Maryse Condé: Mythe, parabole et complexité (Critiques Littéraires) (French Edition)

XXXVI, translation compensates for a linguistic lack, while simultaneously erasing the multilingual nature of its task. Even more interesting — or perhaps one should say appalling — the index of the Beckett biography authorized or unauthorized as it may be does not even contain the words bilingual or bilingualism, translating or self-translating. One consequence of the marginalization of self-translation as a practice is that it reinforces Western models in which monolingualism, rather than multilingualism, are the norm.

Yet in many places in the world, multilingualism is clearly the rule rather than the exception. Critics responding to self-translated texts are forced to acknowledge the extent to which multiple languages may be present, or leave traces, in any given text. In this reading, a self-translated text is more than the chance contiguity of two languages; instead, it involves degrees of reciprocal interference, which deviate from the assumption of a hermetic original confined to a single, pure language.

This theoretical omission has become increasingly evident as the creative inter- Shread 55 facing of multiple languages has gained an expanded presence in the literary scene as a result of postcolonial and transnational cultural expression. In France, from to , television literary celebrity Bernard Pivot aired a show entitled Double Je, which focused entirely on his interviews with authors bilingual in French and another language. In any event, once the range of texts considered is extended from French texts to the wider Francophone field, with all its complex linguistic and cultural history, many more instances of self-translation, both practical and metaphorical, are evident.

Huston has received many prestigious prizes in France and is not shy of entering into the media spotlight for debates about her work. Yet her work still suffers from exclusion in the field of self-translation: Julien Green, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, an analysis that does not include a single reference to Huston, even though her work was one of the most celebrated literary phenomena in France while the book was being written. Unlike Beckett, who started writing in his native English and later shifted to French, for the first ten years Huston wrote only in French, apparently turning her back on her mother tongue, English.

However, since the early s she has consistently composed her texts in French and English, and there are now at least ten novels available in both languages, in addition to a host of interviews and other nonfiction publications see Ducker, for example. Huston has written many perceptive essays on questions surrounding the cultural negotiations involved in her dual linguistic status, starting in with Lettres parisiennes: While Huston observed that her birth as a writer in French began in with the death of her mentor Roland Barthes, she only began to self-translate in the s following Plainsong, a novel in which she returned imaginatively to her childhood home in the Canadian Anglophone province of Alberta.

Katherine Harrington commented on the controversy as follows: What this argument fails to recognize is that Huston already had a considerable number of books written only in French; ironically, Cantique des plaines was the first to have an English counterpart. However, by making this claim not in a bureaucratic or legal context, but rather on the hallowed ground of literary creation, Huston goes for the jugular. Typically, however, when self-translation is not ignored, it is kept under some form of quarantine.

Those critics who discuss self-translation in relation to Huston or other self-translators usually propose Shread 59 supplementary models to talk about self-translation, rather than inferring that examination of this practice might modify conventional notions of translation. Fitch, for example, proposes intra-intertextuality to discuss the specificities of self-translated texts, 4 McGuire introduces the notion of self-translated texts as parallel texts, 5 and Nicola Danby subsumes self-translation under bilingual writing.

In contrast, I suggest that self-translation challenges this dominant definition by inviting our understanding of translation to move beyond a binary framework that does not allow for multiplicity, towards a notion of coauthorship. XXXVI, changes, choices, and developments are inherent to any translation, by abandoning the authorization of the author in favor of the play of the text, translation is able to reconnect with its excluded others — imitation, paraphrase, and adaptation. This expansive, liberating vision of translation is one of the most important consequences of using selftranslation to redefine translation.

Here we have two texts, one French, one English, not in separate volumes, but face to face on the page, with all the gaps, elisions, leaps, additions, and extensions of the translation plain to see. Through this innovative publishing decision, Huston expressed the euphoria, liberties, and excitement of living and writing in two languages, along with a testimony of crisis, of tensions and angst, precipitated by linguistic complexity. The following quote demonstrates the asymmetries between the two texts, as well as the extent to which the languages interact at both semantic and phonetic levels: Grumble grumble grumble Or at least that we want to get a head.

Ou que, du moins, derechef Feeling rotten word, feeling so close to old Sam Beckett these days. Close the way Miss Muffet is close to the spider. Me sens sale mot, sentir si proche du vieux Sam ces jours-ci.

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Yet this process is at work in all translation; I point this out to explode the current category of translation and thereby allow for greater movement in both the origi- Shread 61 nal and the translation. Tanqueiro ascribes perfect self-transparency to the author of the creative act and thereby distinguishes self-translators from translators: In terms of subjectivity there will be no gap between the author and translator; he will never unwittingly misinterpret his own work [ The author has no special authority [ Man or woman, the argument I am interested in making about the unruly practice of self-translation combines a poststructuralist approach with a complex understanding of subjectivity.

