Editorial     

We approached this special issue on Sub-Saharan African languages and literatures with enthusiasm and high expectations. The plethora of African languages, the variety of oral as well as written literatures from distinct cultures, and Africa’s complex colonial history call for nuanced approaches to translation theory, postcolonial studies and cultural studies. Particularly in the case of an area such as Africa, these three rapidly developing fields are inextricably intertwined. Africanist scholars and practitioners of translation could make substantial contributions to the international discourse on the role of translation, broadly defined. Over the many months it has taken to shape this issue, we realized that our optimism about the state of African translation studies was excessive. This is still a very young field. All too often, practitioners of translation as well as those beginning to address theoretical issues seem still to be groping towards an awareness of issues that have occupied a prominent place in the (international) traductological discourse for the past few decades. What is the translator’s role? What choices does a translator inevitably make, or have thrust upon him or her by market pressures or other external factors? Should a translation be shaped to satisfy the expectations or the needs of a particular target audience? What constitutes a “faithful” translation? How should a translator deal with linguistically and culturally “untranslatable” elements in the source language text? What is the impact of translation on the language and culture of the target language audience?  These are questions that can no longer be avoided; nor are they, in fact, so new: such issues have informed the theory and practice of translation for centuries, certainly since the time of the German Romantics.

The role of translation in Africa is particularly crucial. It’s a truism that language and power go hand in hand, and a dominant language reflects the political and military power of those who speak it.  As the saying goes, a language is the dialect of people with an army. The situation in Africa is far more complicated than a simplistic opposition of “African” languages to “Western” languages, especially French and English. In a country like Nigeria, for instance, or Kenya, choosing to write in a particular language or to translate out of or into it privileges that language over others, and always with political ramifications. Distinct linguistic, religious and cultural groups within a single country, —to say nothing of the multitude of different “audiences” in Africa as a whole—need what Kwame Anthony Appiah terms “thick translation” to understand one another’s literatures and cultures: linguistic translation alone is not enough.  This reality complicates any consideration of what constitutes a local audience as opposed to a foreign audience in need of translation.  Authors (from any number of countries, outside the African continent as well) may write in any language with an eye to the translatability of their text, anticipating the needs of an audience not strictly local. When they choose to write in a language such as English to reach a global market, they almost invariably practice a degree of cultural as well as linguistic translation, explaining and glossing words, customs, geographical details unfamiliar to a non-local audience. Indian writers seem particularly adept at writing with a view to multiple audiences encompassing a variety of religious, linguistic and ethnic groups at home as well as readers abroad. Vikram Seth’s epic novel A Suitable Boy is only one example of this kind of cultural (and linguistic) auto-translation, but it is a particularly good one. Over the past two decades or so “writing back” to the former colonial power, as an author, and practicing “foreignizing” translation, as a translator, have gained in popularity and legitimacy and have become the focus of a good deal of theoretical debate. But it was over forty years ago that an African writer, Chinua Achebe, anticipated  even in his earliest published fiction (Things Fall Apart in 1958; No Longer At Ease, 1960; Arrow of God, 1964) as well as in his critical essays the strategies of cultural translation we tend to see as a more recent development.

In a 1964 essay, “The African Writer and the English Language,” he describes himself as a “conscious artist” (101) who chooses to write in “a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings” (103). ¹ To illustrate how he incorporates into an English text an African way of conceptualizing reality, he quotes and analyzes a paragraph from Arrow of God:
 

I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eyes there. If there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is something there you will bring home my share. The world is like a Mask, dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. My spirit tells me that those who do not befriend the white man today will be saying had we known tomorrow.

