Akínwùmí
Ìṣọ̀lá[1]
Translations
like wives are seldom faithful if they are in the least attractive (Trever J.
Sanders)
Many African writers use the English
language mainly for easy access to the global market. Additionally, some of
them blame their choice of English on a low level of competence in their own
mother tongue. But they hardly ever admit succumbing to the lure of the
prestige and glamour that English convers on its speakers in African society.
Not too long ago, in the rural areas of Nigeria, a smattering of English would
enhance a person’s social status. That was why pupil teachers and catechists
were second in status only to the village head. The powerful influence speakers
of English enjoyed in the villages became so overwhelming that some smart
persons who frequented the cities often tried to fake knowledge of English.
Examples of such fakes have survived in the form of nonsensical parodies of
English sentences:
Borasokimi
alodidain, itisi me abolondo
Eja litilitiliti
so bengaliti
What do you eat
so far?
They succeeded no less in dazzling the
unlettered village man and the mystery endured until authentic speaker of
English came to deflate it.
Good story tellers and chanters in
Yorùbá enjoyed great prestige, but they could easily be upstaged by anyone who
could say a few Yorùbá proverbs in English and later condescend to translate
them. In spite of earlier suspicion by critics like H.R. Collins, one may
wonder now whether Amos Tutuola’s decision to write in English had not been
influenced by the wish to upstage more consummate story tellers’ writings in
Yorùbá, like Fagunwa, for example. Whether he has succeeded or not is a subject
for debate. The relevant point here is that the practice by African writers of
exploiting their culture to create literary works in English has greatly
impoverished the culture. It robs it of a necessary feedback. And if African
cultures are not to petrify and die, serious cultural conservation measures,
including translations into Africa languages, must be embarked upon.
Translation is a distinct profession
from creative writing but it can be its ally. So, when an active creative
writer, with his or her own crowded programme, ventures into translation either
from or into their working language, perhaps they are seeking additional
fulfillment in their pursuit of a special goal. A writer’s commitment to the
service of a particular culture may be either by providing exciting literature
in the language of that culture or by using a foreign language to expose to the
outside world the richness of its values and the depth of its civilization. The
effect of the first choice is directly
edifying and rejuvenating to the culture. The second choice may confer honour
and encouragement to the artist but it denies the crucial feedback necessary in
a cultural ecosystem. Soyinka’s translation into English of Fagunwa’s first
novel, Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmalè,.as
Forest of a Thousand Daemons
confirmed what was already evident in his own creative works – a solid base in
Yorùbá culture, and an abiding commitment to share this rich heritage with the
outside world. Fagunwa tickles our fabulous and metaphysical imagination in
poetic prose. Soyinka thought the whole world should hear about it, in keeping
with his own practice of providing riveting drama through the rich resources of
the Yoruba culture and the global possibilities of the English language.
I write mainly in Yoruba because of my
commitment to the preservation and promotion of the Yoruba culture through
active use of its language. So, each time I read some Soyinka’s works,
especially Death and King’s Horseman
and Ake, The Year of Childhood, I
hear mainly sounds of the original sentences, mentally translated, at the back
of the author’s mind. Soyinka writes very good Yoruba in marvelous English. He
has done the translation into English. My own task is to retrieve the Yoruba
original. ‘Retrieval’ is the word because the original Yoruba words and
phrases, the idioms and proverbs, the sharply presented arguments and disarming
logic retain their original weight and power still, but their easy elegant
movements have been restricted by embarrassingly tight-fitting, borrowed
clothes. They beg to be released!
Soyinka is not the only creative artist
writing Yoruba in English. Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare and many other also do.
Occasionally, in their artful attempt to express certain intricate Yoruba ideas
or some culture-bound emotions, they get elevated and burst into direct Yoruba
idioms, proverbs and songs. I know that other writers in other African
languages also do this. One can say that Achebe writes excellent Igbo in superb
English.
