Translation Studies beyond the Postcolony 1443899798, 9781443899796

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Translation Studies beyond the Postcolony

Translation Studies beyond the Postcolony Edited by

Kobus Marais and Ilse Feinauer

Translation Studies beyond the Postcolony Edited by Kobus Marais and Ilse Feinauer This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Kobus Marais, Ilse Feinauer and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9979-8 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9979-6

To all the African thinkers who did so before us

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Kobus Marais and Ilse Feinauer Part One: Africa Chapter One ................................................................................................. 8 We have never been un(der)developed: Translation and the Biosemiotic Foundation of Being in the Global South Kobus Marais Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 33 The Discourse (and Silence) on Literary Translation into Swahili during British Rule: Translation as Deconsecration Serena Talento Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 73 Cold War Translation in the East African Context: Reception and Responses Alamin Mazrui Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 94 Multilingual Shakespeare: A South African Reflects on Translation and Performance in Germany Chris Thurman Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 130 Nollywood Stands Up: Mapping Nigeria’s Audiovisual Sector Adrián Fuentes-Luque Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 154 Bible Translation in Postcolony Africa: Reclaiming Humanness through Bible Translation Performance Jacobus A. Naudé, Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé and Tshokolo J. Makutoane Part One: Africa ....................................................................................... 210 Respondent: Paul Bandia

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Part Two: The Global South Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 220 Translating Silence: Applying Intersemiotic Translation to Interdisciplinary Systems Caroline Mangerel Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 242 Things Fall Apart as Published in Brazil: Searching for a Mouth with which to Tell the Story Amarílis Anchieta and Fernanda Alencar Pereira Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 262 Le Monde diplomatique in Latin America: Translating the Dream of a Different World Tania Hernandez Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 280 Translation and the Ethos of a Postcolony: Three Case Studies Maria Tymoczko Part Three: The Global North Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 314 Beyond the Postcolonial Reading: The Challenges of Translating Current Sub-Saharan Literature Chloé Signès Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 334 Fractalisation: The Human Condition as a Translational Condition Holger Siever Part Three: The Global North .................................................................. 358 Respondent: Reine Meylaerts Notes on Contributors.............................................................................. 364 Author Index............................................................................................ 370 Subject Index ........................................................................................... 377

INTRODUCTION KOBUS MARAIS AND ILSE FEINAUER

Despite the fact that Africa houses at least 1300 languages, that most if not all African countries have populations that are fluent in more than one language and that translation is thus an everyday phenomenon in both the formal and informal economy, the field of translation studies in Africa is small, relative to other continents. The limited number of monographs, journal articles, conferences and summer schools as well as the nonexistence in many countries of translator organisations attest to this assessment. At tertiary level, most of the energy is put into training translators/interpreters, and relatively little is done at the level of research into translation studies phenomena. When one pages through dictionaries, bibliographies and readers, this trend is reinforced. The Summer School for Translation Studies in Africa, in collaboration with IATIS, hosted a two-day regional workshop at the University of Zambia in August 2014 to focus on translation in the postcolony–and beyond the postcolony. At this workshop, where Paul Bandia read a keynote paper, a growing realisation in thinking about the postcolonial condition emerged, namely, that one cannot think about the postcolony as a result of the empire only. In this realisation, the idea is growing that, these days, the postcolony should also be thought of as a space and a time that has to deal with its own historical and material conditions (including but not limited to the influences of the empire) such as AIDS, child soldiers and corruption. The questions that drive this book initiated on African soil where African translation studies scholars were debating translation studies in Africa (obviously not in isolation from the rest of the world). With this focus, the collection set out to ask the following questions: Is (postcolonial) translation studies key/critical in (addressing) issues of the postcolony? Should one retain the notion of postcolonial translation studies, and if so, why? Should one reconsider or adapt the assumptions and methodologies of postcolonial translation studies to the new understanding of the postcolony as explained above to question the effectiveness of postcolonial translation studies in Africa to address issues

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Introduction

of the postcolony? Deliberations also included putting the postcolony in historical perspective and taking a critical look at the failures of postcolonial approaches to translation studies and the question: Should we move beyond or away from postcolonial studies, and if so, why and how? Another question one could ask of postcolonial studies is whether it is not embroiled in power analyses and the building of utopias such as “If we could only…” arguments without due consideration to the material reality of life. In translation studies, this relates to the question why, for example, in a continent where up to 60% of economic activity takes place in the informal economy, most of the work in translation studies still focuses on the formal economy, eschewing the particular material conditions under which translation happens. It further raises questions concerning theorising translation studies from a (bio)semiotic perspective and investigating the implications of such a conceptualisation for a “postcolonial” translation studies. Africa, however, is not alone in contending with these issues. What is commonly known as the “Global South” shares many of the questions/ issues of/in Africa. What is more, work on globalisation and immigration tells us that the “Global North” may also have to deal with the postcolony. A book which dialogically problematises and synthesises these issues should contribute to the global debate in translation studies. Against this conceptualisation, we invited scholars from all over the world to submit chapters for the book. Not all of the questions were addressed, but some were addressed in more detail than we expected. Furthermore, the publication of this collection of articles coincides with the 10-year anniversary of Maria Tymoczko’s (2006) influential article “Reconceptualising Western translation theory: Integrating nonWestern thought about translation”. The project that she put on the agenda 10 years ago still needs work, much work, on the African continent. The international relevance of this collection lies in the fact that it engages the agenda set out in Tymoczko’s work and, perhaps, move beyond it. Tymoczko (2006) lists six biases in Western translation theory, namely: x Translators are seen a necessary factor in interlingual communication. x Translation involves written texts. x The primary text types with which translators work are seen to have been defined and categorised. x Translation is seen as an individual activity.

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x Professional translation is seen as the only model worth striving for. x Culture in the current global world is, all of a sudden, seen as being hybrid. x The object of translation studies is seen to have been adequately identified. Firstly, translation studies suffers from a bias1 towards the formal economy. Not only is the tendency to study phenomena from the formal economy, such as economic translation, legal translation, medical translation or literary translation, but one would also find arguments that translation by non-professionals is not regarded as translation, thus excluding non-professional subtitling from the field of translation studies. This bias means that, in the Global North, about 30% of the world’s economic activities are excluded from the gaze of translation studies scholars, and in the Global South, anything between 60% and 80% of the economic activities are excluded. Secondly, translation studies suffers from a bias towards high culture. Translating Shakespeare, literary translation and the translation of philosophy or academic texts still occupy a large part of translation studies. This means that forms of popular culture and informal culture are excluded from the purview of translation studies scholars. Thirdly, translation studies suffers from a bias towards language. By taking the popular use of the word translation (interlingual translation) as its definition, translation studies limits itself to studying linguistic phenomena and symbolic meaning. This means that the whole range of indexical and iconic semiosis is excluded from the perspective of translation studies. Translation studies scholars from the Global South could counter these biases by what could be called “additive alternatives”, meaning that the alternatives are not meant at replacing existing biases but at correcting them. Firstly, by doing comparative translation studies work, translation studies scholars from the Global South could give effect to the full implications of spatial and temporal relativity. In addition, comparative work could enhance a dialogic undercurrent in translation studies, bringing different traditions to talking and listening to one another. Secondly, translation studies scholars in the Global South should take seriously the particularity of the space-time constraints under which they 1

By bias, we mean a tendency towards the particular facet identified. We do not quantify this bias in any way but rather postulate it to further a particular argument.

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Introduction

live. Whether one calls this a developmental perspective or a Global South perspective or something else, if Global South scholars operate on the assumption that time and space matter and look for the constraints caused by their particular time and space, they might find the unique features of translational activity in their environment which they could contribute to the global debate. Lastly, translation studies scholars in the Global South could expand their notion of translation to semiotics rather than language (see also Tymoczko 2016). Semiotics will allow them to study pre- and postmodern phenomena, will allow them to include body and nature in the study of translation and will allow them to deal with multimodality/ mediality as it is caused by modern technological advances. By studying the translation of all kinds of meaning, not only interlinguistic meaning, translation studies scholars from the Global South could be able to suggest alternatives to approaches and patterns of thinking in the Global North that have met with a dead end. Translation studies scholars from the Global South will not be able to change the world, or even the Global South. The activist impact of academics, we think, is overrated. The human condition is too serious to be solved by new methods of and approaches to research. Rather, we, as translation studies scholars of the world, do what is at hand. We contribute what we can on the basis of what we understand now. It may be beneficial or it may not be. Whichever, we need to engage ethically because the way in which one wages a war contains in it the germ of the kind of peace one will reap. The chapters in this volume contribute to the agenda set out above in various ways, some of them more in line with our own views and some different from our views. Marais asserts that this link between the translation of signs–not only language–and development is so strong that development is a process rooted in the translation of systems of meaning into further systems of meaning. Introducing the term “deconsecration” to refer to a process the reverse of that proposed by Casanova, Talento illustrates how translation can act as deconsecrative force, tearing down a language from a position it has formerly occupied and destroying symbolic and literary capital. Probing the migration of two translations from Tanzania to neighbouring Kenya, where the local population employed them as protest against local exploiters, Mazrui looks at the local recontextualization of the texts leading to a shift in their meaning and message.

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Thurman addresses issues like the controversial blackfacing in German productions as well as idiomatic and figurative racial slurs in Shakespeare. In this article, he demonstrates the complexities of inter-semiotic translation by focusing on cultural-political translation in translating for performance on stage. Fuentes-Luque’s chapter not only focuses on cultural phenomena in the informal economy, but he also focuses on non-linguistic phenomena, namely, movies. With reference to the greater interactive character of performance translations and features such as division of the text among different groups, Naudé, Miller-Naudé and Makutoane illustrate that participation plays a major role in religious communication, thus enhancing the acceptance of vernacular translations of the Bible. In her article on silences in translation, Caroline Mangerel points out how much political power is exercised by non-translation. Like Holger Siever later, she also points to the need for translation across disciplinary boundaries because of increasing specialisation. Anchieta and Alencan Pereira’s article reflects something of the material particularity of the use of language, namely the fact that African novels are situated in a particular time and space by means of the multilinguality of the texts. Like Fuentes-Luque, Hernandez chooses not to focus on literary work, but she rather exposes patterns of translation in the newspaper industry. Her article points to the importance of translation in the flow of information which shapes societies. In her article, Tymoczko uses translation to show how difficult it is to construct a new society. Using translation data from three “Western” contexts, she shows how translation influences the ethos of an emerging society, a process that is painful, slow and messy. Chloe Signès points out that postcolonial translation studies needs to rethink its epistemological basis. In particular, it should consider moving beyond considering the impact of the colony to considering the impact of various current social forces. Lastly, Holger Siever deals with globalisation and hypermodernization, in which translations are needed between spheres of society in order for people from these different spheres to understand one another.

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Introduction

References Tymoczko, M. 2006. “Reconceptualising Western translation theory: Integrating non-Western thought about translation”. In Translating others ed. T. Hermans, 13–32, St Jerome, Manchester. —. 2016. Trajectories of research in translation studies: An update with a case study in the neuroscience of translation. Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies (in print.)

PART I AFRICA

CHAPTER ONE WE HAVE NEVER BEEN UN(DER)DEVELOPED: TRANSLATION AND THE BIOSEMIOTIC FOUNDATION OF BEING IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH KOBUS MARAIS

1. Introduction In his chapter on sentience, Terrence Deacon quotes a scene from a science-fiction book by Terry Bisson in which two aliens are investigating humans after picking up a radio broadcast from earth. In their discussion about the human beings that they have discovered, they have the following dialogue: “They’re meat all the way through.” “No brain?” “Oh, there is a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat!” “So … what does the thinking?” “You’re not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking, the meat.” “Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!” “Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?” “Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.” (Deacon 2013, 498–99)

Henry Schwarz, in the introduction to an edited volume on postcolonialism, deals with the history of colonization on our planet and then closes his overview of history and scholarship with the following disclaimer:

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One must be cautious however, as are the exemplary scholars named above, in invoking such seemingly ancient antagonisms lest we fall back into naturalistic excuses such as ‘human nature’ for explaining violence against others. As in all responsible scholarship, one must vigilantly contextualize and historicize the sources of conflict so that the world history does not appear as one long succession of colonizing regimes. (Schwarz 2005, 5)

These two quotes represent one of the major problems facing current scholarship on the problem of what it means to be human. The first quote considers the human meat and finds it hard to believe that this meat is able to think. The second quote considers the human spirit and finds it hard to believe that this is the spirt of meat. In other words, the two quotes represent two sides of the Cartesian schism. The scholarly relevance of the first view is a growing movement I detect in biology, and in biosemiotics as a particular effort in this direction, to bridge the Cartesian schism between body and mind by providing an explanation of how it came to be that “meat can think” (Barbieri 2007a, 2007b, 2009; Favareau 2007; Henning and Scarfe 2013; Hoffmeyer 2003, 2008; Hoffmeyer and Emmeche 1991; Kauffman 1995, 2000, 2008, 2013; Kull 2007; Kull and Torop 2003). As scholars like Merrell (1998) argue, the Cartesian schism has influenced a variety of aspects of Western thinking, leading to a number of persistent binaries such as mind and matter and nature and culture. The effects of this schism can further be seen in the strong divisions between natural sciences and the humanities, the former dealing with matter and the latter with mind. The works referred to above, mostly from biosemiotics, represent a movement by scholars from the natural sciences to explain the thinking capacity of meat in its animal form (including human animals) without violating the laws of physics and without assuming some supernatural addition to matter. The relevance of the second perspective is a similar reciprocating movement that I detect in the humanities (Deacon 2013, 2014; Deely 2007; Gorlee 1994; Korning-Zethsen 2007; Kress 2010; Marais 2014; Marais and Kull 2016; Merrell 1998a, 2000, 2003; Petrilli 2003; Wheeler 2006). Here I attempt to join this debate from the humanities side of the Cartesian divide, i.e. to include considerations about the meatiness of thinking and the implications thereof for translation studies. In a postmodern climate of thought, one of the larger intellectual projects would be to continue to rethink the Cartesian divide. While scholars in the humanities know a lot about thinking, I claim, following Merrell (1998, 2000, 2003), that we have not sufficiently theorised the meatiness of

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thinking, the materiality of being human. Though Marxist thought and forms of embodied-cognition studies, among others, are dealing with the materiality of human existence, it remains on the agenda of the humanities to reciprocate the move by biologists in order to work out the implications of new developments in their thought and to see where and how we can meet them. I have to make it clear that I am not going the route of cognitive science, rather following Merrell (1998, 96) and Deacon (2014) in maintaining that cognitive science should be embedded in a conceptualization of semiotics. From both sides of the Cartesian divide, complexity thinking (for an overview of complexity theory, see Marais 2014) is used to provide a conceptual space for thinking about these matters (Deacon 2013; Kauffman 1995; Merrell 1998b, 2000, 2003; Morin 2008). Underlying the conceptual effort in this chapter is a philosophy or meta-theory of complexity. I have made the argument elsewhere that, given a philosophy of complexity and given a Peircean understanding of translation, translation studies is in the unique position to argue for translation as one of the missing links in thinking about the Cartesian divide (Marais 2014). Linking my thought to the likes of Latour (2007), Searle (1995, 1998), Sawyer (2005) and others, I have argued that social reality emerges from the semiotic interactions between human beings (Marais 2014; Marais and Kull 2016). I also used Olivier de Sardan’s (2005) anthropological views on development, which he conceptualises as the very emerging of social forms by way of meaning-making actions. Whereas most of the scholars upon whom I base my work have argued that society emerges from linguistic interactions (Sawyer 2005), I am expanding symbolic interactionism by arguing that society emerges from semiotic interactions between human organisms.1 In Peirce’s conceptualisation, these interactions all constitute translations, i.e. the process of creating interpretants (Gorlee 1994; Marais and Kull 2016; Merrell 2003; Peirce 1994), which means that translation can be studied as the process underlying the emergence of the social or cultural. My conceptualisation follows the Peircean conceptualisation of semiosis,2 where language is just one of the modes of semiosis, not all of it (Deacon 2014, 97; see Merrell 1998, 2000, 2003 for lengthy and detailed discussions about how much more than language is entailed in semiosis). Thus, in this chapter, I explore aspects of a theory of translation that entails intersemiotic translation in its broadest conceptualisation (Aguiar and Queiros 2013) and its implications for the emergence of society, i.e. a 1

Biosemiotic theory includes all living organisms in the study of semiotics, and I agree with it. However, this chapter focuses on human semiotics. 2 The term “semiosis” is used when referring to the semiotic process or action.

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semiotics-sociology of translation (Latour 2007). The particular questions that I address here are as follows: Can we have a translation studies that explains translation on a continuum ranging from the biological to the social without recourse to some form of dualism? Can we have a translation studies that explains the whole range of translational actions, not only translational phenomena linked to language and not only translational phenomena linked to biases in particular cultures? Perhaps, in its most basic form, the question is: Can we have a translation studies that explain how any and all translation contributes to the emergence of social reality without the Cartesian split between nature and culture? Therefore, I take as my point of departure the argument made by philosophers, theoretical biologists and biosemioticians that human nature is inextricably, paradoxically both meat and mind. I argue that semiotics and biosemiotics provide us with conceptual tools not only to accept this dictum but also to study it empirically. In particular, I argue that translation, conceptualised by Charles Peirce as the process of creating interpretants, creates the conceptual space to study the emergence of mind, and therefore the social/cultural, from matter. In previous work, I linked translation to development but found that my conceptual underpinning for this effort was somewhat thin. By linking translation and development by means of a biosemiotics framework, it is possible to achieve a richer, postmodern3 conceptualisation for the emergence of the social and the cultural, i.e. development (Olivier de Sardan 2005). This work in translation and development links up with the current interest in the sociology of translation4 and the agency of translators in society. As can be seen from the above, this framework is inter-, multi- or even transdisciplinary. Far from a full conceptualisation of the matter at hand, I here attempt to provide some basic markers of a broad meta-theoretical, somewhat philosophical, interdisciplinary framework as a starting point for considering the broadest possible range of translations where translation is a semiotic rather than a linguistic phenomenon. I am thus trying to explore what would happen if we did factor in human nature as one of a number of possible explanations for why society is the way it is, without falling back into eugenics. How can we free the humanities from the implications of the Cartesian schism, explaining human nature? I am trying to cooperate with theoretical biologists and 3

In the sense that Deely (2007) uses the word. In translation studies, “sociology of translation” refers to sociological aspects of the phenomenon of translation (Wolf 2009, 2011, 2012). In sociology, “sociology of translation” refers to a sociology that is characterized by processes of translation (Siever 2016). 4

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biosemioticians in conceptualising the erasure of the Cartesian schism. I am probably questioning some of the most basic tenets of Western thought on what it means to be human. I am probably also trying to develop an ecological way of thinking about the role of translation in the emergence of human existence in all of its facets. I am definitely suggesting that translation studies would benefit from expanding its interest beyond translation proper (Jakobson 2004; Korning-Zethsen 2007).

2. Translation: The process underlying semiosis Roman Jakobson conceptualised translation on the basis of semiotic theory.5 Following Peirce, Jakobson (1980, 10) bases his argument that all interpretation is translation on the continuous and infinite nature of the semiosic process. Jakobson (2004, 39) claims that “… the meaning of any linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative sign”, especially a sign “in which it is more fully developed”. On the basis of this conceptualisation, he distinguishes three types of translation. The first he calls intralingual translation, or rewording, and by that he means “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language” (Jakobson 2004, 139). The second category is interlingual translation, or translation proper, which refers to “… an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other sign” (Jakobson 2004, 139). The third category is intersemiotic translation, which is “… an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (Jakobson 2004, 139). For Jakobson and Peirce, semiosis is a process of creating meaning by means of creating an interpretant, i.e. interpretation. The interpretant, Peirce (1994, 1.339) argues, can and usually does become a representamen itself, leading to yet another interpretant, ad infinitum. The point is that every interpretant develops the previous interpretant further (Merrell 1997, 11), specifying it or giving more information about it. It is in this sense that semiosis is a never-ending process, entailing the ability always to create new interpretants. This means that a final interpretant is either a theoretical or a pragmatic matter (De Waal 2013). As I have argued elsewhere (Marais and Kull 2016), Jakobson’s view leaves translation studies scholars with a problem. The way in which he conceptualises intersemiotic translation is limited to the interpretation of “verbal signs” by means of “nonverbal sign systems”. He does not 5

Eco (2001), for one, does not agree with his conceptualisation, but see my refutation of Eco (Marais and Kull 2016).

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comment on whether the opposite is also possible, that is, whether one can translate “nonverbal sign systems” into “verbal signs”, which is actually what Peirce’s conceptualisation allows for. Jakobson’s linguistic and perhaps anthropocentric bias causes him to ignore intersemiotic translations between non-verbal semiosic systems, which biosemioticians, among others, claim do exist (Hoffmeyer 2008; see also Gorlee 1994; Kress 2010). Jakobson thus opens up the possibility of intersemiotic translation, but he does not follow the logical implications of his argument to its conclusion. Rather, he limits his conceptualisation to forms of translation that are related to the meaning of “translation” in the ordinary sense of the word, i.e. interlinguistic translation. If one reads what Peirce says about translation, on which Jakobson based his argument, it is clear that Peirce does not limit translation to verbal semiosic systems (Gorlee 1994, 26–27, 31). However, Peirce’s conceptualisation also raises some questions. Most of his references to translation take the form of the following quote: conception of a “meaning,” which is, in its primary acceptation, the translation of a sign into another system of signs (Peirce 1994, 4.127)

From one point of view, translation and interpretation6 could be seen to be the same thing, which means that the creation of meaning (interpretation) “is” translation. So the question is: Was Peirce not aware of the problem he was creating by equating interpretation and translation, or did he have something else in mind? I argue that Peirce’s work provides evidence that he did not try to equate translation and interpretation. Consider the following quote from Peirce: Transuasion (suggesting translation, transaction, transfusion, transcendental, etc.) is mediation, or the modification of firstness and secondness by thirdness, taken apart from the secondness and firstness; or, is being in creating Obsistence. (Peirce 1994, 2.89)

Here, Peirce discusses semiosis, the way in which signs work or in which meaning is created, namely sign-action. The outcome of this process is thirdness, or an interpretant or series of interpretants or interpretation. The process through which this takes place is translation, i.e. the translation of interpretants into interpretants. It is not verbal meaning that is translated,

6

In Peircean terms, interpretation refers to the formation of interpretants, not to oral translation as is usual in current translation studies.

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but firstness7 and secondness that are translated by thirdness or into thirdness. This quote clarifies two matters. Firstly, translation entails much more than interlingual translation (Gorlee 1994; Merrell 2000). In fact, it should include all forms of biosemiotic translation. Secondly, translation denotes the semiotic process of turning interpretants into more interpretants. Translation is essentially a process, a linking-creating process, a meaningcreating process. In this conceptualisation, translation is the semiosic process that leads to interpretation as an outcome of the process. Thus, for the link between translation and development8 to be clarified, I am expanding Peirce’s framework into a complex emergent conceptualisation of semiosis with a focus on process and organisation (Deacon 2013; Merrell 1997, 2003). I propose to explicate his notion of semiosis by conceptualising semiosis from a complex dynamic systems perspective (Marais and Kull 2016) in the same vein as Merrell (1997, 2003) has suggested. This means that the study of semiosis should include not only the logical relationships between representamen, object and interpretant but also a focus on the historical-material processes of semiosis, the relationship-processes between semiosic phenomena in real time and space, the way in which semiosis entails a process that creates and develops meaning (Robinson 2011). In particular, the study of semiosis should also focus on signs of firstness and secondness, as Merrell (2003) convincingly argues. The logical implication of this view is that development also entails semiosic development, i.e. the development of one interpretant into 7

For readers unfamiliar with the Peircean categories of thought, see De Waal (2013) and Merrell (2000). In short, the categories are as follows (Merrell 2000, 21): 1. Firstness: what there is such as it is, without reference to or interrelation with anything else (i.e., a quality, sensation, sentiment, or in other words, the mere possibility of some consciousness of something). 2. Secondness: what there is such as it is, in interrelation with something else, but without relation to any third entity (i.e., it can include the consciousness of the self-conscious self of something other than itself). 3. Thirdness: what there is such as it is, insofar as it is capable of brining a second entity into interrelation with a first one (i.e. by way of mediation of the categories of Firstness and Secondness). 8 Development is a highly fuzzy and contested notion, referring to many things and representing many different perspectives. For an overview, see (Brett 2009; Coetzee et al. 2001; Haynes 2008; Rabbani 2011). In particular, Olivier de Sardan (2005) uses the term “development” to refer to all human responses or adaptation to their environment, a position I strongly support later in the chapter. Also see Marais (2014).

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another interpretant. For this view, Olivier de Sardan’s (2005) work as well as the wide-ranging work of Latour (2007) provide ample evidence. Suffice it to point out here that development is a process based on the translation of systems of meaning into further systems of meaning, irrespective of the nature of those systems, for example, economic, political, cultural or legal.9 It is also a process in which human beings respond to a particular time-space environment by constructing meaningful responses. Humans and groups of humans are inevitably drawn by time and space to interpret their environment by constructing cultural, social, material interpretants. They are then drawn to respond to those interpretants by translating them into more developed interpretants. In this conceptualisation, development does not have the connotation of better or more advanced. Rather, it has the qualification of providing greater understanding, being more meaningful, a response that is more apt, allowing organisms to flourish (Merrell 1998). Given this conceptualisation, one is free not only to ask of development interpretants how they compare with other interpretants but whether they are meaningful, given the particular spatial-temporal constellation of the context in which they occur. Because development is always normative and ethical, one also asks whether this particular interpretant allows the organisms to flourish. Because fallibilism is inherent in human interpretants, one would always need further translations, searching for interpretants under which humanity can flourish even more. What is a crucial implication of this view, however, is that development is a meaning-constructing movement. A possible interpretation of my argument as claiming pan-semioticism requires a short comment here. My argument here and in the following sections claims, on the basis of the strong link between Peirce’s semiotics and his phenomenology, that all human action, including development, entails a semiotic aspect.10 The wording is crucial here. I do not claim that all action is semiosis. I argue that all human action, including all and any mental actions that humans take, entails a semiotic aspect. Action is not all semiosis, but all action has a semiotic aspect, just as all action has aspects

9

Note that Roland Barthes (1986) has argued in the 1960s and 1970s already that social and cultural systems are also semiotic systems (see also Gorlee 1994, 33– 37). 10 For views on semiosis in non-human animals, see Favareau (2007) for a detailed bibliography. Also see Sebeok (2001) and Von Uexkull (1940).

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of time or space. As phenomena of the human experience, it cannot be different.11

3. Biosemiotics: Expanding meaning Although my view of semiosis makes it possible to conceptualise the development of meaning and meaningful systems in human society or culture, I need a second step to overcome the Cartesian schism, an aim I set out in the introduction. This step entails expanding semiosis to include biosemiosis. This move is necessary to present a unified explanation of the development of meaning by living organisms, of which homo sapiens forms part. I take my lead from Peirce (1994, 1.409), who views semiosis as one of the habits that living organisms have taken. All living organisms need to interact with their environment and need to interpret information from the environment in terms of their own existence. Kauffman (2008) calls it the distinction between “yum” and “yuck”, which is basic to the survival of all organisms. John Deely (2007) refers to this basic interpretation that all organisms have to make whenever they perceive something, namely approach, avoid or ignore. This interaction with the environment on the basis of interpreting information thus entails semiosis (Cobley 2010, 3–4). Semiosis refers to the ability of all living organisms to take any phenomenon (representamen) as standing for or in the place of any other phenomenon (object), leading to (further) meaning (interpretant). This is the basic semiosic ability that distinguishes living systems from non-living matter (Favareau 2007; Hoffmeyer 2008; Kull 2007; Sebeok and Danesi 2000). It is also sometimes called the lower semiosic threshold. If one takes the various aspects of this conceptualisation, they refer to the following: x “to take”, in whichever way, e.g. through highly developed sensory awareness such as consciousness or through rudimentary sensory awareness (without consciousness) x “something”, whatever it may be, including all things possible and impossible that can be distinguishable, i.e. the proverbial difference that makes a difference

11

For a detailed discussion about Peircean phenomenology, see De Waal (2001; 2013). For a detailed discussion about semiosis as the link between reality and mind, see Deely (2007) and also Cobley (2010).

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x “as” anything that a living being takes it for, from the survivalist yum or yuck, the quite tangible iconic and indexical to the fantastic symbolic x “something else”, whatever the “else” may be, namely the interpretant which can be as simple as yum or yuck or as complex as a god or a worldview or a culture. The ability to function semiosically allows organisms to form a response to their environment, taking into account the needs of the organism as a whole. As this ability evolved, it allowed more than mere unmediated responses. It allowed organisms to transcend the confinements of space and time by being able to interpret things in reality as signs of things that are absent (Deacon 2013). With the semiosic ability, organisms can interpret things from other spaces or from other times, both past and future, as signs relevant to their existence. Thus entered the absential, i.e. meaning, intentions, aboutness, into the fray of organism life. The emergence of biosemiosic ability thus entails one of the explanations of the absential in organism life. Developing Deacon’s (2013) fascinating work in this field further is a job for another day. Suffice it to say that the evolution of the organism’s ability to deal with more than the “immediate” by means of the “mediate” to some extent frees its existence from the constraints of space and time, allowing it better options for survival. In fact, my argument is that, in humans, this ability has evolved so far that they tend to think that they have severed the link with time and space and body altogether, giving birth to all kinds of radical constructivist ideas (see also Merrell 1998, 2003). Post-Cartesian thinking should maintain the semiosic paradox, namely that meaning entails constructing a response to an environment, an “Other”, as a Second (Merrell 1998). At the very least, meaning has a spatial-temporal substrate in the human brain, and even the most fanciful flights of the imagination relate somehow to the coordinates of time and space. In Deely’s (2007, 13) words, semiosis and biosemiosis assist scholarship in their efforts to “transcend the oppositions of nature to culture, inner to outer, ens reale (being independent of mind) to ens rationis (being dependent on mind)”. The way in which biosemiotics based on Peircean thought allows one to conceptualise both mind and matter in paradoxical fashion makes it possible to conceptualise all possible translation phenomena. Thus, with the addition of a biosemiotics perspective, I now consider the way in which meaning develops in living organisms through translation, focusing on, but not limiting myself to, human beings.

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4. The development of meaning: Translating interpretants In this section, I draw together the ideas on translation and biosemiotics made above and work out some implications for thinking about development. Though translation studies has been involved in thinking about developmental contexts by means of its links with postcolonial and cultural studies and, more recently, the interests in agency, sociology and power, it has not yet conceptualised its thinking in terms of thinking in the field of development studies. Similarly, development studies has, with one or two exceptions, not conceptualised its thinking in terms of translation studies (Lewis and Mosse 2006). One of the points of debate in development studies is the high failure rate of development efforts of all kinds. Each new turn in development studies claims to have found the missing link which the previous approaches have missed. A point that is made time and time again in the context of development failure is that development efforts are often more about the development specialists who want do get something done than about the people who “need development” (Westoby and Dowling 2013, 55–56), i.e. it is more about applying technical know-how than (also) facilitating the creation of meaning. My argument in this section is that the semiotic response theory of development that I am putting forward can assist with this problem in a number of ways. Firstly, it provides scholars of development with a descriptive approach whereby to describe and understand development practices rather than tools for doing development or norms for what societies should look like. Secondly, with the philosophy of complex adaptive systems underlying the semiosic response theory of development, it will become clear that it is part of the reductionist fallacy and the Cartesian schism to think that semiosic systems as complex as development contexts can be managed to success. Thirdly, it provides a framework for translation studies scholars to study all kinds of translational actions that contribute to the emergence of society. Finally, it conceptualises development as (also) a meaningmaking endeavour, a meaning-making response to a particular space-time. In what follows, I provide a brief introduction to current thinking in development studies. I then briefly discuss Olivier de Sardan’s development anthropology and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to development as a link to my thinking before attempting to explore the implications of the biosemiotic response theory for development.

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Development studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that arose at the end of World War II.12 While development or progress has been a topic of thinking since the Ancient Greeks, development studies is a phenomenon with its own history, aims and conceptualisations (Rist 2002). It developed in the wake of the fall of Empire and the decolonisation of the middle of the 20th century, looking for alternative relationships between the former colonial states and the new, independent states. Broadly speaking, it operates as an interdiscipline between economics, political science and sociology. Historically, the field of study moved through three broad phases. Firstly, the structuralist-functionalist phase between 1945 and 1970 operated on the basis that, if the correct structures like democracy and a free market were in place, development would follow naturally. Secondly, between 1970 and 1990, market liberalism dominated with countries from the Global South expected to follow market control strictly. Thirdly, since the 1990s, a neoliberal approach coupled with massive criticism against the development project as such, mainly from deconstructionists, were dominant. Currently, thinking is permeated with a variety of complexity thinking which tries to balance the market with some state control and input from civil society (Brett 2009). The thinking espoused in the previous paragraph all pertains to macrolevel theories. Korten (1990) actually argued convincingly that development takes place not only at the macro level but at four levels or, in his terms, generations: providing direct help, e.g. food, to people in a moment of crisis; building capacity for people to solve their own problems, e.g. training; efforts to change local, national and global institutions and policies; and mobilizing people’s movements around the world. Thus, one of the shifts in thinking about development has been to community development, a people-centred approach or what is sometimes called a “bottom-up” or “grassroots” approach. In particular, Olivier de Sardan (2005, 15) suggests a comparative approach to development in which development is conceptualised as an adaptive response to a particular context. In his view, social change occurs pervasively, and all societies have to respond to it. He argues that all societies, not only postcolonial or un(der)developed ones, have to develop in response to social change. Olivier de Sardan (2005, 69) thus puts forward a localised approach to development in which he emphasises the meaning-making nature of development without theorising it semiotically. Instead, he (Olivier de Sardan 2005, 91) theorises it hermeneutically, i.e. 12 See Section A in Coetzee et al. (2001) for conceptual and historical perspectives on development thinking.