He then presents an alternative version, from which all foreignness has been eliminated. “The material is the same,” he concludes. “But the form of the one is in character and the other is not.” (102) Achebe rejects a translation strategy that would create the illusion of what Western readers have complacently and solipsistically called universality, and which might more accurately be seen as the erasure of the foreign. Yet the values of the source culture are particular to it; so is a way of viewing the world and human relations, for instance the relationship of a father to his son. By dismissing an expression like “be my eyes there” as no more than a quaint turn of phrase, an inferior linguistic peculiarity in need of being colonized and transformed into standard, idiomatic English, a translator, or an author translating his own culture, performs an act of treachery against the source culture and the language that it has shaped and through which it is expressed. Achebe’s choice to forge a “new English” reflects a theoretical and ideological position: as the elegantly economical yet hard-hitting style of his critical work proves, he can write in any style or register he chooses.

In this same early essay, as elsewhere, Achebe’s defense of English as a legitimate vehicle for communication in general among Africans and for literary production in particular is based on a clear understanding of the multiplicity of audiences within Africa: “I do not see African literature as one unit but as a group of associated units—in fact the sum total of all the national and ethnic literatures of Africa”(92). 

If you take Nigeria as an example, the national literature, as I see it, is the literature written in English; and the ethnic literatures are in Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, Efik, Edo, Ijaw, etc., etc.  Any attempt to define African literature in terms which overlook the complexities of the African scene at the material time is doomed to failure (93).

He goes on to discuss the radical differences of language, religion, culture and class that separate writers from different areas of Africa from one another, and recalls an incident from his own personal experience, a meeting in 1960 (in what was then Tanganyika) with the poet and novelist Shabaan Robert:

We spent some time talking about writing, but there was no real contact. I knew from all accounts that I was talking to an important writer, but of the nature of his work I had no idea. He gave me two books of his poems which I treasure but cannot read—until I have learned Swahili. And there are scores of languages I would want to learn if it were possible. Where am I to find the time to learn the half dozen or so Nigerian languages, each of which can sustain a literature?” (96) 

All the more disappointing, then, to find that some Africanists —both African and non-African—seem to accept even today the opposition of an “us” (Africans—on the assumption that one can speak of a single, unified African audience) to a “them” (especially the French and the British).

In the area of oral literatures as well, Africanists could be more self-aware and more aware of the substantial work on oral epics in other literatures.²  Many of the issues relevant to African oral poetry are common to all oral poetry. Homeric scholars have known for a long time that rhapsodes (the Greek means “stitchers of songs”) selected from a vast fund of material to compose and perform a particular story geared to a particular audience or event.  Even after a specific version was fixed in writing and canonized, like the Iliad as we now have it, bards could perform a segment of the poem independently, offering as a free-standing piece the catalogue of Greek ships, or Hector’s farewell to his wife, or the exploits of a minor hero, or a night raid behind enemy lines. What is the role of the collector and “faithful” transcriber of an oral performance? What role does the transcriber play in shaping the oral performance itself, its content as well as its form? Does the collector’s expectation that the epic has to be about a hero or a king elicit from the performing bard or griot a selection of material that will please the listener, providing a unified text that focuses on the exploits of a dominant character?  Scholars who have performed the invaluable service of recording bards have just begun to think about their role not only as transcribers and translators but as shapers of a cultural artifact.

Our next issue (Fall 2002) will once again be ecumenical and eclectic. We have poetry and prose from a wide range of languages and literatures, including Basque (Euskera), Flemish, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, and Modern Greek.  For Spring 2003, a special issue on Francophone literatures guest edited by David and Nicole Ball is already in the works. (You will find a call for submissions on our web site: www.smith.edu/metamorphoses)  As always, we welcome submissions of original translations from and into any language, as well as brief articles and reviews to be considered for the Fall 2003 general issue. For that issue, the deadline is March 15, 2003.

Once again, we would like to thank you, our readers, for your continued support, both intellectual and material. We hope that you will find this issue interesting and thought-provoking.



Notes
¹ Chinua Achebe  Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday. 1975) 91-103.
² To give one recent example of useful scholarship: Maria Tymoczko Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation. (Manchester, U.K.: St. Jerome Publishing, 1999).