There is an African proverb. It exists
in Yoruba, it exists in Igbo. Soyinka uses the translation in Death and the King’s Horseman. Achebe
also writes it in English in Things fall
Apart. The proverb is about a hunter coming from his gaming expedition,
carrying the flesh of an elephant but surprisingly also digging the hole of a
cricket with his toes! The way each writer renders this proverb reveals a
little bit of his style. A stylistician should look at this aspect of style
some other time.
What I have said so far suggests that
perhaps retrieving the Yoruba original of a story written in English would be
an easy exercise. The contrary is unfortunately true. There are, of course, the
bonuses that first lure the unwary translator into the area of retrieval
exercise. These bonuses are the well-known popular idioms, the proverbs and the
songs that get easily recognized in their English translations. But these
materials do not stand in isolation. To form the story, they are linked
together by the narration and other linguistic elements that confer meaning and
depth to the story. African writers in English differ enormously in the way
they weave their story baskets out of the African cultural strands; bringing
forth in English what has been experienced in Yoruba. Soyinka’s greatness lies
in his ability to eliminate completely the usual grating sounds in transmission
between source and target languages.
So. When the bridging forth has been so
well done as in this case, the product becomes a melting pot of two cultures
and the story ‘whirls the reader round in a dazzling cultural kaleidoscope and
the differences in folkways clearly offer verbal, philosophical and spiritual
difficulties. The new story then becomes either a literary pleasure or an
academic nightmare depending on what critical cap you are wearing. If you are
just reading for education or appreciation, your peace of mind is least
disturbed because you can explain away your doubts or overlook the difficulties
altogether. But if you are coming as a retriever, you may have just signed away
your peace of mind for a long time. Having good ideas, they say, is paradise
but working them out is hell. If translation is the slowest and most observant
form of reading, possible retrieval is the most bewildering labour of cultural
disentanglement created by African writers in English. On the one hand, you are
trying to fully understand what the dazzling use in English of long compounds
and intimidating strings of dependent clauses has done to the free floating
perfumes of oral poetry in Yoruba; on the other hand, you are struggling to
determine the saturation level of English culture in the Yoruba story.
Because Soyinka’s English is highly
idiomatic, it means that his Yoruba stories have been invaded, however
unobtrusively, by subtle but stubborn culture-in-language aspects of English.
The greatest problem of the retriever therefore is making the story come back
to the Yoruba audience ‘with all its vital organs still intact’ despite the
suffocating influence of an unfriendly environment it has been made to inhabit.
The retriever must look for the best way of doing this. At the same time, the
style of the original writer must be adequately reflected. To quote Walter
Hamilton,
The aim of a
translation … is to convey to a reader ignorant of the language of the original
as accurate an impression as possible of its style as well as its meaning
without lapsing into stilted or unnatural or pedantic (target language) (from
William Radice, The Translator’s Art)
In other words,
my task in this regard, is to make my retrieval close enough to retain
Soyinka’s inimitable style but loose enough to make the Yoruba natural and readable.
A comfortable balance must be struck to reconcile the demands of accuracy and
readability. And although readability should take precedence over accuracy, yet
I had to ensure that I was not writing a new work based on Soyinka’s play. The
structural features of English and Yoruba are so remarkably different that
faithfulness in terms of structural style is out of it altogether, but the
rendering of the artist’s struggle with meaning and interpretation must be as
close as possible to the original. I have tried to maintain that.
The difficulties
in the way of a retriever occur at many levels some of which are the lexical
level with names, titles and terms; the syntactic level with amazingly long and
complex sentences, and the cultural element level where equivalents do not
really exist. At the lexical level in Aké,
for example, you are faced with the names of exotic flowers and trees like the
passion fruit, pomegranate, apple and others. There are also types of relations
like uncles, cousins, first, second cousins, nieces and nephews, and of
religious titles like cannons, reverends, sextons, vicars and pastors in Aké. In a few cases, there are direct
equivalents like the fig tree which is ‘igi ọ̀pọ̀tọ́’ in Yoruba, but for many, direct borrowing is the only solution.