For instance, in Les variations de Goldberg, the author speaks from the position of thirty different individuals, and in many of her subsequent novels, the narrative is based on a juxtaposition of perspectives. It is because both writing and translation enable the performance of alternate identities that they are compelling and necessary activities: XXXVI, heroic, self-coinciding individual as the source of creative expression. In his letters, Beckett described self-translation as a chore: Wish I had the courage to wash my hands of it all [ I have nothing but the wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.

We might well ask, then, what is the source of this discomfort? And further, why do authors feel compelled to endure such an unpleasant task? Firstly, I believe that the difficulty is in part the result of the immense effort required to make space for multiple subjectivity in a culture in which considerable forces combine to constrain severality into discrete, individual, and isolated units.

To forge connections among multiplicity: Secondly, the fact that the task of translating is neither easy nor pleasant is an important point, particularly in the context of a reconceptualization of translation paradigms. In arguing for a generative view of translation — a view that would replace the current paradigm based on degenerative models of inferior copies — I do not wish to be accused of idealizing translation. Self-translation is painful in part because it also points to conflicts, to points of resistance within subjectivities-in-encounter.

A generative model of translation should not Shread 63 be conflated with this idealized heuristic fiction which has come into being along with translation studies. Rather, the move from discourses premised on loss to an appreciation of the gains of translation also assumes the ethical responsibilities, conflictual encounters, and creative possibilities of growth through translation. These insights into multiplicity in writing and self -translating allow us to move from the singular original text, dominated by, and stubbornly rooted in, the conceit of individual creation, towards a larger conception of authorship, one that has room to allow for the possibility of collaboration and in which author, reader, and translator act as partners in the elaboration of a text that is always unstable, undetermined, open to extension, dissension, and interpretation.

Yet, in laying claim to the generative possibilities of translation, the conception of self-translation that I have proposed goes beyond mere survival and plays an important role in drawing attention to the agency of translators. XXXVI, nature of the source text, then the process and goals of translation appear in a different light. My hope is that further research into the neglected area of self-translation will resolve a significant theoretical aporia in the field while simultaneously contributing to a new conception of the goals, strategies, and nature of translation.

Works Cited Akai, Joanne. West Indian Writing as Translation. Language and Selfhood in CrossCultural Autobiography. Journal of Women in Culture and Society Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 2. Alan Warran Friedman et al. An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work: Shread 65 Green, Julian. Nancy Huston and the Case of the Bilingual Subject. Hokenson, Jan Walsh, and Marcella Munson. History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation. Nord perdu, suivi de Douze France. Harvard University Press, A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma Lessons from a Francophone Text.

Allison Beeby et al. Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Pour reprendre les termes de Barbara Folkart: Ainsi des jouets objets concrets: And who knows Soon the universe. And who knows By and by the universe. Falls and makes rings in the water Falls in the water and makes circles. Ces questions restent ouvertes. Il joue 82 FLS, Vol. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 3 Aspects de la construction du sens dans les langues naturelles. Cognitive Science 22 The Way We Think: A Poetics of Translation. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind.

University of Chicago Press, Saint-Denys Garneau, Hector de. My observations are based on the analyses of experts in the field — linguists, authors, translators —, on my own experiences as a translator, and on some non-analytic but intuitive insights that I have gained over the course of the past twenty years.

In addition, I hope to show that literature and all cultural and artistic forms of expression are political, each in their own way. Thus, translation is for me also an act of political activism. But so with all, from babes that play At hide-and-seek to God afar, So all who hide too well away Must speak and tell us where they are. In this essay I discuss three facets of translation and the revelations it aspires to disclose. The first of these, of course, are the familiar linguistic discoveries that we make during the working process.

Secondly, there are the cultural differences and similarities revealed by the texts through which, as this translator hopes, we come to know one another better. Finally, there are the revelations that my work has brought me on a personal level. Human language is the one specific characteristic that sets us apart from other living creatures and should thus, logically, offer our species a great chain of solidarity. Sadly enough, however, the spoken word is all too often perhaps even more often than not?

We get in trouble over language and people kill each other over words. How often do we find ourselves saying: These are but a few of the infinite ways that prove we are not communicating well, or at all. This comes down to the anecdotal: How complex, then, is the interchange and subsequent attempt at really grasping what is being said or written in a language that is not our own. Gregory Rabassa, the eminent translator of Latin American literature, wrote years ago: Writing is not truly a substitute for thought, it is a substitute for sound.

If this is true, as I believe it is, then translators are listeners first and speakers second. Human interaction and mutual understanding, the final purposes of translation, after all, are based first on hearing and listening. Only then can I embark on turning my source text into English first, into fine writing second. This is always a balancing act, a balancing act that time and experience never render any easier, as my students used to ask with hope in their voice.