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as interpretation, creating meaning. His work of opening up development studies to the interests of meaning and understanding is invaluable, and much of what I wish to do builds on his initiative. Nussbaum’s human capabilities approach has become influential as a people-centred approach to development. She argues that economic and political measurements at the macro level, e.g. GDP or whether there is a democratic government in a country, do not necessarily say anything about what it means to be human in a particular country (Nussbaum 2011; Nussbaum and Sen 1993). One example is that a high GDP could hide a wide gap between rich and poor by focusing on the average income per capita. She thus argues that development should be aimed at creating opportunities for human beings to develop their potential, whatever that may be. To this end, she presents a list of capabilities that she claims have some general relevance all over the world and could thus be negotiated in every development situation to decide on a focus (Nussbaum 2011). While I agree that her theory entails a major step forward, it leaves out semiosis in general and language in particular as a crucial factor in development. Also, it is driven by a particular set of goals, rather than being open-ended as a complex adaptive process inherently is. Furthermore, development studies could benefit from a semiotic conceptualisation for at least two reasons. Firstly, a semiotic conceptualisation will provide development studies with a descriptive tool that will be valuable in efforts better to understand what development entails. Approaches such as the human capabilities approach are highly normative in that they set values that need to be achieved. It cannot be denied that development is a value-laden endeavour, and I would not want to change that. What I would suggest, however, is to broaden the thinking with a descriptive approach that will help with understanding a problem that we do not understand well (yet). Secondly, in a semiotic approach to development, considering development as a clash of “universes of the mind”, to quote Lotman (1990, 2005), will allow one better to understand and guide the process itself, not as some goal to be strived for but as responding to the environment into which we are born by creating our own meaning to the best of our ability. I think the point is that nobody knows what the end-result of development will be. It is an open-ended process. Thus, goal-oriented development studies run the risk of closing down the openness of an essentially open, non-linear, complex semiosic process before it has even started. Westoby and Dowling (2013) take an important step in the direction of conceptualising development in terms of meaning-making when they base their approach to community development in dialogue. With this move,

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they not only invite language into the debate but, more basically, they situate development at the level of intersubjectivity, to which I return later. This truly postmodern approach, in the sense that Deely (2007) defines it, does not aim at an outcome and, from this perspective, cannot fail. This is an important point. Development has been conceptualised normatively since its inception, and thus it is no wonder that it failed. Being human cannot be a failure. Responding to an environment into which you were born can probably be regarded as more effective or less effective, but can it be said to have failed? You can only fail if you do not reach a pre-set goal. For humanity, there is no such goal, which is why I chose the title (borrowing from Latour (1993)): “We have never been un(der)developed”. Being human, being a semiosic being, means responding in a creative way by constructing meaningful responses. These are the implications of the continuous nature of semiosis. In fact, Olivier de Sardan has emphasised this basic point: Development is a meaning-making response to an Other, a point that I work out semiotically in what follows. Whether conceptualised at macro or micro levels, whether thought of as an economic, political or human-centred endeavour, whether a technical or a hermeneutical or a dialogical activity, development entails a biosemiotic aspect. Development presupposes biosemiotic interactions between human beings (Sawyer 2005) which, given the argument above, presupposes translation. Once again, I am not claiming that development is biosemiosis or translation. I am claiming that development entails a biosemiotic and thus a translational aspect, or that it presupposes biosemiotics and translational interaction. Following from the above, I now draw a few outlines of a semiotic response theory of development, in which translation entails the semiosic process as argued in the first section. My argument runs as follows: Living organisms arrive in a pre-existing world. For their survival, they need to respond to this world in an appropriate way. If not, they will not flourish, at best, or they will not survive, at worst (Cobley 2010, 3–4). Except for the physical and biological responses, living organisms have to respond to their environment semiosically. In other words, they have to respond to their environment by “interpreting” stimuli from the environment as information about something. In Kaufmann’s terms, they need to decide whether something is “yum” or “yuck”, and in Deely’s terms, they need to decide whether to avoid, approach or ignore. For simple organisms, this process is also simple and could be called something like “proto-semiosis” because there is no consciousness in the sense that there is with humans. However, it still is a “proto-decision” based on semiosis because it can go wrong. Interpreting “yum” instead of “yuck” can be fatal.

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This very basic semiosic response becomes much more complex in higher life forms. In plants, it takes a different form, in non-human animals, yet another form, and in human animals, yet another form. All life forms, however, share this ability and task. The important point that flows from this discussion is that all organisms are, temporally speaking, secondary to their environment. This means that they must respond to that environment. I am well aware that the notion of response will not sit well with many scholars because the Western paradigm of thought (even translation studies) have been emphasising human agency and mastery over the environment through constructivist thinking. It is indeed my intention to deconstruct this way of thinking by arguing that organisms are, first and foremost, responding to an environment in order to maintain their existence. The implication of this point is that the relationship to the environment should be a factor in development thinking and practice. Deely (2007) argues convincingly that relationality is at the heart of life. No living organism exists without real relationships with other organisms or the environment. The environment in which any development action takes place has been shaped by a particular space and time, which needs to be factored into thinking about the action. This means that a semiotic response theory takes a stance against cultural reductionism in which development (or postcolony in most cases) is seen as a contestation of ideas with little attention to the material conditions in which the contestation takes place and which makes possible the contestation itself. The second point is that development, conceptualised in terms of semiotic responses, is thoroughly political and ethical. It is such because the Other is factored into the definition of response. As indicated in the previous paragraph, one of the problems that humanity has not yet able been to solve is that of relationality–in particular, relations with the Other. Deely (2007) argues that one reason for this is the solipsistic bias in modernist philosophy. His argument is that, because of the Cartesian schism, intersubjective intentionality between humans and their environment has been rejected. Thus, what I can know is inside of my head, the prisoner of arbitrary linguistic symbols. My knowledge is something that I, as an agent, construct irrespective of an environment. In fact, I am not able to know that environment, nor am I able to know the human Other. The implication is solipsism: I am contained inside the activities of my mind. By means of a semiotic conceptualisation, Deely shows the way in which we would be able to say that intentional existence, i.e. living, entails relationships and cannot be thought of apart from relationships, which are suprasubjective. To use Deely’s example, a frog

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cannot be a frog without its relationship to the swamp in which it lives. It is related to that swamp for food, shelter, breeding partners, oxygen, water and so forth. The important point is that these relationships are not incidental or epiphenomenal. The swamp is constitutive to the frog’s being. It is the relationship between the frog and the swamp that allows the frog to exist. A semiotic response theory of development allows one to overcome the solipsism of modernist and so-called postmodernist thinking. Deely argues that most of what is called postmodern philosophy is still caught in this solipsism while real postmodern thinking is communicative, suprasubjective, relational, dialogic (cf. Westoby and Dowling (2013)). So what is the other? In development, the other is matter, time, space, organisms (human and non-human), society, culture. These are all others with which human beings have to deal in trying to create a meaningful existence. Development will thus have to deal with the irrefutability of the other. In this sense, a semiotic response theory to development is deeply political and ethical. By definition, it deals with relations, which pertains to power, responsibility and ethics. This response to the other, however, is a construction of meaning, achieved by translating. In this regard, Deely (2007) again points the way. Thinking of human beings as meaning-creating animals rather than merely thinking or doing animals, holds much more potential for development (Deely 2007; Merrell 2003). Falling back on Peirce, we see that humans become aware of (firstness) the other (secondness) by means of a meaning-constructing activity (thirdness), i.e. translation. Being human means that this triad underpins your existence. You are continually translating objects into interpretants or interpretants into interpretants. Although it is true that the other is, temporally, first, semiotic agents respond with a constructing activity, interpreting the secondness of the other, responding to it by creating interpretants, which are actions, cultural artefacts, societies. Development is thus both a response and a construction. Deely (2007) points out that one will never be able to sever the ties between self and other, knowledge of reality and reality. These notions are relationships. Thus development is relationally constructed in a meaning-making response to an Other. The theory I am suggesting thus allows one to ask different questions about development. Rather than asking how we can all attain certain standards, we can ask: How do human beings construct responses to their environment in order to flourish? Rather than asking with Brett (2009) how the whole of humanity can achieve what the West has, we can ask: How do human beings construct responses to the agency of the Other?

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Asking these questions from a non-prescriptive, non-normative, yet deeply political and ethical perspective, may allow us better to understand and better to do development. Conceptualising development from the perspective of complex semiotic responses by means of the translation of interpretants, we would have a descriptive approach to development that is non-reductionistic, ethical, with a non-dualist ontology and the ability to deal with both the material and the virtual nature of human existence.

5. Translating development: Two cases My aim in this section is to demonstrate the analytical purchase of the theoretical markers I have put forward, analysing (non-language) semiotic phenomena and translation processes in a developmental context. In South Africa in general and in South African universities in particular, transformation is high on the agenda. In the South African context, transformation refers to the need to redress the inequalities caused by years of colonisation in general and apartheid in particular. In this sense, it is both a decolonisation and a development project with the aim of giving Black South Africans their rightful place in their country of birth. Thus, like all South African universities, the University of the Free State (UFS) is grappling with the transformation process, changing names in public spaces, considering the removal of colonial and apartheid statues from public spaces and reconsidering its language policy. Against this background, I present two sets of data, which do not necessarily form part of the mainstream debate on transformation but which illustrate my argument. The first set of data refers to the construction of new buildings on campus and the second to the gowns used by officials during official events of the university. Both sets of data were chosen because they entail semiotic and translational aspects which are not linguistic in nature. Firstly, in Figure 1, I present you with one possible semiotic system which could act as a source system when thinking about housing on a South African university campus, in particular if you wish to create a space at the university that could be called “African”. Please note that I am not arguing in favour of such a space. I am merely engaging in a thought experiment, claiming that should a university’s management decide that part of their transformation drive would be to develop some form of indigenised semiotic universe (Lotman 1990, 2005) on the campus, this could be one source from which to draw meaning. The particular figure pictures indigenous housing juxtaposed to an ox wagon (brought to South Africa by White settlers). The indigenous housing most probably

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represents Griqua housing in the 18th or early 19th century. Note the round shape and that it used natural material, i.e. grass, wood and sticks. Once again, I am not suggesting that modern housing should look like any of the two possibilities in Figure 1, although translating them into modern semiotic systems would not be beyond the imagination. I am pointing out the fact that any or both of these could have acted as source semiotic systems for housing projects at a university in an African context. Figure 1: Examples of traditional housing in South African history

Compare this possible semiotic source system to the current semiotic target system. Figure 2 pictures the latest residences that have just been erected on campus. It is clear that there is no relationship between the semiotic systems in Figure 1 and Figure 2. Figure 2 most probably used particular European semiotic systems as sources if one looks at the straight lines and the materials, i.e. bricks, steel and glass. There is nothing in this target system that gives any clue to having been linked to the semiotic systems of housing in Africa. By not translating from this kind of source system, the UFS, it could be argued, is choosing to make use of foreign semiotic sources, therefore translating, through their choice, a particular semiotic system onto the campus of the UFS. In this case, they are translating from a system that has no connection to African semiotic systems. African semiotic systems are thus negated or ignored via the translation choices of the management of the UFS. In the process, the UFS is building a university with strong links to Western semiotic systems. On the positive side, one could argue that they are trying to create a university

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with a universal, not tribal, semiotic universe or that they are seeking the largest number of housing units for the lowest cost.

Figure 2: New UFS residence

The second set of data refers to clothing. Figure 3 is a photo of Basotho in their traditional clothing. My interest here is on the blankets, which by the way are made for the King of Lesotho by a British company (but that is a story for another day). In the region in South Africa in which the UFS is located, the Basotho are the majority population group.

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Figure 3: Basotho in traditional dress

Figure 4 shows the Chancellor and Vice-chancellor of the UFS with a guest speaker after a recent graduation ceremony. On the surface, this picture could have been taken anywhere else in the world, with typically Western gowns, caps and hoods. Figure 4: Academic dress at the UFS

However, if one were to zoom in on the back of the gowns of the dignitaries, one would see that the UFS has taken some of the motives from the Basotho blankets and worked them into the Western academic gowns. Figure 5 below is an example of one of the designs from the back of a gown.

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Figure 5: Mootive on the acaddemic dress

This second set of daata shows how w two meaninng systems, orr semiotic systems, havve been combiined to create new meaningg. In the combiination of Western accademic dresss with Basottho traditionaal dress, the UFS is maintaining meaningful links with two o sets of meanning systems:: Western academia annd African cultural c roots. Though thiss hybridity iss, in this particular seet of data, merrely at a symb bolic and perhaaps ceremoniaal level, it is nonetheleess an examplle of how the translation oof meaning caan lead to developmentt, i.e. the creaation of new sy ystems of meaaning. In this particular case, officiaaldom has been indigeniseed to some exxtent by endo owing an institution off Western origgin with symbo olism from thee African conttext. Obviously, the data thhat I present offers o scope fo for much moree detailed analyses. Thhis will have to wait for an nother day, hoowever, as I here h only point to thhe way in which w translattion studies could do deescriptive, comparativee analyses of intersemiotic i translations t thhat play a major role in determiningg the developm ment of a socieety.

6. Concllusion Studyingg the semiotic features off social and ccultural structtures and artefacts alllows scholarship of all kin nds to maintaain a meaning g-making interest in thhe developmeent of society. Meaning, whhich lies at thee heart of organismic llife, is the anttidote to techn nique, mechannism, reductio onism and rationalism, which have come c to dominate the modeernist and eveen the socalled postm modernist parradigm in Weestern thought ht. Like the su ubtitle of Henning andd Scarfe’s (20013) edited volume v whichh claims to bee “Putting life back intto biology”, trranslation stud dies could be ““Putting mean ning back into developpment”. One of o the implicaations of my thhesis is that trranslation studies has w within its concceptual apparaatus the ability ty to assist thee world in

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understanding its (the world’s) development. If translation studies were to disentangle itself from the strangle-hold of language and base itself in semiotics, a whole new avenue of research will open up. Translation studies scholars have at their disposal the notion of translation, of the process of meaning-making, of the transformation of objects into interpretants and interpretants into new interpretants, of the complexity of semiosic processes with which to serve scholarship on development. They have the conceptual apparatus to explain the “thinkiness” of meat and the “meatiness” of thinking. They have the conceptual apparatus to help solve one of the most pervasive problems in all scholarship: the Cartesian schism. In this sense, translation studies would be able to partake in the construction of a really postmodern scholarship that explores the nature of relational existence within a wholly ecological paradigm.

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Kull, K., and P. Torop. 2003. Biotranslation: Translation between Umwelten. In Translation Translation, ed. S. Petrilli, 315–28. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Latour, B. 1993. We have never been modern. Trans. H. Wheatsheaf. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —. 2007. Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, D., and D. Mosse. 2006. Development brokers and translators: The ethnography of aid and agencies. Bloomfield: Kumarian Press. Lotman, Y. M. 1990. Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. Trans. A. Shukman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lotman, J. 2005. On the semiosphere. Sign Systems Studies 33 (1): 205– 29. Marais, J. 2014. Translation theory and development studies: A complexity theory approach. London: Routledge. Marais, J., and K. Kull. 2016. Translating living: On the concept of translation in biosemiotics and translation studies. In Border crossings: Translation studies and other disciplines, ed. Y. Gambier and L. Van Doorslaer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [BTL 126] Merrell, F. 1997. Peirce, signs and meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —. 1998a. Sensing semiosis: Toward the possibility of complementary cultural "logics". New York: St Martin’s Press. —. 1998b. Simplicity and complexity: Pondering literature, science and painting. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. —. 2000. Change through signs of body, mind and language. Prospect Heights: Waveland. —. 2003. Sensing corporeally. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Morin, E. 2008. On complexity. Trans. R. Postel. Cresskill: Hampton Press. Nussbaum, M. 2011. Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Cambridge: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University. Nussbaum, M., and A. Sen. 1993. The quality of life. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Olivier de Sardan, J. P. 2005. Anthropology and development: Understanding contemporary social change. Trans. A. T. Alou. London: Zed Books. Peirce, C. S. 1994. The collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge: The Murray Printing Company. Petrilli, S., ed. 2003. Translation translation. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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Rabbani, M. J. 2011. The development and antidevelopment debate: Critical reflections on the philosophical foundations. Surrey: Ashgate. Rist, G. 2002. The history of development: From Western origins to global faith. 2nd ed. Trans. P Camiller. London: Zed Books. Robinson, D. 2011. Translation and the problem of sway. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sawyer, R. K. 2005. Social emergence: Societies as complex systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schwarz, H. 2005. Mission impossible: Introducing postcolonial studies in the US academy. In A companion to postcolonial studies, ed. H. Schwarz and S. Ray, 1–20. Oxford: Blackwell. Searle, J. R. 1995. The construction of social reality. New York: The Free Press. —. 1998. Mind, language and society. New York: Basic Books. Sebeok, T. A. 2001. Global semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sebeok, T. A, and M. Danesi. 2000. The forms of meaning: Modeling systems theory and semiotic analysis. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Siever, H. 2016. Fractalization: The human condition as a translational condition. In Translation beyond the postcolony, ed. J. Marais and A. E. Feinauer. London: Cambridge Scholars. Von Uexkull, J. 1940. The theory of meaning. Repr., Semiotica 42 no. 1 (1982): 25–87. Westoby, P., and G. Dowling. 2013. Theory and practice of dialogical community development: International perspectives. New York: Routledge. Wheeler, W. 2006. The whole creature: Complexity, biosemiotics and the evolution of culture. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Wolf, M. 2009. The implications of a sociological turn: Methodological and disciplinary questions. In Translation research projects 2, ed. A. Pym and A. Perekrestenko. Tarragona: Intercultural Studies Group. —. 2011. Mapping the field: Sociological perspectives on translation. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 207:1–28. —. 2012. The sociology of translation and its "activist" turn. Translation and Interpreting Studies 7 (2): 129–43.

CHAPTER TWO THE DISCOURSE (AND SILENCE) ON LITERARY TRANSLATION INTO SWAHILI DURING BRITISH RULE: TRANSLATION AS DECONSECRATION1 SERENA TALENTO

1. Introduction In this paper, I discuss the use of translation within literary exchanges as a form of “deconsecration”.2 With this term I refer to a process inverse to the one described by Casanova (2004, 126–27) as “consecration”. While translation within transnational literary exchanges can represent a symbolic resource for winning literary visibility and legitimacy by means of accumulating literary capital or gathering literary resources, I will point to an alternative operation of subtracting literary and symbolic capital which takes place by means of translation, or particularly by the construction of a discourse on translation which popularises categories of perception patronising the defective position of the target language and literature. When a field of reproduction of knowledge is monopolised by an exogenous authority–as in the case of a colonial regime or a mandate– translation and its discourses can represent a strategy to tone down the prestige of the target literary field. My case study explores the import of literary texts within the Swahili literary field under the historical circumstances of British rule in Tanganyika, with the aim of understanding

1

I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke, who read the draft manuscript and offered her insightful comments. For any errors or inadequacies that may remain in this work, the responsibility is entirely my own. 2 Preliminary thoughts on the notion of translation as deconsecration can be found in Talento (2014, 52–57).

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the ways translation was conceptualised, and sheds light on the logics underlying the literary exchanges. Swahili is a Bantu language, which emerged on the East African coast around the 9th century (Nurse and Spear 1985, 49). It is now the official language of Tanzania and Kenya, and one of the four national languages of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is also used in other countries in East Africa, including Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, northern Mozambique, Somalia and the Comoro Islands. Today Swahili has a pan-ethnic, an interreligious and a trans-national dimension, but up to the end of the 19th century it was only associated with the urban coastal Muslim communities of the East African coastline between southern Somalia and northern Mozambique, including the offshore islands. Swahili has a rich literature in both oral and written form. In the latter case, among the oldest literary testimonies Swahili preserves a corpus of both religious and secular poetry in Arabic script dating back to the 18th century (Harries 1962, 5).3 Colonialism in the Swahili-speaking area began in 1885 with the establishment of German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika) which consisted of what is now Tanzania–with the exception of Zanzibar–Rwanda and Burundi (Marsh and Kingsnorth 1972, 124). Zanzibar was declared a British protectorate in 1890 by Britain and integrated in the British crown colony (including Uganda and Kenya) in 1920 (Page and Sonnenburg 2003, 312–13). After Germany’s defeat in World War I, the destiny of overseas German colonies was ratified at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. With the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations passed Tanganyika into the hands of Britain as a Mandate Territory (Iliffe 1979, 247). Britain replaced the German administrative structure in 1925 by introducing the principles of indirect rule with the use of “native authorities” (ibid., 318). Although some forms of indirect rule were used 3

However, the dates on the manuscripts cannot be taken as marking the inception of a Swahili written literary tradition. The fact that the dates and names may refer to the making of a copy by the scribe (Zhukov 1992, 61), the complication of preserving manuscripts in a tropical environment, the tendency to preserve some kinds of literature (religious literature) to the detriment of others (Mazrui and Shariff 1994, 92; Abdulaziz 1996, 413–14), together with the fact that the earliest known manuscripts manifest a language of which the complexity and refinement show a long history of development (Knappert 1979, 107), point to a long unwritten literary tradition anticipating the manuscript datings. For further insight into the difficulties of dating Swahili manuscripts, see Zukhov (1988 and 1992). The Latin alphabet was introduced by Christian missionaries at the end of 1880 (Brumfit 1980, 275).

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in Kenya as well, this was conceived as a settler colony which was not the case for Tanzania (Page and Sonnenburg 2003, 402). The different policies adopted by the British crown for its colonial possessions occasioned Marjorie J. Mbilinyi (1980, 240) to comment that Nairobi represented the centre of the East African political and economic fields, while Tanganyika was the “periphery”. The same could not be said with regard to the field of the production of knowledge. Tanganyika was, in fact, a catalyst of linguistic and literary policies to a greater extent than Kenya, and this is the reason behind taking translation practices in Tanganyika as the pragmatic basis for the present analysis. As was the case under German rule, during British rule Swahili was maintained as the language of (the lower levels of) education and administration. In this context, the colonial machinery initiated a rigorously monitored planning of translation activities, which was bound to have an impact on the construction and popularisation of categories of perception pertaining to Swahili language and literary fields.

2. Literary exchanges as a walk of fame? Enlarging the republic of letters: Including (neglected) contexts in the transnational literary space Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological outlook, scholars such as Pascale Casanova, Gisèle Sapiro and Johan Heilbron have initiated a current of research which focuses on the reconstruction of the logics beneath the process of reproduction of cultural knowledge and the circulation of cultural goods within the world literary space. Although Bourdieu (2002) specifically addressed translation only in a short but inspiring article on the social conditions of the international circulation of ideas, his scientific programme relating to the organisation of the social world has proved crucial for Translation Studies and triggered the rise of a branch of research devoted to understanding translation as a symbolic resource selected by agents who operate in a system that depends on the negotiation of symbolic forms, and which is regulated by relations of power. Bourdieu portrays social reality as being composed of fields, semiautonomous areas of production in which social agents (individuals, groups or institutions) are allocated certain positions (of power) according to the distribution of resources (Bourdieu 1993, 29–30). The allocation of the different types of capital (economic, cultural, social and symbolic) does not follow a logic of equality, meaning that the constitutive element of the field is the struggle over certain resources and therefore certain

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positions of power within the social space (Bourdieu 1989, 17; 1993, 34; 1997, 50). Following this vision, the field of production and re-production of knowledge is a space in which cultural products are converted into resources which entail that the agents who select and exchange them are endowed with some form of capital (Bourdieu 1993, 75). In applying this sociological frame to the circulation of literary goods, Casanova (2002; 2004), followed by Heilbron (1999), and Heilbron and Sapiro (2002; 2007; 2008) and Sapiro (2008), envisage the literary world as composed of hierarchized literary fields in which different lingo-cultural systems struggle to get certain positions of recognition and legitimacy in accordance with the accumulation, exhibition and recognition of literary capital. This particular form of capital was introduced by Casanova (2004, 245) to describe “a symbolic central bank […] where literary credit is concentrated”. Literary capital refers both to material factors, such as the infrastructures promoting the fruition of literature (volume and age of works produced, the existence of a public and a professional milieu) and to non-material factors such as status and prestige, namely “credit” which is the degree of recognition and legitimacy granted to a literary field (ibid., 13–17). The accumulation and, to a greater extent, the international recognition of literary capital are responsible for the “inégalité structurelle”4 of the literary world which is dichotomised into dominated versus dominant fields corresponding to dominated and dominant literary languages (Casanova 2002, 8–9).5 The fact that “[l]iterary capital is both what everyone seeks to acquire and what is universally recognized as the necessary and sufficient condition of taking part in literary competition” (Casanova 2004, 17), makes the relationship between the literary fields one of tension over cultural resources, thus evoking Bourdieu’s struggle between agents to gather resources and consequently capital. Indeed, translations circulate within a space governed by power relations among national states and their respective languages and in which resources (political, economic and cultural) are unequally distributed (Heilbron and Sapiro 2007, 95). In this state of affairs, literary exchanges, and thus translation, comply with the same logic of “competition and rivalry” in which the political, economic 4

“structural inequality” (my translation). All translations of quotations and examples are my own. 5 The binarism to which the dichotomy between dominated and dominant literary languages might seem to allude is rendered multifaceted by Johan Heilbron and Gisèle Sapiro (2008, 29–30), who propose to look specifically at the world system of translation as literary exchanges between hyper-central, central, semi-peripheral and peripheral languages.

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and cultural relations of this international field are experienced (ibid.). Being at the centre of unequal international relations, the nature of exchanges is affected by a degree of asymmetry, implying that literary exchanges also become vectors of relations of (symbolic) domination (Casanova 2004, 39; Heilbron and Sapiro 2007, 95; 2008, 29, 34).6 For this reason, in conceptualising the movement of texts within the international literary space, Casanova (2002) defines translation as “un échange inégal”.7 In spite of the asymmetries in distribution and recognition of resources within the international space, the different literary fields which make up the literary world are banded together by the “struggle, albeit with unequal advantages, to attain the same goal: literary legitimacy” (Casanova 2004, 40). Indeed, within the space of literary exchanges, translation represents a practice and a resource of consecration in a two-fold manner. A first operation concerns the circulation of literary goods from dominated into dominant literary field. In this case translation is a way of seeking legitimation and international recognition for a writer, a language, a text or a literary field in a broader sense (Casanova 2004, 127; Heilbron and Sapiro 2008, 34). Being translated into one of the languages which happen to be most endowed with literary capital involves the attainment of 6

I am aware that, put in these terms, it seems that sociological approaches share some epistemological features with postcolonial approaches to translation. The conceptualisation of translation as an activity entangled in a web of unequal power relations which affects the way literary exchanges as well as the translation process are experienced, is the cornerstone of postcolonial translation research (Jacquemond 1992; Bassnett 2002, 4; Bandia 2010, 266; Baer 2014, 233). In spite of the sound development which postcolonial Translation Theories have offered for the field of Translation Studies, I deliberately prefer to look at translation phenomena through the lenses of sociology, which enables the researcher to overcome, as Tarek Shamma (2009, 191) contends, the “neglect of the sociopolitical background” in postcolonial paradigm and, as Hélène Buzelin (2007, 44) maintains to avoid championing the “cult of the text”. Although at a theoretical level, postcolonial approaches seem to have something in common with the sociology of literary exchanges, the use of methodological tools from sociological approaches allows both an overcoming of the weakness of postcolonial methodologies as being predominantly textual, while bridging that gap in literary theory described by Bourdieu (1993, 30, 140, 180–81) as the opposition between internal and external readings. In breaking with the reductionism of internal and external readings, sociological approaches take as their object the set of social relations in which translations are produced and circulated (Heilbron and Sapiro 2008, 26–27). 7 “an unequal exchange”.

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“literary visibility and existence” (Casanova 2004, 135). However, importing texts from a dominant language into a dominated literary field epitomises the enriching of a literary archive, and promotes the accumulation of literary resources which in the long run could be converted into literary capital (ibid., 134; Heilbron and Sapiro 2008, 34). Is this scheme transferrable to empirical contexts different from those explored by Casanova, Heilbron and Sapiro? Since their emergence, sociological approaches to translation based on the ideas of Bourdieu, Casanova, Heilbron and Sapiro have found fertile ground in contexts outside that from which they originated. The theoretical apparatus relating to the circulation of literary goods within the world literary space has stopped being a phenomenon anchored in French examples and has crossed the borders of lingo-cultural fields located in Europe, the Americas, Africa or Asia, thus demonstrating the transnational potential of applicability these theories have to offer. In commenting on the transposition of Bourdieu’s theory into other non-French contexts, Anna Boschetti (2006, 144) observes, that “Bourdieu’s research was able to draw attention and to have impact on a vast transnational scale, despite the national peculiarities of its objects”. Bourdieu’s theoretical conceptualisations have jumped from France to Finland8 to Egypt9 and Iran,10 just to mention a few examples. In a similar fashion, Casanova’s approach has been transposed into different contexts such as Taiwan11 or Latin America.12 Nevertheless, discussion on the application of Casanova’s theoretical approach to sub-Saharan African contexts are still uncommon. In addition, her theories relating to the transnational circulation of literary goods have not yet been taken up by scholars in the colonial context. As a matter of fact, Casanova’s theoretical thinking hardly touches on the historical context of colonial regimes. In describing the history of the “world 8

Hekkanen (2008). Khalifa and Elgindy (2014); Hanna (2005; 2006). 10 Haddadian-Moghaddam (2014). 11 Chung (2013). 12 Bielsa (2013). For further case studies of sociological approaches to translation in an array of contexts, see the collection Sociocultural Aspects of Translating and Interpreting edited by Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger and Zuzana Jettmarová (2006) which includes a range of languages such as Dutch, Finnish, German, Portuguese, Romanian, French, Gujarat, Latvian, and contexts as variegated as Quebec, Gran Canaria or Flanders. Another “de-centred” collection is that edited by Claudia V. Angelelli, The Sociological Turn in Translation and Interpreting Studies (special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies [2012]) which provides case studies from Palestine, Baghdad, India, China and Italy, to cite a few. 9

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republic of letters” and the phases of its formation, colonisation is not mentioned as historical circumstance: a description of the initial phase and that of enlargement through the use of literature to serve the establishment of national realities is directly followed by the third and last phase of decolonisation which is described as the phase “marking the entry into international competition of contestants who until then had been prevented from taking part” (Casanova 2004, 48). Casanova’s discussion of the logics behind the import-export of texts leaves out the literary exchanges existing between an external power and its colony, mandate territory or protectorate. In the light of this blank space left in the description of the Republic of Letters and literary transfers, the main concern of this paper is to address the issue of the application of Casanova’s concepts outside the boundaries of the European continent and within the historical circumstance of an external regime. What happens when Casanova’s concepts are applied to a context of institutionalised political dependency? Can they be applied to such contexts? And if so, how? Does this necessitate a revision, a re-interpretation? Is the notion of consecration still tenable? How do literary exchanges work when translation into the dominated language is not done by “indigenous” translators but by agents who are embroiled within the colonial machinery? Colonial empires constitute politico-territorial formations different from the national states, which Casanova envisages as her reference. Indeed, although Casanova (ibid., 101) describes the literary world as a space which “ignores ordinary geography and establishes territories and boundaries along lines quite different from those of nations”, in the course of her reasoning she tends to apply a national-based perspective. Colonies and mandate territories were territorial formations which escape the notion of a national state and which could be characterised by the co-existence of different linguistic and cultural groups. However, these political and territorial aggregates constitute spaces in which cultural products were imported as well as exported, and which still represent literary entities, literary fields, different from the literary field of the metropole. At the time of the inception of British rule, the Swahili literary field was a space characterised by considerable antiquity and sophistication. Swahili written literary tradition, especially poetry, consisted of a multiplicity of prosodic possibilities practised by a professional milieu for a cultivated public. Most of the corpus of Swahili poetry was written by the ulamaa, Islamic scholars and judges (Mazrui 1994, 202) who were also often “hired” as court poets of the many sultanates disseminated along the East African coast (Knappert 1979, 103). While the corpus of religious poetry addressed a broader audience as it was used in (semi-)public events

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in order to spread values and knowledge (Vierke 2011, 437), poetry was also a cultural practice to manifest status and power within defined élites. Poetic competitions between poetic rivals or between the Swahili citystates were at the centre of managing antagonism within social organisations.13 In addition to this, Swahili poetry was also a symbolic resource for an elevated class which, through the possession of manuscripts in private libraries or the organisation of poetic gatherings, provided manifestation of patrician distinction. In the hierarchized Swahili societies the possession of a refined and elaborate Swahili vocabulary and proficiency, together with the ability to compose poetry, were among the requisites which differentiated waungwana (cultured, patricians) from washenzi (uncultured people) (Kresse 2007, 51, 251; Horton and Middleton 2000, 152). Thus, in the East African landscape Swahili was a prestigious literary language which had accumulated literary capital vis-à-vis other local languages. The structure and dynamics of the Swahili literary field were bound to be affected by British rule: the hierarchizing of languages and the prestige attached to them, the role and status of agents of literary (re)production, and the modalities of literary practice were recomposed and rearranged following government interventions. The central position Swahili had in the East African linguistic and literary landscape was then mined by the presence of English which caused Swahili to occupy a less prestigious position in the linguistic hierarchy compared to English. However, the Swahili literary field under British rule still represented a space different from the literary field of the metropole. Political and economic domination was not equivalent to literary annexation. The Swahili colonial literary field constituted a field with its own logics which defined things for the colony and not for the metropole and which deviated from the dominating literary field in terms of themes, audience and producers, as well as the language of literary production. In this paper I will therefore use the term “target literary field” to refer to a field of literary production in Swahili besieged by an external power. In applying Bourdieu’s concept of capital and Casanova’s concept of consecration to this situated context, it is my aim to start a discussion for understanding literary fields and transnational literary exchanges in areas neglected by Casanova’s scheme. Casanova (2002, 10) postulates that among the reasons which induce translators (or writers) to import “les grands texts universels”14 from dominant literary fields into their 13 14

For further insights on this topic, see Bierstecker (1996). “the major universal texts”.

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dominated space, is the desire to “regagner, par l’accumulation initiale de ce capital que la traduction rend possible, l’ancienneté manquante”.15 The other reason for importing cultural goods, according to Casanova, is the urge to “rivaliser”, to compete (ibid.). As will be seen in the following case study relating to the time of British rule in Tanganyika, none of these concepts can be applied. The concept of translation as consecration and translation as accumulation of literary capital seems to fail when projected onto this situated context. The following analysis shows why this is so, while providing an additional concept to describe symbolic usages of translations, which might be applied to similar contexts. In investigating the discourse on literary translation into Swahili during British rule, I discuss the conceptualisation of translation as a three-fold process of deconsecration: deconsecration of the symbolic capital that Swahili language had acquired, deconsecration of the literary capital that the Swahili literary field had accumulated, and deconsecration of the (endogenous) agents of translation.