When borrowing,
however, care must be taken to see that the English words are domesticated by
making them adopt the Yoruba open syllable structure, and by preferring
ear-borrowing to eye-borrowing. Ear-borrowing is better because it comes from
the sound of the word and that is what ordinary illiterate Yoruba person, our
main target, would hear. Eye-borrowing is the disease of the school educated
elite. For example, for the word ‘table’ in English, the ear-borrowing will be
‘tébùrù’ while the eye-borrowing will be ‘tábìlì’. For the word ‘deacon’, a
religious title in English, the ear-borrowing will be ‘díkìn’ and the
eye-borrowing will be ‘díákónì’.
There are also
Soyinka’s own ingenious creations like ‘Wild Christian’ and ‘Essay’ in Aké. Since the nickname Wild Christian
was inspired by Eniola, the writer’s mother’s attitude to the Christian
religion, an equivalent can be found in similar attitudes of the Elégùn in
Yoruba religion. So Wild Christian is translated as ‘Elégùn Jésù’. Elégùn in
Yoruba religion is the one who is permanently possessed by the spirit of the
leader or founder of the religion and who personifies right and acceptable
behaviour in the belief. For ‘Essay’, however, a direct equivalent will not be
appropriate because the activity that inspired the nickname is not directly
duplicated in traditional Yoruba culture. At the syntactic level, the big
difference between the structures of the two languages is encountered. The
competent speaker of English takes glory in weaving long interminable complex
sentences apparently to dazzle modest achievers in the foreign language. Even,
after you have read these sentences many times over, you often not too sure
what they really means. And until you are sure what a sentence means, you
cannot break it into smaller units to suit Yoruba sentence patterns.
The most problematic
areas to translate are those that relate to the local colour or the special
usages attaching to certain geographical areas. Direct translations may make no
sense in such cases because such ideas may be so far-removed from our target
audience. For example, in Death and the
King’s Horseman, JANE thinks that OLUNDE is too sensitive:
The kind of
person you feel should be a port munching rose petals in Bloomsbury (p. 28).
How do you
translate ‘a poet munching rose petals in Bloomsbury’ to make sense to an
illiterate Yoruba person, except by using something in their own experience to
convey the idea intended. After all, we are talking of Olunde, an Ọyọ man. If
he was not in school and was going to be a local poet, an ìjálá artist, for
example, he would not be in Bloomsbury, he would be in Amukuderin munching old
roasted yam. Hence, my translation:
Kí ó máa jẹ
ẹ̀gbẹ iṣu péú ní Amukuderin (p. 31).
This is just to
confess that the problems of translation can be very formidable. But the fact that the difficulties exist does
not mean that they cannot be overcome. As a matter of fact, I am consoled by
Soyinka’s ample demonstration that many Yoruba experiences do not have direct
equivalent in English. He solved the problem by using the direct Yoruba
expression. According to George Steiner,
Total
translation are impossible because each writing represents its own complex,
historical and collectively determined aggregate of values, proceedings of
social conduct, conjectures on life. So, translators have to decide what they
are going to try to retain … and what they are going to be willing to lose
(Michael Grant in William Radice (ed.), The
Translator’s Art).
As far as I am
concerned, one thing I did not feel willing to lose was readable and meaningful
Yoruba.
When Soyinka was
60, in 1994, this Yoruba version, Ikú Olókùn
Ẹṣin was performed on stage at the National Theater in Lagos. It ran for
about a week. He himself watched it. What pleased me most was that some of
those who had watched the English original on stage confessed that some aspects
of the play had just, for the first time, became clear to them. Professor Louis
Gates was there. He was delighted by the Yoruba version that he promised to
sponsor the filming in celluloid. He even made a large sum of money in hard
currency immediately available.
But …
My joy is that, now, the Yoruba people
themselves can now see and assess what Soyinka has done with materials taken
from the culture thus, ensuring a proper feedback. The block in two-way
umbilical cord – from culture to writer and writer to culture – is, at last,
resolved.
[1] This was presented as a seminar
paper at the Faculty of Arts, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife Seminar
Series. Professor Isola was then at the Institute of Cultural Studies, Obafemi
Awolowo University after retiring from the Department of African Languages and
Literatures, Obefemi Awolowo University in 1991.
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