Each author in any language has a different voice; each text is a new text that poses different problems, even when a same author has created it. Every word, then, must be heard, understood, interpreted and, finally, rewritten. Contrary to the perception of too many readers, translators are writers, not verbally clever secretaries. The obvious imperatives are first the purely technical aspects, that is to say a thorough knowledge of source language and target language.

Included but more playful and more difficult, too, is working with idioms, word play, double entendres, and proverbs, the latter being a particularly common facet of African literature, which forms much of the body of my translation work, where the literal almost never works and the search for an appropriate equivalent becomes one of the many great challenges.

Ideally, the translator should translate into his or her mother tongue, as I always stressed to my students at NYU. Since of these two source languages one is Romance and the other Germanic, I discover time and again how different are the difficulties that arise when dealing with either one or the other. There are two problems here: It is an unalterable fact that certain words cannot ever be translated, even when the source vocabulary is far smaller than the English.

There is an exact word for everything but not always for the same thing in every language. How can this be? Why, then, does English not have a word for it? But so it is and we must find a way around it, time and again. Titles often pose a major problem. Mudimbe and Le Baobab fou by Ken Bugul. I always make an effort to get to know personally the authors I translate, if only to be able to go to the very source for answers to whatever queries I will undoubtedly have, and more often than not I have been fortunate enough to succeed.

With the Mudimbe book, I put together list after list of possible translations of the word bel and the word immonde. The results were either quite plebeian, a bit sleazy, or downright boring. I consulted with Mudimbe, we toyed with various titles, and neither of us liked what we came up with. He advised me to keep going with the novel and perhaps I would find something in the text itself.

I contacted Mudimbe and suggested Before the Birth of the Moon. He was as enthusiastic as I, and it did become the title of the published translation. And so The Abandoned Baobab was born. XXXVI, In the process of self-discovery that she goes through she uncovers things that are too potent, too serious, too enormous, too sharply against the grain, too taboo; they are not things meant to be disclosed [read: That is why [ This, it, me, her?

In fact, the added pronoun matters little, for it is all about the rejection that the little girl, Ken, suffers: She finds in her culture a means to symbolically escape the silencing imposed on her, for by naming herself Ken Bugul she insures her survival as a writer born into a new name [ Returning now for a moment to the challenge of finding the, or a, good title, the two I mentioned above do work in English, I believe. A writer creates, refines, and publishes a book, then moves on to the next one. How many translators are able to say the same? Each time I look at a supposedly finished and now printed translation — which I try not to do too often — I see things I would do differently today.

However, this is not only a striving for perfection but also because, to quote George Steiner once more: Language is in perpetual change. But ordinary language is, literally at every moment, subject to mutation. This takes many forms. New words enter as old words lapse. Grammatical conventions are changed under pressure of idiomatic use or by cultural ordinance.

The spectrum of permissible expression as against that which is taboo shifts perpetually. At a deeper level, the relative dimensions and intensities of the spoken and the unspoken alter. This is an absolutely central but little-understood topic. Inward discourse has its complex, probably unrecapturable history [ Inevitably and a priori every translation encounters the question of cultural differences, expressed not only in descriptions of foods, dress, religious and social customs, for example, but in the very language and style of the work, even within the framework of a same continent such as Europe.

When the divide between the two cultures of source and target languages is wider, the ear needs to be even more finely tuned, research becomes more unmistakably urgent, and cul- 92 FLS, Vol. XXXVI, tural sensitivity is a prerequisite. In their art, many African writers by necessity use not their mother tongue but the official language of their country — a seemingly permanent remnant of colonialism, even when in their daily life they speak Wolof, Haussa, Swahili, Lingala, Bambara, Bassa, or any other of the hundreds of African tongues. Those authors who do write in their mother tongue cannot escape having a much smaller readership and will most likely remain relatively unknown outside their own culture.

Initially writing in English, he writes in Kikuyu now, then translates his books himself or has them translated into English. I recently read that Boubacar Boris Diop is doing the same thing in Senegal, writing in Wolof these days. Assia Djebar reads and speaks Arabic fluently, but writes in French only, yet not only the subject matter of her books but the lyricism of her French, too, reflects a decidedly non-French background.

To write my voice, the one that I once had and still today is tingling in my toes, beneath my naked feet that spin in panic every night until they reach the shore of dawn To write the voice of every little girl, that voice of hers as it lies nestled in her hair concealed beneath the scarf of shining black, the voice of the maiden with the shaven skull while her eyes of terror widen as she faces all of you, faces only you who, so much later, write.

Djebar It stands to reason that colonialism has left its imprint on much of the content of African literature, especially in the work of the older generation. Innumerable are the novels and volumes of poetry dealing with colonialism, its repercussions, the personal and communal suffering during, and subsequent to, the occupation of the European rulers. In more recent work by a younger generation, we find a growing concern with life in Africa today unrelated to anything European. These are primary and recurring themes in both Ken Bugul and Werewere Liking, in whose worlds there is an everpresent emphasis on the position of and attitude toward women, which we find in much African fiction, but particularly and certainly not surprisingly in the work of female authors.

