old pirate! He had finally kept his promise, one that he repeated every morning as he passed my door, fixated on my neck through his one living eye. He didn’t forget, despite the long years that had passed. Without a doubt his project of hateful retribution had kept him alive, it sustained him. The desire for vengeance is such a powerful force, and just like hate it provides one with a reason to live! Ah! I knew it well, he enjoyed it, this rare satisfaction, and I can’t bring myself to hate this old wrinkle-faced peasant. He will go out revelling in his success, but just like the red iron that is no longer capable of withstanding the inferno, his satisfaction can but only subside. I know that he will slump to his home, as soon as he realizes he has been emptied of all substance he will once again be thrown into disarray, no longer knowing what best to do with his hands, his life, his belligerence... I lay there with my eyes closed, my face doused in urine and the door slammed shut on my now putrid room. On my chest I can feel the gathering of tiny sobs. Is this the effect of uncontrollable rage, or am I beginning to feel sorry for myself and my predicament? Suddenly and without warning, my hiccups transformed into an internal glee of an intensity I had not yet known. I felt it more sensible of me to consider this story as one of grandguignolesque farce.

Methodology of Tombéza

As with Guests of the Nation, the language of source text in Tombéza is entirely dictated by its context. However unlike Guests of the Nation, the source language is far less rooted in the variety of French spoken by the author and is more influenced by official terms which are generally rigid across all varieties of a language. In the case of Tombéza, the dominant linguistic domain and resulting lexical field is of health and healthcare, at least in the passage which has been translated for this paper. The main obstacle this serves to the translator is one of formality versus functionalism. Certainly for many of the medical terms discussed in Tombéza, cognate equivalents in English exist. We must however remember that the story is set in Algiers and the cultural capital of Maghrebin French must be considered.

First of all I will discuss the translation of medical terms in Tombéza on the micro level. In analysing specific terms and clusters related to health, I will explain my reasons for both domesticating and foreignising this text. Leading on from this I will look at the text in a broader context, focusing on specific examples where a technical description of medical procedures and events in the hospital may or may not need to be sacrificed for the sake of the dramatic force of the text.

Translation of individual terms

When translating certain terms related to medicine in Tombéza, I had to accept certain limitations and that my approach would be functional, as is the case in the example below:

S.T.	T.T.
grabataires ou impotents (L. 3-4)	bedridden and invalid (L. 2-3)

Although some liberty was taken with the translation of impotents, the intended meaning is transferred, and in this case the intended meaning is very clear. Mimouni describes the other patients very technically and in a sense very formally.

While the same formality needs to be applied to the following translation, in this case I have decided to intervene for the sake of maintain the neutrality in the tone of the source text.

S.T.	T.T.
les bipèdes en blouse blanche (L. 42)	everyone in a white overall (L. 43)

By removing the reference to les bipedes, I have possible reduced the potency of the image in describing the chaos, but to translate this literally would be to foreignise it and risk alienating the target readership. Moreover, from a stylistic point of view, the description of people in white overalls adds to the extremely sterile and inhuman scenario which Mimouni is trying to portray.

Conversely in the following examples I applied a much for dynamic approach to terms which could be regarded as having very strict definitions, and thus very limited scope for a translator:

S.T.	T.T.
vermeil (L. 46)	ruby-red blood (L. 47)
relâcher (L. 49)	lost control of  (L. 48)

In the first example, Mimouni describes the dire situation Tombéza could find himself in if he were to pass out and tear his vein on a needle. Although a literal translation of vermeil is possible: vermilion, I felt that the image of flowing red-ruby blood was far more powerful and, as mentioned in previous examples, extremely useful in portraying the chaos of the hospital. Again this may be functionalism to the point of intervention, but I feel that it reinforces rather than takes away from the intended utterance.

In the second example, Mimouni offers another disastrous scenario whereby Tombéza would be left in immense discomfort without any help from the nursing staff. To substitute relâcher with relax would satisfy the communicative requirements of the source text, but as with the image of the blood, it would not adequately transfer the essence of the scene. This is particularly relevant given that Mimouni goes on to describe an even more hellish scenario where, overcome by anxiety and fear, Tombéza is left completely alone to die in a state of agony and isolation. When we think about the overall context of the passage and the chaos of the hospital, the communicative requirements of the text changes and as such so does the role of the translator, for this reason I felt the transposition lose control of as the most suitable translation.