3. Tracking the discourse on translation: Paratexts, extratexts and the conceptual construction of texts According to Bourdieu (2002, 4), the circulation of texts, and the transfer from one context to another, is determined by a number of social operations. A primary operation–in chronological terms–is the operation of selection pertaining to what is translated, and by whom. Subsequently, the selected text undergoes an operation of “marquage” (marking, labelling), in that it is furnished with editing features and additional texts (such as prefaces), which present the text while appropriating it to a specific vision of reality which is peculiar to the field of reception (ibid.).16 The operation of marquage prompts us to reflect on the relevance of the discourse, which is constructed on and about a text. Indeed, an emerging trend in Translation Studies is to investigate the complicity between specific uses of language (as well as images) and dynamics of power. This is accomplished by focussing on the textual productions which accompany a translation, or comment on it. Once considered the periphery or the “threshold of interpretation” (Genette 1997), paratexts–

15

“regain a missing antiquity through accumulation of initial capital which translation makes possible”. 16 A third operation consists of “reading”, in which readers apply their categories of perception to the work of art (Bourdieu 2002, 4–5).

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together with extratexts–are increasingly gaining attention in translation research. The term “paratext” is a general term referring to textual elements that “surround” and “extend” the text “in order to present it” (ibid., 1; original emphasis). Genette (ibid., 5) speaks of “peritext”, meaning internal elements such as the cover, title page, front matter, back matter, glossaries. The term “epitext” is used to refer to external elements such as reviews, statements about or by the author or other individuals connected with the writing and publishing activities (ibid.). Although Genette did not elaborate on translated texts, his theoretical model has been applied to translation research since the end of the 1990s to complement the description and analysis of a translation.17 Applied to a translated text, the use of peritextual material proves effective in foregrounding how the text has been conceptualised and presented to the audience. In addition, epitexts help us to understand who is talking about a specific translation, and in which terms. Being designed to guide the reading experience (ibid., 2), paratexts can provide key information pertaining to the target readership, audience conventions, scopes of the translation, visibility of the translator, or the terms of the source/target-cultures relationship. All this information obtainable from paratexts “in turn informs the researcher about the conventions, concepts and expectations of a society regarding translated texts” (Tahir-Gürça÷lar 2013, 113). To complement the typologies of discourses in/of/about translation, Tahir Gürça÷lar (2002) has introduced the notion of “extratext” to refer to “the general meta-discourse on translation circulating independently of individual translated texts” (ibid., 44). Extratexts complement the contextualisation of translational events and offer clues to the sociocultural contexts which translations come to inhabit. Pellatt has elegantly commented on the relevance of para-extra textual material: 17

Cf. Kovala (1996), Watts (2000), Tahir-Gürça÷lar (2002; 2013), Harvey (2003). Apart from single articles, two collections have recently been devoted to paratexts in translation: see Gil-Bardaji, Orero and Rovira-Esteva (2012), and Pellatt (2013b). In addition to the publication of specialised texts, paratexts have been the object of conferences, such as the one held on Paratextual Elements in Translation at the Department of Translation and Interpreting of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in June 2010, and the one on Text, Extra-text, Meta-text and Para-text in Translation, held at Newcastle University in September 2011. In 2005 at the University of Vigo a research group called “Translation and Paratranslation (T&P)” was created together with a homonymous MA-degree programme (YusteFrías 2012, 118).

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[p]aratext primes, explains, contextualises, justifies and through beautification, tempts. Epitext, in the form of reviews, can serve these purposes, but may also serve to reject and refute the text and deter the reader. (Pellatt 2013a, 3)

The “performative” function which Pellatt ascribes to para- and extratextual material implies that the discourse which surrounds a text is not an accessory or a superfluous appendage. This is in accordance with Bourdieu (1993, 110), who propounds the view that the discourse on and about a text contributes to institutionalising a work of art and constructing its value. Indeed, Bourdieu (1996, 229) advocates that a science of works of art should take as its object of study not solely the material producers of a work of art (writers in the case of literary goods) but also the symbolic productions, which agents and institutions create to construct specific belief in and popularise the values of a work. In the attempt to track the circulation of “acts of credits”, Bourdieu (ibid., 230) identifies a procedure to reconstruct the production of belief in a work of art, with preface writers having a favoured place as consecrators. Indeed, in the eyes of Bourdieu the process of marquage has such a symbolic potential that he argues: Il faudrait faire une sociologie comparée des préfaces: ce sont des actes typiques de transfert de capital symbolique. (Bourdieu 2002, 5)18

Along similar lines, Casanova (2004, 10, 22) also emphasises that, in order to adequately describe the international Republic of Letters, it is necessary to consider the discourse on a work constructed by the producers and critics. Casanova (2002, 19) ascribes symbolic relevance to the textual space of prefaces which are the site where literary capital is transferred and where, subsequently, consecration of the author and the work takes place, something which leads the French scholar to speak of the “canonizing effect” of prefaces (Casanova 2004, 115). The inclusion of the discourse on a work of art goes in the direction suggested by Bourdieu (1989, 18) that sociology should include a “sociology of the perception of the social world” which aims at shedding light on the procedures through which the construction of visions of the world construct the world itself. According to Bourdieu, the construction and popularisation of categories of perception of the social world is the means through which the struggle for symbolic power operates (Bourdieu 1991, 167–68). This symbolic struggle “over the power to produce and to 18 “There should be a comparative sociology of prefaces: they are typical acts of transfer of symbolic capital.”

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impose the legitimate vision of the world” (Bourdieu 1989, 20) operates either through actions of representations (demonstrations by a group are an example) or through a particular use of language which aims at transforming the categories of perception of social reality (ibid.). It is at this point of convergence that the analysis of para- and extratextual material gains in relevance. The following analysis of the role of translation in literary exchanges within the Swahili literary space under British rule is based on the examination of paratexts (and I will favour prefaces) of a number of translations issued in the framework of the InterTerritorial Language Committee, together with extratexts. I have scrutinised 11 texts (10 from English and one from French) translated into Swahili in the form of published books and serialised versions (in the Swahili journal Mambo Leo [Today’s Affairs]).19 In terms of time frame, the texts span the period from 1927 (Kisiwa chenye Hazina [Treasure Island]) to 1952 (Omar Khayyam kwa Kiswahili [Omar Khayyam in Swahili]). All the texts are translations from English, with the exception of Tabibu asiyependa utabibu (Molière 1945), which is a translation of Le Médecin malgré lui by Molière. Most of the texts were translated by agents involved in the colonial machinery, and only one text was translated by an African translator. The texts selected pertain to different source-text genres, and therefore include translation of source texts as collections of tales, novels, plays and poetry. The translations making up the corpus were included within school readers for government schools. In addition to translated texts and their paratexts, it was my aim to take into consideration extratexts and therefore, since translation activities emanated from educational and language policies, I have considered the Report of the Education Conference of 1925. In narrowing the focus to para- and extra-texts, I explore conceptualisations of translation and categories of perception related to the target language and culture as they have crystallised within the textual practice, and which in turn reveal the conditions under which translations were produced and circulated.

19

I would like to add that, in the catalogue of translated texts into Swahili I am compiling I could collect a total amount of 22 translated titles in Swahili from 1927 to 1960.

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4. Constructing a discourse on Swahili literary translation during British rule 4.1 Translation within the Inter-Territorial Language Committee In September 1920, shortly after the British government took over the mandate of Tanganyika, the Department of Education was founded, and five years after its establishment the governor, Donald Cameron, convened the Education Conference in Dar es Salaam from 5 to 12 October 1925. This was a conference between government and missions intended to organise and coordinate educational and linguistic policies within the territories under British authority. Apart from setting the tenets of the education policy to be pursued in the territories under the British crown, the conference paved the way for the establishment of the Inter-Territorial Language Committee (ITLC)20 in 1930 with the aim of standardising the Swahili language to be used throughout East Africa. In addition to the formulation of standards for syntax, phonology and orthography, the Committee members agreed that among the duties of such a body should be that of “giving advice and encouragement in the preparation of literature and for revising any work before its publication” (TEC 1925, 160). Therefore, the preparation of (text)books was envisaged as a means of promoting standardisation. Since the organisation of literature also contemplated arrangements for translations into Swahili, it is at this juncture that–as was common policy throughout the whole empire–translation became part and parcel of the literacy and standardisation programmes of the Committee (ibid.). Thus, at the end of the 1920s, a structured planning of translation activities was initiated, which was entrenched in the language and education policies of British rule. However, this is not to say that before the ITLC the Swahili literary field was void of translation practices. On the contrary, given its geographical position, between the Indian Ocean and the African mainland, the Swahili coast was a centre for the translation and circulation of fables and tales from across the Ocean which became incorporated within the Swahili oral archive. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the translation of Arabic (Islamic) historical and legendary stories was an 20

The Committee was renamed “East Africa Swahili Committee” when transferred to Makerere College in 1952, and afterwards “Institute of Kiswahili Research” following its transfer to the University of Dar es Salaam.

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activity which extensively engaged the educated Swahili élite, and which left substantial written testimonies. During German rule (1885–1919) literary translation from German into Swahili was definitely scarce and mainly concentrated on the translation of a few children’s stories in the colonial journal Kiongozi (Leader). Following these isolated events, a primary exposure to European literature was experienced in the second half of the 1880s when the English bishop in Zanzibar, Edward Steere, translated–in the form of prose summaries–Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (Hadithi za Kiingereza, 1867), Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes, Greek fairy tales (Mashujaa: Hadithi za Wayonani, 1889) and Aesop’s fables (Hadithi za Esopo, 1889). However, Steere’s translations were conceived and consumed within the space of the mission and were not followed by translations of other literary texts until the end of the 1920s. With translation activities becoming a favoured practice within the Department of Education in Tanganyika, Swahili was exposed to European classics. Thus, Rider Haggard, Jonathan Swift, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel Defoe, Lewis Caroll, Molière and other European authors made their debut in Swahili. Inasmuch as the organisation of cultural (re)production and transfer of knowledge was basically in the hands of the Language Committee,21 selective filtering limited the access of Africans to the field of literary translation. During British rule it was mainly Europeans, in other words exogenous agents, who “had the right to become translators”.22 The translations were done by members of the committee, and mainly by a single individual, the Secretary. Between 1927 and 1935, Frederick Johnson, the first Secretary of the ITLC, and Senior Clerk in the Education Department, translated Treasure Island, King Solomon’s Mines, The Jungle Book, Tales of Uncle Remus, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, The Song of Hiawatha and Allan Quatermain. Johnson was, in fact, among the most prolific translators during British rule in Tanganyika. Although African membership in the Committee officially dated 1939, it was not 21 Book publications and translations were monitored by a long procedure in which the Directors of Education suggested to the Committee new books and manuscripts; after this the Secretary made preparations for publication or translation and settled details such as the number of copies and arrangements with publishers. After the text was written or translated into Swahili, copies were sent to the Committee’s Readers for examination and perusal. Once assured that the recommendation approved by the Committee had been incorporated in the text, the Secretary allowed the imprimatur of the Committee (Whiteley 1969, 84–85). 22 I am borrowing this phraseology from Reine Meylaerts (2006, 65) who titled a paragraph of her article “Who has the right to be(come) a translator?”.

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until 1946 that Africans actively participated in the Committee meetings and activities (Mulokozi 2006, 15), and thus in the translation of foreign literature. However, entering the space of literary translation was allowed exclusively to specific agents, namely the select few who had access to literacy in English, who were trained to become civil servants or officers and who, with different titles, were connected with the Education Department. This was so in the case of Edwin Brenn, Rawson Watts, Abdulla M. Abubakr and Shaaban Robert who, having received a missionary education, worked in the Education Department or in the Language Committee. Thus, the establishment of the ITLC meant that the field of reproduction and transfer of knowledge into Swahili was taken over by exogenous agents in a process that was rigidly monitored by an exogenous committee, which also happened to be in possession of the economic capital to distribute the texts. Translation firstly appeared as serialised texts in the journal Mambo Leo (Today’s Affairs), published monthly from 1923 onwards by the Tanganyikan Education Department. From 1928 the serialised texts were collected in separate books, or translations were directly published in the form of complete books, usually by the London publishing houses Sheldon and Longmans. The translations issued by the Committee were included in the school curricula as reading material. Indeed, any text that received the approbation of the Swahili Committee could be used in shule za serikali (government schools) (Mbaabu 1991, 28). However, I would like to point out that, in spite of the fact that translations were mainly addressing a school public, they were to play a role in the Swahili literary field also in the aftermath of the end of British rule. Those literary translations were bound to have an impact on formal aspects of the Swahili literary repertoire. For instance, the exposure to foreign literature marked a change in the organisation of the sequence narration which moved from causality to a unified narrative with connected structure (Rollins 1985, 52; Bertoncini-Zúbková et al. 2009, 32). Besides, motives and themes were metabolised and assimilated. As an example, Wafula (2008, 107) points out a resemblance between the travels of the seven messengers in Kusadikika by Shaaban Robert, and those undergone by Gulliver. Although the end of colonial rule determined, either in Kenya and Tanzania, education policies which aimed at localising school curricula and syllabi and making them more Africa-centred (Mngomezulu 2012, 132) with subsequent eradication of foreign literary works, some of these translations were nevertheless allowed to enter the Swahili literary archive by means of retranslation. During the 1960s some

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of the texts translated in the framework of the Language Committee were retranslated by Tanzanian writers.23 In 1993 the Kenyan branch of Macmillan released some translations from English literature, among which the retranslation of Gulliver’s Travels by Michael Warevu. In 2015 Ida Hadjivayanis, a Swahili scholar from SOAS, retranslated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (translated in Swahili in 1940 by Ermyntrude Virginia St Lo Malet Conan- Davies) as Alisi Ndani ya Nchi ya Ajabu.24 The translations published during British rule were usually accompanied by translators’ prefaces which replaced the original ones even in cases where the latter were part of the fictive narrative structure or served as an indispensable element of the plot.25 Generally speaking, the prefaces which compose my corpus constitute a type of paratext which, according to Kovala’s classification (1996, 127), is “informative”. The prefaces offered a place where the original and the translation were contextualised, that is where the original author and the original work were introduced. Such prefaces were used to comment on the processes of abridgement, adaptation or augmentation. Sometimes they were used to foreground the source cultures, which were far away in time and space.26 But most of all, prefaces were the place where translators negotiated with the readers the terms on which the translation should be received. Sometimes, translators made reference to the reception of the source text and emphasised its status in the source culture. Alternatively, translator expounded the reasons underlying the activity of translation, thus suggesting to the audience to align itself with the translator’s objectives.

4.2 Translation as deconsecration of the target language According to Mazrui (2007, 124), the English classics translated between the 1920s and the 1940s by British colonial education officers 23 Robinson Crusoe was retranslated as Robinson Kruso na kisiwa chake (Robinson Crusoe and his island) in 1962 by members of the Literature Bureau. London: Nelson. Treasure Island was retranslated as Kisiwa chenye Hazina in 1965 by Peter Kisia. 24 Portlaoise: Everytype. 25 For instance, the translation of Gulliver’s Travels omits the original introduction in which the editor introduces Dr. Gulliver and corroborates the veracity of the facts described in the text by offering to let the curious reader inspect the original manuscript written by Gulliver himself (Swift 2005, 13). 26 This is so in the case of the translations of The Song of Hiawatha and The Heroes, which give ample elucidation of the cultural and historical features of the American Indian and Greek societies, respectively.

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“were intended to fill the gaps in Swahili readers for schools and perhaps provide models that would encourage East African nationals to write prose fiction along similar lines”. In a similar fashion, Thomas Geider (2008, 71) is inclined to look at the importing of texts as a response to the need for reading material. Without rejecting these views wholesale, I would like to argue that in the specific context of British rule in Tanganyika translation, or more specifically the discourse on translation, was aimed at building schemes of evaluation of cultural products, which affected the perception of the target language and literary field. In this section, I analyse the construction of a discourse on translation which aims at denying prestige and status to the Swahili language. Against the background of the translation practices initiated by the Language Committee, the discourse on translation provokes a rupture in the conceptualisation of the enterprise of translation when compared with the discourse accompanying translation in previous epochs. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Swahili literary field was hectically importing Arabic (Islamic) historical and legendary stories. These narratives were imported in the form of poetry, namely in the form of the utendi (pl. tendi), a written genre consisting of a long narrative poem with defined metre and rhyme (Mazrui 1994, 201). Elsewhere (Talento 2014) I have explored the recourse to translation by Swahili classical poets as a strategy in the pursuit of prestige, and recognition. The extensive use of a meta-discourse on translation within the preamble (dibaji) and epilogue (tammati) of tendi provided Swahili classical poets with a means of exhibiting their expertise in translating from Arabic, where they could praise the beauty of their works, and where they could be inscribed in a chain of esteemed predecessors (ibid., 46–52). Within the tendi tradition, translation was thus conceived as a resource for consecration for the classical Swahili poets who, by means of their translation practice, could secure prestige, recognition and earthly fame for themselves and their works of art (ibid.). As a consequence, the authors themselves referred to translation as an enterprise that entailed uwezo, that is, “power” and “capability”. Within the context of British rule, on the other hand, conceptualisation of the enterprise of translation shifted from translation as power and ability to translation as a mere attempt (jaribio), as the following examples illustrate:27 27 The author is aware of making a comparison between two different genres. I would like to point out that precolonial written translated literature in Swahili mainly consists of poetry, i.e. translation of prose texts rendered as poetry. Therefore, no corpus of written translations into Swahili in the genre of prose is available to allow a comparison between same genres.

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2)

Lakini mimi si mtungaji, ni mtu tu niliyejaribu kufasiri hadithi hii kwa ajili ya watu wasomao Kiswahili . . . . [However, I am not the composer, I am merely someone who has tried to translate this story for the sake of those who study Swahili . . . .] (Johnson 1929, v; emphasis added) Hapa nitajaribu kufasiri hadithi namna alivyoiandika mwenyewe . . .. [Here I will try to translate the story as the author himself wrote it . . . . (Johnson 1932, v; emphasis added)

3) Sasa nitajaribu kuihadithia (hadithi yenyewe), na pengine katika hadithi nitajaribu kufasiri mashairi ya Yule Mshairi maarufu [Here I will try to narrate it (the story itself), and sometimes during the narration I will try to translate the verses of that distinguished poet] (Johnson, in Longfellow, n.d., 2; emphasis added)

4) Sasa tumejaribu kuzifasiri (hadithi za zamani sana za Wayunani) katika Kiswahili ili watu wa Afrika Mashariki wapate kuzisoma na kuzifurahia [Now we have tried to translate (the ancient stories of the Greeks) into Swahili so that the people of East Africa can read and enjoy them] (ITLC 1933, iii; emphasis added)

Upon first glance, these examples seem to evoke the much debated trope of the translator as embodying a historically forced and self-imposed humility and invisibility. Daniel Simeoni (1998, 3, 12) and Erich Prunþ (2007, 48–49), among others, describe the historical marginalisation of translators as involving the development of a translator habitus based on the internalisation of subalternity and marginality. Douglas Robinson (1991, xii) has also highlighted the apologetic nature of translators’ prefaces. However, within the paratexts of selected examples, translators were accorded a certain degree of visual prominence: their status as translators and their names were clearly indicated on title pages, in prefaces and/or on back covers–sometimes using characters that obfuscated the names of the original authors. In addition to this, the fact that prefaces were usually signed or the fact that a translation could be presented as a work “created by”28 is a manifestation of the overcoming of translators’ invisibility.

28 This is the case for the translation of Le Médecin malgré lui presented by the translator Alexander Morrison as “uliotungwa na” (composed by, created by).

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The emphasis on attempt could be related to a conceptualisation of translation as an unfinished, or imperfect work.29 An example taken from the translation of Le Médecin malgré lui (The doctor in spite of himself) by Molière may serve to illustrate this. The text was translated as Tabibu asiyependa utabibu by Alexander Morrison, a Scots lawyer long resident in Tanganyika, who also authored a translation of the New Testament in Luo. In his preface, Morrison presents his translation as an adaptation of the French text which was subjected to erasures and the replacement of cultural references by local homologous phenomena in the target culture.30 In the description of the translation process and the explanation of stage directions, Morrison alludes to a process of situating the texts into an African environment, which he applied to the translation of Molière’s play. This implies that translation can be described as an enterprise which violates the original. In his preface Morrison alludes to the fact that once the text is adapted to the African “environment” the “literary quality” of the original is bound to be lost: 1)

No attempt has been made to achieve a literal translation or to convey the literary quality of the original. (Morrison 1945, vii)

Morrison then conceptualises the act of translation as an act of violence committed against the original: 2)

So much violence has already been done to the text by the translator that the producer need not treat it with undue reverence. (Morrison 1945, vii; emphasis added)

The way Morrison comments on the translation establishes a hierarchy between the original which, when adapted to the African “environment” (Morrison 1945, vii) is a victim of violence, and the target text which, once accustomed to “an African audience” (ibid.), does not deserve any reverence. 29 It should be added that, on a general level, translation practices throughout colonial empires were aimed at establishing literary hierarchies. In projecting the colonial model of social hierarchies, translation was usually conceptualised as a product standing in a position of inferiority when compared to the “great European original” (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999, 4, 5). 30 Here is how Morrison (1945, vii) himself commented about his work: “LE MEDICIN MALGRE LUI was chosen for translation or rather adaptation because it seemed possible to present a play which would appeal to an African audience as credibly happening in the environment to which they are accustomed and in which African actors would not have to be Europeans.”

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In the discourse on translation that was prevalent during British rule, Swahili translations were usually presented as products which, as Morrison says, cannot convey the literary quality of the original, or the entirety of their sources. This is reflected in the fact that the translations of European classics prepared or monitored by the Committee were usually in the form of summarised or extensively abridged texts.31 This is something which was usually indicated, either in the translators’ preface or on the title pages. In the preface to Gulliver’s Travels the translator Johnson remarks:32 3)

Hapa nitajaribu kufasiri hadithi namna alivyoiandika mwenyewe, lakini pengine nitakuwa sina budi kufupisha habari kwa kuwa hadithi ni ndefu sana. [Here I will try to translate the story as the author himself wrote it, although sometimes I will have no choice but to shorten the content because the story is very long.] (Johnson 1932, v; emphasis added)

The length of the source text to which Johnson alludes is not the sole reason for abridgement of texts. In the following example, the reason for offering the Swahili audience an extensively summarised text is ascribed 31

The translations which constitute my corpus are, generally speaking, simplified texts. Corpus analysis applied to translation studies has shown that simplification is one of the “generalities” of translational behaviour. I use here “generalities” instead of “universals”, following Mauranen and Kujamäki (2004, 9). Briefly, simplification can be described as a tendency to simplify the language of the target text compared to that of the source text (Toury 1995, 181). Sara LaviosaBraithwaite (1998) has distinguished different levels on which simplification occurs in translated texts: lexical, syntactic and stylistic. At the stylistic level, simplification implies the use of shortened sentences, the replacement of elaborate phraseology with shorter collocations, omissions and avoidance of repetition (Laviosa-Braithwaite 1998, 289). All these can be found in the translations in my corpus, which all show a tendency to simplify, abbreviate or omit information. Therefore, they can be said to be stylistically simplified texts. The translation of Gulliver’s Travels, as an example, contains only two of the four journeys undertaken by the protagonist: Lilliput and Brobdingnag. Or in The Song of Hiawatha, for instance, the last two chapters of the English text, “The White Man’s Foot” and “Hiawatha’s Departure”, are combined in the single chapter “Kufariki kwake Hiawatha” (Hiawatha’s Departure). The original 22 chapters of the English text are reduced to 11 in the Swahili translation. 32 Although the use of abridged versions of well-known works was, and still is, a widespread practice for texts to be included in school anthologies and readers, the fact that translators indicated such abridgment shows that the source texts were the unabridged versions.

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to the alleged inability of Swahili to convey the content of the book. This is what Johnson writes in his introduction to the translation of Treasure Island: 4)

Pengine ilikuwa lazima kubadili maana kidogo na pengine kufupisha habari kwa kuwa hazikufaa kwa maneno ya Kiswahili. [Sometimes it was necessary to alter the meaning, and sometimes to shorten the content because they did not suit the Swahili words.] (Johnson 1927, 572, quoted in Talento 2014, 56)

Two years prior to this translation, when summarising the resolutions of the Committee at the 1925 meeting, Johnson had expressed similar ideas on the (supposed) deficiencies of the Swahili language. In this document he claimed that Swahili “raised […] above the ordinary Bantu dialects” only on account of the fact that it incorporated Arabic terminology; deprived of these Arabic elements it would be an “impoverished language (TEC 1925, 160). This is what caused him to conclude that in the “more advanced composition” the use of Arabic and English words were highly desirable for the reason that the “thoughts of more advanced scholars” “could not be adequately expressed” in a Bantu language–like Swahili (ibid.). Now, where do these allegations intersect? In the hierarchized Swahili social landscape of the 18th and 19th centuries which dichotomised the social groups of washenzi (uncultured people) and waungwana, (cultured people, patricians) (Horton and Middleton 2000, 18; Kresse 2007, 39), sociocultural factors which endorsed patrician identity included the ability of being conversant in the Swahili language.33 The possession, and notably the exhibition, of a “refined vocabulary and the most elaborate ways of talking” was conceived as a characteristic of the uungwana status (Kresse 2007, 51).34 In addition, composing poetry and music (in Swahili) was a moral quality associated with nobility (Horton and Middleton 2000, 152).35 Indeed, Swahili was the language of fine arts. The fact that the use 33 For a more detailed discussion of waungwana/washenzi ideology, see Nurse and Spear (1985, 23–25), Horton and Middleton (2000, 17–23 Kresse (2007, 36–69). 34 The term uungwana, with the u- prefix, is the abstract terms for waungwana, and may be translated as “the state of being cultured”. 35 Other requisites of uungwana status were: noble ancestry (usually foreign, particularly Arab or Persian); adherence to Islam; ustaarabu (civilization), to be understood as a long tradition of residence at a place; and utamaduni, a term covering a variety of qualities such as purity and good behaviour (Horton and Middleton 2000, 115).

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of Swahili, in its most elaborate form, was associated with patrician identity manifests the elevated position Swahili had in society, as well as in the literary field. The implementation of the education policy endorsed during the Education Conference of 1925 provoked a drop in the prestige of the Swahili language. The school system was designed to implement a division of roles of English and Swahili in order to control the number of those who had access to formal education, thus restricting the number of urban-workers-to-be who would become subordinate administrative officers (Mbilinyi 1980, 236, 254; Morris-Hale 1969, 116, 131). While a literary education in English opened the door to positions in the administrative or education sectors, education in vernacular languages at lower levels followed by Swahili at higher levels was more vocational in focus, aimed at preparing workers for menial labour (Mbilinyi 1980, 237). For this reason, in spite of the initial mistrust of literacy in English, the popular demand for English education in the territories under British rule was bound to increase while Swahili became depreciated as the language of the lower classes (see Mbilinyi 1980, 259–61). The drop of prestige was reflected or perhaps perpetuated in the discourse on translation. Although Swahili had a long history as a literary language, and was a language of prestige before colonialism, the discourse on translation during British rule promoted an image of the Swahili language as incapable of embodying literary quality and stylistic eloquence, as well as its inability to be a vehicle of “high culture”. In the context described here, when the importation and circulation of texts is the job of exogenous agents who find themselves in dominant positions, translation can develop a deconsecrative force. In this section I have analysed the use of translation to pull Swahili language down from the level of sophistication which it had formerly enjoyed, while destroying the symbolic capital it had accumulated. In the following section, I address strictly literary concerns.

5. Silence in translation as deconsecration of the target literary field The deconsecrative force of translation I am envisaging in this paper also has something to do with the form of the texts selected under British rule to be translated and infused into the Swahili literary field. In this respect it is not without significance that the “social effect” of a text is not based only on its content, for form cannot be divorced from the power a

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text has to mould visions of the social world. This is what Bourdieu (1991, 139) advocates when proclaiming that: The form through which symbolic productions share most directly in the social conditions of their production is also the means by which their most specific social effect is exercised. (Bourdieu 1991, 139)

Building on this, I would argue that in the context of British rule, the correlation between translation and the obscuration of symbolic capital is not solely related to the actual use of translated texts. At a different level, the deconsecrative force of translation is also manifested in the preference of certain genres, and deliberate avoidance of other genres. Heilbron and Sapiro (2007, 96) contend that, within the hierarchized and unequal space of cultural exchanges, dominant languages export a lot, and import little, while the dominated languages export little and import a lot. In the case of Swahili this is partially true: the colonial power was importing Swahili literature, as well as exporting European classics to the colony. However, translation practices were subject to a selective filtering of genres. The translation activities monitored by the Committee deliberately avoided the poetic genre in favour of prose texts. The Swahili translation of Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha is the only case of a poetic text being translated and it was rendered in the form of a prose summary. Thus, a deliberate shift of genre took place. However, in the reverse direction, namely from Swahili into English, translation of poetry resulted in a hectic exercise. The process of collection, transliteration from Arabic and translation started during the years of German power and continued uninterrupted throughout the whole of British rule.36 The centuries-old poetic tradition which Swahili literature could boast of was therefore not a mystery to the English intelligentsia. 36 As early as 1870, Edward Steere edited the Takhmisa ya Liyongo in Swahili Tales as Told by Natives of Zanzibar. Other translations into English of Swahili poetic works of art published during the colonial years include, among others: Utenzi wa Ayubu edited by Alice Werner in Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies (1921–22); “A poem attributed to Liongo Fumo” edited by Alice Werner in Festschrift Meinhof (1927); Mikidadi na Mayasa edited by Alice Werner in Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen (1932); “The advice of Mwana Kupona upon the wifely duty” edited by Alice Werner and William Hichens (1934); AlInkishafi: The soul’s awakening edited by William Hichens (1940); Diwani ya Muyaka bin Haji Al-Ghassaniy edited by William Hichens (1948); Utenzi wa Abdirrahmani na Sufiani edited by John W. T. Allen (1961); and “Ode to Mwana Mnga” edited by H. Lambert in Bulletin (1953).

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But, in spite of this intense activity of translating poetry from Swahili into English, English poetry was discarded as a potential source text. Being in possession of the means to publish and distribute the translated texts, the Committee possessed the power to determine publishing policies and dictate literary trends. In this context the prose genre became prominent while the translation of poetry was neglected–in spite of the fact that, for centuries, poetic translation had been an estimated occupation of Swahili poets. The existence, authorisation to circulate and legitimation of a work of art depend upon an institutional framework, which must be taken into consideration when understanding the logics behind the circulation of cultural goods. Institutions “such as the educational system, the academies, and official and semi-official institutions or diffusion (museums, theatres, operas, concert halls, etc.)” (Bourdieu 1993, 122–23) serve to consecrate a symbolic good, conserve its capital and–particularly in the case of the educational system–guarantee that the agents will be imbued with categories of action and perception (Bourdieu 1993, 121). The interdependence between the favouring of specific repertoires, and the blocking out and rejection of others, or what Wolf (2002, 60) defines as the “exclusion procedures”, gain in relevance when considering the context in which the translations of European classics were intended to be injected, circulated and consumed. The translations made or monitored by the Committee were inserted in the classroom curricula at all levels of instruction, while Swahili stories and poems, which were being circulated in translation in academic circles in Great Britain, were not allowed to enter the Swahili school syllabus. In other words, translated texts from English (or French) were consecrated and circulated within the Swahili literary space but Swahili poetry, which was circulated in Britain, was not consecrated in its geographical territory of birth. The educational system is a selective mechanism preventing or permitting the dissemination of cultural resources. There is a complicity between the educational system and the construction of discourses on power. While literary exchanges have been described as supporting various forms of (literary, linguistic, political, economic) domination (Casanova 2004, 115–16; Heilbron and Sapiro 2007, 95), I would argue that absence, and silence, in translation can achieve the same effect. In that, I am not interested in the silence of textual remainders, or omissions, but in the silence of a practice. Silence is performative, in that it has the power to communicate by virtue of a parallel between it and what is voiced. What

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was available but not selected, and therefore silenced, still has the power to communicate and elucidate the contingencies of translation practices. Theo Hermans (2007, 70) expresses this as follows: what is translated is always profiled against what is left untranslated. But silence can also communicate: it may communicate an inability or an unwillingness to translate. (Hermans 2007, 70)

What could have been behind such “unwillingness” to translate texts from a specific genre, namely poetry, in the Swahili literary and social landscape under British rule? I would argue that the choice not to translate poetry in this context can be understood as a strategy to deal with literary and symbolic capital, and to eventually deconsecrate the Swahili literary field. This correlation between the preference of certain genres and the obscuration of prestige is based on Bourdieu’s (1991, 67) conception of genres as resources, which bring certain forms of prestige within social hierarchies. If the possession of a genre is equivalent to the possession of symbolic capital, as Bourdieu contends, the non-translation of the poetic genre into Swahili seems to have the objective of consecrating exogenous repertoires while deconsecrating endogenous ones. Generally speaking, the premises on which the Committee operated were based on the (mis)conception that the Swahili literary archive was lacking the prose genre, and more specifically the novel. In the Report of the Conference on Education, the Committee complained about the shortage of books in Swahili of “general readings of a more advanced kind […] containing Native folk-lore tales” (TEC 1925, 153). In the paper which Johnson attached to the report, he expresses a similar view when he considers that the number of texts throughout all of East Africa “which have a real education value is practically nil”. In the same paper Johnson remarks that he is aware of the existence of “plenty of religious books and a number of books of stories”–which might be an allusion to the substantial archive of tendi. However, those texts are described as incapable of inspiring interest, and having no usefulness (ibid., 165). This is what led Johnson to advocate the import of literary material (ibid.). Canon Hellier, a member of the Committee and a translator, lamented the non-existence of the novel in the Swahili archive of genres (1940, 257). The neglecting of Swahili poetic production, the lamenting of (alleged) flaws in the Swahili literary archive and popularisation via translation of the prose genre concurred to make translation a resource to establish distinctions between the target and source literary fields. If, as Tymoczko (1999, 17–18) maintains, translation is a significant means to form images of cultures, then silence concerning poetry can be read as a strategy to emphasise the presence of prose,

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making the possession of this genre a tool to construct the image of the importing literary field as possessing something which the Swahili literary field supposedly did not have. At a different level, the deconsecrative force of translation is manifest in the attempt to avoid competition. In the view of Casanova (2002, 10), the importation of texts into a dominated literary field can spring from the need to “rivaliser” with the most endowed literary nations. In the case of the importation of texts by exogenous translators into the Swahili literary field, the avoidance of the poetic genre might be related to a purposeful avoidance of competition with the well-established and prestigious Swahili poetic archive. In discussing the complicity between translation and the exercise of power, Lefevere (1978, 21–22) proclaims that extrinsic powers may show an interest in the spreading of knowledge as long as this knowledge can be used to reinforce their power. Thus, any kind of knowledge which makes the agents of power feel uncomfortable is usually suppressed or censored, and the producers of this knowledge silenced (ibid.). Swahili traditional poetry may have been “uncomfortable” in that it was a testimony of antiquity and cultural heritage. Swahili poetry embodied the sophistication and elaboration of Swahili language and literature. The suppression of poetry in school programmes, whether local productions or imported, could represent a procedure to avoid any confrontation of repertoires with equal claims to antiquity and sophistication. Hence, Swahili poetic works of art were not included in the educative programmes of the colony. In addition, colonial translation practices deserted the genre of poetry altogether. The raising up of prose over poetry can be seen as a strategy to obscure, and therefore subtract, from the literary capital accumulated by Swahili literature. The translations issued by the Committee sanctioned the consecration of prose while deconsecrating Swahili poetry, on which the prestige of the Swahili language had hitherto been built.

