Translating the Basaa Epic: Bon Ba Hiton
 

Who are the Basaa?

The Basaa of Southern Cameroon are Bantu people who settled in Ngog Lituba (Rock with a Hole) on the right bank of the Sanaga River around the 13^th century. From the 15^th century on, they organized into Mbog Liaa (Society of the Rock), and are today established in three major communities in the country. Ngog Lituba , the sacred cave, is their spiritual shrine and a pilgrimage destination. The Basaa language is codified as A.43 and related to the Benue-Congo group of the Niger-Congo subfamily, a member of the Niger-Kordofonian language family. It exhibits characteristic features such as tonality, an extensive verbal system, and a prolific noun classification. The regional flora is dense tropical rainforest, hot and very humid with heavy rainfall and numerous bodies of water conducive to fishing. The land is rich and fertile, lending itself well to the people’s agricultural economy, which involves slash-and-burn farming for subsistence and trade. Their main crops include roots, tubers, and various green vegetables cultivated by women, while men tend palm tree plantations, which provide palm wine, palm kernels, and palm oil, an important commodity for local and international trade. Hunting is also an essential part of male culture reinforced by local social institutions.  Basaa menfolk are renowned hunters and fierce warriors. In the past, they were famous for their ability to hunt elephants and harvest ivory for ceremonies and trade. 

Basaa society is organized around extended families that trace their descent from a common male ancestor. The oldest patriarch, Mbombog, supported in decision-making by an advisory council of village elders, heads each of these patrilineages. Traditionally, the ancestral land is delimited by rivers and considered a gift to unborn descendants. Marriage is exogamous and a groom is expected to give bridewealth to his wife’s lineage. This is traditionally due on the birth of their first child. A man may have more than one wife if he can afford it. 

The Basaa people believe in one supreme god, Nyambe, the creator and sustainer. Many also hold parallel religious beliefs including reverence for elders and ancestor spirits. They often seek guidance from Ngambi, diviners who read the future and interpret spiritual messages concerning major life decisions. Indigenous oral traditions provide an enduring basis for understanding Basaa civilization. They catalog local landscapes, constructs, cosmologies, customs, institutions, practices, and patterns. Such is the case with the cultural epic Bon ba Hiton, composed in the early 19^th century. 

The heroic poem is traditionally sung in an open or public space throughout the night by a professional bard playing the hilun , a charmed stringed lute, which has earned the Basaa epic tradition the name Mingen mi Hilun (the Wonders of the Hilun). Its dramatic performance involves not only the bard, who moves about, passionately, dramatically reenacting the heroic account, but also a team of musicians, singers, and the audience. The bard Njib Njib, in his village of Matomb, narrated this four-hour performance of Bon ba Hiton in the 1970s. It was recorded and transcribed respectively by Ngijol Ngijol and Njewel Njewel, who later translated it into French. 

Why Translate an Unknown African Epic into English?

My multidisciplinary and multimedia approach to teaching African civilizations draws substantially on literary texts and various genres of oral tradition. They are the foremost repository of African indigenous cultures (Hampate Ba), and also a central element in informal traditional education (Okpewho African Oral Literature). Paradoxically, this critical source of institutionalized knowledge has been egregiously neglected, especially in the form of the epic, which is one of the richest African oral genres. I tap into the most notable heroic narratives such as Sundiata (Niane, Johnson), Chaka (Mofolo 1981), and other epic works representative of the diverse continent. Some have been documented, namely by Okpewho (The Epic in Africa) and Johnson, Hale, and Belcher, while others remain unknown to the English-speaking world. A case in point is the Basaa foundational epic Bon ba Hiton, which I use in my classes to illustrate African socio-cultural realities and experiences. This powerful representation of Africans’ worldviews through their indigenous literary productions has yet to be translated into English. I have attempted to fill that gap by translating into English some highlights of the heroic narrative Bon ba Hiton, which recounts a complex tale full of heroism and wonders centered on the protagonist, Hiton. 

The Process of Translating the Basaa Epic 

I set out to capture the spirit and depth of Bon ba Hiton through a linear translation of the actual words narrated by the bard. I tried to produce an English text that is enjoyable and accessible to a diverse audience, including teachers in universities and high schools, literary scholars, folklorists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and other social scientists. Precedence was thus given to faithfulness, effectiveness,  accuracy, clarity, simplicity, integrity, and the intent of the Basaa rendition, which encompasses text and performance, narration and dramatization. How is it possible to produce an English translation that incorporates both linguistic and paralinguistic resources, as well as the verbal and nonverbal devices involved? How is it possible to capture and convey in an English text all the peculiarities of Basaa indigenous oral art? 

The heroic poem is encoded in rich language with some idiosyncratic lexical items that have no English counterparts. I have accordingly used Basaa idioms so long as they did not impede understanding.  Sometimes I have resorted to English idiomatic equivalents when they seemed to express the indigenous version more effectively. An interesting instance that kept me wavering is the formulaic line rendered as “in barely a ‘bamboobeat.’” Though the first gloss that came to mind as I read the original line was the English idiom “in a heartbeat,” I opted for the indigenous expression. Not only is its alliterative pattern effective, but most importantly, it draws the reader into the Basaa epic performance universe. Some of the musical instruments accompanying the heroic rendition are bamboo pieces that a musician plays in rapid beats. These musical beats are compared to the hero’s swift gestures throughout the epic. The formulaic repetition “In barely a ‘bamboobeat’” gives the reader a taste of the traditional narrative, both semantically and alliteratively. Incidentally, the formula has been translated into French as “l’espace d’un clin d’oeil,” “the blink of an eye.”  Should we call this the creativity of translation? Or is it an example of the notion that meaning can be communicated across cultures and languages with varying faithfulness? 