Fictitious accounts, faces and murmurings of a nearby imaginary, of a past-present that rebels against the intrusion of a new abstraction.

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From collo- de Jager 95 quial Arabic or from feminine Arabic; one might just as well call it underground Arabic. I could have listened to these voices in no matter what language, nonwritten, nonrecorded, transmitted only by chains of echoes and sighs. Not only is woman neither to be seen nor heard, to be appropriated in every way, to move around ghostlike, fully veiled when outside, sequestered when inside, but she is to be silent everywhere.

It leaves women with nothing but one another, and other women are then the only ones with whom and upon whom she can begin to experiment with the sound of her own voice. It is this that becomes the ultimate challenge for the translator of her work: The amputation of memory also leads to silence, for how can you speak of what you do not remember?

And who are we, who can we be, if we do not have the memory of where we came from, what our culture is, who we are individually and collectively as people? We must then become what we are told we should be, because we have no other information on which to rely and base our growth. Liking consciously and with great pain excavates her memory, digging like an archeologist for the experiences she had lived without at the time, comprehending their significance, and by doing so she constructs her life as an adult woman, finding deeper wisdom with every exhumed piece, a wisdom she then relays to her own children and grandchildren.

It is a lovely collection of women who form a trinity of marvelous, stern but compassionate, smart, courageous, and humorous models, although certainly not without flaws of their own. The question of female subjugation — whose permanent companion is silence — is ever-present in many literatures.

The themes of expected obedience, submission, and resulting silence are everywhere in the work of Djebar, Liking, and Ken Bugul. And when the female character resists, whether she does so quietly or revolts openly, she enters a dangerous world, colliding with established mores and patriarchal domination, risking rebuke, banishment from the family, or exile. And often cannot say it. That, too, is the mission of the literary translator: In conclusion, a few words about what I have learned, and what has, indeed, been revealed to me on a personal level through the act and art of translation.

Almost twenty-six years ago, on our first date, my husband and I attended a political meeting. He answered quite emphatically: Not until I began to translate African literature did I realize how right he had been. Coming from three generations of Dutch colonialists in Indonesia, where I was born and spent my first decade, reading the work of African authors was truly a revelation for me.

On some level I had always known the evils colonialism had wrought, but hearing the personal voices of these writers and the characters they had created, the pain before, during, and after colonialism became brightly illuminated, a burning torch in what was until then mostly a fog of my own childhood memories, and I felt compelled, feel compelled, to bring those voices to a wider audience through the also-political act of translation.

My translation work, however, will go on as long as 98 FLS, Vol. XXXVI, my head and hands keep functioning, bringing both the voices and their silences to a different and broader audience, being a link in the chain. I have also learned a great deal about what it means to be a woman and for that feel deeply indebted to the work of Bugul, Djebar, and Liking.

A child said What is the grass? Fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white Lawrence Hill Books, Afterword by Jeanne Garane. La Folie et la mort. Riwan ou le chemin de sable. English as a Global Language. Cambridge University Press, Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence.

University Press of Florida, Listening for the Silence. Murambi, le livre des ossements. Murambi, The Book of Bones. Indiana University Press, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. Afterword by Clarisse Zimra. Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Before the Birth of the Moon. Simon and Schuster, After Babel — Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford University Press, This study analyzes how the self-translator and translator alike deal with various linguistic and cultural realities presented by African languages upon translating them into French and then into English.

Most critics have claimed that the opposite is true — that French as a language of the colonizer is one that the African writer has been forced to accept. As Kwaku Gyasi claims, the early African writers started to write in the languages of the colonizers without considering all the implications involved in the use of such languages. In the zeal to destroy the stereotypical images of Africa and to project their African world view, these writers may have considered the colonial languages as mere tools or means to achieve their objectives.

One writer who clearly challenges all of these assumptions, however, is Cameroonian novelist and playwright, Werewere Liking, whose works in French resemble no Western forms of fiction and whose language and registers are highly distinctive. Self-taught in French as an adult, Liking had been immersed during her youth exclusively in the language, rituals, traditions, and teachings of her native Bassa culture of Southwestern Cameroon.

According to each individual writer, the European language in Africa is given different hues and shades. Through her writing and self-translation, Liking essentially engages in the act of redefining African orality. Liking may have found less creative freedom in Cameroon because she was indeed too close to home — that is, translation as cultural production simply could not be as widely appreciated for several reasons. According to Conteh-Morgan then, we can say at the very least that all Cameroonian spectators are not sharing in the same experience and understanding of the play, and to another extreme, some may even find the aestheticization of a sacred ritual offensive FLS, Vol.