6. The discourse on translation as deconsecration of the agents of translation Another facet of the deconsecrative force ascribed to translation practices is the possibility of lowering a translator’s status or denying his or her role altogether. This can be illustrated by the example of Shaaban Robert (1909–1962) who is today regarded as a celebrated Swahili writer and has been called by some the “Shakespeare of Africa” (cf. Harries 1975, 194). Shaaban worked as a civil servant in several Tanganyikan offices, including organisations devoted to language and literature such as

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the East African Swahili Committee, the East African Literature Bureau and the Tanganyika Languages Board (Bertoncini-Zúbková et al. 2009, 34). As the son of a clerk, Shaaban was one of the selected few to receive higher education and, on the basis of his involvement in the Language Committee he was one of the selected few endogenous agents who were allowed to enter the field of literary translation. In 1952, Shaaban made a Swahili translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur, the first of Edward Fitzgerald’s English translations of the Rubaiyat by the Persian poet-astronomer (1859). The Swahili version was published as Omar Khayyam kwa Kiswahili (Omar Khayyam in Swahili).37 A close look at the preface, and the discursive strategies employed by Shaaban, together with a look at the reception of the text, reveal the tension between the quest for consecration of the Swahili poet and translator, and the deconsecrative power inscribed into the discourse on translation. Shaaban’s translation is accompanied by two prefaces. One describes the work of the translator and his objectives, while the second is an introductory text to the life of the Persian poet-astronomer. The first preface consists of two letters sent to Shaaban in 1944 by A.A.M. Isherwood, head of the Education Department from 1924 to 1945. In the first letter, Isherwood invites Shaaban to translate the text, and in the second he comments on the accomplished task. The enterprise of translation is, therefore, mediated by a commissioner. The use of Isherwood’s letters as the preface to Shaaban ’s translation seem to make the translator disappear in the background, giving the right to speak to Isherwood alone. However, using the patron’s words and discourse may conceal a subversive strategy on the part of Shaaban . By resorting to the words of his patron, Shaaban allows himself room to do what he might not feel inclined, or allowed, to do openly. The letters are, in fact interspersed with praise of Shaaban ’s abilities: 1)

37

Nimekupeleka (kitabu cha mashairi ya Bwana Omar Khayyam) kwa kujua kwangu ulivyo mwanachama maalum wa mashairi. […] Ukipata kukisoma barabara hutakosa kufanya neno la kufaa, nikujuavyo wewe u mwelewa wa mashairi; basi utaweza kufasiri na kuyapanga mashairi kadiri ya ustadi wako, kama hivyo alivyoifanya huyo Bwana Edward Fitgerald alivyoyatoa katika Kiajemi yakawa ya Kiingereza. [I have sent you (the book of verses by Sir Omar Khayyam) in the awareness that you are a distinguished advocate of verses […]. By

The translator’s preface is dated 1948.

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Chapter Two reading it carefully you will not fail to do a good work, to my knowledge you are an expert of verses; therefore, you will be able to translate and arrange the verses according to your expertise, as did Sir Edward Fitzgerald who rendered them from Persian into English.] (Robert 1952, v; emphasis added)

A preface is usually the place for the transfer of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 2002, 4), and the place where the consecration of the author and the work takes place (Casanova 2002, 19). However, when a translator does not possess enough literary and symbolic capital, the intercession of a mediator works as a strategy to negotiate autoconsecration (Casanova 2002, 19). The process described by Casanova is exactly what takes place in the preface by Shaaban. Although Isherwood did not write the preface with his own hands, Shaaban appropriates his discourse and makes it the place where he, as a poet, is consecrated. Nevertheless, the public identification as a poet presupposed possible negative after-effects. Shaaban was a prolific Swahili writer engaged in an array of genres ranging from novels and poetry, to essays and (auto)biography. But he lamented that his contribution to the Committees in which he worked was never appropriately recognised. In his autobiography he speculates that his being a poet might have been one of the motivations behind this failure: Yamkini, maendeleo yangu yalipotea kwa kuhesabiwa kuwa mshairi. [Perhaps, the possibility to make a career was ruined by the fact that I was considered a poet.] (Robert 1967, 106)

A year following the publication of Omar Khayyam kwa Kiswahili, Shaaban’s translation was reviewed in the Bulletin of the Inter-Territorial Language Committee by Daisy Valerie Perrott, author of Swahili grammars, dictionaries and text-books. The review is ambiguous and oscillates between praise and castigation. In introducing the Rubaiyat, Perrott makes the following comment: It was a work of a Persian poet living at the end of the eleventh century, and consisted of separate stanzas on subjects such as love, wine, beauty, etc. and the transitoriness of these pleasures. From these disconnected stanzas, by a free translation and sometimes a mistranslation, Edward Fitzgerald built up an English poem. Now, by the same process, Shaaban Robert has produced a Swahili one. He could not, of course adopt Fitzgerald’s metre and he has wisely chosen an eight-lined stanza which enables him to express the meaning of the English without undue

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compression. I give here one or two examples of his skilful paraphrases. (Perrott 1953, 78–79; emphasis added)

Perrot regards Shaaban’s work as a text constructed by the same process adopted by Fitzgerald, and thus implicitly suggests that his is a mistranslation which is labelled–although skilful–a “paraphrase”. Yet, paraphrase does not necessarily have negative connotations–as advocated by Dryden, for instance (Dryden 1900, 237). Paraphrasing can encompass a gamut of practices, ranging from glossing to reformulation, explicitation, summarising and elision. At this juncture I would like to point out that, in precolonial translation practices, Swahili translators put greater emphasis on describing their translation activity as one which follows the source text and sticks to it as accurately as possible, in the attempt to give the idea that no single word shall be lost or neglected (kusaza neno) during the transfer into Swahili (Talento 2014, 47–48). Therefore, the appellation of “paraphraser” or “mistranslator” would have made reference to a translation attitude which was, up to that moment, connected to negative implications. The brief review of Omar Khayyam kwa Kiswahili denies Shaaban the status of translator and describes him as a “mistranslator” or a “paraphraser”. Perrott’s review illustrates the power of the discourse on translation to reject both a translation and the translator and, therefore, to deconsecrate them. If being a poet, as Shaaban himself was inclined to think, was the reason why he was denied the opportunity to climb the social ladder, the devaluation of the status of translators negated the inscription in the register of one of the favoured activities of the Committee. In this hypothesis, I would concur with Bourdieu (1993, 35) who conceives of the existence of the work of art as directly and intrinsically dependent on collective acknowledgment of it as a work of art. The discourse on the work of art consists in “one of the conditions of production of the work” (ibid.) and, in turn, is part of the struggle for a monopoly on literary legitimacy. According to Bourdieu (1996, 224) literary rivalries are centred around the obtainment of the monopoly to provide a legitimate definition of the producer of a work of art, that is the power to say who is authorised to appoint herself/himself as a writer and who can be deemed a writer. By interchanging the terms “work of art” and “writer” with “translation” and “translator”, it can be concluded that the production of a discourse on Shaaban’s translation revolved around the construction of a belief which delegitimised his role as a translator and his work as a translation.

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7. Concluding remarks This article has investigated the construction of a discourse on translation during British rule in East Africa by focussing on the translation practices of the Inter-Territorial Language Committee in Tanganyika. During the years of developing what came to be known as Standard Swahili (1930–1958)–a task that was performed by an exogenous Committee which assigned itself responsibility for dictating the rules of other people’s language–translated texts were part and parcel of the standardisation and literacy programmes. Nevertheless, a close examination of the conceptualisation of translation as encapsulated within paratextual and extratextual material has brought to light ulterior motives behind translation activities, which reach beyond the linguistic and literary dimensions. Categories of perception related to the Swahili literary field were wrapped in the texture of the discourse on translation, or blanketed by a wall of silence. In this respect, I have discussed translation (its discourses and silences) as a strategy for dealing with literary and symbolic capital. However, the linkage proposed here between translation and capital does not repose on a process of accumulation as is usually postulated in the sociology of the cultural product. The case under study offers to look at this relationship as anchored to a process of obscuration of capital. Indeed, the discourse (and silence) on translation practiced during British rule popularised a defective image of the Swahili language and literary field, as well as its endogenous translation agents. The Swahili language was depicted as incapable of embodying literary quality and stylistic eloquence. In addition, Swahili was constructed as having a defective literary repertoire. The avoidance of the poetic genre, and the deliberate silence concerning it, was a strategy to present a patronising image of Swahili literature as lacking a genre which the Committee thought it needed. Furthermore, discourses on translation had the power to deny the legitimacy of an endogenous translator altogether.38 38

Parallels can be drawn with similar translation practices in other colonial empires. Working on the Spanish colonisation of the Tagalogs in the Philippines and on the colonisation of the New World by Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries, Vicente Rafael (1993, 20–21, 29) and Eric Cheyfitz (1991, 119–22) have respectively highlighted the use of translation as a resource used by the colonisers to establish hierarchies aimed at making the linguistic and literary possibilities of the colonised appear weak and inadequate. Drawing from the Indian colonial experience, Niranjana (1992, 21) and Sengupta (1992) have reflected on the fact that in British India translations of local literature served to promote specific

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While Casanova (2002, 10) postulates that the import of classics into a dominated literary field serves either the goal of gathering resources, and therefore literary capital, or vying with dominant literary fields, the situated Swahili example deviates from these assumptions. The literary exchanges (or lack thereof) from a dominant to a dominated literary field in a situated context of political, as well as economic and cultural, subjection can follow different logics. This article has attempted to propose one of the manifold possibilities. The historical and social context explored in this article, in which the field of re-production of knowledge is monopolised by exogenous authorities, has shown that translation, as well as its discourses and silences, can acquire the sinister potential of obliterating the symbolic and literary prestige accumulated by the target literary field. Whereas translation has been legitimately described as one of the “weapons in the struggle by and for literary capital” (Casanova 2004, 23), the case under study depicts the opposite. Thus, I have described translation as a form of deconsecration which, instead of transferring literary and symbolic capital, operates in the reverse order. Casanova’s (2004, 133) postulation that “[t]ranslation is the foremost example of a particular type of consecration in the literary world” could also be adapted to the specific context depicted in this article to reinterpret translation as an “example of a particular type of deconsecration”. The notion of deconsecration I am proposing in this article should not, however, be understood as the solely strategical use of cultural resources in literary exchanges in besieged territories. Rather, it should be taken as one of the alternative logics to describe symbolic usages of translations and read literary transfers in contexts so far left on the “fringes” of the Republic of Letters. A colonial, mandate or protectorate situation was indeed a much more complex reality which should not be reduced to a binary opposition between circumscribed categories (Black and White, good and evil, etc.). Without minimising the violence, colonial encounters cannot be simplified by looking at them as the clashing of monoliths. Colonisation also constituted a moment of social recomposition which left open interstices occupied by ambivalent, coactive or iconoclastic agents, and in which negotiations of power took images of the dominant and dominated cultures. Indeed, the process of selection of texts favoured those texts which conformed to stereotypical images of the Indian, or the texts were rewritten in order to fit these images (Sengupta 1992, 159–60). Sengupta and Niranjana thus conclude that translation was a strategy of containment, in that it reflected the colonial experience and the asymmetrical relations of power under colonialism.

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place (see Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts 2008). As the colonial experience cannot be reduced to absolutes, since it was inflated by reconfiguration of agencies, contradictions and paradoxes, the notion of translation as deconsecration proposed here does not constitute an absolute. For instance, other translation practices during the period explored in this article were not affected by the same deconsecrative force described. As an example, the preface to the translation of Alice in Wonderland (Elisi katika nchi ya ajabu39) made by Ermyntrude St Lo Malet Conan-Davies, a nurse married to the assistant District Commissioner Conan-Davies, does not show any evidence of a discourse aimed at subtracting the literary capital of the Swahili language which, in the preface, is even described as nzuri (beautiful). Still, in neighbouring Kenya, the gap between the great quantity of Swahili poems translated into English and circulated in the metropole and the small numbers of Swahili poems circulated in East Africa was noticed by J.W.T. Allen, a leading Swahili scholar who worked in the Inter-territorial Swahili Language Committee. From the 1950s, in his personal attempt to recover and disseminate Swahili poetic works of art for a Swahili audience, Allen started collecting Swahili poems and publishing them in booklets with the Kenya Literature Bureau in the collection Johari za Kiswahili (Jewels of Swahili).40 These examples corroborate my view that the notion of translation as deconsecration should be read as a concept that calls for alternative conceptualisations of the ways translation is used within literary exchanges among neglected geographical and historical areas of the Republic of Letters. The exploration of contexts that have been neglected in the description of the literary world, and the proposal of additional notions to equip the scheme, will make the international literary space an enlarged and more inclusive conceptual place.

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1940. I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke who pointed this example out to me while discussing a former version of this manuscript. Examples of poems collected by Allen are: Allen and El-Buhry (1955; 1956).

40

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—. 2013. Paratexts. In Handbook of translation studies, vol. 4, ed. Y. Gambier and L. van Doorslaer, 113–16. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Talento, S. 2014. Consecration, deconsecration, and reconsecration: The shifting role of literary translation into Swahili. In Translators have their say? Translation and the power of agency, ed. A. W. Khalifa, 42– 64. Zürich: LIT. Talento, S. 2014. Consecration, deconsecration and reconsecration: the shifting role of literary translation into Swahili (unpublished PhD manuscript). Bayreuth: University of Bayreuth. [Forthcoming] TEC (Tanganyika Educational Conference). 1925. Report of education conference 1925: Together with the report of the committee for the standardisation of the Swahili language. Dar es Salaam: Government Printer. Toury, G. 1995. Descriptive translation studies and beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tymoczko, M. 1999. Translation in a postcolonial context: Early Irish literature in English translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. Vierke, C. 2011. On the poetics of the Utendi: A critical edition of the nineteenth-century Swahili poem “Utendi wa Haudaji” together with a stylistic analysis. Zürich: LIT. Wafula, R. M. 2008. Performing identity in Kiswahili literature. In Culture, performance and identity, ed. K. Njogu, 103–17. Nairobi: African Books Collective. Watts, R. 2000. Translating culture: Reading the paratexts to Aimé Césaire’s Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal. TTR 13 (2): 29–45. Werner, A., ed. 1921–22. Utenzi wa Ayubu. Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, 2, no. 1 (1921): 85–115; 297–319; 2, no. 2 (1922): 297–320; 2, no. 3 (1922): 347–416. —, ed. 1927. A poem attributed to Liongo Fumo. Festschrift Meinhof 1927:45–54. —, ed. 1932. Mikidadi na Mayasa. Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen 21:1–25. Werner, A., and W. Hichens, eds. 1934. The advice of Mwana Kupona upon the wifely duty. Medstead: Azania Press. Whiteley, W. 1969. Swahili: The rise of a national language. London: Metheun. Wolf, M. 2002. Censorship as cultural blockage: Banned literature in the late Habsburg monarchy. TTR 15 (2): 45–61. Yuste Frías, J. 2012. Paratextual elements in translation: Paratranslating titles in children’s literature. In Translation peripheries: Paratextual

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elements in translation, ed. A. Gil-Bajardí, P. Orero and S. RoviraEsteva, 117–34. Bern: Peter Lang. Zhukov, A. 1988. The dating of literary monuments of the old Swahili literature. Africa in Soviet Studies: Annual 1987, 138–43. —. 1992. On the dating of old Swahili manuscripts: Towards Swahili palaeography. Swahili Language and Society: Notes and News 9:60– 65.

CHAPTER THREE COLD WAR TRANSLATION IN THE EAST AFRICAN CONTEXT: RECEPTION AND RESPONSES ALAMIN MAZRUI

1. Introduction The end of European colonial rule in East Africa in the early 1960s had an important impact on the practice of literary translation of texts from English to Swahili. Throughout the colonial period this endeavour was almost entirely controlled by colonial functionaries–from the choice of the text to be translated, to its production and ultimate circulation. As we approached the end of colonialism, however, there was a shift in at least one dimension of the experience: Now East Africans made their own choices of what to translate from English and sometimes how those translated texts were to function in the space of East African literature. This became part of the postcolonial response in translation. The end of formal colonialism, however, did not mean the end of imperial ambitions. Africa now began to experience competing claims by the USA and the Soviet Union in particular, each seeking to influence African developments in the direction of its desire. These imperial aspirations also came to be articulated in the form of translation, specifically in the selection of some texts that the USA and the Soviet Union sought to introduce to Africa against the backdrop of Cold War rivalry. In this chapter I look at this postcolonial face of cultural imperialism, drawing on two texts translated into Swahili: George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Maxim Gorky’s Mother, focusing on both the imperial motives behind these translated texts and some of the African responses to them. A particularly significant development in the early years of the postcolonial period is how these texts translated by Africans in the

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aftermath of colonialism sometimes came to reconfigure the boundaries of Swahili literature itself to the extent that the translated texts now came to be part and parcel of the Swahili literature curriculum in East African schools. In 1995, for example, the noted Kenyan literary critic, Chris Wanjala, charged that his colleagues teaching Swahili at the university “operate on a narrow skeleton of literary texts and only from the East African region” (1995, 12). In spite of the fact that Swahili is primarily an East African language and literary texts in Swahili are produced primarily by writers from East Africa for an East African audience, Wanjala considered the focus on texts from this region for Swahili literature courses to be unduly insular. Wanjala’s critics were quick to question his facts but, curiously, not his terms of reference in defining the scope of Swahili literature. Sheri Mwimali (1995, 19), noting that contrary to Wanjala’s presumption, university students of Swahili literature were already being exposed to a wide range of texts from other countries, mentioned translated works of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Orwell, Gogol, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ferdinand Oyono, Robert Serumaga, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. Likewise, Mwenda Mbatiah claimed that at the University of Nairobi, they had all along been “teaching translated works from all parts of the world” in Swahili literature courses. Mbatiah (1995, 19) then asked: “So where does Wanjala get the idea that the Swahili literature syllabus is narrow?” Both Wanjala’s point of reference and the responses to it from his colleagues essentially reconfirmed Anthony Appiah’s views that postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia – a relatively small, western-style, western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery. In the West they are known through the Africa they offer; their compatriots know them through the Africa they have invented for the world, for each other, for Africa. (Appiah 1991, 348)

In response to colonial views about the paucity of African literature, Swahilists found themselves at pains to prove otherwise even if, in so doing, they became trapped in a discourse of contradictory formulation, redrawing the boundaries of Swahili literature by incorporating translated texts from English. In other words, in the quest for postcolonial validation, Swahili literature became reinvented within the corridors of the African academy by claiming, inadvertently perhaps, that the colonial “Other” is an integral part of the postcolonial “Self”.

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Yet there have been times when the transformation was not so much about the boundaries of Swahili literature as of the translated texts themselves and what they are used for. In this sense, translation becomes an aspect of the wider phenomenon of transculturation, a term used to describe how subordinated or marginalized groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture. While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying degrees what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for. (Pratt 1992, 6)

In this process, what becomes of the translated text is not only what the translator may have done with the translation in getting it to enact “its own processes of signification which answer to different linguistic and cultural contexts” (Venuti 2000, 215), but also how its intended audience reads it, receives it, and finally chooses to use it. The East African experience with the Swahili translation of Orwell’s Animal Farm and Gorky’s Mother points to a phenomenon that goes beyond the postcolonial. For in the process of transculturation, the reading of the translated text undergoes a re-contextualization in a way that results in a shift in its meaning and message. The end result, in both cases, is that instead of serving as responses to the imperial subject that was responsible for the selection and translation of the metropolitan texts in the first place, the translated texts are directed inward to serve as critiques of local structures of power and authority. To this extent, the postcolonial framework in translation studies ceases to be useful in capturing the dynamics and counter-dynamics of the transculturation of Orwell’s Animal Farm and Gorky’s Mother in the East African context. And it is to the analysis of the translation of these two texts that we must now turn, exploring the ways in which the (re-)readings of the translations in the East African context came to be redirected towards a new and local signification.

2. The USA and Orwell’s Animal Farm In his brilliant book, Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture and the Cold War (2012), Andrew N. Rubin demonstrates how the USA, during the Cold War period, patronized the arts in a way that aimed to reinforce its ideological onslaught against the Soviet Union. An important American initiative of this time was the state sponsorship of the translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm into various languages of especially the South, as a propaganda tool against perceived communist incursions

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(Rubin 2012, 24–46). One of those US-sponsored translations became Shamba la Wanyama, the Swahili rendering of Animal Farm by a Tanzanian national, Fortunatus Kawegere. According to the University of Kansas Libraries Exhibit, the Swahili translation too was “underwritten by United States Information Service” (KU Libraries Exhibits 2015), even though there seems to have been a general agreement that these USsponsored translations should “contain no references to the Information Department of the Embassy or the United States Information Exchange” (Rubin 2012, 38). Born in 1943, Kawegere completed elementary and high school in Bukoba, Tanzania, where he was born and raised. He attended Kijunguti Teachers College between 1960 and 1961 with a focus on Swahili, and completed his elementary teacher’s certification just as the country–then Tanganyika–attained its independence from Britain. He later served as a teacher in the region at the elementary school level. In addition to the translation of Orwell’s Animal Farm into Swahili, Kawegere authored several creative works in Swahili, including Kinga ya Rushwa (Antidote to Bribery), Kazi Yangu: Mashairi juu ya Kazi Mbalimbali za Wanadamu (My Work: Poems on Different Human Professions), Uongo Uliozaa Jitu (The Lie that Produced a Giant) and Sayari Iliyozama na Mgeni wa Usiku (The Planet that Sank with the Night Visitor), and at least one short-story collection in English, Inspector Rajabu Investigates and Other Stories. Animal Farm (1945) is a satirical animal fable ostensibly about a group of animals who, through conspiracy, launch an armed revolution to oust their human owners from the farm on which they live. They then run the farm themselves on the agreed revolutionary principles of “Animalism” that distinguish them from humans and human rule. Within a short period, however, animal rule degenerates into a brutal tyranny, erected on the deliberate erasure of the history of the revolution, muzzling of political dissent, a growing personality cult, corruption and ruthless exploitation. The revolution has been betrayed. Orwell intended Animal Farm to be an exposure and critique of the dangers of the Soviet totalitarian government under Joseph Stalin. Events in postcolonial Tanganyika–as mainland Tanzania was then known before its merger with Zanzibar–provided the immediate political context for the translation of Animal Farm. As Venuti points out, the inscription of local target-community interests in the process of translation “begins with the very choice of a text for translation, always a very selective, densely motivated choice” (Venuti 2000, 486). In this case, however, it was not the betrayal of a revolution that had already taken place but the fear of an impending (socialist) revolution that became the

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inspirational force for Shamba la Wanyama as part of an anti-communist offensive during the Cold War. It is true that the socialism of Ujamaa1 was not formally launched, and the ruling Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) did not become Chama cha Mapinduzi (Revolutionary Party) until 1967, precisely the year that the Swahili translation of Animal Farm appeared. But the idea of a quasi-socialist state had certainly been in gestation as early as 1962, if not earlier, when the then president of the country, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, released his pamphlet entitled Ujamaa: The Basis of African Socialism. America’s fears of a socialist turn of events in Tanganyika were further reinforced when on 26 April 1964, the country merged with the independent island state of Zanzibar to form the United Republic of Tanzania. This merger came barely three months after the violent Zanzibar Revolution of which the aims–given the central role of the Marxist-led Umma Party as its architect–were seen by many, especially by the US government, as essentially communistic. It was even feared that Zanzibar would be an African Cuba of a sort, poised to influence the rest of the region (Wilson 1989). A Swahili translation of Animal Farm acquired additional urgency due to the unfolding tensions between pro-socialist and pro-capitalist political camps throughout the East African region. Critics generally agree that Kawegere’s translation is poised towards domestication. He situates the story in a known neighbourhood in Tanzania, employs a diction that is reminiscent of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s Swahili political idiolect, and seems to omit aspects of the text that would compromise its domestication. In the words of Flavia Aiello Traore: Already from the opening of the work, it is clear that the translator is operating a radical and coherent process of domestication, mainly through three strategies: Africanization – the translator carries out a full contextualization of his familiar milieu (Ibura is a neighborhood in the outskirts of Bukoba, seat of the Lutheran church); De-Englishization – Kawegere opts for a massive removal of linguistic references to England and English culture (names, toponyms, culture-specific objects such as barrel, scullery, etc.), often without searching for replacements in the target language; Re-writing – he manifests his authorial attitude by omitting or reformulating sentences. (Traore 2013, 21)

1

Ujamaa is the Swahili term that the first president of Tanzania, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, coined to refer to the quasi-socialist system that he introduced in the nation in 1967.

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Olivia Herrington (2015) makes similar observations and reaches more or less the same conclusions as Traore. Even the chapters of the translated text are given titles that are reminiscent of didactic formulae often found in Swahili story-telling. It is not clear whether the decision to domesticate the text was made independently by Kawegere himself or, as happened in some other parts of the world, was a product of some American influence. In their attempts to construct their authority of the “Third World”, Rubin notes, both the American and British governments favoured the adaptation of Animal Farm to local contexts and conditions: In Malaya, where the British fought its longest postwar conflict, there was an effort to produce a less “English” version of Animal Farm. In Egypt, too, where British authority faced mounting anticolonial challenges to King Farouk, the IRD [Information Research Department, a secret unit of the British Foreign Office] viewed Animal Farm as particularly “relevant” to conditions there. Reducing the Arabic language to Islam, Ernest Main wrote Ralph Murray that translating Animal Farm is “particularly good for Arabic in view of the fact that both pigs and dogs are unclean animals to Muslims.” (Rubin 2012, 38)

Domestication, in other words, was seen as adding to the anticommunist propaganda value of translations and adaptations of Animal Farm. And whether or not Kawegere came under the influence of the US sponsors on his mode of translation, there is no doubt that the domestication of the text was in conformity with the wider imperial agenda. The fact that Shamba la Wanyama was intended to be a critique of the socialist orientation certainly did not endear it to the Tanzanian political establishment of the time. In her dissertation Ida Hadjivayanis even suggests that the book was banned in the country. In her words: the translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm by Kawegere Fortunatus was immediately rejected by the state … Fortunatus had to go to Kenya to have his translation published as Shamba la Wanyama. And even after it was published, the book was banned in Tanzania. (Hadjivayanis 2011, 11– 12)

In an interview with the online SwahiliHub, Kawegere does refer to a visit by Tanzanian intelligence officers soon after the release of his translation and to the possibility that “viongozi wengi serikalini hawakuipenda” (many government leaders did not like it [my translation]) (Gikambi 2013). However, he does not claim that the book was banned,

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nor is there any official record suggesting so. The fact that Kawegere chose to publish his translation in Kenya is not evidence enough that the text was not accepted in Tanzania. After all, Kawegere and some other leading Tanzanian writers (like Said Ahmed Mohamed) published virtually all their works in Kenya. Book market rather than political security seems to have been the overriding consideration here, as Kawegere himself affirms in the same interview with Gikambi (2013). Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the translation, appearing as it did on the eve of Tanzania’s Arusha Declaration to move to the socialist left, is likely to have rubbed the political establishment the wrong way. However, while Kawegere produced Shamba la Wanyama for his own compatriots in socialist-leaning Tanzania, it was ironically enough in capitalist Kenya that the translation came to score its greatest success. In 1994 the book was adopted by the Swahili Committee of the Kenya Institute of Education to be a required text for the Swahili literature paper in the national high school examination. Some of the most influential voices within this committee were left-leaning graduates of local universities. These members of the Swahili Committee took the growing momentum for political reform in Kenya in the early 1990s as an opportunity to inscribe an oppositional voice, evident in Animal Farm, suggesting the need not merely of a changing of the guard but of a fundamental transformation of the political order. The Kenyan revolutionary movement that can be compared most closely with that of Animal Farm is perhaps the Mau Mau movement against British settler colonial rule. Known as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) by its combatants, the Mau Mau war broke out in 1952 under the leadership of Dedan Kimathi. The expropriation of much of the best land in the country for European settlement, accompanied by a series of labour laws and regulations forcing Africans to provide illcompensated labour for the settlers, made land and labour the most burning issues in the struggle for independence. And under oppressive colonial conditions Mau Mau became precisely the kind of revolutionary movement that partly inspired Orwell to write Animal Farm (Ingle 1993, 75–76). It was a violent, conspiratorial revolution with a popular following. And while Mau Mau’s military leaders may not have been known to be power-hungry, those who claimed its political mantle and leadership and eventually assumed the reins of power when the country became independent in 1963, obviously were. In other words, like Orwell's characterization of the Russian revolution, the Mau Mau too was a revolution that quickly opened the gates to its own betrayal, as Oginga

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Odinga, Kenya’s first vice-president, came to argue in his controversial book, Not Yet Uhuru (1967). Central themes of Animal Farm are the rewriting of history to distort the objectives of the revolution in general, and the role of Snowball, its selfless intellectual spirit in the struggle for animal liberation, in particular. This political exercise as it relates very specifically to the history of the Mau Mau came to be the hallmark of successive Kenyan regimes in the postcolonial era. Until recently, the silent policy was: “Speak no Mau Mau; Hear no Mau Mau”, in which Kenyans were led to develop a culture of amnesia about the movement and its leaders. On 20 October 2001, for example, over 70 Kenyans were arrested and charged with unlawful assembly. The party had apparently angered the government of the day by celebrating October 20th not as Kenyatta Day–as officially named to mark the arrest of Jomo Kenyatta by colonial authorities–but as Mau Mau Day in honour of Kenya’s freedom fighters. Similarly, the Kimathi Cultural Centre was denied permission to hold celebrations in honour of Dedan Kimathi, the military leader of the Mau Mau, on February 18th, the day of his execution by the British colonial government (Sunday Nation, February 19, 2006, 4). This was early in 2006 when Kenya was regarded to be at its most open in political space. The political record of Kenyan leaders is also of direct contextual relevance. Under Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of the country, the mystification of the leader, the misappropriation of the products of people’s labour, the kleptocracy and corruption in the highest circles of the government, the rabid authoritarianism of the regime and its recurrent attempts to mislead the public, all bear a striking resemblance to some of the events revolving around the life of "Our Leader, Comrade Napoleon" in Animal Farm. Even Kenya's brand of capitalism was once projected as an exercise in African Socialism, and Kenyans were required to believe it. And like Snowball (the dedicated selfless revolutionary) in the political manipulations of Napoleon (the corrupt leader of the animals), Marxists and critics of the government were regularly hounded by the police and became scapegoats to cover up the regime’s ineptness and mismanagement of the state. No wonder, when Nyahururu Secondary School decided to compete in the National School Drama Festival by staging a dramatized version of Shamba la Wanyama, it was immediately censured, and the play banned (Mazrui 2007, 141). Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s second president, essentially followed in the footsteps of Kenyatta after the latter’s death in 1978. In the words of a member of parliament:

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Deterioration really set in [in] 1982, by which time there was no more freedom of debate for fear of falling foul of the party and the president. The days are gone when you could stand up in parliament and discuss what is in your mind – now it is considered subversion and treachery. (Africa Watch 1991, 17–18)

Just as the general meetings in Animal Farm are progressively used merely to endorse the self-serving proposals of the pigs, so the parliament in Kenya progressively became a mere rubber stamp for the wishes of the president and those closest to him. Throughout the 1980s, fear of the “enemy” focused primarily on the universities that Moi’s government monitored through informers. Many academics, students and writers were forced into exile. In no time, Kenya had a huge population of political exiles, which was repeatedly accused of conniving with “imperialists” to undermine the popular will of the Kenyan people (as in the case of Animal Farm’s Snowball, who is accused of collaborating with Farmer Jones to destabilize Animal Farm). Those who remained and dared teach Marxist and other radical ideas were hounded out of the universities and imprisoned without charge or trial. Napoleon’s dogs thus found their mirror image in the Special Branch Police officers of Kenya, who often succeeded in forcing individuals to “confess” to crimes they had never committed. In its attempts to combat “the enemy”, Moi’s regime strengthened its propaganda machinery. The government had always owned the television and radio stations whose news broadcasts always began with the day’s engagements of “His Excellency”. Now it added a newspaper, The Kenya Times, to its media arsenal. Essentially playing the role of Squealer of Animal Farm, the government-owned media became the most important organs for justifying the unjustifiable actions of Moi and his government and for covering up problems that faced the country, from drought to famine, from the AIDS pandemic to the shortage of medicinal drugs. In due course, Moi developed a personality cult. No direct criticism was expressible in public and the culture of fear and silence that Jomo Kenyatta had managed to construct in the country took even deeper root. In 1984, Moi declared, “I call on all ministers, assistant ministers, and everyone to sing after me like a parrot. You ought to sing the song I sing. If I put a full stop, you should also put a full stop” (The Weekly Review [Nairobi], September 21, 1984, 4). Thus the entire destiny of the country was predicated upon how well its citizens parroted their president and sang his praises. Moi rose above the party and the nation and his voice became the voice of all. Daniel arap Moi was now projected as the epitome of human wisdom and well above the laws of the land.

