Amelia Fielden

Found in Translation: Act 1, Scene 1, Morocco 1970

sliced baguette
a small pot, labelled
Confiture de Fraises,
butter on a patterned plate,
Marie nibbling her biscotte

Breakfast time. Still weary. I’m with my toddler daughter in the dining room of a central Rabat hotel. We were brought here last night, on arrival from London.

Derek has already gone to the Embassy. It keeps local office hours, apparently: opening early with a long break in the middle of the day. All very different from Tokyo, where we’ve been living comfortably in Japanese for the past five years.

While I’m sipping a bowl of milky coffee, a waiter approaches.

“Madame, votre mari vous demande,” he says, handing me the receiver of a black telephone on a long cord.

“Amelia ? I’m sending around a maid for you to interview. Name’s Fatima. She’ll be there in five.”

” Wait … what language do I interview her in?”

“She speaks Berber, Arabic, and French.”  

He hangs up.

I scramble to dredge up enough of my old university French to ask some appropriate questions and possibly engage this young Berber woman as our domestic helper-to-be.

sweet Fatima              
fluent in three languages,
literate in none ...
recalling your lullabies
for my babe, bound on your back

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About the Author

Amelia Fielden is Australian. She is a professional Japanese translator and a keen writer of traditional Japanese forms of poetry in English. Her most recent collection is These Purple Years (Ginninderra Press, 2018).  

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