Though it is difficult to retain the sounds, rhyme, and rhythm of the original epic, an attempt has been made to reproduce words expressing typically Basaa/African entities—for instance langoo (line 314), a tree bark that is dried, grated, and used to heal a number of ailments including stomachache. Also retained are onomatopoeia and ideophones. Defined by Doke as “vivid representation of an idea in sound” (118), these linguistic devices are very prominent in the lexicon and literary discourse of African languages such as Basaa.  Yet they have remained one of the greatest dilemmas in translation practice and theory. How is it possible to transfer these “ideas-in-sounds” from one language to another, faithfully communicating their meaning to the reader? One of the major challenges I faced in translating the epic was deciding whether to explain or paraphrase the meaning of ideophones, find a formal counterpart, or recreate the story in a format familiar to the reader. Some translators choose to keep the indigenous ideophones intact, while others prefer to create in the target language an effect as poetically expressive as the vivid sound. I have found it more effective to retain in the English version the original ideophones as they appear in the Basaa text.  In the case of onomatopoeia, their features seem to transcend linguistic boundaries. Consider the sound of a gunshot in line 1135: “Toommm” can be understood across languages and cultures.  As for other ideophones, their meaning seems recoverable from the context: consider Hiton getting up briskly, “vum,” or palm-wine flowing down his throat, “togom, togom, togom.” Tedlock underscores this point in his translation of Zuni oral art, arguing that the meanings of most interjections and onomatopoeias are made clear by the context. The retention of these expressive sound patterns brings the reader into the bard’s artistic world. It makes it possible not only to decode the meaning but also to gain access to the literary and cultural context of Basaa expression. Does this practice “foreignize” my translation? I follow Noss in responding that “to retain ideophones in translation may be doing violence to the translation. To transform them may be to do violence to the artist’s original creation.” (271). This remark aptly resonates with Venuti’s metaphor of translation as violence (The Scandals of Translation ). Notions of code-switching, idiom-mixing, and linguistic/cultural hybridity also come to mind here. 

I made a principled decision to translate the epic into English from the original Basaa text, although it had already been translated into French. I chose to steer away from a mediated translation, in keeping with my goals of accuracy, authenticity, and faithfulness.  Given my deep interest in cross-linguistic analysis, once the translation of a given passage was completed, I would inquisitively read through the French version. This first translation of the 4,934 lines of poetry into a European language is groundbreaking. It also contains interesting idiosyncrasies—poetic embellishment, fanciful manipulation of style, omission or reduction of some repetitions. Beyond these stylistic elements emerge some engaging conceptual processes that unveil complex inter-lingual and intercultural dynamics in translation. 

One of the practices pervasive throughout the French text is what I call “transgression of gender boundaries in cultural translation.” The original Basaa title Bon ba Hiton is rendered in French as Les fils de Hitong (Hiton’s sons). Yet the lexeme bon literally translates into French as enfants de (children of ), and is the plural form of man, l’enfant de (child of). The epic title Bon ba Hiton would be more accurately rendered in French as Les enfants de Hiton (Hiton’s Children). How then did bon become les fils, whose Basaa translation is in fact bilog ? In rare instances, bon and man are respectively translated correctly, as in lines 64, 73, 130. On page 61,  however, bon is variously translated as fils (3 uses out of 4) and as enfants . On page 93, for example, man is consistently rendered as fille . Interestingly, throughout the passage (pages 102-111) relating the birth of Hiton’s twenty-seven children (twenty-six sons and one daughter), the Basaa words man and bon are consistently translated into French as enfant/enfants. Lines 1961-62 read, “Hitong eut des enfants, / des enfants au nombre de vingt et sept unites.” Why, then, is the French title Les fils de Hitong instead of the more accurate Les enfants de Hitong? The same gender blurring occurs with the words mange/bonge (child/children) variously translated as jeune future(s) (lines 60, 372, and 392) and jeune fille(s) (lines 65, 67, 68, 1150, 1158, 1170, 1230, and 1235-36). 

This “genderizing” of neutral Basaa referents runs through the French version of the epic. In fact, this misrepresentation seems to be persistent and pervasive in translations of African languages into Indo-European ones, as underscored by Oyewumi. In her insightful appraisal of Yoruba gender constructs, she contends the “process derived from the uncritical assumption that Western categories were universal…oral traditions became part of global history, they acquired the coloring of the dominant cultural institutions of their time—both Western and Christian” (85). The issue of gender mistranslation in the French version of Bon ba Hiton is so compelling that I take it up in another publication. Rendering excerpts of Bon ba Hiton in English has revisited fundamental issues germane to translation practice and theory. It has also underscored translating oral genres in general and epic works in particular, as multidimensional and multifunctional. The endeavor goes well beyond linguistic restitution to capture aesthetic expression: text and theatrics, content and context, matter and manner. It is an exercise in translating cultures, in what Budick and Iser call the cultural “space between.” The process has also highlighted the flexibility, fluidity and dynamism of both language and culture, pointing to their reconfiguration. The compelling trans-linguistic,  trans-cultural and trans-textual relations recovered during the translation will be examined in a separate space. In the meantime, Bon ba Hiton remains a work in progress, as I hope to later reveal the 4,934 lines of poetry to the English readership, and to further knowledge migration and transmission.