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Equally significant was the ethnocratic tendency of successive Kenyan regimes–rooted in colonial history and founded in economic considerations– in which the president’s ethnic compatriots and their allies were placed in a position of relative advantage vis-à-vis members of other ethnic groups. Under Jomo Kenyatta, it was the Gikuyu; under Moi, it was the Kalenjin. The privileging of the pigs of Animal Farm over other animals related directly to this ethnocratic interpretation of Kenyan politics of the time. The dynamics of this ethnic politics during the presidency of Daniel arap Moi led to the production of yet another translation of Animal Farm. This was W.W. Munyoro’s Gikuyu translation of Animal Farm under the title Mugunda wa Nyamu (2002). This came at a time when the Gikuyu people felt particularly marginalized by a regime that was seen to be overwhelmingly dominated by politicians from the so-called KAMATUSA fraternity–an acronym for the ethnic alliance between the Kalenjin, Maasai, Tugen and Samburu. At one time the Gikuyu were even described as the Igbo of Kenya, an allusion to their potential to foment secessionist ideas just as the Igbo of Nigeria are said to have done, actions that led to the eruption of the Biafran War. It was in this climate that Munyoro produced Mugunda wa Nyamu. Looked at from this ethno-nationalist angle, the KAMATUSA oligarchy can be compared to the pigs of Animal Farm–greedy, corrupt, tyrannical and, above all, determined to downplay the role of the Gikuyu, the backbone of the Mau Mau movement, in the liberation of the country from European rule. Like the Swahili translation of Animal Farm, then, the Gikuyu translation also goes beyond the postcolonial and is turned inwards as a critique of an ethnocratic, authoritarian rule. In sum, then, even though Animal Farm was written as a critique of the “socialist revolution” of the Soviet Union, and was translated into Swahili ostensibly to forewarn Tanzanians against an impending “socialist revolution”, the reverberations of its political message were felt equally strong in the staunchly capitalist nation of Kenya. And that message, I contend, became a primary reason for the left-oriented Swahili educationists to use their influence, in the wake of growing political opposition against the Moi regime, to inscribe Shamba la Wanyama as a counter-discourse text into the high school literature syllabus of the country. This internally directed critique of the Kenyan state was later reinforced by the production of the Gikuyu Mugunda wa Nyamu. Both translated texts transcend the parameters of postcolonial discourse and have become transculturated in the service of nation-internal struggles for a new politico-economic order.

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3. The Soviet Union and Gorky’s Mother In the same period of Cold War rivalry, the Soviet Union launched the Swahili translation of Gorky’s Mother, the Russian novel described by Katerina Clark as that post, or station, where Bolsheviks coming out of the old intelligentsia tradition were able to stop and take on fresh horses to bear them on into Socialist Realism itself. Mother provided a system for translating the clichés of tsarist radicals into the determining formulas of Bolshevism. (Clark 1981, 52)

The Swahili translation–Mama–was sponsored by the Department of Progress (Swahili “Maendeleo”) of the USSR. Besides “Imechapwa katika Soviet Union” (Published in the Soviet Union), there are no details of the publisher or year of publication. According to Gromova, Mama was among the earlier of Soviet texts rendered into Swahili by Swahilispeaking East Africans who were then living in the Soviet Union, either studying or working with Radio Moscow or Foreign Languages Press. These included Husein Abdul-Razak, Herman Matemu and Ben Ombuoro (Gromova 2004). The Swahili translator of Mother, specifically, was Badru Said, a Tanzanian of Zanzibari origin who was then residing in the Soviet Union. Described by Kasim Suleiman (2015)2 as an extremely brilliant student from his earliest years of education, Badru Said left Zanzibar soon after his graduation from high school to go to China to study political economy in 1960. In fact, he was among the first batch of African students to visit Communist China for academic reasons. By 1962, however, he and many other African students left China allegedly because of “undesirable political indoctrination, language difficulty, poor educational standards, inadequate social life, outright hostility, and racial discrimination” (Larkin 1971, 142). He later went to Moscow to continue with his studies. It was during this period that he was approached by an agent of the Foreign Languages Press to produce a Swahili version of Gorky’s Mother. Because he was not yet sufficiently proficient in Russian, Badru based his translation on the already existing English translation of Gorky’s text. In the meantime, his frequent visits to the Chinese embassy in Moscow to read Chinese papers led the Soviet authorities to suspect him of spying for China. As a result, 2

Personal interview with Kasim Suleiman who was a friend of Badru Said and was in the Soviet Union before, during and after Said left for Zanzibar. Kasim Suleiman now lives in Zanzibar.

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he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1967, just a couple of weeks before the completion of his studies. Thereafter he returned to Tanzania where he joined the University of Dar es Salaam, from which he graduated. Badru was then employed by the National Bank of Commerce in Dar es Salaam where he rose to become a department head, until his death in 1992. Mother is the story of the daily struggles of the average proletariat in the Soviet Union who were protesting against the Czar and the capitalists of the time, stimulating conditions towards the October Revolution of 1905. Pelageya, the protagonist, is the wife of a factory worker who ignores the political upheaval in her country, focusing her energies on her family instead. In this regard, she represents thousands of workers who, partly out of fear, are simply concerned with living their lives. Pelageya’s son Pavel, on the other hand, joins the revolutionary movement that inspired so many. But when Pavel is arrested, Pelageya is herself transformed into a revolutionary activist, standing by her son against the oppressive state. The plot itself “fuses historical reality and revolutionary myth in a coherent political allegory. The novel describes an actual incident, a May Day demonstration that took place in the Volga town of Somov” and its immediate aftermath (Clark 1981, 52). The cover of the Swahili translation of the book deserves special note. The front cover with an all-white background presents a sketch of a young plant–perhaps alluding to the status of Tanzania as a new nation. The plant is red and its branches and leaves are all blowing “backwards”. The impression created by the sketch, then, is one of a (red) flag in a “forward” march against an unseen force of wind. Though the image takes one back to the May Day march of workers in Volga in which Pavel was holding a red banner, the representation could conceivably also refer to Tanzania’s move to the socialist left in spite of the challenges on its path. The back cover is not the usual description of the book, the author and quotes of reviewers. This information is found in the inner cover of the book, with a photograph of Maxim Gorky himself (alias Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov). Rather, the back cover bears two photographs of people who existed in real life during Gorky’s lifetime, each accompanied by a caption. The first is that of Anna Kirillovna Zalomova, and the other of Pyotr Zalomov and his wife Josefina Zalomova. The captions explain that it is the activist life of Anna Zalomova and Pyotr Zalomov that inspired two of Gorky’s main characters in the novel, Pelageya Nilovna Vlassova, the mother, and Pavel Vlassov, the son. The back cover ends by quoting Gorky’s own words:

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Je, Bi Nilovna alikuwako kikweli? ... Yapasa kujua kwamba akina mama pia walishiriki katika maandalio ya mapinduzi na katika harakati za kisiasa za kichinichini. Bi Nilovna ndiyo taswira ya kifasihi iliyobuniwa na mwandishi yenye kummathilisha mama Pyotr Zalomov. Mama huyo alikuwa akishughulika katika jumuiya ya kisasa na kusambaza maandishi huku na huko, akijifanya kama mhajiri …Wala hakuwa ni mhusika wa kipekee. [So then, did Lady Nilovna truly exist? … It is important to understand that women too participated in preparing for the revolution and in underground political activities. Lady Nilovna is the literary image created by the author as the example of mother Pyotr Zalomov. That mother was active in modern society and in distributing pamphlets here and there, [on the move] like a migrant. And she was not alone in this.] (own translation – AM)

These words are intended to underscore not only the working-class dimension of that revolutionary moment, but also the important role that women played in its planning and execution. The Swahili translation also has a foreword by Boris Bursov, the distinguished Soviet literary scholar who was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and served as professor, first at Leningrad University and later at the Herzen Leningrad Pedagogical Institute. Bursov opens his foreword with the following words: “Katika fasihi ya kila taifa kuna vitabu venye kuambatana na nyakati za mabadiliko katika maendeleo yake” (In the literature of every nation there are books that accompany the moments of change in its development [my translation]) (Bursov p. 3). Gorky’s Mother was certainly one such book in Soviet history. And the Swahili Mama was perhaps intended to encourage a socialist revolutionary choice in Tanzania. As political life began to change in Tanzania, however, Mama and other texts from the Soviet Union began to disappear. But if the book went out of circulation in Tanzania, its African relevance was most clearly demonstrated in the events that followed the disputed Kenyan presidential election results of December 27th, 2007. This is when Kenya erupted into weeks of bloody violence, pitting poor Kenyans against poor Kenyans, seemingly along ethnic lines. When calm finally returned with the intervention of the peace-mediating team led by the former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, over a 1000 people had been killed–some in a very brutal manner–and hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes. These developments in a country once considered an island of peace in a sea of turmoil sent shock waves throughout Kenya and the international community, resulting in intensive multilateral efforts for national reconciliation and healing. In addition to numerous diplomatic shuttles from all over the world, there were local initiatives from the

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business community, trade unions, faith-based organizations, civil society groups, hip-hop artists and so forth, all directed towards the need to create an enabling political, socio-economic and cultural environment that would make a united and peaceful Kenya more sustainable. In Kenya’s largest slum, Kibera, where the poor turned violent on each other only to add misery to their suffering, a different kind of postviolence response was taking place. A multi-ethnic group of young artists was meeting every afternoon in a corner of a partially destroyed community hall partly to reflect on and make sense of what had transpired in the immediate aftermath of the elections. They expressed their horror and anger at how successful the “Mafuta Mingi”–those with a lot of fat, the rich–of Kenya had been in ethnicizing the face of poverty to a point where the poor were rendered blind and could no longer see who their real enemy was. They seemed clear about the economic roots of what was projected on the surface as ethnic conflict, springing from the long burning question in Kenya about who owns and controls land in the different parts of the country. They reminisced over a Swahili saying that “Ndovu wawili wakipigana, ziumiazo ni nyasi”–when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. And when a deal was finally brokered for the contending factions of the political class to share power, the Kibera youth added that even when “Ndovu wawili wakitombana, ziumiazo ni nyasi”–when two elephants are copulating, it is (still) the grass that suffers. As a result, this group of young artists from the Kibera slum decided to inject a different kind of message in the political discourse of peace and reconciliation that had come to dominate the nation in the aftermath of the violence: That no member of the “Mafuta Mingi” could be expected to address the concerns and needs of the poor; that there can be no genuine peace and reconciliation without socio-economic justice; and that what Kenya needs is a complete political and economic overhaul. Towards this end, members of the group, calling itself Matigari3, spent hours reading tattered photocopied pages of the Swahili Mama. Each chapter of the novel became a point of animated discussion and reflection on their perceived state in Kenya. In the process they were busy crafting a dramatized version of the Swahili translation of the novel which they intended to perform on stage in various parts of the country to propagate 3

Matigari, of course, is the revolutionary hero of NgNJgƭ wa Thiong’o’s Gikuyu novel, Matigari ma Njurungi. The leader of the group of seven people, Chris Opiyo is someone who had served as my research assistant in previous field work in Kibera, and it is he who invited me to the meetings of the group. They solicited my assistance in procuring funds to enable them put up the play in Nairobi and other towns. Three of the seven were university graduates.

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their message of revolution. In a sense, the group vindicated the words of Satish Kalseker when he wrote the day Mother waited for has not come yet. The struggle for its survival, too, has not ended. It is possible that we need to fight for it incessantly; and will have to prepare ourselves for a long drawn struggle. We all, and the next generations to come will have to read Mother again and again. (Kalseker, quoted in Pansare 2012, 228)

The dramatized Swahili version of Mama that was produced in Kenya differed from its novel version in several ways. Firstly, the title was changed from Mama to Bega kwa Bega (Shoulder to Shoulder), emphasizing the comradeship of collective struggle not only between the workers, but also between mother and son. Apparently the title was inspired by one of Alamin Mazrui’s Swahili poems by the same name. An English translation of one stanza from the poem reads as follows: When the moon rises I will return, I'll protect and defend you Above the mountain the full moon gazes down on us in sympathy The road is too long Time is too short But like my husband I continue shoulder to shoulder to liberate our humanity. (Poetry Translation Center 2015)

The fact that the poem alludes to men and women joined in a common struggle was seen by the members of the group to be of particular relevance both to the text and the message they were seeking to convey. A second important difference is in the names of the characters. They were all domesticated. Some names–Magau, Sumira–did not suggest any identifiable Kenyan figures. Others did. Prominent among these is Makani as the name of Pavel, the leading labour activist in the story. The name Makani clearly brings to mind Makhan Singh (1913–1973), the Kenyan trade union activist of South Asian descent who was imprisoned by the British colonial government for 11 years without charge or trial (Patel 2006). Equally important is the name of Pavel’s mother, Pelageya, who in the dramatized Swahili version is called Wangari. This is most likely in reference to Wangari Maathai (1940–2011), the Kenyan environmental and political activist, founder of the Green Belt Movement and laureate of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. By making a “blood link” between an IndianKenyan and a Gikuyu-Kenyan, the group was seeking to transcend ethnicity in its characterization of the mother and her son and, by implication, opening up the possibility of a trans-ethnic unity of the working poor against the forces of capital.

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These and other strategies used by the group in rendering the Swahili translation of Mother into a dramatized version targeted at a Kenyan audience point towards a preference for domestication of the text. Even the language departs from the so-called standard Swahili used in schools and the media towards the urban, working class Swahili one hears in cosmopolitan Nairobi. The objective of the translating team seemed to be one of making the text as directly relevant to the Kenyan scene as possible, to give it a meaning that answers to a local need at a particular historical moment. In addition to addressing the politics of the moment precipitated by the post-election violence of 2007, Bega kwa Bega brings to the fore a particular reading of the history of Kenya–the history of the labour movement on the one hand, and that of women’s leadership on the other. One of the most comprehensive studies of the trade union movement in Kenya during the colonial period is certainly that of Makhan Singh, History of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement to 1952 (1969). In it we learn of the importance and centrality of the trade union movement in the country’s struggle for liberation from British colonial rule. Equally important, we learn how the space of trade union activism sought to defy the apartheid structure of the colonial government. Then leader of the Asian Railway Trade Union, Makhan Singh, was himself constantly forging trans-ethnic links with other trade union organizations and leaders, especially Fred Kubai and Chege Kebachia. The period after direct European colonialism was one in which the Kenyan trade union movement expanded organizationally but was weakened immensely in its activism and collective bargaining power through a combination of dictatorial politics, political co-optation of leaders and new laws to curb their power and restrict their independence. In spite of these new postcolonial conditions, however, Kenyan workers have continued to protest and strike in various circumstances. Just over the last 10 years, for example, there have been strikes by teachers, health workers, airways workers, tea workers, among others–all over issues of wages and terms of service. The postcolonial situation, then, has suggested that there is a significant level of worker consciousness in Kenya. This possibility is well captured in Tunakataa (forthcoming), the collection of Swahili poems composed by Kenyan workers that have been compiled by Nazmi Durrani. The beginning of the opening poem that gives the collection its title, for example, reads as follows: Tunakataa, tunakataa, tunakataa Kunyonywa na wale wasiotoa jasho Sisi wafanyakazi na mafalahi tunaotoa jasho

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Tunakataa, tunakataa, tunakataa Kunyonywa na wale wasiotoa jasho Sisi wafanyakazi na mafalahi Ni sisi tu tunazalisha mali Tunakataa, tunakataa, tunakataa Kukubali zinyakuliwe na mabepari … [We refuse, we refuse, we refuse To be exploited by those who do not toil We the workers and peasants who sweat We refuse, we refuse, we refuse To be exploited by those who do not toil We the workers and peasants It is we alone who produce the wealth We refuse, we refuse, we refuse To let it be stolen by capitalists …]

Like the workers in Gorky’s Mother who stood steadfast behind Pavel when he was delivering his fiery speech to protest against pay cuts, the Kenyan workers have shown consistent potential to be inspired in that same direction of labour activism. An equally important contextual link between Mother and Bega kwa Bega is the role of Kenyan women in national political struggles in general, and in the trade union movement in particular. In modern times, this history of women goes back to the earliest period of British colonialism in the work of MeKatilili wa Mwenza, for example, who led the Giriama resistance against forced labour and taxation (Mugi-Ndua 2000), to women leaders and fighters in the Mau Mau war of liberation from colonialism (Presley 2013), to the more recent hunger strike of Kenyan mothers at “Freedom Corner” in Nairobi, protesting against the continued political imprisonment of their sons (Brownhill and Turner 2004). In the trade union domain, Kenyan women have always provided indispensable support to their family members during moments of strike, and have taken positions of leadership in areas of work where they are well represented. More importantly has been the establishment, since 1992, of the Kenya Women Workers Organization (KEWWO), under the leadership of the indefatigable woman labour activist Kathini Maloba. And linking the economic and the political, was the figure of Wangari Maathai who seems to have inspired the mother character in Bega kwa Bega. If the mother in Gorky’s Mother was providing a model of the new

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woman in a revolutionary moment, then the model of a revolutionary woman, from which the Swahili translators could draw inspiration, had already been firmly established by the time Gorky’s Mother arrived in Kenya in its Swahili dramatized version. Commenting on the Marathi translation of Gorky’s Mother, Megha Pansare has argued that: Gorky’s Mother introduced a new woman participating in the revolutionary activity. She is not to be equated with the sacrosanct Hindu culture, or with the essence of a divine goddess to be put on a special pedestal to be worshipped. Gorky’s Mother is an ordinary woman who becomes the vehicle of revolutionary fervour. (Pansare 2012, 227)

In Kenya, in contrast, it is partly the local woman who inspires and shapes the mother character in the dramatized translation, in conformity with the image of the protagonist, Pelageya, in Mother. In the meantime, however, we must not forget that when the Matigari group decided to work on a Swahili translation of Mother, the target of their anger was not the capitalist factory owners, specifically, but the kleptocratic class of politicians whose evolution they linked to a deformed state of capitalism. This African reception of Gorky was not completely in line with the objectives of the Soviet sponsors of the Swahili translation who had hoped to transport a socialist revolution to Africa. Yes, Mama was embraced with the intention of popularizing a “class war”, but less towards communist ends than towards the goals of (social) democracy and social justice. In the process, the Matigari group seems to have drawn from the trade union and political history of the country to augment the relevance of Gorky’s Mother to the Kenyan audience.

4. Conclusion The Swahili translations of Orwell’s Animal Farm and Gorky’s Mother, then, share interesting facts of history. They were both products of imperial agendas, one American, the other Soviet. They were both initially intended for a Tanzanian audience, one as a counter-hegemonic text against the country’s turn to the left, and the other in support of it. Once they migrated to the neighbouring country of Kenya, however, the two translations immediately freed themselves from the imperial project. Now they became the voices of the local population against local exploiters even if, as suggested in one reading of the Swahili translation of Animal Farm, the local exploiters were somehow linked to more global forces of capitalist exploitation. If in Tanzania the two texts, as imperial projects, confronted each other in relation to Ujamaa, in Kenya they both

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became independent articulations in opposition to capitalism a la Kenya. This partly explains why Shamba la Wanyama came to be taught as part of the Kenyan Swahili literature syllabus and why Bega kwa Bega has the same potential of being enlisted in Swahili literature courses in the country. As transculturation, the two examples discussed here demonstrate that translation exposes the tension between the authority of the original and the autonomy of the translated text. In this sense, it stresses “the dialectics of difference [that are] collateral with sameness, establishing the link between the translator and the actor–both live their own paradox, which is to be faithful in difference, saying the same thing, yet saying fatally something else” (Vieira 1994, 65). Translation, then, can be seen as creating a “double” that is simultaneously an affirmation and a denial of the original. In Kenya, that denial included the very role for which the two translations had originally been intended by their imperial sponsors, redirecting the texts towards a local and different political mission altogether whose articulation can only be appreciated by going beyond the postcolonial paradigm.

References Africa Watch. 1991. Kenya: Taking liberties. Washington, DC: Africa Watch. Appiah, A. 1991. Is the post- in postmodernism the post- in postcolonialism? Critical Inquiry 17 (2): 336–57. Brownhill, L. S., and T. E. Turner. 2004. Mau Mau women rise: The reassertion of commoning. Canadian Woman Studies 23 (1): 168–75. Bursov, B. n.d. Dibaji (Foreword). In Mama, ed. M. Gorky, 3–5. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Clark, K. 1981. The Soviet novel: History as ritual. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Durrani, N., ed. Forthcoming. Tunakataa. London: Vita Books. Gikambi, H. 2013. Kutana na Mwandishi Aliyetafsiri Shamba la Wanyama. September 4. http://www.swahilihub.com/habari/MAKALA/-/1310220 /1979574//qhupnd/-/index.html (accessed May 29, 2015). Gromova, N. V. 2004. Tafsiri Mpya ya Fasihi ya Kirusi Katika Kiswahili. Swahili Forum 11:121–25. Hadjivayanis, I. 2011. Norms of Swahili translations in Tanzania: An analysis of selected translated prose. PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

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Herrington, O. A. 2015. Language of their own: Swahili and its influence. Harvard Political Review (online version), http://harvardpolitics.com/books-arts/swahili-language-influence/ (accessed May 21, 2015). Ingle, S. 1993. George Orwell: A political life. Manchester: Manchester University Press. KU Libraries Exhibits. 2015. Shamba la Wanyama [Animal Farm]. http://exhibits.lib.ku.edu/items/show/6039 (accessed December 19, 2015). Larkin, B. D. 1971. China and Africa 1949–1970: The foreign policy of the People’s Republic of China. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Mazrui, A. 2007. Swahili beyond the boundaries: Literature, language, and identity. Athens: Ohio University Press. Mbatiah, M. 1995. Why we shouldn’t sing praises to English literature. Sunday Nation, 25 June:19. Mugi-Ndua, E. 2000. Mekatilili Wa Mwenza: Woman warrior. Nairobi: Sasa Sema Publications. Munyoro, W. W. 2002. Mugunda wa Nyama. Nairobi: Sarakasi. Mwimali, S. C. 1995. Is Kiswahili study inferior? Sunday Nation, June 25 Odinga, O. 1967. Not yet uhuru. London: Heinemann. Pansare, M. A. 2012. Target-oriented study of Maksim Gorky’s Mother in Marathi polysystem. In Collection of papers presented at the international symposium organized by the Russian State University for Humanities, ed. N. Reinhold, 215–33. Moscow: Russian State University for the Humanities. Patel, Z. 2006. Unquiet: The life and times of Makhan Singh. Nairobi: Awaaz. Poetry Translation Centre. 2015. Poems: Shoulder to Shoulder. http://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/shoulder-to-shoulder (accessed June 10, 2015). Pratt, M. L. 1992. Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. London: Routledge. Presley, C. A. 2013. Kikuyu women, the Mau Mau rebellion, and social change in Kenya. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Rubin, A. N. 2012. Archives of authority: Empire, culture and the cold war. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Singh, M. 1969. History of Kenya’s trade union movement to 1952. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Suleiman, K. 2015. Interview by A. Mazrui. 21 May. Sunday Nation. 2006. 19 February:4.

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Traore, F. A. 2013. Translating culture: Literary translations into Swahili by East African translators. Swahili Forum 20:19–30. Venuti, L. 2000. Translation, community, utopia. In The translation studies reader, ed. L. Venuti, 489–500. London: Routledge. Vieira, E. R. P. 1994. A postmodern translational aesthetics in Brazil. In Translation studies reader: An interdiscipline, ed. M. Snell Hornby, F. Pöchhacker, and K. Kaindl, 65–72. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wanjala, C. L. 1995. Kiswahili: Our varsities must do a lot better. Sunday Nation, 11 June:12. Weekly Review. 1984. September 21. Wilson, A. 1989. US foreign policy and revolution: The creation of Zanzibar. London: Pluto Press.

CHAPTER FOUR MULTILINGUAL SHAKESPEARE: A SOUTH AFRICAN REFLECTS ON TRANSLATION AND PERFORMANCE IN GERMANY CHRIS THURMAN

1. Introduction The material in this chapter emerges from a broader comparative and collaborative project that seeks to link Shakespeare studies in the South African and German contexts.1 Applying one of the key terms of reference established by the editors of this volume, I wish to consider certain aspects of “the postcolony in the Global North” by reflecting on my engagement, as a South African scholar, with some of the Shakespearean manifestations I encountered as translated and performed on German stages during an extended research visit in 2015. There are obvious differences between the history and current state of Shakespeare reception in these two countries, and–although there are also numerous points of intersection, as I shall indicate below–it is worth dwelling on these differences in order to introduce my present undertaking. I will then address some of the conceptual challenges entailed in defining “the postcolony in the Global North”, before giving careful attention to the translation and performance choices made in selected Shakespeare productions. Borrowing from Ton Hoenselaars in Shakespeare and the Language of Translation (2012, 2), I will treat translation as “a multitude of virtues”. That is to say, I will be writing not only about “language-oriented” modes 1

“Our” Shakespeare: Language, Performance, Education–a project supported by South Africa’s National Research Foundation and the Humboldt Foundation (through a Georg Forster Research Fellowship), hosted by Peter W. Marx at the University of Cologne.

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of translation (such as in the paradigm set out by Roman Jakobson) but also about what Hoenselaars and the contributors to his book see as “trading between cultures, between different ways of imagining the world”–the “encounter model” of translation–“recognizing that translation crosses more than just the conspicuous frontiers of language and negotiates less obvious distinctions of gender, class, race and nation”, and that in the theatre it also means “translating” meaning from text to performance.

2. Shakespeare in Germany, Shakespeare in South Africa German was the first language other than English in which Shakespeare’s plays appeared; Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet were performed in German either while Shakespeare was still alive or within a few years of his death. In the 18th and 19th centuries Germany’s “Shakespeare cult” was both a literary and a theatrical phenomenon, strongly tied to the development of the very idea of a coherent “German” nation and national culture. Taking their cue from figures like Lessing, playwrights and theatre practitioners had begun to combine Shakespeare with the Volksdrama tradition (in opposition to French classicism), Wieland had turned Shakespeare’s drama into prose and Shakespeare had been idealised by the authors of Sturm und Drang–this, before the landmark translations of Schlegel, the Tiecks and Von Baudissin made Shakespeare “ganz unser” (entirely ours). The influence of Shakespeare on Goethe, Herder and Schiller, and their influence in turn in popularising Shakespeare, is almost taken for granted. Despite Shakespeare’s central place in German literary practice and criticism, Alois Brandt (writing in 1913) felt he could affirm that the theatre was always “the stronghold of the Shakespeare cult in Germany” (1913, 7).2 In the century since Brandt penned these words, the connotations

2

Scholars such as Robert Weimann would challenge this assertion; for Weimann, the post-Enlightenment theatrical space was “dominated by a strictly literary mode of composition … by the time Lessing and Goethe became aware of Shakespeare, generally valid uses of the stage could not be conceived except in terms of a purely literary culture aspiring to serve a nation of the educated” (1997, 176). Weimann also notes parallels between the way in which Shakespeare was put to use by Enlightenment advocates for social progress and his utilitarian function in the socialist GDR: the text was emphasized and theatrical experimentation restricted. Nonetheless, despite this emphasis, Weimann argues that East German Shakespeare scholarship remained more attuned to theatre practice than in West

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of a phrase like “the Shakespeare cult” have shifted substantially–as, indeed, have the political aims and consequences of Shakespearean appropriation and adaptation in Germany.3 Shakespeare has become a much more complicated symbol. The “high cultural” status of Shakespeare’s plays gained a problematic inflection under the Third Reich (see Hortmann 1998 and Symington 2005). Shakespeare was also a contested symbol during the Cold War; the division of that venerable organisation, the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, into West and East–and its subsequent reunification–tracked the contemporaneous ideological and economic tensions of German, European and global politics (see Guntner and McLean 1998). Such vicissitudes notwithstanding, Shakespeare remained “ganz unser” in Germany during the course of the 20th century. More recently, the “tradaptation” (translation and adaptation) of Shakespeare’s plays has also provided a means to contest linguistic, ethnic/racial, religious and cultural homogeneity in Germany (Cheesman 2010, 207). By contrast, Shakespeare arrived in South Africa as a book–a decidedly English book–the Collected Works. His fate was strongly tied to that of the 1820 Settlers and subsequent waves of British colonists/immigrants. Through Shakespeare’s presence on the curricula of mission schools, a parallel history of “black” South African Shakespeare was established; this is often associated with Sol Plaatje (although it predates him by some generations), and through him with the beginnings of the liberation movement in South Africa (see Willan 2012, 3–18). Yet Plaatje’s translations of Julius Caesar and The Comedy of Errors into Setswana did not grow into a much wider tradition of translating Shakespeare into South African languages. There are other notable examples, and if one includes the translation of Shakespeare into Afrikaans, the number grows appreciably. Still, Shakespeare has remained primarily an English point of reference in South Africa, and the false notion of Shakespeare’s “untranslatability” has continued to be both implicitly and explicitly affirmed. This is, as David Schalkwyk has argued in a specifically South African context, patent nonsense; indeed, Schalkwyk goes further in claiming that “no English-speaking audience can properly understand Shakespeare unless they have access to another language through which he may be made available to them in translation” (Schalkwyk 2006, 47). Most multilingual South Africans (with English as a second or additional Germany, where scholarly interest in Shakespeare was more literary and concerned with the study of language and poetics. 3 One might consider, by way of example, the characterization of Hamlet in the Weimar Republic, in early Nazi Germany and in three post-War decades of the Federal Republic; see Marx (2006; 2012, 115–28).

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language) have, however, been denied the opportunity to read or hear Shakespeare in their mother tongue. Even the embrace of Shakespeare by some of the charismatic Drum writers of the 1950s could not change the high-cultural and colonial stigma attached to “the Bard” and his work. Shakespeare’s co-option by both “white liberals” and by the apartheid state did little to endear him to the greater South African population. Despite the role of Shakespeare-ineducation that forms part of the strand of intellectual and political continuity connecting Plaatje and Nelson Mandela, it is fair to say that the overall effect of Shakespeare’s use in education has been to “mute” him as a potentially liberatory voice (see Orkin 1987, 1991; Johnson 1996; Distiller 2005, 2012).4 Shakespeare-on-stage has been more closely tied to South Africa’s history of “resistance” than Shakespeare-as-literature. There is no doubt, however, that this field is under-researched–which, in turn, speaks to the marginal position of performed Shakespeare in South Africa more generally.5 * Shakespeare in South Africa and Shakespeare in Germany thus appear to be two very different, perhaps even diametrically opposite, phenomena. As I have suggested, however, there are some unexpected points of intersection. First, there is the legacy of totalitarian exploitation of Shakespeare as “high culture”. Ultimately, in Germany, this failed; Shakespeare could not be recruited to the ideological ends that Nazi apologists hoped for (a failure perhaps best represented by Goebbels’ never-to-be-completed film version of The Merchant of Venice) (see 4

Laurence Wright (2009) offers two useful caveats on this score. While affirming that “the dialogical nature of Shakespearean drama in performance habitually resists tidy ideological closure” and acknowledging that “such protean openness tends to be less evident in classroom and lecture hall, where pedagogues have power to ensure that public ideologies impinge forcefully”, Wright insists that “even here, notes of political dissonance sometimes sound unexpectedly” (2009, 16–17). One should thus not be too sweeping in one’s generalizations about Shakespeare and education: “It is not that large-scale sociological treatments of Shakespeare are always wrong, but that they are often unrelated to the way Shakespeare impacts uniquely on individual people.” 5 Rohan Quince’s Shakespeare in South Africa: Stage productions during the apartheid era (2000) is the only book-length treatment of staged Shakespeare under apartheid; there is a small body of scholarship dedicated to productions not only from this period but also from the first half of the 20th century and the postapartheid era.

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Bonnell 2008, 170–73). Under white rule in South Africa, both during the colonial period and then during apartheid–the latter, at least, undeniably enforced through totalitarian means–the appropriation of Shakespeare was less explicit but enjoyed greater longevity: making him an emblem of European “civilisation”, giving him exalted status in school curricula and simultaneously making him a barrier to the acquisition of English by nonmother-tongue speakers, and ensuring he remained ensconced in the repertoires of state-funded arts companies. Indeed, given this history, it is almost surprising that there is a tradition of “doing” Shakespeare as an act of political resistance in South Africa at all. Could one then compare “Shakespeare under apartheid” to, say, “Shakespeare in the German Democratic Republic”? These phenomena were at least more or less coterminous. Yet, as Robert Weimann has noted, although the GDR state apparatus restricted its citizens’ civil liberties, it did so on the ostensible basis of egalitarianism. The state’s official view was that “Shakespeare’s abiding greatness … derived from a view of man (sic) which transcended the boundaries of class society and actually helped affirm and enrich ‘socialist humanism’” (Weimann 1997, 182). Many East German theatre-makers, however, resisted not only the state’s idealised vision of harmony or continuity between the 16th century shift from feudalism to early modern society and the socialist revolution of the 20th century–they also resisted the oppressive means by which the state imposed its socialist ideals. So one could at least compare, in South Africa and East Germany in the second half of the 20th century, the use of Shakespeare to resist authoritarian government, to protest against surveillance, violence, coercion and enforced segregation of one kind or another. Perhaps it is more appropriate to speak of “parallels” between South Africa and Germany than national “intersections”.6 An exception would, however, have to be made for the watershed years of 1989/1990, in which the same geopolitical forces were in operation as the two countries experienced the beginnings of their respective liberatory historical moments. Following this period, each country faced the challenge of reconciliation after segregation. Could Shakespeare facilitate in any way? Here the dissatisfying similarity lies in how “Shakespeare” did not, in either case, smooth the process of integration–whether in terms of racial dynamics in South Africa (where he has in fact remained a divisive and heavily racialised symbol) or East/West divisions in Germany (where 6

This does not preclude, of course, the consideration of intersections at a personal or professional level–for example, German director Dieter Reible staged influential Shakespeare productions in South Africa in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

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ongoing friction between East and West was echoed in the difficult process of reuniting the divided Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft). In the 1990s, East German scholars, writers and theatre practitioners had to confront the possibility that as intellectual dissidents who had opposed the authoritarian government of the GDR they were still not entirely free of complicity in the system of authority; just as those who had been antiapartheid scholars and artists came to realise after South Africa’s first democratic elections, non-conformity requires the existence of conformity and, indeed, draws its power from the power it opposes (Weimann 1997, 200). There, however, the parallels and intersections end. More careful consideration of how and why Shakespeare is a divisive force in South Africa undermines claims of similarity to the German experience. In South Africa, Shakespeare acts as an ambiguous symbol–both of colonial history and of the history of resistance to colonialism; both of apartheid-era education, paternalistic “liberalism” or political indifference among white South Africans, and of the struggle for liberation by black South Africans; both of post-apartheid political intellectual leadership (claimed separately by Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki) as well as cultural cosmopolitanism, and of the problematics of elitism associated with that leadership and cosmopolitanism (the Polokwane “moment” in which the African National Congress both produced and consumed a populist, anti-intellectual narrative in electing Jacob Zuma). The politics of Shakespeare in Germany is complex, rich and varied, but it does not share these particular concerns.

3. Reconsidering the postcolony in/and the Global North It would seem, then, that while Germany’s love-affair with Shakespeare is something of a special case, the differences between Shakespeare’s reception in Germany and his reception in South Africa can primarily be seen as inevitable consequences of colonial and postcolonial dynamics. Germany is European, a powerhouse of the Global North; notwithstanding 50 years of madness at the start of the 20th century (with, admittedly, substantial echoes in the decades after World War Two and even today), in the long view it has had positive historical, cultural, economic and political ties to England. Furthermore, as I have indicated, Shakespeare is not linguistically “alien” in Germany because, for almost three centuries, Germany’s Shakespeare has been in German. None of these considerations apply in South Africa–if we are to take the country as a manifestation, a feature or a variant of the postcolony.