Her performance art has less readily been labeled sacrilegious; indeed, it has been praised for being highly innovative. Gyasi offers an explanation as to what contributes to this success: Even though the African writer uses symbols and metaphors that touch on a real African situation to reflect or express an idea, he or she also goes beyond a particular time and place because, by writing in a foreign language, the final product is invested with meanings that apply in varying degrees to different people and societies. Therefore, not only does Liking successfully transform her work into written form, but she translates it, for the most part, into Bassainfused French.

The thought of yet another person tackling an English translation that remains faithful to these already intricate linguistic and cultural nuances is seemingly a daunting task for even the most experienced translator. Obviously, the translator of English is using as reference a text that has been translated initially into French by Liking.

Similar to what Liking has done in French, the translator of English must also convey all the cultural nuances of the African text within the limitations of what is possible in English, which in turn may differ from what is feasible in French. Linguists Vinay and Darbelnet identify some of the potential problems in translating from French to English alone; namely, taking into account differences in the two languages regarding metalinguistic information of message 29 , situational equivalence 39 , and cultural lacunae Gyasi also posits that translators of African texts have a Toman tendency to adhere too closely to the tenets of translation theories developed in the West, which may result in a translation that gives primacy to the European languages that the African writer has so fiercely sought to subvert in the act of writing The Francophone African Text Furthermore, as both writer and translator, Liking obviously has an advantage over the translator of English, who, as an outsider to the initial work, has less linguistic freedom.

And I see blatant suffering, redhot rage crying: According to linguist Philip Noss, Dingome as translator is left with only three choices as to how to handle the ideophone in her English translation: Noss claims that one of the reasons why the ideophone poses such a dilemma for the translator is precisely because of its incredible adaptability to creative rhetoric In her written texts as well as in her oral performance, Liking uses a familiar combination of Bassa and French, but she seems to use less Bassa in the written form with the exception of ideophones and proverbs.

It is unclear as to why Liking decided on this change in the published play; perhaps it is because the oral performance relies more heavily on a musicality that is achieved through the retention of certain words in Bassa. It may, however, be a message that Liking intended for a Western audience to understand, and the context in which the phrase is found in the written text, as opposed to the oral performance, would not allow the reader to know its true meaning had it remained in Bassa.

This explains why Dingome, as translator, feels the need at times to provide —————————— 2 Noss observes, for example, that in a dictionary of Zulu a language of South Africa , there are at least three to four ideophones on every page. In his last example, ideophones comprise one in every four entries in the Ghaya-French dictionary Ghaya is spoken in the border region of Cameroon and the Central African Republic [41].

In all of her works and performance art, it is clear that Liking is translating both culture and language. Indeed, we see this in a text such as the aforementioned La Puissance de Um, in which the retelling of a funeral rite of the Bassa serves two purposes: Liking often uses such a technique in her writing, ultimately allowing her readers to question their own accountability concerning societal problems.

Project MUSE - Women in French Studies-Volume 20,

However, one of the liberties taken by Liking as cultural translator was to change certain elements of the ritual in an attempt to render Bassa women more powerful, as she believed them to be in precolonial times. See Dingome 10 comments of Siga Asanga. However, it is the normally voiceless and supposedly, ritually silenced Ngond Libii who in fact brings the mourners to the realization of their faults, which have led in part to the death of their leader and to the symbolic death of their rich culture.

As a woman writer, Liking espouses feminist ideals typical of African matriarchal social structures that differ from Western feminisms, in the sense that Liking advocates the idea of women and men being equally different, as opposed to their being considered equal. Thus, through language and her references to various myths and rituals, Liking provides a translation of these concepts into French. For example, in her analysis of the sexualization of language in To Speak is Never Neutral, Irigaray claims: This assertion poses an interesting challenge for Liking as her own translator, as she seeks a way of transmitting these cultural nuances of African matriarchy from Bassa to a seemingly more patriarchaloriented language, French.

To further complicate matters, various African languages, unlike French, are genderless. Liking uses the image of a birth by cesarean, the more violent, medicalized form of birth, as a reminder of how patriarchy is embedded in language and also as a symbol of the urgent necessity for a new language to emerge — one in which women have —————————— 4 Translation mine.

Toman a more rightful status. The female remains within an amorphous maternal matrix, source of creation, of procreation, as yet unformed, however, as subject of the autonomous word. The coming, or the subjective anastrophe rather than the catastrophe , of the female has not yet taken place. And her movements often remain stuck in mimetic tendencies: As of yet, she neither affirms nor develops her own forms. She lacks some kind of growth, between the within of an intention and the without of a thing created by the other [ See French version, page 17, and the English translation, page At the very end of the work, however, the narrator questions his own identity, shifting between possible selves modeled on those of males and females whose origins are found in African oral tradition.

