Extraits du texte original, en anglais
À propos de ce livre
La romancière américaine Edith Wharton, future lauréate du prix Pulitzer, visite le Maroc en 1917, en pleine Première Guerre mondiale, invitée par le résident général Lyautey. In Morocco raconte ce voyage : Rabat et Salé, Fès, Meknès, Marrakech.
C’est le regard d’une invitée du Protectorat français, dont elle partage souvent le point de vue. Mais ses pages sur la lumière et les villes du Maroc comptent parmi les plus belles qu’on ait écrites en anglais.
Les pages qui suivent
Deux passages : Salé et Rabat face à face sur le Bouregreg, puis la première vision de Fès. Le signe […] marque une coupure.
Le texte est celui de l’édition originale, libre de droits, en anglais. L’accent de Salé, perdu dans la version numérique, a été rétabli.
Salé et Rabat
Texte en anglais
Salé the white and Rabat the red frown at each other over the foaming bar of the Bou-Regreg, each walled, terraced, minareted, and presenting a singularly complete picture of the two types of Moroccan town, the snowy and the tawny. To the gates of both the Atlantic breakers roll in with the boom of northern seas, and under a misty northern sky. It is one of the surprises of Morocco to find the familiar African pictures bathed in this unfamiliar haze. Even the fierce midday sun does not wholly dispel it: the air remains thick, opalescent, like water slightly clouded by milk. One is tempted to say that Morocco is Tunisia seen by moonlight.
Première vision de Fès
Texte en anglais
Many-walled Fez rose up before us out of the plain toward the end of the day.
The walls and towers we saw were those of the upper town, Fez Eldjid (the New), which lies on the edge of the plateau and hides from view Old Fez tumbling down below it into the ravine of the Oued Fez. Thus approached, the city presents to view only a long line of ramparts and fortresses, merging into the wide, tawny plain and framed in barren mountains. Not a house is visible outside the walls, except, at a respectful distance, the few unobtrusive buildings of the European colony; and not a village breaks the desolation of the landscape.
[…]
There was time, before sunset, to go up to the hill, from which the ruined tombs of the Merinid Sultans look down over the city they made glorious.
[…]
There it lies, outspread in golden light, roofs, terraces, and towers sliding over the plain’s edge in a rush dammed here and there by barriers of cypress and ilex, but growing more precipitous as the ravine of the Fez narrows downward with the fall of the river. It is as though some powerful enchanter, after decreeing that the city should be hurled into the depths, had been moved by its beauty, and with a wave of his wand held it suspended above destruction.
At first the eye takes in only this impression of a great city over a green abyss; then the complex scene begins to define itself. All around are the outer lines of ramparts, walls beyond walls, their crenellations climbing the heights, their angle fortresses dominating the precipices. Almost on a level with us lies the upper city, the aristocratic Fez Eldjid of painted palaces and gardens; then, as the houses close in and descend more abruptly, terraces, minarets, domes, and long reed-thatched roofs of the bazaars, all gather around the green-tiled tomb of Moulay Idriss, and the tower of the Almohad mosque of El Kairouiyin, which adjoin each other in the depths of Fez, and form its central sanctuary.
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