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Since it was made prominent by Achille Mbembe, the term “the postcolony” has developed a range of significations. The first of these is temporal. It is an age, a durée, but one not limited to the post-independence period in Africa–as Mbembe notes, “every age, including the postcolony, is in reality a combination of several temporalities”, and it is not as simple as thinking of “a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ of colonization” (Mbembe 2001, 15). The postcolony has geographical associations; Mbembe’s interest is in Africa, but “the postcolony” is often used as equivalent to “the Global South”, hence including countries in Asia or South America. The postcolony could also be understood as a set of social relations, or as part of an individual’s psyche. As Mbembe himself has noted, the implications of the term, and the assumptions underlying it, are in need of constant revision.7 The binary opposition of coloniser and colonised, of West and East, North and South, Europe and Africa, lacks nuance; while we may still be living with the consequences of such polarising, the global migration of people and circulation of ideas have long made these binaries conceptually redundant. Hence the appeal of considering “the postcolony in the Global North”. Yet there is a risk that, by positioning this consideration within the framework of a South Africa/Germany comparison, I am simply reinscribing the binaries listed above. Moreover, insofar as South Africa is an unusual postcolonial state in the African context, Germany is an unusual former colonial power. Is it fair to use it as a “representative” of the Global North? It may be better to think of Germany as a nexus–one among many–in which the Global North and the Global South meet. If the postcolony can be construed as an historical moment, or a series of such moments, then Germany is beginning to experience “the postcolony in the Global North”. During the period in which I saw the productions discussed below, there were two major policy issues dominating the headlines in Germany. The country’s simultaneous dominance in and dependence on the Eurozone, brought to a head during the Greek debt crisis and debates over the prospect of “Grexit”, raised some uncomfortable spectres from the past: Germany’s imperial expansion under the Third Reich (in turn linked to German colonial ambitions prior to World War One) and a divided Europe during the Cold War. Then there is the issue of immigration, made both more complicated and more urgent in the latter half of 2015 by the Syrian refugee crisis. Germany accepts more asylum seekers and economic 7

Moreover, in his preface to the recently published “African edition” of the book, Mbembe writes: “There is nothing in On the Postcolony that could resemble a linear history. Africa will never be a given.” (Mbembe 2015)

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migrants than any other European country, but it is still seen by some as typical of Europe’s resistance to immigrants from Africa and Asia. It has a largely progressive state policy on immigration, but this is matched by vocal (and sometimes violent) opposition from the far right. These matters, undoubtedly, are in the domain of the postcolony. It is also possible to view “the postcolony in Germany” in a radically different light, as I discovered when discussing the topic with colleagues at the Freie Universität Berlin. One member of the group proposed that, as East Germany had effectively been a “satellite state” of the USSR, Germany after reunification was, in part, “postcolonial”–many citizens had previously lived in a country defined by its relationship with a colonial power. Another member of the group proposed that colonial dynamics were in fact exemplified in/by the West: It was West Berlin, effectively occupied by the American, British and French authorities from 1949 until 1990, which had been a colony. I mention these alternative views to emphasise that, as an anglophone scholar of the postcolony–as a postcolonial subject–my engagement with Shakespeare in Germany carried, and carries, a particular bias. As I indicated at the outset, my interest in translating Shakespeare is linguistic (the normative practice of Shakespeare-in-German as opposed to the prevalence of Shakespeare-inEnglish, and early modern English at that, in South Africa) but it is, more broadly, in other processes of translation: both the practice of “translating” written text to stage performance, and the complexities of cultural-political “translation” (which is, more accurately, appropriation and adaptation). Consequently, I have particular expectations about the performance of race and racial identity politics–indeed, about what constitutes “politics” in the theatre–that inflect my analysis of Shakespeare productions in Germany. An obvious play with which to start, in view of this, is Othello. I will then proceed, via comments on The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It, to a brief discussion of the most (post)colonial of Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest, and conclude with some thoughts on the postcolony in the Global North in Hamlet.

4. Race, language, blackface, whiteface When I arrived in Germany, my key point of reference was the version of Othello by Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, directed by Luk Perceval and first performed at the Munich Kammerspiele in 2003 (it later toured across Germany, travelled to various countries and became “a cult fixture in the Kammerspiele programme”) (Cheesman 2010, 208). By using “a literary idiom based on an underclass demotic language, in

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cultural opposition to canonical Shakespeare languages”, Zaimoglu and Senkel’s translation “refigures the action [of Othello] in terms of an oppositional political agenda”. This Othello both used Shakespeare to examine present-day Germany and used contemporary German to reinvigorate Shakespeare’s language. For German-speaking audiences and English-speaking audiences alike–the latter following surtitles translated back into English–it “reproduce[d] the shock of the Shakespearian original” and thus, removing the sanitising effect of four centuries of semantic change (by which obscenities become poetic “word-music”), gave audiences “the essence of a great tragedy without its romantic accoutrements” (Rutter 2007, 55; Billington 2006). In other words, it was a necessary reminder that the language spoken by Shakespeare’s characters is frequently vulgar and crass. This Othello was a significant departure from the dominant German translation tradition which, according to Cheesman, “avoids offence even at the cost of fidelity” (2010, 209). So much for language. What about race? Surely Othello is the play through which to address conflict around immigration, diversity and national identity in Germany today? After all, Othello is a dark-skinned man in a light-skinned society, an “Eastern” (or “Southern”) man in a “Western” (or “Northern”) society, as well as a religious outsider in a nominally Christian society. As I learned more about the ZaimogluSenkel-Perceval production, however, my South African assumptions about what race and ethnicity “mean” or “do” in Othello were challenged. First and foremost, Othello was played as a white man by a white actor, Thomas Thieme; in the world of the play, this casting decision “intentionally renders absurd the racist abuse directed at him” (ibid., 218). Desdemona, in a speech that has no real Shakespearean antecedent, attributes to Othello a “deluded self-image”: Du strotzt nur so vor Komplexen. Man kann dir tausendmal sagen, dass du weißer bist als die meisten Weißen. Doch du bestehst darauf, du seiest schwarz. Das bist du nicht, schau dich im Spiegel an … Du bist bleich. Ein Neger willst du sein, und um dir zu gefallen, reden dich deine Lakaien auch als Neger an. Du bist kein Neger. Du bist ein alter verbitterter Mann. Deine Füße sind in Knobelbechern geschnürt. [You’re simply bristling with complexes. You can be told a thousand times that you’re whiter than most whites. But you insist you’re black. You’re not, look at yourself in the mirror … You’re pale. You want to be a nigger, and to please you, your lackeys all address you as a nigger. You’re no nigger. You’re an old embittered man. Your feet are laced up in

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jackboots.8] (Zaimoglu-Senkel Othello, 117–118)

Cheesman suggests that “Desdemona’s point applies regardless of skin colour. Othello has established ‘black’ or ‘Neger’ as a victim identity. From another perspective, it is a role, associated with uncleanliness, fear, sexual potency, violence and the grotesque body, which may be ascribed by others, or self-ascribed, but also rejected.” Zaimoglu himself disavowed an interpretation of the production purely in terms of race, ethnicity and the binary of foreignness/indigeneity: Was nützt das Fremde, wenn das Maß der Entfremdung alle Figuren schleift … Immer wieder wird der sogenannte Fremde als Fremder markiert. Für mich ist das nicht unbedingt inspirierend … Es ist sehr leicht sich vor den Spiegel zu stellen und zu sagen: Aber selbstverstनndlich, es liegt an der Hautfarbe. Die Probleme sind jedoch vielschichtiger. [What use is foreignness/alien-ness (“Fremde”) when all the characters are abraded by a measure of alienation (“Entfremdung”)? … The so-called foreigner is constantly marked out as a foreigner. For me, that’s not necessarily inspiring … It’s very easy to stand in front of the mirror and say: But of course, it’s because of the colour of my skin. But the problems are more multi-layered than that.] (Zaimoglu-Senkel Othello, 128)

Here Zaimoglu ostensibly joins those who argue that readings of Othello should not be limited to the question of race and racism.9 Given the subject matter and stated purpose of much of Zaimoglu’s other writing, it is curious that he should adopt a stance which, if not apolitical, does shy away from the potential of Shakespeare’s play (and of his adaptation of the play) to critique the widely-held albeit implicitly expressed view– among supporters of the German far right, it is explicit–that “whiteness” is a facet of German identity. The decision to make Othello a white man “deluded” about his race or race-based persecution does, however, foreground the basic question of casting. As so often with Othello, this takes us into murky terrain: the “blackface” convention and its use, particularly, in Germany. 8

Quotations from the Zaimoglu-Senkel Othello, and from the translators’ commentary on the text, are provided (with translations) by Cheesman (2010). 9 Sarah Pett (2015) puts this claim succinctly: race is “in many ways a minor detail in a play centrally concerned with status, gender relations and masculinity”. Douglas Lanier (2012), discussing film versions of the play, notes: “The emergent trend in adapting Othello to the screen has been to shift away from race towards some other form of identity politics–sexuality, class, cosmopolitanism, ethnicity, religious difference.”

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* The long and sorry history of white actors “blacking up” for stage or screen roles extends beyond Shakespeare, of course, and this is no less the case in Germany than elsewhere in the world. The issue gained greater traction when, in 2012, white actor Joachim Bliese was cast as AfricanAmerican character Midge Carter in a production of I’m not Rappaport at Berlin’s Schlosspark Theater. While this was not the first time the strategy was used by that particular company for that particular play–indeed, director Thomas Schendel affirmed that “blackface is part of a theatre tradition” in Germany–the claim that the theatre “couldn’t find an elderly black actor who fit the role and could speak with a perfect German accent” was roundly rejected, notably by advocacy groups such as Initiative for black Germans (BBC News 2012). In the same year, also in Berlin, the Deutsches Theater production of Unschuld (Innocence), in which blackface was used to portray African migrants, was subject to widespread protests initiated by watchdog body Bühnenwatch (Stage Watch). Undoubtedly this affected the sensitivity of German Shakespeareans towards the problems of blackface casting. The near-standard practice of casting white Othellos in German productions even throughout the 1990s and early 2000s often seems to have entailed minimal efforts to avoid racial caricature (further complicated by the ongoing use of blackface in opera, notably with Verdi’s Otello, facilitating the normalising or condoning of the practice). Around the time of the Zaimoglu-Senkel-Perceval Othello in 2003–4, there was a precarious balance between productions seeming to use the convention uncritically or simplistically, and directors and actors deliberately making subversive use of it. An extreme example of the latter was the reductio ad absurdum (the red-lipped Zwarte Piet or Jim Crow visage) applied in Stefan Pucher’s Othello in Hamburg 2004, with Alexander Scheer in the title role. In an enigmatic act of exoticising, in Stuttgart in 2011, Turkish-born German actor Mehmet Kurtuluú was heavily made up so as to appear more “Moorish” in the title role. Here it may be noted that a common translation of the English title Othello: The Moor of Venice, the German Othello: Venedigs Neger (the “black” of Venice, with pejorative undertones), removes the ethnic, geographical and religious slippage encapsulated in the word “Moor”. This was, itself, a clumsy racial category in early modern Europe–with misleading variations such as “blackamoor” and “tawny moor”–but does at least signify, in the 21st century, some form of complex identity politics. Since, in contemporary German, “Mohr” is associated with chocolate-

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covered confectionary (although in recent years Mohrenkopf [Moor’s head] has largely been replaced by Schokoküsse [chocolate kisses]), “Neger” rather than “Schwartze” comes closer to the connotations in Shakespeare’s usage. Yet it also implies a certain homogeneity in “blackness”. To be “black”, in this sense, is simply to be anything other than “white” or Caucasian; Othello, embodying “blackness”, conflates North African, sub-Saharan and Central Asian or “Middle Eastern” subjects. I will return to the ramifications of this conflation shortly. It is necessary to pay attention to such details of racial or ethnic difference if we wish to challenge a white-centred view of race in which “whiteness” is privileged over any and all racial others. Paradoxically, however, this can seem comparable to the reification of race–the hyperracialisation–that was seen in apartheid South Africa. The classification of South African citizens into “European” and “non-European”, into “white” and “black” (or “native” or “bantu”) and “coloured” and “Asian” (or “Indian”) was, of course, an absurd and tragic enterprise. The Nationalist government would, when convenient, lump all citizens into the categories of “white” and “non-white”; but it also attempted to undermine solidarity by reinscribing racial hierarchies (being “coloured” was better than being “black”) and “tribal” identities (given spurious concreteness in the allocation of tribal homelands or bantustans). In post-apartheid South Africa, these categories and sub-categories remain embedded in the national consciousness as well as–because South Africans were so effectively indoctrinated by centuries of formal and informal segregation–in the national “subconscious” (redressing past injustice requires acknowledgement of the enduring consequences of apartheid policies). Eruptions and irruptions of this deeply racialized world view occur daily across the country, sometimes quietly and privately, sometimes making headlines or causing social media flurries. In the months prior to my departure for Germany, a number of “blackface” controversies brought this issue to the fore once again.10 Moreover, race is and always has been a crucial aspect of Shakespeare productions in South Africa; it is simply impossible to ignore blackface and other casting decisions when assessing the performance history of a play like Othello (see, as a recent example, Haresnape 2015, 53–60). Understandably, then, this was a key concern in my approach to Othello in Germany. 10

The “tradition” ranges from the frequent use of blackface by popular comedian Leon Schuster to its practice in music videos by renegade act Die Antwoord. In two prominent instances (in August and September 2014), white students at the universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch dressed up in blackface to attend costume parties.

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Although, since the Zaimoglu-Senkel-Perceval production opened in 2003, Othello has continued to be a popular choice on German stages, performances of the play were few and far between when I visited in 2015. Indeed, the only “Othello” I encountered during the first four months of my stay in Germany was at a bakery in downtown Bonn: a sweet pastry with a creamy filling and a chocolate coating (brown on the outside but white on the inside). I discovered this “Othello” with a combination of delight and horror. Delight, because here was further evidence of Shakespeare’s presence in German daily life. Horror, because it was a marker of the kind of casual and unexamined racism that, while apparently innocuous, is not entirely distinct from the anti-immigrant discourse and even race-baiting hate speech that continues to rear its ugly head across Europe. The joke behind the edible “Othello” also depends on a narrow view of the play that is so superficial as to be specious (see Thurman 2014b). It is worth noting, however, that the wider phenomenon of using food to describe hybrid racial identities in a reductive and dismissive way– and the particular inflections of confectionary and race in Germany– inform Zaimoglu and Senkel’s version of Othello.11 The Othello I eventually saw onstage in Germany was in Marcel Krohn’s production at the Clingenburg Festspiele. As in the seminal 2003 production, this Othello was also white: “ein weißer Mann”, as a voiceover prologue described him. That was in itself a complicated claim, because the role was performed by Mathias Kopetzki, who defines his own “ethnische Erscheinung” (ethnic appearance) as “nahöstlich, südeuropäisch, aber auch deutsch” (Middle Eastern, southern European, but also German) (Kopetzki). Kopetzki had, in fact, previously participated in a staging of Zaimoglu’s Kanak Sprak–in which Zaimoglu reclaims the pejorative Kanake, used to refer to Germans of Turkish or “Middle Eastern” extraction, to validate the Turkish-German dialect–and is also the author of Teheran im Bauch (Teheran in the belly), in which he recounts his engagement with his “persischen Herkunftslandes” (Persian origins). For the purposes of this Othello, however, he was “white”. Moreover, he was 11

Natasha Distiller discusses this phenomenon in Shakespeare and the Coconuts (2012): in America, it is the Oreo cookie; in England, it is the choc ice; in South Africa, it is the coconut. Distiller’s book considers the relationship between Shakespeare and “coconuts” such as Sol Plaatje, arguing that to be a “coconut”–to have a complex sense of identity that isn’t limited to essentialised notions of race and culture–should in fact be a term of opprobrium, not an insult. For further discussion of Zaimoglu and Senkel’s tradaptation of Othello in terms of “confectionary jokes” and the “running gag of Othello’s nickname, ‘Schoko’ (‘Chocco’)”, see Cheesman (2010, 209).

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alone in his whiteness; inverting the race dynamics of Shakespeare’s play, Krohn cast “black” actors in all the other roles. The first point to make about this casting decision is that it directly undermines those who justify using blackface in Germany on the grounds that there aren’t enough German or German-speaking “actors of colour” who can perform the heightened text of Shakespeare-in-translation. But there are other, more problematic, implications. Having a white Othello in a production presented to predominantly white audiences arguably facilitates these audience members “stepping into the shoes” of someone who is a victim of, or at least subject to, racism and racial discrimination; indeed, Krohn has noted, “some viewers told me: Now I understand much better how Othello feels” (Krohn 2015, pers. comm.). The counterargument, however, is that because global racial dynamics continue to privilege whiteness–in other words, perhaps with very rare exceptions, white people are not subject to structural and substantial discrimination on the basis of their race–the idea of white “victimhood” is politically reactionary. To take this case further, one might claim that if it requires a white Othello to bring home to white audiences how it feels to be alienated or denigrated, white privilege and white-centeredness remain unchallenged. A well-established but nonetheless fascinating question about Othello is: to what extent is his susceptibility to Iago’s ruse and his descent into violence against Desdemona a direct consequence of race-based insecurities? In other words, if Othello wasn’t subjected to the racism of Venetian society, would he so readily embrace the role of the jealous murderer, the misogynistic monomaniac? If we apply this to the Clingenburg Othello, we must ask to what extent the psyche of Kopetzki’s Othello was fractured by his whiteness within a “black” society. Was he, one might ask, systemically disadvantaged? Certainly, he was annoyed by two young girls who appeared regularly to giggle at the novelty of his pale skin. And he was subject to racial insults: Krohn’s Othello was “Bleichgesicht” (paleface) and “Kalkgesicht” (chalkface); Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, called him “ein weißer Mann, dessen Anblick jedem Menschen Grauen schafft” (a white man, the sight of whom creates horror in everyone) (ibid.). He had even internalised this disdainful view, blaming his faults on his whiteness: “… weil ich weiß bin und mir des leichten Umgangs Gabe fehlt” (… because I am white and lack the gift of handling things/dealing with people easily). One could match these with a dozen direct racial slurs in Shakespeare’s Othello, conveying how anti-black language is enmeshed in Shakespeare’s early modern English–idiomatically and figuratively–and comes almost as easily to Othello himself as to the white characters in the

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play. But somehow, the idea of a white mercenary obsessed by his sense of racial inadequacy is less persuasive without a concrete sense of a society in which that might actually occur. Where is the action set? Krohn’s translation studiously avoids references to Venice or Cyprus. This exploits an advantage that Shakespeare-in-translation has over Shakespearein-English. While English directors and performers stuck in the thrall of a putatively “original” Shakespearean text find it more difficult to change the “facts” of a play–commonly resulting in allegorising, where “Venice” must stand for, say, London or Washington and “Cyprus” for a NATO military base–translators have greater licence to change or remove such linguistic-geographic details in the shift from one language to another. Allegorical mapping from one place/time to another is particularly difficult to sustain when it comes to Shakespeare, because he tended to play fast and loose with history and geography. But to what extent do contemporary theatre makers have a responsibility to be accurate or “faithful” to history and geography in their rendering? Given the ranges of skin tone in the “black” cast, the costumes employed–from the soldiers’ uniforms to the civilian clothes of Desdemona, Brabantio and the Duke–and details such as ululation at the announcement of a military victory, the Venetians and Cypriots in the Clingenburg Othello could variously be interpreted as (sub-Saharan) “African” black or (North African) Arabic or Central Asian/“Middle Eastern”. For Krohn, consistency here is unimportant, not simply because “Shakespeare often didn’t take care with history” but because this production was “not about history”–it sought, rather, to illuminate “a socio-psychological question”. The difficulty is that Krohn kept one detail from Shakespeare’s muddied history: the enemy Othello had been recruited to fight was the Turks. Although we were not given further information, and Krohn’s translation avoids any mention of religion, this remained a vexing allusion given the history of immigration from Turkey to Germany. For two or three generations in Germany, “Turkish” has been short-hand for “foreign”, “non-white” and “Muslim”; arguably it remains so, even as the profile of immigrants to Germany has become more and more diverse. Audiences familiar with the Shakespearean text would know that, in his final words before committing suicide, Othello effectively collapses the distinction between himself and the Turkish enemy, even as he offers a final desperate reminder of his “service” to the Venetian state–a slippage that was further complicated, in this case, by the depiction of a “white” Othello by an actor, Kopetzki, who in other contexts has emphasised those aspects of his ethnicity that are “foreign”, “non-white” and “Muslim”.

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Thus, even though the Clingenburg Othello sought to make blackness normative and whiteness alien, offering a potentially radical challenge to the assumptions about Shakespeare-in-German and race-in-Germany that have typically informed German productions of the play, it could not escape this tradition entirely. * As an outside and, indeed, a transitory observer, I am not in a position to comment authoritatively on race in Germany or on attitudes towards immigration. As it is, there are any number of contrary accounts; this is perhaps inevitable, when even though Germany is bureaucratically far more accepting of immigrants than any other European country, and has taken in about 30% of asylum seekers across the EU, it still rejects far more applications than it grants.12 One must also consider the common assertions that attitudes to race are different in eastern and western parts of Germany, and that white supremacist rhetoric and violence are specific to certain cities. But underlying all the news items and survey data is the question: are Germans as open to immigration and integration as their government wants them to be? Towards the end of my stay in Germany, debate around this question in Germany centred on responses to an expression of support for migrants by primetime news anchor Anja Reschke (see Connolly 2015). Then the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in late 2015 showed the German desire to turn the bureaucratic coinage Willkommenskultur (culture of welcoming), which was initially aimed at encouraging skilled and affluent migrants to the country, into a national point of pride: “Refugees are welcome here”, as banners and songs declared at train stations and football stadia across the country. But this, too, has resulted in a right-wing backlash; in January 2016, for instance, reports of looting and sexual assault committed by male refugees in Cologne provided anti-immigration groups such as the Islamophobic PEGIDA with the opportunity to foment racism and xenophobia. 12

Compare Doug Saunders’ optimism in “Germany: Where the refugee flood is a solution, not a problem” (2015) to Yermi Brenner’s less sanguine reportage in “Asylum seekers face increasing violence in Germany” (2015). Turning from journalistic narrative to the arts, one may also gain insight into the issue from Nigerian sound artist Emeka Ogboh’s 10-channel video installation at the 2015 Venice Biennale, which included the voices of African refugees who have been denied formal residency in Germany each singing a stanza from the German national anthem in their home language.

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So it is hard not to link the observations I have offered about blackface and attitudes towards racial or ethnic otherness to my experience of watching the Schauspiel Köln production of The Merchant of Venice/Der Kaufmann von Venedig, directed by Stefan Bachmann at the Depot in Cologne. In this reduced-cast version, which made use of some astute doubling, veteran actor Martin Reinke played both of Portia’s failed suitors: the Prince of Arragon and the Prince of Morocco. Arragon received some caricatured treatment, as perhaps Shakespeare had intended with this Spanish cameo. I was particularly struck, however, by the audience response to Reinke as Morocco (one of Shakespeare’s three “black” characters–the other, in addition to Othello, being Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus). Reinke broke the fourth wall as he hastily applied a layer of make-up to take on the role, bringing a conspiratorial chuckle out of the audience; aside from responses to the clever clowning of Johannes Benecke and Thomas Müller, playing Solanio and Solerio as a chorus-like Marx brothers duo, this was one of the loudest laughs elicited throughout the performance. In productions of Othello, “temporary” blackface (the actor applying or removing make-up during the course of the play) has been linked to the idea, present in the Zaimoglu/Senkel/Perceval production, that Othello is not actually black, or that his racial identity is at best ambiguous, and that he “performs” his blackness. But what was happening in this Merchant of Venice? Was the audience recognising Reinke’s actions as a metatheatrical moment, exposing the absurdity of the convention? Or was it a more dangerous laughter, an automatic association of the blackface tradition with comic relief? Is humour in Portia’s Belmont scenes, an escape from the tension between Christian and Jew in Venice, here achieved through racial stereotyping? Audiences know not to find Shylock “funny”, but is Morocco still fair game? One cannot accurately gauge the sensitivity of either performer or audience to the intricacies of blackface in such fleeting moments, but this remains a necessary line of questioning–particularly in an already problematic “comedy” such as Merchant of Venice. How can we admire Portia as a proto-feminist heroine, when the (racist) way that she speaks about and treats the Prince of Morocco could be seen as no less offensive than her (anti-Semitic) attitude towards Shylock? Can one simply “play Shakespeare straight” and/or translate him in a way that merely reproduces the racist idioms in which his characters speak? Here again, “tradaptation” offers an alternative. It is common, in contemporary German translations of Shakespeare’s plays, to hear a few lines of early modern English in iambic pentameter creeping in. Sometimes they are spoken in context, sometimes taken from elsewhere in

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the play or even from another play; very often they are sung, creating a convention that Shakespeare’s prose and poetry is translated into German but his songs retain their English lyrics when put to new musical accompaniment. Occasionally this can be attributed to a certain indulgence on the part of actor or director: snatches of Shakespearean English are used to provide a stamp of authority, or to test audience members (dividing them into those who “get” the reference and those who do not). There is more than a hint of bardolatry in such gestures, which–somewhat anomalously, given the history of “unser Shakespeare” that I have sketched–in fact become acts of linguistic deference to English. Yet the “intrusion” of Shakespeare’s words can also have an invigorating effect precisely because they are simultaneously recognisable and foreign; they are fremd (alien) and thus facilitate Brechtian Verfremdung (alienation), breaking the spell of realism and forcing members of the audience to reconsider their position as spectators. In a play like Merchant of Venice, this entails various levels of complicity: we might sympathise with the mistreatment of Shylock, but the very structure of Shakespeare’s play–generically, as a comedy, it must end with couples happily married–forces him off the stage before the end of the fourth act, and we are lured into the lovers’ games of his persecutors. The Schauspiel Köln Merchant embraced the awkwardness of this problematic fifth act, emphasising the way in which 21st-century actors, if they reproduce Shakespeare’s play-text, risk endorsing the order of “Christian” Venice. The dialogue between Lorenzo and Jessica (Shylock’s daughter) in Act Five, in which they compare themselves to famous lovers past and then enjoy a musical interlude, is at odds with the drama of the preceding courtroom scene. By allowing Shakespeare’s English to infuse this scene, Lorenzo (Jacob Leo Stark) and Jessica (Julia Riedler) emphasised its dissonance; the clownish Launcelot Gobbo (Jörg Ratgen), with a shrug of his shoulders, explained to them and to the audience that they had been quoting “Shakespeare”. Taking this alienation–this foregrounding of the indisputable fact of early modern anti-Semitism in Shakespeare’s play–to a logical extreme of sorts, Lorenzo’s banjo-playing, which was initially by turns comic and lyrical, soon descended into the chaos of a death-metal thrash that betrayed the fundamental violence of his relationship with Jessica. After this, the final piece of music in the production (a soothing a capella rendition by the whole cast of Sonnet 106–in English) was an utterly, and deliberately, unconvincing “resolution” of the conflicts inherent in Shakespeare’s play.

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5. Politics as you like it: Deleting and repeating “colonialism” in Shakespeare Perhaps my anxious questions about The Merchant of Venice above demonstrate a further schism between German and South African manifestations of Shakespeare. There is scholarly consensus that German Shakespeare–German theatre–has always been “political” in a way that, for example, Anglo-American Shakespeare–and theatre–has not. Likewise, in South Africa, it is common to hear artists affirm, “All art is political”. The contrast between, on the one hand, “politicised” German and South African approaches to theatre (especially Shakespeare) and, on the other, a “depoliticised” or “apolitical” Anglo-American tradition is neatly illustrated in Dennis Kennedy’s Foreign Shakespeare and, more recently, Andrew Dickson’s Worlds Elsewhere. Kennedy, in a book that did much to bring to the attention of British and American scholars the scope and variety of Shakespeare outside of their narrow national contexts–even though its title in effect accepts the premise of Anglo-American centrality–writes that Shakespeare on the European continent in particular “has never stood above or outside history”, an approach facilitated by “the absence of immersed linguistic and cultural connections”, and found new political purchase in the latter half of the 20th century; in Britain and the United States, “greater political stability has robbed Shakespeare of some of the danger and force that other countries have (re)discovered in his texts.” (Kennedy 1993b, 4–5) Other contributors to Foreign Shakespeare make this argument with specific reference to Germany: Ron Engle emphasises “the German tradition of merging political statements with theatre” and Lawrence Guntner asserts that “any account of East German Shakespeare” in particular must keep in mind that theatre in the GDR was “news commentator, political scientist, and historian”, because “on the stage things were said which would not or could not be said elsewhere … Shakespeare came to enjoy a political relevance that he may not have had since the days of Elizabethan England.” (Engle 1993, 109–10) These views are linked almost seamlessly (albeit fleetingly) with the South African context in Kennedy’s Afterword, which quotes the country’s most famous playwright, Athol Fugard: “There are no non-political stories in South Africa.” (Kennedy 1993b, 299) In Worlds Elsewhere, an account of Dickson’s discoveries about Shakespeare in various corners of the globe–it has chapters dedicated to both South Africa and Germany–the reader is alerted to the differences between the author’s experiences of Shakespeare in England (“when I was

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an English literature student at Cambridge in the smooth and Blairite late 1990s, politics had been a tainted word”) and the versions of Shakespeare he encounters in South Africa and Germany respectively (Dickson 2015, 327). John Kani echoes the words of Fugard, his former collaborator, when he puts his hand on Dickson’s shoulder and, recalling his experiences as an actor opposing apartheid, asks him: “What at that time was not a political act?” A conversation with a student actor, Sinako Zokufa, confirms that even under democracy, “In this country, theatre is political. It gets politicised, everything gets politicised.” (ibid., 299) These conversations, in turn, have their direct equivalents during Dickson’s visits to Germany–perhaps best encapsulated in a conversation with Shakespeare scholar Ruth von Ledebur: although, after the Nazi exploitation of “high culture”, “postwar intellectuals [were] determined that culture should never again be co-opted for political ends”, this had long been and would continue to be the case because, Von Ledebur tells Dickson, “Everything is political, in a way.” (ibid., 66–68). Such resonances notwithstanding, my experience of Shakespeare in Germany brought home again and again that “politics” can be a category so broad as to be meaningless. What is called “political theatre” in South Africa may have nothing in common with “political theatre” in Germany– where “political” has, at different stages, referred to the project of national identity in the 19th century, or, in the 20th, the politics of Weimar, the Third Reich, Cold War politics and resistance to autocracy in the GDR. Is 21st-century German Shakespeare “beyond” politics in this heightened register? Is it so self-aware of this political history as to be blasé? Is it so complicated and so ambiguous as to avoid, or treat lightly, or “knowingly”, ongoing social questions of racism? Is it too cautious of seeming dogmatic or didactic? How many productions are actually tackling aspects of a new or changing German national identity? And is this, ultimately, a narrow and unfair expectation of how “politics” should play out in the German theatre? What about regional as opposed to national politics in this self-consciously federal republic? What about foreign policy and the pan-European or global implications of Germany as an economic power? What about the politics of sex and gender? What about “green” politics? These are the questions that circulated in my mind each time I watched Shakespeare on the German stage–with the answers (perhaps becoming a single answer) hinging on the title of the first production I watched: Wie es euch gefällt (As You Like It). To reflect on the extent to which, or the way in which, Shakespearean theatre makers “should” address particular political concerns–and here, admittedly, even the phrasing of the issue

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sounds anti-creative and a limitation on artistic freedom–takes us as far back as the treatment of Shakespeare in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, before the Romantics (in Germany and, later, England) sought to redeem Shakespeare from the constraints of the “Enlightenment”. Shakespeare was criticised, by les hommes des lumières, for not conforming to classical unities, for indulging in wanton rhetoric and for excessive use of metaphor, which meant that his words risked “going beyond” their “intended meaning” (Drábek 2015). This rationalist project of strict conformity, of removing ambiguity, seems absurd and dangerous today. Instead, we cherish Shakespeare’s heterogeneity, his inconsistency, his subversion of expectations. The notion of a simple “message” or even a polemic presented onstage is, from this point of view, not only gauche but a return to Enlightenment rigidity and hypocritical moralising. Phrased in terms of theatre ethics, one might say that when addressing politically sensitive matters–race, gender, class–theatre makers are not bound to adopt a didactic position, but can instead present a problem and leave it to audiences to make of it what they will. Working on this premise (which also privileges audience autonomy over an “intentionalist” model of artistic production) affirms, as Pavel Drábek has suggested, what the wise fool Touchstone says in As You Like It: there’s “much virtue in ‘if’.” (As You Like It 5.4.94) (ibid.) The subjunctive tense allows opposing interpretations of an event–in the news as much as onstage–to be sustained; it is through ambiguity that art facilitates dialogue between differing world views. “If,” Touchstone tells us, “is the only peacemaker.” Still, when it comes to manifestations of the postcolony in Shakespeare in the Global North, or of Shakespeare in the Global North in the time of the postcolony, there is much to be gleaned from the slippage between what might broadly be called “authorial vision” (we can come far closer to describing Shakespeare’s vision than his “intentions”, about which we can only surmise) and the interests of particular translators, directors and actors; and then, in turn, between their individual visions and what significance or meaning different audience members find in what they see onstage. This is the slippery ground of politics “as you like it”. * As You Like It is not readily associated with colonial or postcolonial critique; it is, rather, the blurring of gender identity that typically drives “political” readings of the play (Rosalind, the heroine, spends much of the action pretending to be a man, “teaching” her would-be suitor Orlando). It also lends itself to an eco-critical interpretation: Arden, the forest/“desert”/

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wilderness to which Duke Senior (Rosalind’s father) has been banished by his usurping younger brother, is both comforting and threatening in its difference to courtly or urban life. Yet the central metonym in all of this– the deer or buck, which is the cause of tears for the melancholy but loyal courtier Jacques, the occasion for Touchstone’s mirth and, indeed, the source of jokes by most characters about cuckolding–is specifically introduced in terms of colonising conquest: Duke Senior:

First Lord:

Come, shall we go and kill us venison? And yet it irks me that the poor dappled fools, Being native burghers of this desert city, Should in their own confines with forked heads Have their round haunches gored. Indeed, my lord, The melancholy Jacques grieves at that, And, in that kind, swears you do more usurp Than doth your brother that hath banish’d you. … Thus most invectively he pierceth through The body of the country, city, court, Yea, and of this our life; swearing that we Are mere usurpers, tyrants, and what’s worse, To fright the animals and to kill them up In their assign’d and native dwelling-place. (As You Like It, 2.1.21–66)

Such a colonial framework is reinforced when the class hierarchy that places court above forest, and “courtier” above “rustic”–the basis of various quips and allusions, a hierarchy that remains firmly in place despite the exiled Duke’s lyrical celebration of the “woods/More free from peril than the envious court” (2.1.3–4) and the jocular but sustained scrutiny it receives during Touchstone’s dialogue with Corin the shepherd in Act 3 Scene 2–is mapped onto the hierarchy of “civilised” and “barbaric”. This occurs most explicitly, phrased in classical (Roman) terms, when Touchstone tells country bumpkin Audrey: “I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths.” (3.3.5–6) It seems feasible, then, to offer a reading of As You Like It in which animals, and the animalistic, are linked to the postcolonial subject in his/her various incarnations (in the colonial imagination, at least) as a noble savage, a barbarian to be subdued or a victim to be pitied. But what happens when Arden is the site of a more malevolent form of anthropomorphism; when blurring the human-animal divide results in

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violent, atavistic behaviour–a natural world “red in tooth and claw”? The Schauspiel Köln production of Wie es euch gefällt (which shared the Depot stage with Der Kaufmann von Venedig) tested the capacity of As You Like It to be both a story of love and reconciliation that challenges gender binaries, and a story of cruelty and misogyny that, in the end, remains phallocentric. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It often falls into the uncritical genre of Shakespeare-in-the-Park: the stage and surrounds at a double remove–both in the world of the play and in the “green space” of the outdoor theatre–from social reality and urban anxiety. But both plays also have the capacity to undermine the pastoral lyricism typically associated with them. Shakespeare’s debt to the Roman poet Ovid is well established, and scholars such as Tony Tanner have pointed to the undertone of violent “Ovidian energy” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream–a subtext that, when brought to the fore, can result in a much more complex rendering of events in that play than is commonly provided.13 This is latent in As You Like It, too; moreover, the play’s performance history in Germany includes a handful of vehemently anti-idyllic interpretations.14 The ground had thus been ploughed for director Roger Vontobel and his company at Schauspiel Köln, but it is unlikely that audiences were prepared for what they saw. The tone for “humans acting as animals” was set in the opening moments of the play, as Charles the Wrestler, employed to provide bloodsport entertainment for the usurping Duke Frederick, appeared onstage as a chained, snarling dog. (This would later lend an unusually menacing air to the character of Jacques as one actor, Johannes Benecke, filled both roles.) Frederick held court with the moody aggression of a cocaine addict, and at first it was a relief escaping from this hedonistic, claustrophobic environment to the gentle comedy of Duke Senior and his companions. But the banished Duke’s rural court, it turned out, was not entirely different from that of his wicked younger brother (a symmetry that was, 13 See Tanner (2010) and Van Schalkwyk’s (2011) application of Tanner’s reading to a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Cape Town-based theatre group The Mechanicals in 2011. 14 These range from the “de-poeticizing intent” of Heine Müller (1967) to Roberto Ciulli’s (1974) replacement of “the transforming power of love” with “aggressive sex, neurosis and freezing self-isolation” (Hortmann 1998, 237, 252) and Petrica Ionescu’s proclamation of “the doom of a degenerate civilization”, in which a set “suggesting a vandalized slaughterhouse or a war-damaged factory” was peopled by “a group of hard-boiled soldiers, survivors of an atomic war” (Hortmann 1993, 236–37).