Was I the half-brother, in the background, but faithful friend Manding Bori? Or one of the sorceresses? While the West clings to a binary categorization of gender, there is evidence that African languages and traditional cultures are less rigid by comparison. Using the Igbo language as a prime example, Nigerian feminist scholar Ifi Amadiume explains in books such as Afrikan Matriarchal Foundations and Male Daughters, Female Husbands that Toman the fact that various African languages have fewer gender distinctions makes it possible to see certain social roles as separate from sex and gender, making it plausible for either sex to fill the roles Afrikan Amadiume attributes this to the influence of African matriarchal heritage on language, thereby differentiating African languages from those in the West, which carry rigid sex and gender association Afrikan Although in the novel, Liking pairs up the misovire with a misogynist, the misovire is not to be understood as a man-hater or the antithesis of the misogynist, but rather someone who is thus far unsatisfied with the men she has encountered.

If we consider the misovire as a product of an African matriarchal world, then the misovire would FLS, Vol. XXXVI, still expect that man is potentially her complement as opposed to the hierarchized patriarchal world in which woman is of a status inferior to man. Thus, the misovire is analogous to the misogynist in their respective matriarchal and patriarchal realms. With the creation of the New Race — one that will free Africa from its current misery and oppression — the social conditions that create the misovire and the misogynist would simply disappear into a world apart.

Even as a self-translator, Liking, in her quest for ownership of the French language, essentially shares with Dingome and de Jager some of these same goals. Toman Works cited Achebe, Chinua. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. International Scholars Publications, The African Quest for Freedom and Identity: Cameroonian Writing and the National Experience. Theater and Drama in Francophone Africa: Dingome, Jeanne, et al. The Power of Um and a New Earth. Writing African Languages through French.

The Francophone African Text: Translation and the Postcolonial Experience. African Literature and the Challenges of Translation. To Speak is Never Neutral. New Dimensions in African Linguistics and Languages. Africa World Press, Elle sera de jaspe et de corail. Nouvelles Editions Africaines, La Puissance de Um. Identity, Sexuality, and Difference. A Dilemma for Translation and Translation Theory.

Perspectives and Strategies of Translators and Artists. Artist, Critic, and Translator in African Literature. Vinay, Jean-Paul, and Jean Darbelnet.

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Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation. John Benjamins Publishing Co. His sermon is translated into Fang by an interpreter. This article proposes to explore how a dynamics of mistranslation or missed translation locks this particular scene into a dead end and raises two kinds of questions: However, in the English version, the confrontation of the written text — the English subtitles — and the oral text, that of the film script itself, manifests another type of discourse.

Viewers who are able to understand both English and French constitute a specific audience. Bassek ba Kobhio looks critically at Albert Schweitzer — the physician, the missionary, the philosopher, the theologian, the musicologist, the organist, and also the Nobel Peace Prize winner. Then the chief allows Bissa to play a key role during this ceremony and offers him Bissa as a sign of friendship. It is not obvious that the drummer succeeds in making him revise his ethnocentric discourse on the purity and universality of classical European music, however. Because the Great White Man is deeply irritated by the unrefined sound of the drum, he will eventually give the drummer a trumpet as a Christmas present, urging him then to barter his African instrument for a more acceptable European substitute.

By doing so, the Great White Man states his conditions for accepting to pursue this musical dialogue initiated by the drummer. At this point in the film, we learn that she would sleep on the floor when he would occasionally let her enter his room after the death of his wife. Because it uses a faulty translation in the subtitles provided by the California Newsreel English version, the scene can be read from two significant angles: The differential status between an African and a European spirituality results in a clash between a colonial and postcolonial mentality.

Hence, in the scene where he preaches the Gospel to the people, he needs to rely on a Gabonese interpreter to communicate his message to the villagers, who do not seem to understand the original French. Me I understand, but the Bible is too complicated for you natives. What should be learned from the Bible is sometimes easy. Illiterates, just get on with your work, the rest will follow. Dans ce sens, le travail dans toutes les conditions est un acte de salut. In this sense, work in all conditions is an act of salvation.

You are sure to have a place in heaven if you work. What has been said is final. Authorization to reproduce this picture was granted by California Newsreel. The French- and English-speaking audience From the perspective of a bilingual audience, able to consider both the original and the English subtitles, the analysis I propose is that of a privileged viewer-reader.

In his sermon in French, Schweitzer is perceived as the theologian on a mission to Christianize and civilize, and he is apparently convinced that his message reaches his audience through the translation, something we know is not true, when we consider the subtitles. This reading of his symbolic power is indeed reinforced by the presence of his wife and two nurses all dressed in white, and sitting on stools higher than those used by the Gabonese people. At this point the doctor fails to understand that the interpreter transforms his words, that he is being mocked, and that it is actually the interpreter who is in command of the message, not Schweitzer.