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again, reinforced by doubling: Robert Döller played both dukes). Going “back-to-nature” meant getting naked and testing what it means to act like a “beast”. This resulted in some fine physical theatre and enjoyable ensemble work, but it also culminated in a grotesque scene: Touchstone, a drunkard, appeared with a champagne bottle strapped to his crotch and used this to rape Audrey. In one sense, this was a brutal exposure of the deceit undertaken by Touchstone in “wooing” Audrey–hidden, or at least tolerated, in Shakespeare’s play because of Touchstone’s wit. In another sense, if we view this scene through the colonial lens established above, this could be seen to represent imperial violence: the coloniser raping the colonised. Crucially, however, the lines I quoted to frame the play in this way were cut from the translation (by Angela Schanelec and Jurgen Gosch) in performance, thus sublimating–or, indeed, removing–the colonial/postcolonial dynamics present in Shakespeare’s play text. * Elision is one aspect of the translation process that may cause the postcolony to recede into the background of, or disappear from, Shakespeare’s plays when performed in the Global North. Paradoxically, so may emphasis or repetition–as was the case, I wish to suggest, in the Shakespeare Company Berlin’s fascinating production of Der Sturm (The Tempest), which used a translation/adaptation of the text by director Sebastian Kautz. The Tempest has, of course, become viewed as the colonial/postcolonial Shakespearean play. Prospero, the politician-turned-mage who (having been ousted as Duke of Milan in the distant past) rules like a tyrant over the small island of his exile, stands for the coloniser; Caliban, the “indigene” who welcomed Prospero to the island only to become his slave, stands for the colonised. Indeed, so dominant is this reading that not to engage with it is in itself a political statement of sorts. The ensemble and director of the Berlin production, while mindful of the play’s politics, chose to focus on one strand in this complex text: the journey of Prospero from bitterness, pride and a desire for revenge to contentedness, humility and a readiness to forgive. This was a journey that he stage-managed for himself; as assistant director Heike Irion explains, Prospero converted the island “into an experimental arrangement … [a] petri dish inside which a kind of family therapy was happening … We read it as a family story, not a colonial one.” (Irion 2015, pers. comm.). Accepting this premise, I was nonetheless intrigued by the representation of Caliban. When I saw the

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production, the role was performed by a black actor, Daniel Schröder. This was ostensibly a “colour-blind” casting choice–the part was previously played by a white actor–but it could not be separated from the race dynamics implicit in The Tempest, and made explicit in the translation and revision of Shakespeare’s text for the Berlin company. In Act Two Scene One of The Tempest, the shipwrecked mariners (Alonso, the King of Naples, Antonio, Prospero’s usurping brother, and their respective entourages) bemoan the twist of fate that has brought them to the island. Had they not previously travelled across the Mediterranean from Italy to North Africa for the wedding of Alonso’s daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis, they would not have been caught in the storm. Sebastian, Alonso’s mischievous brother–soon to engage in his own treasonous plot with Antonio–complains that it is all Alonso’s fault, and constructs his complaint around the Europe-Africa binary: Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss, That would not bless our Europe with your daughter, But rather lose her to an African (The Tempest 2.1.118–120)

The Europe-Africa dialectic is patterned on the archetype of Aeneas and Dido–we are reminded that “This Tunis, sir, was Carthage” (2.1.79). But Kautz’s translation makes Sebastian and Antonio emphatically racist. Sebastian sarcastically dismisses the “nette Hochzeit, meine Nichte und der Neger” (nice wedding, my niece and the nigger/negro); Claribel is, he sneers, a “Negerbraut” (nigger bride) (Shakespeare Company Berlin 2012, 25–27). Antonio, in a reconfiguration of Shakespeare’s dialogue, adds: Was musstest du auch, statt Europa zu beglücken, dein Kind einem Schwarzafrikaner geben. Von wegen: Vereinigung zweier Kontinente! [Instead of blessing Europe, You (Alonso) gave your child to a black African. The reason: the union of two continents!] (Shakespeare Company Berlin 2012, 25–27)

The equation of Europe with (celebrated) whiteness and Africa with (denigrated) blackness established even more firmly in the translation suggests a certain disingenuousness in interpreting The Tempest as a family drama outside of a (post)colonial framework. In Shakespeare’s play, Caliban is given some fine lines that stake his claim to ownership of, or at least belonging on, the island on which Prospero now keeps him enslaved–and that express his resistance to this

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oppression. The best known of these is probably the declaration: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,/ Which thou takest from me.” (The Tempest, 1.2.336–37) What follows is an eloquent speech summarising his exploitation, and bemoaning “I am all the subjects that you have,/ Which first was mine own king.” (348–49) In Kautz’s production, the insistence that “This island’s mine” (die Insel ist mein) was repeated by Caliban, removed from its context, at various points in the action–by turns proud and desperate, then a comforting mantra of sorts, then spat out as if a symptom of Tourette’s Syndrome. In each iteration, arguably, the line lost some of its potency. The repetition of “die Insel ist mein” also seemed to confirm that Schröder’s Caliban suffered from some form of mental disability; whether this was the result of his trauma at the hands of Prospero, or a congenital condition, was not immediately clear. Either way, he was effectively a simpleton–a childlike character, infantilised by Miranda (Katharina Schenk) and Prospero (Michael Günther), tolerated with caution and castigated when necessary. After his violent attempt to rape Miranda, she treated him as a sister would a troubled younger sibling. This was an interesting exploration of Prospero’s “paternalism”. According to Irion, Caliban was “an unloved step-child”: at first somewhat nurtured, when he did not turn out as desired, or began to misbehave and lay claims on the island, [he] was brutally discarded and kept more like a pet than a child, thus trapping him at the mental stage he had at the point of abandonment. Miranda nonetheless grew up with him in a sisterly way, taking pity on him. (ibid.)

Audience members, likewise, could take pity on Caliban. But this placed them in the same condescending position as Prospero. The political ramifications of Caliban’s rebellion were thus stifled; his protest could not be taken seriously. The Berlin Tempest was notable for its music. This was mostly diegetic, apposite to the island “full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” (3.2.129–30), and allowed for some virtuoso performances. The music was also matched with comedy, particularly through the characters of Stefano (Thilo Hermann) and Trinculo (Benjamin Plath), who drunkenly plot with Caliban to murder Prospero. The difficulty with The Tempest is that the more the actors bring out the humour in Shakespeare’s text, the less credibility can be given to Caliban’s revolt against Prospero. Ultimately, however, Schröder’s Caliban obtained his freedom. More than this–he seemed to have been granted dominion over the island. In

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Shakespeare’s text, having used his “rough magic” to bring events to his desired conclusion, Prospero promises to “abjure” it: I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. (5.1.55–58)

He eventually sets Ariel, his “fairy spirit” (who, like Caliban, has complained about his/her enforced servitude), free. Not so Caliban. When he is brought before Prospero with his failed co-conspirators, Caliban is punished once more with menial labour: Go, sirrah, to my cell; Take with you your companions; as you look To have my pardon, trim it handsomely. (5.1.291–93)

Here, in Shakespeare’s play, it is unclear what will happen to Caliban when Prospero et al return to Italy. In the Berlin Tempest, while the linguistic translation of the play’s closing scenes matched the Shakespearean dialogue quite closely, through some nuanced reconfiguring of the text and through visual translation–that is, through extra-textual action–a significant departure occurred. Prospero’s famous meta-theatrical speech, in which we are reminded that the play we are watching is an illusion, a “vision” that will dissolve, an “insubstantial pageant” that will fade (4.1.141–146), is also a meditation on the evanescence and insignificance of human life. Having wrought an elaborate magical pageant for Miranda and her husband-to-be Ferdinand, Prospero remembers Caliban’s plot against him and suddenly calls off the masque–unconvincingly trying to reassure Ferdinand and telling him that “Our revels now are ended.” (139) In Kautz’s translation, Prospero is more direct: “Ich bin am Ende.” (I have come to the end.) As he spoke the next two lines, he collapsed the curtain that had formed the actors’ backstage: “Und gebe meinen Zauber auf./ Da liegt nun meine Kunst.” (And give up my magic./ There is my art.) Renouncing his “art”, Prospero revealed the theatrical mechanics. But this was taken further. His haughty scolding of Stefano, “You’d be king o’ the isle, sirrah?” (5.1.301) was borrowed for the final exchange between Prospero and Caliban. Asking, “Caliban, du wolltest doch schon immer König dieser Insel sein?” (Caliban, you always wanted to be king of this island?), Prospero handed the symbols and accoutrements of his power– his “royal” robe and book–to his former slave, who ascended the nowexposed “throne” of a crude step ladder.

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Despite the problematic representation of Caliban as colonial subject and would-be revolutionary, then, the Berlin Tempest went beyond the Shakespearean text in “granting” him liberty–although, as Irion warns, “whether Ariel and Caliban will indeed be free on the island or immediately engage in the next power battle remains to be seen” (2015, pers. comm.). Either way, Caliban’s (and Ariel’s) “freedom” was a function of the production’s focus on Prospero’s journey and not an affirmation of the justice of Caliban’s cause: The focus was entirely on Prospero here, his relief at being rid of his quest, and also of the burdens he had placed on himself. The hand-over to Caliban illustrates this relief. Prospero is now so liberated that he … can be generous and give [Caliban] what he’d desired all along–with the tiniest hint of glee (“see how you fare with all this responsibility!”), hence the burdening of Caliban with all the adornments of power. (ibid.)

6. A postcolonial tragic hero in the Global North: Hamlet The dynamic described above might be extrapolated into an observation about manifestations of the postcolony in German productions of Shakespeare more generally: what I have been discussing in the preceding pages is, really, Germany-Prospero coming to terms with itself in a global postcolonial context. Yet, to adapt and answer Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s now-famous question, when it comes to Shakespeare in translation, the subaltern can speak–in his/her own voice, and about his/her own experience–at least insofar as any performer, whose position on the stage necessarily entails a certain level of privilege, can lay claim to subaltern status. The subaltern-subject-actor who does so may be Caliban, but may also be Hamlet, as was evident when Brazilian company Cia Completa Mente Solta performed their Trans Hamlet Formation at the 2015 Shakespeare Festival at the Globe Theatre in Neuss. Germany is home to no fewer than three Globe theatres, which predate (but are admittedly less accurate than) the replica in London. At Neuss, the annual Shakespeare Festival hosts both German productions and companies from further afield, as it has done for some 25 years. Shakespeare Festivals, and the global Shakespeare industry of which they are part, have been the subject of much valuable scholarly critique in recent years–particularly the World Shakespeare Festival coinciding with the London Olympics in 2012 and, most notably, the Globe to Globe Festival (in which Shakespeare’s works were performed at the Globe in 37 different languages) (see, for example, Prescott and Sullivan 2015). The festival circuit is valuable insofar as it brings to the attention of much

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larger audiences the work of actors, directors and translators that might otherwise be limited to a “local” reception–or, in some cases, work that is neglected in the countries in and for which it was first produced–but festival performances can also be understood as contemporary “masques”: pageants for privileged audiences of the Global North that both exoticise and domesticate the “foreign”. With this caveat in mind, however, it is worth considering how a performance by a company from Rio de Janeiro in Brazilian Portuguese, with partial English surtitles, to a German audience, forces us to reassess what constitutes Shakespeare-in-translation as/and the postcolony in the Global North. Trans Hamlet Formation was certainly not Hamlet played “straight”. The opening Shakespearean exchange between soldiers keeping a tense watch along the walls of Elsinore Castle was foreshadowed by shouts between “soldiers” of the Brazilian drug trade, complaining about the incursion of the “gringos” (international drug traffickers) into the favela (Cia Completa Mente Solta 2015).15 After the first scene of Shakespeare’s play, the action of Hamlet broke off again and we were in a rehearsal room. A contract was established: the audience would both be following the world of Hamlet (the action in medieval Denmark) and getting a behind-the-scenes look at the process of the actors–who, rather self-mockingly, presented themselves like the rude mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While the movement between theatrical and meta-theatrical stage business was seamless in Portuguese in performance, the surtitles made a telling distinction between two modes in English. Lines from Hamlet were translated back into the Shakespearean “original” (itself a loaded term and a dubious notion, as centuries of Shakespeare textual scholarship have shown). But lines spoken by the actors as “themselves” were translated into colloquial, contemporary English. This meant that the German audience, who were presumed to have sufficient English competence to follow the surtitles, continually had to switch registers in a way they would not normally expect to do when watching Shakespeare in German–because, in almost all cases, the translations performed are in modern German. Such a disjunction is, in fact, a reminder that Shakespeare-in-English is something of an anomaly: as long as his early modern English is deemed sacrosanct and “unmodernisable”, English audiences lack access to Shakespeare in language that is contemporary with their own. Theatre makers and audiences sharing Shakespeare in translation do not have this 15 Trans Hamlet Formation (working script, courtesy Leonardo Florentino). Subsequent references are to this text.

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problem. But the act of translation is fraught with problems of its own– practical and aesthetic and ideological–and was a subject of discussion among the actors/characters in Trans Hamlet Formation. One of them, Márcio Januário, playing himself in the “play-outside-the-play” (the rehearsal of Hamlet, rather than the play Hamlet) arrived on the scene ready, like Peter Quince, to bring his fellow-thespians into line, announcing that he had brought his own translation of Hamlet. Why a new translation, his colleagues wished to know–aren’t there plenty in Portuguese already? Januário replied that he translated it himself because, “If I hadn’t, we would have to pay the translator, the translator’s publisher, the translator’s daughter, the translator’s mother. We would end up having to pay to perform!” This quip foregrounded the intractable economics of translation; authors, translators and publishers all have to be factored in when translations are sold, but this often prices them out of circulation. Even Shakespeare, who has been dead far too long to claim royalties, can be too expensive. I have argued elsewhere that we should guard against invoking Shakespeare’s putative “universality”, because to do so is to disregard the material history through which he has become (or has been made) “universal” (See Thurman 2014a, 16; 2012, iv). Here, we have the inverse: material conditions preventing Shakespearean universality. Other, more mundane material circumstances can also counter Shakespeare’s universal reception. In the case of Trans Hamlet Formation in Neuss, it was a technical glitch that highlighted the various linguistic and cultural fault lines precluding universalist claims. About a third of the way into the performance, the surtitles–which had not quite been keeping pace with the dialogue–ceased to be meaningfully connected to the words being spoken by the actors. After a few fragmented minutes of leaping from scene to scene (the action continuing onstage all the while), director Leonardo Florentino decided to turn the surtitles off. This put to the test the principle that responding to the worlds represented in Shakespeare’s plays, and understanding the languages in which those worlds are depicted, are not mutually inclusive. In the case of Shakespeare, arguably, familiarity with the plays–for some people a basic knowledge of plots and characters, for others chunks of text memorised–makes the onstage action accessible regardless of the language in which it is performed. Yet the argument may be made more boldly. As John Russell Brown puts it, an audience member watching a play in a language he or she does not understand (Brown has in mind “English” audiences watching “foreign” Shakespeare, but the point applies regardless of the languages in question) “will not assume that to listen to the words is to understand the play well enough”:

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The use of surtitles to lesser and greater degrees for various productions at the Globe to Globe Festival resulted in renewed debate over the advantages and disadvantages of this device. More recently, Lyn Gardner has suggested that, even in the case of a carefully considered translation, surtitles can be an unwelcome distraction: You end up relying on the text rather than looking for other clues, which in a great production of a play in any language are demonstrated in a myriad of ways … It’s possible to understand a great deal about a production from its look and sound, even if you don’t speak a word of the language in which it’s being performed. (Gardner 2014)

Undoubtedly this applies differently to well-known Shakespearean plays than to lesser-known or new plays by non-canonical playwrights. In the case of Trans Hamlet Formation, however, the matter was complicated by the digressions from Shakespeare’s plot. In addition to the metatheatrics, the Hamlet narrative entailed the hero leaving Elsinore to become like a “rich kid” in Rio wanting to slum it in the favelas or join protests against the state. He was then transformed into a kind of South American Everyman; the programme notes had laid the groundwork for the allegorical association of Gertrude with Latin America, and Claudius with drug cartels and corrupt governments. Yet, with no surtitles, the audience (apart from some Portuguese-speaking members) could not always be sure–despite some immediately recognisable scenes, such as Hamlet and Gertrude in the “closet”–when we were “inside” or “outside” the play. Florentino comments as follows: People from the audience, the crew, the local press and artists involved in other plays at the festival have all said that the lack of subtitles was good, that it made the crowd stop reading and paying more attention to the actors. So it apparently helped the performance in a way, made the interaction of the audience and the actors more intense, matching the action onstage. (Florentino 2015, pers. comm.)

Moreover, what made the surtitle-less Trans Hamlet Formation invigorating was the linguistic insecurity of the audience: here was the

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postcolony on stage, not “explaining” itself in or to the Global North, but still placing the concerns of postcolonial subjects (in the case of Brazil, colonial Portuguese legacies, the poverty of the favela, drug cartels and corrupt politicians) front and centre.

7. Concluding notes: Shakespeare and the postcolony in South Africa In this chapter I have suggested that my experience, as a South African Shakespeare scholar engaging with aspects of the complex phenomenon that is “Shakespeare in Germany”, may offer some insight into translation and the postcolony in the Global North–through a perspective from the Global South. This is a modest undertaking, and not one that can claim any representative position regarding the Global South, Africa or South Africa (if such a position were possible, or even desirable). What, then, might be the “local” implications of this “global” dialogue? For South African readers, the sheer fact of translated Shakespeare in the productions I have described–instances of a common practice not only in Germany but in various postcolonial contexts, as signalled by Trans Hamlet Formation– should be a sobering reminder that the potential in South Africa’s (limited) 20th-century tradition of translating Shakespeare remains largely unfulfilled. Since Yael Farber’s SeZaR (2001), there have been only a handful of exceptions to the anglophone rule. South Africa’s contribution to the Globe to Globe Festival, the Isango Ensemble’s multilingual adaptation of Venus and Adonis (uVenas no Adonisi, directed by Mark Dornford-May), was enthusiastically received in London but hasn’t been formally staged in South Africa. Student productions, such as the University of the Witwatersrand’s Julius Caesar Project directed by Sarah Roberts (2013), have experimented with both scripted and extemporised translation. There have been screen versions broadly based on, or–at a stretch–influenced by Shakespeare’s plays, from the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s “Shakespeare in Mzansi” TV series to the isiZulu film Otelo Burning, directed by Sara Blecher (2011). In 2014, Marthinus Basson’s macbeth.slapeloos revived Eitemal’s 1965 Afrikaans translation of Macbeth. One could list a few other examples, but there is not much to go on; the most important work to be done in the field of South African Shakespeare is, it seems to me, the work of translation. Until this work is undertaken more frequently and substantially than it has been until now, the combination of “understanding” and “misunderstanding” across linguistic and cultural divisions–which I have tried to elucidate not only in the case of Trans Hamlet Formation but, to

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varying degrees, in each of the German productions I have discussed here– will be a necessary conceptual framework to apply when it comes to South Africans of any language background encountering Shakespeare in early modern English.

References BBC News. 2012. Germany’s Schlosspark Theatre defends “blackface” actor. January 10. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-16492222. Billington, M. 2006. Review: Othello. The Guardian, April 28. http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2006/apr/28/theatre.rsc. Bonnell, A. G. 2008. Shylock in Germany: Antisemitism and the German theatre from the enlightenment to the Nazis. London: I. B. Taurus. Brandt, A. 1913. Shakespeare and Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brenner, Y. 2015. Asylum seekers face increasing violence in Germany. Al Jazeera America, June 15. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/6/15/asylum-seekers-faceincreasing-violence-in-germany.html. Brown, J. R. 1993. Foreign Shakespeare and English-speaking audiences. In Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary performance, ed. D. Kennedy, 21–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cheesman, T. 2010. Shakespeare and Othello in filthy hell: Zaimoglu and Senkel’s politico-religious tradaptation. Forum for Modern Language Studies 46 (2): 207–220. Cia Completa Mente Solta. 2015. Trans Hamlet Formation. Working script, courtesy L. Florentino, August 25. Connolly, K. 2015. German TV presenter sparks debate and hatred with her support for refugees. The Guardian, August 6. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/06/german-tv-presenteranja-reschke-sparks-debate-support-refugees?CMP=fb_gu). Dickson, A. 2015. Worlds elsewhere: Journeys around Shakespeare’s globe. London: The Bodley Head. Distiller, N. 2005. Shakespeare, South Africa, and post-colonial culture. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen. —. 2012. Shakespeare and the coconuts: On post-apartheid South African culture. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Drábek, P. 2015. “With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage”: Shakespeare and the frivolous drama of early modern Europe. Lecture presented at the University of Cologne, June 9.

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Engle, R. 1993. Audience, style and language in the Shakespeare of Peter Zadek. In Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary performance, ed. D. Kennedy, 93–106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Florentino, L. 2015. Personal communication. August 25. Gardner, L. 2014. Mind your language: The trouble with surtitles. The Guardian, September 10. http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2014/sep/10/theatresurtitles-language-translation. Guntner, J. L., and A. M. McLean, eds. 1998. Redefining Shakespeare: Literary theory and theater practice in the German Democratic Republic. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Guntner, L. 1993. Brecht and beyond: Shakespeare on the East German stage. In Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary performance, ed. D. Kennedy, 109–139. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haresnape, G. 2015. Black and white: Othello at Maynardville, 1970– 2015. Shakespeare in Southern Africa 27:53–60. Hoenselaars, T. 2012. Shakespeare and the language of translation. London: Bloomsbury. Hortmann, W. 1993. The scenography of recent German productions. In Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary performance, ed. D. Kennedy, 232–253. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1998. Shakespeare on the German stage: The twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irion, H. 2015. Personal communication. August 25. Johnson, D. 1996. Shakespeare and South Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kennedy, D. 1993a. Afterword: Shakespearean orientalism. In Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary performance, ed. D. Kennedy, 290–300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1993b. Introduction: Shakespeare without his language. In Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary performance, ed. D. Kennedy, 1–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kopetzki, M. 2016. Angaben zur Erscheinung, www.mathiaskopetzki.com. Krohn, M. 2015. Personal communication. August 6. Lanier, D. 2010. Post-racial Othello. 2010 Lindberg Lecture, University of New Hampshire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScroEtGwmOQ. Marx, P. W. 2006. Max Reinhardt: From bourgeois theater to metropolitan culture. Tübingen: Francke. —. 2012. Janus-faced Hamlets of the German stage: Fritz Kortner and Gustaf Gründgens. In The Hamlet zone: Reworking Hamlet for

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European cultures, ed. R. J. Owen, 115–28. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Mbembe, A. 2001. On the postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. —. 2015. Achille Mbembe: The value of Africa’s aesthetics. Mail & Guardian, May 15. http://mg.co.za/article/2015-05-14-the-value-ofafricas-aesthetics. Orkin, M. 1987. Shakespeare against apartheid. Craighall: Ad Donker. —. 1991. Drama and the South African state. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pett, S. 2015. What a less Eurocentric reading list would look like. The Conversation Africa, July 24. https://theconversation.com/what-a-lesseurocentric-reading-list-would-look-like-42068. Prescott, P., and E. Sullivan, eds. 2015. Shakespeare on the global stage: Performance and festivity in the Olympic year. London: Bloomsbury. Quince, R. 2000. Shakespeare in South Africa: Stage productions during the apartheid era. New York: Peter Lang. Rutter, C. C. 2007. Watching ourselves watching Shakespeare, or How am I supposed to look? Shakespeare Bulletin 25 (4): 47–68. Saunders, D. 2015. Germany: Where the refugee flood is a solution, not a problem. The Globe and Mail, May 23. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/germany-where-therefugee-flood-is-a-solution-not-a-problem/article24565583/. Schalkwyk, D. 2006. Shakespeare’s untranslatability. Shakespeare in Southern Africa 18:37–48. Shakespeare Company Berlin. 2012. Der Sturm! Script for performance by C. Leonard and S. Kautz, June 11. Symington, R. 2005. The Nazi appropriation of Shakespeare: Cultural politics in the Third Reich. Lewiston: Mellen. Tanner, T. 2010. Prefaces to Shakespeare. London: The Belknap Press. Thurman, C. 2012. Editorial. Shakespeare in Southern Africa 24:iv. —. 2014a. Generation S: “Southern” Shakespeares across time and space. In South African essays on ‘universal’ Shakespeare, ed. C. Thurman., 1–16. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. —. 2014b. Othello and Post African futures. Business Day, May 28. http://christhurman.net/art-and-culture/item/half-art-othello-and-postafrican-futures.html. Van Schalkwyk, S. 2011. The Mechanicals’ Midsummer Night’s Traum. Shakespeare in Southern Africa 23:70–75.

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Weimann, R. 1997. A divided heritage: Conflicting appropriations of Shakespeare in (East) Germany. In Shakespeare and national culture, ed. J. Joughin, 173–205. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Willan, B. 2012. Whose Shakespeare? Early Black South African engagement with Shakespeare. Shakespeare in Southern Africa 24:3–18. Wright, L. 2009. Introduction: South African Shakespeare in the twentieth century. Shakespearean International Year Book 9:16–17).

CHAPTER FIVE NOLLYWOOD STANDS UP: MAPPING NIGERIA’S AUDIOVISUAL SECTOR ADRIÁN FUENTES-LUQUE

1. Introduction Hollywood is perceived as the most important film industry in the world, both in terms of popularity and in terms of films produced. However, it actually ranks only third after India’s massive Bollywood film industry and another contender. This contender, Nigeria’s booming film industry, or Nollywood, has surpassed Hollywood with over 2 500 movies per year. Its success can also be measured in economic terms. It is rated as the third most valuable film industry in the world and as the country’s second largest employer. Although the Nigerian film industry started in the 1960s, the 1990s marked the booming of the Nollywood industry, based on low-cost, profitable, fast-turnover, direct-to-video productions. Nollywood differs greatly from the neighbouring African Francophone film industry in technical, cinematic, aesthetic, linguistic, cultural, thematic, production and distribution terms. Whereas the latter is mainly based on a celluloid art-film tradition, the former is predominantly commercially oriented, filmed on video and based on English-speaking West African countries. Before Nollywood, the largest part of the English-speaking, African cinematic scene consisted of Bollywood musicals, action movies from Hollywood and Asian martial-arts movies. Nollywood filmmakers have usually had very little training, getting their inspiration from foreign imported movies and television series which reveal a significant post-colonial influence. This translates into the local social, economic and human reality. Nollywood deals with popular urban narratives of violence, religion, prostitution, AIDS, corruption and romance. The commercial imperial influence is absorbed and then blended into the post-colony.

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This paper aims to present an approach to Nigerian film or video, a little-studied form of audiovisual communication in Sub-Saharan Africa, which has its own unique production, distribution, translation and conceptual frames of reference. I deal with modes and practices of audiovisual translation; linguistic, social and geopolitical aspects; as well as the increasing presence of Nollywood productions in the rest of the world (a sort of back-globalisation process) in order to offer a descriptive analysis of Nigeria’s flourishing audiovisual influence in both Africa and other regions of the world. Nollywood talks about Nigeria and about Africa: [Nollywood] videos are so fundamental to Africa’s self-representation that it is impossible to understand contemporary Africa and its place in the world without taking them into account. (Haynes 2010, 21) Nollywood tries to tell a new history of Africa through interlingual subtitling, a form of intersemiotic translation. While colonial powers tried to impose their control through strong languages, Nollywood can be seen as an example of microhistory. Historians like Hayden White, Alun Munslow and Dominique LaCapra view history as a new type of narration, related to ideology and the position of power of the narrator. Thus, history has been told “from below” and, as such, is thought to be applied to translation in the context of “Subaltern Studies”. Gayatri Spivak (1985) and Jeremy Munday (2014) understand that the act of translating can be an interesting way of telling “subaltern” stories. Nollywood is one such way. Translating Nollywood involves being aware that the English language used reveals a way of understanding the history of the subaltern. Nollywood is a chorus presenting a variety of identities, of voices, that have long been heard in their context. Now they want to be heard on a more global stage. “Representation of these multiple voices is tantamount to translating a hybrid, linguistically multilayered text from the periphery to the global centre” (Bandia 2009, 16). From an ethics point of view, it is paramount that audiovisual translators take into account such political vision of language for the sake of a translation that is adapted to contemporary society, hybrid, cosmopolitan and post-universal, as Appiah (2006, 144, 151) and Delanty (2009, 52–53) put it.

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2. Historical outline 2.1 Nigerian film Opubor et al. (1979) situate the onset of cinema screening in Nigeria in 1904 when a number of documentary shorts were screened at the Glover Memorial Hall in the Lagos Island area. Nigerian audiovisual production as such began in the 1960s in the wake of the decolonisation process when some films were produced by filmmakers like Hubert Ogunde (J’ayesinmi [Let the world rest] and Aiye [Life!] and Ola Balogun (One Nigeria, Thunderdog). However, this cinematic start was somehow frustrated by high production costs. Contrary to most Francophone African countries where cinema has systematically been supported by France (both financially and organisationally), Nigerian cinema lacked substantial official support. In this regard, neither the Nigerian state nor the former metropolis supported the development of Nigerian cinema. Haynes rightly describes it as follows: This is at least partly a legacy of colonialism: whereas French colonialism and neo-colonialism vigorously pursued a policy that has kept francophone Africa in close contact with official French cultural bodies, British colonialism tended to leave culture to the private sector, and so Ghana and Kenya as well as Nigeria have favoured commercial popular forms. (Haynes 2000, 5)

Nigeria’s film had its heyday between 1970 and 1989 after the civil war (1967–70) that ravaged the country. Several factors helped this process: the high exchange rate of the naira, the opening of numerous cinemas, the fundamental contribution of theatre directors and actors (mainly from the important Yoruba travelling theatre), the eruption of television broadcasting (which at least in the first years received significant government support), the oil boom in the country, the 1972 Indigenization Decree (which, among others, included the expropriation of hundreds of cinema theatres around the country from their foreign owners—most of them Lebanese—to Nigerian nationals) and the adaptation and television broadcast of local theatre and literary productions. However, as shall be discussed below, Nollywood evolved to a large extent thanks to the democratisation of technology (VHS videocassette first, the VCD or video compact disc later) rather than to the Indigenization Decree. Some of these factors leading to success also contributed to the decline of the Golden Era of Nigerian film and eventually led to the birth of

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Nollywood as a new social, economic, cultural and technological phenomenon. As part of a protectionist scheme, namely the Structural Adjustment Programmes introduced by the Babangida military regime in 1986, Nigerians could no longer import foreign films, leaving audiences around the country hungry for their Bollywood musicals, action movies from Hollywood and Asian martial-arts movies. The virtual lack of cinematic infrastructure in the country implied having to send celluloid films abroad (mainly to the United Kingdom) for processing. Eventually, the shortage of film and production equipment led to an almost total lack of negative stock, and filmmakers were forced to resort to reversal film stock,1 which in turn resulted in one of the main vectors for the introduction of video as filmmaking platform: … they adapted reversal stock for mainstream feature filmmaking—in spite of its disastrous consequences. And when they emptied the Nigerian Television Authority of its reversal film stock and chemicals, they settled for videotapes! And not even of broadcast standard. (Adesanya 2000, 40)

Among other suggested factors for the decline of cinema are the fact that most filmmakers were steadily transferring to television productions (mainly soap operas, but also Yoruba theatre adaptations and, to a lesser extent, documentaries), poor distribution, the drop in the value of the naira, a technological turn in terms of a significant and widespread increase in television and domestic video sets (VHS players) in Nigerian homes around the country and a rapid decrease in the number of cinemas. The main reasons for the latter were the inability to modernise and to adapt venues to new film quality and technological standards as well as the rampant insecurity (except perhaps in the North of the country), which made people opt to stay home. Until then, Nigeria boasted quite a number of large cinemas, some of them with a capacity of up to 3 000 seats. Most cinemas were then turned into evangelical churches (mostly Pentecostal), warehouses or clubs, leaving the country with virtually no film theatres, a situation which extended to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.2 Only the north 1

Reversal film produces a positive image on a transparent base. The film is processed to produce transparencies or diapositives instead of negatives and films. When used as motion-picture film, it produces a positive image on the camera original. This avoids the expense of using negative film, which requires additional film and processing to create a positive film print for projection (Wikipedia 2015). 2 On 15 April 2010, the British newspaper The Independent (2010) pointed out the following: “Around 50 cinemas remain in business – most in South Africa and Kenya with a few in Nigeria.”