Most importantly — and this is the postcolonial twist — as Schweitzer does not show any interest in learning Fang and therefore fails to become a true translator-missionary, 7 he himself maps out a dynamics that contributes to the failure of his Christianizing mission, since the interpreter cannily subverts it. Moreover, the posture and physical appearance of the interpreter, who wears western clothes, a colonial helmet, and holds a Bible in his hand, confer authority upon him for the Western viewer. By stealing his voice and therefore his colonial power, he substitutes himself for the voice and position of the Great White Man.

In so doing, he establishes a social, religious, and cultural distance between himself, as the talking subject, and the silent audience. As a result, they may not be able to identify the ideological impact such a complex game played by the Curtius interpreter can have on the audience. The audience targeted by the English subtitles may be seen as unable to perceive the interpreter as a postcolonial parasite 8 who occupies a border zone that allows him to manipulate and reinvent two realities: So, as a postcolonial parasite, the interpreter has the mission to unveil skillfully a theological subtext and to reveal its true intent: In this position, the interpreter is a threat to the authority, credibility, and respect that the doctor has gained in the community.

I would like to suggest that both the Great White Man and the interpreter articulate distorted colonial and postcolonial discourses. Therefore, postcolonial is not used in the chronological sense of the term, conquest-colonization-decolonization but to describe the deconstructive strategies that characterize a postcolonial mentality. But Schweitzer does not rely on such a vocabulary. In other words, the interpreter supposedly tells the Gabonese that since the Great White Man is telling them they are illiterate, fornicators, and drunks, then they should choose to be so, and live the plenitude of the stereotypes.

As a parasite, the interpreter chooses a discursive strategy that allows him to confuse the issues and to acquire authority as a disruptive go-between. Like all parasites in the biological sense of the word, he only exists if he inscribes himself into the power dynamics in which the Great White Man is immersed. If I wanted to bring to an end my analysis of the various discursive strategies used in this scene at this stage, I realize that the French original version alone does not allow me to do so, since it does not allow for a duplicitous discourse of reinterpretation to be present in the words of the interpreter until the English subtitles appear in the film.

Thus, the French-speaking audience is not given the opportunity to articulate a critical discourse as the other audiences are. At this point only, the subtitles missing in the French version drastically change the ideological meaning. As is the case with the monolingual English audience, —————————— 9 Authorization to reproduce this picture was granted by Bassek ba Kobhio. XXXVI, the French-speaking audience is not in a position to encode the colonial-postcolonial dialectics that comes into play in the scene.

The Fang, French, and English-speaking audience The interpretation by a fourth audience fluent in Fang, French, and English adds a powerful twist to the three analyses proposed so far. At this stage, reflecting upon the interrelation between languages in the film, it seemed logical to verify whether the English subtitles correspond to what the interpreter was saying in Fang in the sermon scene.

And my investigation led to the question of the reception of such a film by an African audience, a consideration often ignored in studies of African Cinema. Medzu mese Nzame a nga dzo ne mi ke bo mia bo dzia me, ve mia yia ne wokh medzu mese a ke mine ekanege. You must do everything that God tells you to do. Edzam mia yia ne sile ezango, eti e ne foghe, ve ise, ise ete ede eke mine vole.

Ce que vous devez attendre de Dieu, est que seul le travail va vous aider. What you can expect from God is that work alone will help you. Jeannette Ekomie Cinnamon provided me with the transcriptions in Fang. Mia yia ne yem na, adzu Nzame ede mia yia neb o etam, et mia yia ne yem fen a abwi mam asese me ne eti, Nzame enye a ve me. You must know that God has given you all that you have. Medzu mese a ndokh man kobe mi, mia yia ne yen na.

However, it has nothing of the sardonic and insulting thrust of the English subtitles available in the California Newsreel version. But does knowing the truth make my previous analyses inappropriate? Are interpretations by viewers of the California Newsreel version also faulty, inasmuch as they are based on wrong English subtitles? My earlier analyses need not be discarded, since both versions of the film —————————— 12 Neither California Newsreel nor Bassek ba Kobhio was able to identify the translator.

Ba Kobhio informed me that the translation was negotiated between California Newsreel and the producer. XXXVI, will continue to circulate, and multiple layers of interpretation will continue to be intertwined because of the missing the M3M original version or existing the California Newsreel version subtitles, and because of the geographical, linguistic, and ideological boundaries that the film has crossed.

Moreover, is the omniscient Fang, French, and English-speaking audience in an ideal position to elaborate a definitive interpretation of the Bible teaching scene? In September , I finally communicated with Bassek ba Kobhio, and here are his written remarks about the sermon scene: A greater confusion thus derives from knowing all three languages. From this perspective, one is able to guess the interaction that may have been mapped out between the actor who played the role of the interpreter in the film and Ba Kobhio. Might this be the reason why the California Newsreel translator, dissatisfied with the translation 13 in Fang, decided not to remain subservient to the original text?

As a performer, at this specific moment of the film, the translator barters the position of faithful translator for that of a cultural agent who produces meaning for a North American audience and requires that his reinvented English subtitles stand in their own right. In this scene that generates a weave of polysemic subtexts, each participant makes innuendos, wears a mask, subverts individual languages. This is how a postcolonial translation of a colonial mentality loses its meaning.

I can only wish that one day, the California Newsreel trickster-translator will identify himself or herself and reveal to us the secret of his or her performance. Thank you to Mamadou Badiane, John M. Cinnamon and Shelly Jarrett-Bromberg for their precious help in facilitating the translation process with these two informants.

Peau noire masques blancs. Albert Schweitzer, Music, and Imperial Deafness. Ethnicity and Representation in French Cultures. University Press of New England, The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford University Press, Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Performing Without A Stage: The Art of Literary Translation. La violence des hommes a fait la mort cruelle, hideuse.

Les paroles qui divisent. Les actes qui scellent les trahisons. Les gestes qui enclenchent la terreur. All you have is the voice of the memory and the imagery thereof. Memory comes to you only in hearing. Concerto pour un sacrifice en trois temps. Interview sur PlaneteAfrique Amina avril Barbery, Muriel, Tahar Ben Jelloun, et al. Le Monde des Livres 16 mars Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, Research in African Literatures La Magie dans le roman africain.

Les Origines de la culture. Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation. World Literature Today Davies Cordova Krog, Antjie. A Change of Tongue. Le Nouvel Observateur 24 mars Women in French 15 Concerto pour un sacrifice. Le Seigneur de la danse. For Benjamin, translation is good archaeology: For Chamoiseau, an ethical ethnography is a dialogic translation that gives agency to both speaker and object. The essay concludes that both writers articulate parallel forms of artistic agency that can make cultural anxiety both visible and productive.

Writing about translation, the German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin evokes archaeology. Out of their rather different contexts, the two authors emerge as anxious and playful cultural insider-outsiders, who turn, respectively, to the shapeliness of material or figural objects and, consequently, to object-centered disciplines — archaeology and ethnography — as metaphors. This common strategy is the point of departure for my FLS, Vol. To make his point, he likens it to a disciplined reconstruction of something like the integral shape of an original artifact: Fragments of a vessel that are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another.

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragment is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. I am grateful to Michael Jennings, who commented on an early draft of this essay and whose work on Benjamin frames my reading here — just as my treatment of Chamoiseau in these pages has been shaped by my experience translating Solibo Magnificent and Texaco, with Val Vinokur, more than ten years ago.

I also wish to thank Jeanne Garane and James Day for their suggestions. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, illfitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.

But this is not the only reason I turn to Chamoiseau. Furthermore, Chamoiseau strategically chooses a discipline whose object of study is the animate shards of broken cultural traditions. The detective narrative tells the following story: Solibo-asdetective-narrative privileges the argument between dark-skinned and contemptuous Sergeant Bouafesse and the nerdy and genteel Inspector Pilon about how to conduct the investigation.

A focus on the detective narrative reveals that in Martinique, one can either play along and reap the benefits of sociocultural assimilation or resist and be the victims of those who do. The detective novel here is a farce and a tragedy. He signals his ambiguity towards his own discipline near the beginning of the novel by inscribing his narrative in the framework of mourning: On the other hand, he is aware of the nationalism, paternalism, and racism that mark the history of ethnographic discourse.

A —————————— 4 Commenting on the wake, Chamoiseau writes: He is an insider-outsider who is an amateur ethnographer of his native country. He suffers from asthma and seems to be suffocating from self-doubt. Specifically, he doubts his methodology. Asthma, that delicate respiratory condition of first world countries, has become his Homeric attribute. Even his tape recorder seems to have respiratory problems: One morning, Solibo addressed me with the exhausted insteadof-hello question: This verbal energy seduced me even then. Especially since Solibo used four facets of our diglossia: The Creole basilect and acrolect, the French basilect and acrolect, quivering, vibrating, rooted in an interlectal space that I thought to be our most exact sociolinguistic reality.

Solibo Magnificent used to tell me: I, Solibo, I speak. You see the distance? In your book on the Watermama, you want to capture the word in your writing, I see the rhythm you try to put into it, how you want to grab words so they ring in the mouth. You say to me: One writes but words, not the word, you should have spoken. To write is to take the conch out of the sea to shout: You give me your hand over the distance. She does not recognize that if literary works could be translated so mechanically, we would not need human beings to translate for us. Our translation of Chamoiseau is Benjaminian inasmuch as we tried to translate his modes of signification and avoid a mechanical reading of his works.

Other words of your vocabulary, still numerous, fail to invoke in me anything besides the flavor of other places and other cultures.

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