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of Nigeria, which until recently enjoyed greater security, kept some cinemas. Unfortunately, since the declaration of Sharia Law in 2000, women have not been allowed in cinemas, thus forcing them to watch films at home.

2.2 Did video kill the cinema? In such social, political, structural and financial circumstances, it was extremely difficult to produce and screen films. However, the widespread democratisation of television and video-player ownership set the basis for the development of the Nigerian video industry. Many filmmakers, like Tunde Kelani, Babatunde Adelusi, Zeb Ejiro, Amaka Igwe and Eddie Ugbomah, made the transition to video through television production (mainly of soap operas, some of them extremely successful, like Behind the Clouds, Checkmate and Ripples). The generic name of Nollywood has been criticised by some on the grounds that such denomination is a clear reference to Hollywood and evokes a form of imperialism. General belief attributes the origin of Nollywood, Nigeria’s video industry, to Kenneth Nnebue, an electronics dealer and Yoruba films producer. Apparently, Nnebue had an excess of imported blank videotapes which he used to film Living in Bondage (1992), an Igbo-language film which sold over 200 000 copies in just a few days, and Nnebue shot a second part with English subtitles. This is “… the film that started the Nigerian video boom, [and it] contains the seeds of almost everything that followed” (Haynes 2010, 15). However, some authors situate the real origin further back: Barrot (2008b, 18) places it with Jimi Odumusu, a Lagos television director, who shot a horror movie called Evil Encounter in 1980. Odumusu discovered that videocassette copies of his film were being sold by the hundreds the very next day after being broadcast. Adekosan (2004, 46) mentions the vision of Babatunde Adelusi, who in 1986 proposed an approach to filmmaking similar to music videos, which “… would cut costs [and] imitate the Indians and Chinese [Hong Kong] in terms of quality and quantity”. The renaming of the Nigeria Film Censors’ Board in 1993 to Nigeria Film and Video Censors’ Board meant the official recognition of Nollywood as Nigeria’s video industry, the second largest film industry in the world according to UNESCO (2009) after India’s Bollywood and before Hollywood. In a broader sense, before the eruption of Nollywood, both the Nigerian and the African audiovisual landscape were dominated

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by foreign films, mainly Hollywood (Westerns and action films), Bollywood (musicals) and Asian (martial arts) films. When compared to audiovisual productions in the FESPACO (the Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou, held in French-speaking Burkina Faso since 1969) area, it is clear that Nollywood operates with players, stakeholders and means that differ from those in the francophone Sub-Saharan countries. Nollywood is not art cinema/cinéma d’auteur. It could be said that it follows more commercially dominant cinemas, namely American (in the Southern urban areas) and Indian (in Hausa-speaking Northern Nigeria). However, themes are appropriated from these and adapted to local (however wide this concept can be in Nigeria and the surrounding countries) realities and drives. Production is not based on financial support from French cultural or political bodies. Instead, distributors and producers reinvest returns from sales into the production of new films. The usually slow pace of African art films is not present in Nollywood where narratives are fast and dynamic, often moralistic. Most importantly, however, the medium used is different: Nollywood is an audiovisual industry built on video format, no celluloid is used. Video (VHS cassettes first, then VCD discs) provided the malleable, perfect support for the inexpensive, mass production of films. This, however, proved to be a double-edged sword as the medium was not only unique for wide commercial dissemination but was also the perfect tool for piracy, both inside and outside of Nigeria.

3. What is Nollywood? Nollywood is not only a huge industry in Nigeria. It is an exceptional field of cultural production, the kind that is difficult to ignore, one that has crossed national boundaries, creating what is akin to a sub-regional expression of culture and society (Okome 2010, 27). Although Nollywood is the umbrella term for Nigeria’s massive video industry, strictly speaking, it refers only to films from southern Nigeria, mainly in the English, Yoruba and Igbo-speaking regions. The Hausaspeaking, northern-Nigerian region, which also boasts a prolific filmmaking tradition, is known as Kannywood (after the region’s main city, Kano). Other sub-Saharan areas where video films are developing fast upon the Nigerian model are Ghana (whose film industry is known as Ghallywood) and Tanzania (Bongowood). One in four Africans is Nigerian. With over 180 million people, Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and currently the seventh most populous country in the world. Such vastness is also reflected in the

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ethnic and linguistic variety: more than 500 ethnic groups speak over 500 languages (of which Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo are the most important). From a thematic point of view, three main areas can be distinguished in Nollywood films: x Yoruba cinema is heavily influenced by the popular Yoruba travelling theatre tradition, marked by witchcraft and voodoo horror, taboo and juju stories. x Igbo (often shot in English) movies derive from a television background, particularly soap operas. x Hausa films copy the models, themes and aesthetics of Bollywood musicals and melodrama, extremely popular in northern Nigeria. Nonetheless, other common genres in both Yoruba and Igbo movies incorporate romance, historical epics and the abovementioned popular urban narratives of violence, religion, prostitution, AIDS, money and corruption. Hausa films are distinctive in many ways and are heavily marked by the social, religious and geopolitical context in which they are produced. Just like Igbo films are especially influenced by Onitsha3 market literature, Kannywood movies are ingrained in the romantic pulp literature soyayya (“love” in Hausa), based on Bollywood films and written mostly by women. Conservative northern Nigeria never really had many actresses: “[I]n the 1980s, it was inconceivable that a woman should act in a television soap-opera, so the producers employed prostitutes” (Noy 2008, 79). Today the situation has changed, and women are fortunately allowed to perform although they are forced to watch films at home, away from theatres and video parlours. The aforementioned linguistic division is also used by the Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board to classify audio-visual productions. Rather than sticking to a genre categorisation, thematic division seems to be superseded by the implicit notion of dominant language structure, 3

The definition given by Wikipedia (n.d.) is as follows: “Onitsha Market Literature refers to a number of pamphlets, books and other publications sold at the Onitsha Market in Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s. Much of it was written in pidgin and creole varieties of English. This form of literature is now interesting to researchers as a secondary source of information about social conditions of the time; general readers can appreciate it for its creative use of colorful, non-standard English as well as its often racy plotlines”. The Onitsha market is one of the largest markets in Western Africa, and it has been labelled as the commercial power house of West Africa.”

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which in turn reflects the original geopolitical structure of Nigeria. The coloniser’s language is appropriated and a typically African flavour is added to it (Bandia 2006, 351), turning it into the so-called “third code” in line with Bhabha’s (1994, 354) “third space”. Two more categories can be established: films shot entirely in English (be it Nigerian English or Nigerian Pidgin4) and films shot in Engligbo where both English and Igbo are used. As Esan (2008) points out, “Engligbo also reflect tensions between modern and traditional Igbo cultures. The ethnic affiliation around the industry is very clear in the story lines, shooting location, and sometimes even the cast”. Although Living in Bondage, the film that started Nollywood’s video boom, was originally shot in Igbo, it was soon subtitled into English. In general, Igbo filmmakers and audiences prefer the use of English or Engligbo, thus revealing a disinterest for the few films produced in the Igbo language. This is probably not an alienation reaction, as Bandia suggests, referring to African authors born after the independence process: They were less likely to perceive the colonial languages as alien to Africa or as foreign languages, but rather as part and parcel of the African linguistic reality they grew up in, and as tools in the hands of Africans to express and assert African identity on the world stage. (Bandia 2008, 4)

This fact seems to be reinforced by the demands of the diaspora and a keen attraction to the English language (Ugochukwu 2009). Despite being the smallest of the three largest ethnic groups and having a preference for the use of English or Engligbo instead of Igbo, Igbo films are rarely the product of a single group. They tend to be very inclusive, having a varied cast of Igbo, Yoruba, Edo and others (which would be in line with Meylaerts and ùerban’s (2014, 2) observations regarding multilingual production processes in film). Thematically, Igbo films still retain a certain educational message along the lines of the traditional storytelling and ethnic manifestations of popular culture. As such, these are films to be watched in a group, at home or at public sites of consumption (street corners and video parlours, makeshift video clubs where people can watch videos for a small fee) with the aim of triggering debate as a modern update of the ubiquitous oral tradition. Although, in principle, the language barrier appears to have restricted the dissemination of Nollywood productions, limiting them to Nigerian

4 Authors like Igboanusi (2002) and Schneider (2007) analyse in detail English language varieties in Nigeria.

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contexts,5 reality proves otherwise, and Hausa films have been successful among northern African and neighbouring countries, which find a particular affinity with the themes, aesthetics and culture portrayed in them. Such success temporarily decreased upon the introduction of Sharia Law in the region, but the films have continued to expand across borders and are, with the aid of added subtitles, now extending to other areas in the Sahel region (Niger, Chad, Sudan, Mali). Yoruba films, for their part, dealing with popular urban narratives of crime and money, did not fare well in more conservative northern Nigeria but have always enjoyed enormous success in the south, reaching to other Yoruba communities in Benin and Togo as well as non-Yoruba territories like Kenya, Tanzania, Gabon, Congo, Uganda, Cameroon and South Africa. It also reached the Nigerian diaspora, mainly in the United Kingdom and the United States (Ugochukwu ibid.). The spread and success of Nollywood cinema has served as a model for the development of local film industries in many African countries, thus feeding the advance of local cultural and film narratives. Nollywood films, as opposed to FESPACO6 ones, deal with the everyday drives, fears and desires of the people rather than with cinema scholarship. Filmmakers for the most part do not have any training and perceive and conceive their works rather as popular culture and an economic piece of engineering. As ùaul and Austen (2010, 2) rightly put it: Students of francophone African art films have largely been humanist, concerned with cinema aesthetics but also very attentive to the ideological issues that many of these works (and certainly their most vocal producers) address explicitly. [Nollywood] Videos, on the other hand, have been perceived as an apolitical emanation of popular culture, subject to the scrutiny of social scientists (mainly anthropologists) or, in humanities faculties, of “media studies” and “cultural studies” specialists.

5

Grutman (2006, 18) deals with this issue in a general way, referring to “those instances where the text to be translated is not neatly couched in one language, but is itself a composite of different language strands”, and highlighting the fact that “[t]exts of this kind pose unusual challenges for individual translators and Translation Studies alike, especially if unequal relations and power imbalances between come into play”. 6 FESPACO is the Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou or FESPACO), which is held every two years in the capital of Burkina Faso since 1969, and it is possibly the most important film festival in Africa.

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Haynes also supports this idea and underwrites Tahar Cheriaa’s (the prominent Tunisian film critic, writer and translator) address to African filmmakers: Your cinema shall be … first and foremost a cultural action … or it will be nothing. If it eventually can also become an economic action, that will only be a by-product. (Haynes 2000, 6)

So far Nollywood has been more interested in selling its output than in dealing with political issues. That does not mean, however, that it is void of social criticism. The themes, problems, fears and dreams that these films depict are presented from an individual perspective, from the characters’ experience, rather than from a reflection of a neo-colonial establishment or oppressive system. Nonetheless, Nollywood is slowly including new, but real, controversial social concerns and taboos among its themes: religious confrontation, child abuse, nudity and sexual identity. In any case, it could be argued that Nollywood videos lack thematic creativity as they often deal with the same themes to exhaustion, almost in a loop of multiple plagiarism, in which producers bond and compete against each other with remakes, making up film titles and plots that are sometimes nearly identical and even have the same cast. Nollywood shows some resistance to fitting into the framework of African cinema, and as Haynes (2000, 13) suggests, it probably fits better in the paradigm of popular African arts and culture, largely based, in the case of Nigeria, on the Yoruba travelling theatre and various forms of traditional music. In terms of popular literature, Nollywood films have roots in the Onitsha market literature, both in the aesthetics and some of the themes. Audiences have transitioned from the pulp pamphlets and literature to video, retaining the fascination for Western urban life and the moralistic struggle and warnings against it, turning Onitsha into one of Nollywood’s hubs (Uzoatu 2012) (together with Idumota and Surulere, near Lagos). This context has provided, and continues to do so, a multi-layered weave of influences in which Nollywood moves between the traditional and the modern, between aspirational behaviour and a fascination with modernity, on the one hand, and witchcraft and the occult, on the other (the latter often used as a way to achieve the former in the form of voodoo spells and curses, for example). However, Nollywood is produced by the masses and for the masses with extremely limited financial and technical resources and cinematic training at all levels, and it is mostly not operating on formal cinematic structures and sites of consumption but on a largescale, informal sector of the economy.

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Nollywood is not concerned about the theme of decolonisation. Nollywood caters to a different segment of the Nigerian public, which has very little to do with the grand theme of decolonization and all that came with it. … Nollywood filmmakers are concerned with the everyday life and the things that matter to the man and woman in the street. (Okome 2010, 37–39)

In this manner, Nollywood videos are a sort of real-life testimony of contemporary Nigerian social and cultural history from the bottom up: Nollywood provides the imaginary for certain marginal sections of the society where it operates. It is the poorer part of its postcolonial base, which is no longer restricted to Nigeria. (Okome 2007, 2)

As Italian-Zambian filmmaker Franco Sacchi explains in a TED talk: You can be in a traffic jam in Lagos and buy bananas, water, a movie … This proves that storytelling is a commodity, a staple. There isn’t life without stories. (TEDGlobal 2007)

3.1 Behind the Nollywood scene Nollywood film production is unique in many ways. It is the world’s second largest film producer with an estimated production of 2000 feature films every year.7 The industry yields an estimated annual revenue of US$45 million (Adesokan 2004, 47), making the country’s movie sector Nigeria’s second largest source of income after oil exports. It is estimated that the video industry employs more than 200,000 people, “most of whom are involved in the video trade rather than in their production” (Barrot 2008a, 38), and audience figures are certainly in the millions. There are hardly any established production and technical standards.8 Nollywood films are shot using video technology (first VHS video 7

There is a lack of reliable data, however. The Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB), the most reliable official source, only issues data related to films that are legally distributed. Since Nollywood is sustained on an informal-economy market system, statistics are surely much higher. In comparison to Nollywood’s enormous production, Francophone sub-Saharan Africa (a total of 18 countries) produced only 12 feature films in 2001 and 2002 (Barrot 2008c, 6). 8 This situation is changing with the fast development of other technological forms of transmission: South Africa-based commercial channel Africa Magic, one of

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systems, evolving to light, digital video equipment today) and are completed in around two weeks on very low budgets, averaging US$15,000. With such short deadlines and budget restrictions, film crews and cast work in almost “retreat” conditions where the set often serves as accommodation. They literally live together during the shooting: They eat, sleep, pray, act … all together, often under the same roof. The scale of the business is enormous and extremely fast, and any given film can yield a ten-fold return in less than a week. The average distribution of a film is 40,000 copies (but again, reliable statistics are hard to obtain) with some successful hits, such as Osuofia in London (2003, part I), which sold an estimated 400,000 copies according to its producer, Kingsley Ogoro (Barrot 2008a, 34). For the most part, there are no film studios. Videos are shot in the streets, hotels, private homes, and improvised makeshift filmshooting areas, which makes the films and the narratives they tell more plausible and authentic, closer to the audience. Although VHS tapes ($2 for a VHS movie) are still used in northern Nigeria and neighbouring territories and are cheaper than VCDs (around $3 each), VCD video has largely become the common technology in most sub-Saharan countries, thanks to better sound and image quality and lower prices than DVD players and discs, which only the most affluent can afford. VCDs offer a much higher sound and image quality and are more versatile than VHS tapes, use digital audio/video compression, and have a storage capacity of about 700MB (while a DVD can store up to 7GB). The transition from analogical VHS video to digital technology could be equated to the shift from celluloid to video. However, such a revolution, as previously mentioned, is a double-edged sword: While making it more affordable to shoot and sell films, the new technology put a drastic end to the recycling of unsold VHS copies, and the risk of piracy became even more ubiquitous, faster and out of control. Nollywood feature films have a running time of between 90 and 180 minutes, and quite frequently, they follow the aesthetics and serialisation of soap-operas (of which, as previously mentioned, Nigerians were always fond, since the advent of Brazilian and Latin American television soap operas). This explains the fact that many Nollywood productions are structured in parts, with cliffhanging, open ends that ensure audience loyalty and keep the business going. Film editing and rudimentary postproduction are carried out with poor technological equipment in the video markets of Onitsha and Surulere.

Nollywood’s best customers, has set up training initiatives aimed at improving production techniques and standards among Nollywood filmmakers.

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Nollywood’s distinctiveness can also be seen in the production chain. While most countries base their film production on just a small number of major production and distribution companies, Nollywood operates on a constantly fluctuating, intricate network of informal businesses with an almost absolute lack of formal contracts. As Jedlowski (2013, 27) points out, “[t]ransactions are based on systems of solidarity and (mis)trust”. Contrary to usual cinematic processes, where producers and directors are in charge and set their own principles, it is the distributors who are in command. More concerned about getting fast economic returns than about the aesthetic and technical aspects of the films, they control the distribution of the films. They control not only the end product but have, since its inception, been acting as producers at the same time, directing directors, selecting casts, setting deadlines and suggesting storylines. Thus, narratives arise from the urban buzz of the cities, the materialistic aspirations mediated through crime and witchcraft rituals or Bollywood musicals and melodramas, and they find their way to their avid audience through movie theatres, urban and rural video parlours, street shops, the abovementioned markets of Surulere, Aba, Idumota and Onitsha (and their counterparts in other African countries) as well as street hawkers. In a surprisingly short period of time after the first release (a couple of weeks, often just days, sometimes even overnight), films are broadcast on television. Nollywood is developing and trying to adapt to new forms of transmission mainly through widespread satellite television and Internet video streaming (including mobile phones9). However, technical issues and the lack of good broadband Internet infrastructure are still hindering Nollywood from reaching wider audiences in Africa. Nonetheless, this new technological development, which implies the use of subtitling to convey the message, is proving extremely useful in the dissemination and expansion of Nollywood cinema, among both the Nigerian diaspora abroad and new Nollywood film fans. It is particularly interesting to see how technology, mainly through the Internet, is also shaping the present and future of Nollywood. Many Ghanaian and Nigerian filmmakers and distributors are gradually becoming aware of this and are looking at the diaspora audience. Nigerian director and producer Femi Odugbemi suggests that “[e]very filmmaker in Nigeria must look at the diaspora audience very carefully because that is really where the market is”, and Emem Isong acknowledges a shift in the 9

Websites like www.nollymovies.net and www.naijapals.com allow users to watch and download Nollywood movies for free. Pay subscription IrokoTV has a choice of over 6000 Nigerian and Ghanaian films as well as Indian and Korean films, also popular in the region.

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distribution and business vision, revealing that she is now releasing her films first in America and then in Nigeria and Ghana at the same time (Jedlowski 2013, 31). As part of this transnationalisation or internationalisation process, some interesting initiatives are being carried out. In this sense, Paris has hosted three editions of the Nollywood Week since 2013, aimed at promoting Nollywood television and cinema abroad. Seeing both the diaspora and different international audiences as a market is a change of mind and perspective that arguably poses new challenges from the point of view of business, culture and translation (as the films need to be dubbed or subtitled to ensure successful market delivery and audience reception) while it creates a need to further study the Nollywood phenomenon as a potential back-colonialism process. Africa is no longer the colony. It is now the turn of West Africa (led by Nigeria) to spread out and “conquer” (culturally speaking) the former metropolises. Director and producer Victor Okhai recently stated: In most African homes, street side theatres, hotel rooms and television stations, Nollywood has taken over. Africa Magic, the Trans-African movie channel is proof enough. There is a cultural neo-colonisation of the African continent by Nollywood films. People now speak Igbo words and Pidgin English in far-off places like South Africa as a result of this. (Business Day 2013)

Nigeria thus becomes the African metropolis, a convection of multiple subcultures, of which Afropolitan young urban narratives and identities would be just one of the components. Nollywood may perhaps not have fully entered the sphere of Afropolitanism (Adebe 2015; Selasi 2005) in the sense that it is not a world of African artists working in the West but a world of Africans who live, work and present their society and culture to a global world from the immobility in which that same globalised world has been keeping them.

4. Translating Nollywood It is extremely difficult to map audio-visual translation modes in Africa. The complex, dynamic and varied social, linguistic, political and economic diversity of the different African countries and regions makes it an almost impossible task. However, it is both worthwhile and necessary to pay attention to the audio-visual reality in Africa. With the exception of a very small number of academic papers (Hamilton and Daramola 2012; Ibbi 2014; Ugochukwu 2009, 2013; Usman and Abdulsalam 2013) and some scattered short newspaper articles, Nollywood has hardly been

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researched. Furthermore, most of the academic research tends to focus on the semantic and grammatical aspects of subtitles (Hamilton and Daramola 2012; Ibbi 2014) or the potential of subtitles for language teaching (Usman and Abdulsalam 2013).

4.1 Subtitling Nigeria (and other Nollywood territories, like Ghana) opted for subtitling as the main audio-visual translation mode, right from the onset of the Nollywood video industry, with the introduction of English subtitles in the successful Igbo film Living in bondage (1992). Several factors led to this choice, including the huge ethnic and linguistic diversity of the country, the need to cater for at least the audiences of the major indigenous languages (Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, as pointed out above), a reasonably acceptable literacy rate (around 70%) and a booming audio-visual industry that cannot afford higher production costs involving dubbing (at least dubbing as it is known and practised in other film cultures, including Western cultures, as will be discussed below). The notion of Nigeria as a multilingual country, which produces multilingual audio-visual texts, is consistent with Delabastita and Grutman’s definition of a multilingual text as not just a text worded in different languages: … not only the “official” taxonomy of languages, but also the incredible range of subtypes and varieties existing within the various officially recognised languages, and indeed sometimes cutting across and challenging our neat linguistic typologies. (Delabastita & Grutman 2005, 16)

It could be argued that given the multi-ethnic, multilingual character of Nigeria and the neighbouring territories, perhaps multilingual subtitling would have been a better choice. However, the technical, financial and training constraints faced by the industry made this impossible, thus opting for monolingual subtitling in English. This practice would also be adopted by film industries in other countries in the region, such as Ghana. Although English is Nigeria’s official language, according to a global cinema survey conducted by UNESCO,10 Nigeria’s multilingualism is reflected in its movie production with 56% of Nollywood films produced 10

UNESCO (2009) provides the following statistics: “About 56% of Nollywood films are produced in Nigeria’s local languages, namely Yoruba (31%), Hausa (24%) and Igbo (1%). English remains a prominent language, accounting for 44%, which may contribute to Nigeria’s success in exporting its films.”

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in local languages and the remaining 44% in English which, according to the report, “may contribute to Nigeria’s success in exporting its films”. The survey was carried out in 2009, but such percentages have most likely over the last few years tended towards a prominence in favour of English11 versus indigenous languages, partly due to the transnationalisation or internationalisation of Nollywood. Subtitles are proving to be an extremely useful and powerful linguistic and cultural resource for speakers of the main indigenous languages (Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo) in the diaspora (mainly based in the United States, the United Kingdom and Western European countries), which help them maintain their roots and keep their language alive abroad. However, some local languages are particularly popular and successful not only in their geo-linguistic domestic context but also in neighbouring territories. This is the case of Hausa in Niger, Chad and northern Cameroon and Yoruba in Benin and Ghana. Although there is some subtitling into the major indigenous languages, the majority of subtitling is done into English with limited subtitling into French, mainly aimed at the neighbouring francophone African countries. However, the quality of Nollywood subtitles is, in general, substandard: Most of the time, they do not follow basic conventions such as number of lines per subtitle, number of characters per line, duration of subtitles on screen, deficient time and space synchrony, font colour and size. Also, the position of subtitles on screen tends to be anarchic, and there is a random use of typographic symbols as well as appalling spelling and grammatical errors, inconsistent syntax, unsystematic subtitle background colour and omissions (Ugochukwu 2013). Examples are the absence of subtitles in witchcraft sequences, and in other cases, cultural references, sayings, proverbs, songs, et cetera are totally omitted. Hamilton and Daramola (2012, 12–20) present a (rather confusing) categorisation of specific subtitle problems in Nollywood films, which include what they call “direct translation” (literal translation) and “poor imaging [of the country]” and “logorrhoea” (verbosity). All these factors, apart from badly damaging the projected and perceived image and diminishing the potential quality of the film, result in confusion and significantly lower comprehension levels among the audience that hinders reception. In this vein, Ibbi (2014, 58) points out that “movies to be given for international viewership must be ones that will not disgrace the country through subtitles or storyline”. Subtitling of Nollywood films has not, so far, commissioned professional subtitlers or trained translators. As mentioned above, films are 11

By English, I mean Pidgin or Nigerian English, for the most part.

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produced on a very limited budget, which results in an overall streamlining of the different process involved in film production, including subtitling. Subtitling is then carried out by directors, producers and distributors, who lack the expertise and training to produce quality translations. This might also be connected to a certain lack of specific, formal translation training in the region. In a recent newspaper interview (News Agency of Nigeria 2015), Nigerian linguist Bosede Alonge has warned about the poor subtitling of Nollywood movies and has called for the participation of professional translators and linguists “to assist in churning out well translated movies and not films that will murder languages”. Hamilton and Daramola (2012, 40) summarise the opinions of two Nigerian subtitlers, who confirm that they still use manuscripts instead of digital software. This could be solved easily as free subtitling software that could considerably improve the quality of Nollywood subtitling is available online. These subtitlers explain that they take an average of 24 hours to subtitle each movie and are paid US$50–100 per film. I interviewed other Ghanaian and Nigerian subtitlers (two university graduates and three members of film crews), living and working in Nigeria, who explained that the fees are actually much lower than those reported and that such amounts are hardly ever paid, adding that, in general, Nollywood subtitlers (if and when they are employed) have neither a contract nor a steady flow of work. Nollywood web-based video-on-demand platform IrokoTV (dubbed Africa’s Netflix) released a plan in 2013 aimed at subtitling Nollywood films in several languages, including English, Spanish and Portuguese, as part of its internationalisation strategy. I agree with both Hamilton and Daramola and Ibbi when they argue that subtitling should be carried out by trained, professional translators and that filmmakers, producers and distributors should realise that quality audio-visual translation is paramount for the successful delivery and reception of Nollywood films, particularly in the wake of the transnationalisation or internationalisation process of Nollywood. Hamilton and Daramola (ibid., 45) even go as far as to suggest that the Nigeria’s National Film and Video Censors Board should impose sanctions for subtitling errors.

4.2 Dubbing In a general introductory paper published in the early years of Nollywood, Antia Bassey (1996, 67–69) states that, at the time of writing,

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there was no known example of dubbing in Nigerian film and television. He adds that dubbing would be a better option than subtitling given the linguistic, financial and technical constraints related to subtitling and that it would be the optimal way of overcoming illiteracy problems in Nigeria. Today, dubbing does not seem likely to become a major audio-visual translation mode in Nollywood. Several reasons can be established for this. Similar financial, linguistic and technical constraints still persist and make dubbing more expensive. Technical constraints related to the use of single-soundtrack technology instead of separate background soundtracks (which makes it nearly impossible to translate or dub) persist. Nollywood is characterised by an almost absolute lack of trained dubbing experts and professional voice actors (added to the abovementioned overall poor quality of the translations). The multilingual landscape of Nigeria (not translating films into local languages could mean losing audience numbers and eventually lead to the disappearance of these languages and cultures) and social preferences play a role, among others. In this vein, Ugochukwu points out the following: … while preliminary surveys (author, 2009 and 2012) on the reception of productions in Nigerian languages tend to indicate a European preference for dubbing, Nigerians and other African viewers have so far felt more at home with subtitling, a technique which better enhances the original Nigerian flavour of the film while discretely [sic] guiding viewers through the storyline. (Ugochukwu 2013)

There have, nevertheless, been some instances of dubbing on the Nollywood scene. Ugochukwu (2013) refers to a joint project in 2003 between the European Union, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Francophony Agency to support the distribution of African films in Africa. This project involved dubbing a number of Nollywood films mainly into French but also into other languages, including English and Swahili. Dubbing for those films seems to have taken place not in Nigeria but in Cameroon, Gabon and Ghana where there are better facilities. Piracy has always been a serious blight of Nollywood films since the age of VHS videos in the 1990s. As discussed earlier, the transition to digital technology and computer editing exponentially multiplied the possibility of pirated copies. Recently, piracy seems also to have taken over the distribution process in the form of pirated dubbing, as Barrot (2010) confirms. As opposed to Nigeria, other African countries seem to have “embraced” dubbing, although it would perhaps be more appropriate to say that they have “developed” their own particular form of dubbing (or

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rather, improvised live interpreting). Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, some of the main Nollywood markets outside of Nigeria where Nollywood films are extremely popular, developed the figure of the commentator (which already existed in the early days of cinema and still exists in some Asian countries like Indonesia, Japan and Thailand as well as in certain regions of the former Soviet Union and South America), commonly known as “vee-jays” (VJs, video jockeys). VJs are tremendously popular figures, sometimes even more than the actors themselves, who narrate, in a very theatrical style, a voiced-over translation of the foreign film (either live at public video parlours or on dubbed recordings sold in shops and markets [Hoad 2012]). Dubbing has been subject to intense debate lately. In this sense, several professional meetings between Nigerian filmmakers and international distributors, held during the 2013 NollywoodWeek in Paris, discussed the pros and cons of a wider use of dubbing in Nollywood. While some French film directors, producers and distributors stated that “[i]f you want to reach a lot of people you have to use dubbing; if you use subtitling, only two or three intellectual people will watch the film” (NollywoodWeek Paris 2013a), Nollywood filmmakers and actors consider dubbing as a betrayal of their work and passionately defended the use of subtitling as a highly important tool among the diaspora to teach their children about their culture and linguistic and heritage features. They also highlighted the importance of subtitling to maintain the authenticity of their films and the languages and cultures they present. If anything, some of them agree, though, that dubbing perhaps could be better for films and TV series watched on smartphones where subtitling is not suitable given the small size of the screen. Nollywood filmmakers also pointed out technical issues related to dubbing such as the lack of African dubbing actors. A number of initiatives are slowly being implemented in this respect, including dubbing workshops and training courses in various sub-Saharan countries and in France where American actress Whoopi Goldberg helps to train African dubbing actors (NollywoodWeek Paris 2013b).

5. Conclusion In this paper, I offered an overview of Nollywood, Nigeria’s colossal film industry, which has swiftly evolved from a local, rudimentary industry into a living popular art engine. It magically turns into images the lives, dreams, fears and traditions of Nigeria, the most populated and perhaps most diverse and kaleidoscopic country in sub-Saharan Africa,

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and offers a unique model of audiovisual production and distribution that transcends linguistic, cultural and geopolitical boundaries. From Nigeria to neighbouring African countries and the sub-Saharan African diaspora and from the diaspora to international audiences, Nollywood is conquering, rather spontaneously, new worlds. It is not imposing any rules on anyone. It is only expressing itself in a very distinctive way, making its own choices to a large extent. Thus, it chooses its own translation mode to communicate across cultures, respecting and preserving local languages. Audiovisual translation, and specifically subtitling (albeit still lacking the urgent implementation of local academic and professional training structures and protocols), is used to convey the history and story of West Africa. Nollywood has reshaped the audiovisual map of Nigeria and most of sub-Saharan Africa and continues to do so (as the title of the book edited by Krings and Okome, Global Nollywood [2013], reflects). Nollywood reveals a conglomerate of identities, which may still be immersed in the categories of developing countries but which are no longer “the Other” and which now have a voice of their own. The way this process continues to unfold both at the regional and international level; the role national and regional film, academic and professional institutions choose to play; and the different agents, procedures and factors involved in the translation of Nollywood films still deserve and need further study from multidisciplinary approaches. Nollywood stands up.

References Adebe, A. 2015. Afropolitanism: Global citizenship with African routes. Debating development: A conversational blog from researchers at the Oxford Department of International Development (University of Oxford), April 4. http://blog.qeh.ox.ac.uk/?p=910. Adesanya, A. 2000. From film to video. In Nigerian video films, ed. J. Haynes, 37–50. Africa Series no. 73. Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies. Adesokan, A. 2004. Loud in Lagos: Nollywood videos. Wasafiri 19:45– 49. Antia, B. 1996. Situation audiovisuelle dans un pays multilingue: le Nigéria. In Le transferts linguistiques dans les medias audiovisuels, ed. Y. Gambier, 67–69. Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Appiah, A. K. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. London: Penguin.

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Bandia, P. 2006. African Europhone literature and writing as translation: Some ethical issues. In Translating others, vol. 2, ed. T. Hermans, 349–61. Manchester: St. Jerome. —. 2008. Translation as reparation: Writing and translation in postcolonial Africa. Manchester: St. Jerome. —. 2009. Translation matters: Linguistic and cultural representation. In Translation studies in Africa, ed. J. Inggs, and L. Meintjes, 1–20. London: Continuum. Barrot, P. 2008a. Selling like hot cake: Box office and statistics. In Nollywood: The video phenomenon in Nigeria, ed. P. Barrot, 32–40. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. 2008b. The Italians of Africa. In Nollywood: The video phenomenon in Nigeria, ed. P. Barrot, 12–21. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. 2008c. Video is the AIDS of the film industry. In Nollywood: The video phenomenon in Nigeria, ed. P. Barrot, 3–9. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. 2010. Nollywood: How Nigeria produced ten thousand films in fifteen years. Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (France). http://www.inaglobal.fr/en/cinema/article/nollywood-how-nigeriaproduced-ten-thousand-films-fifteen-years. Bhabha, H. K. 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge. Business Day. 2013. Emerging talents: Nollywood and the future of African cinema. http://businessdayonline.com/2013/03/emerging-talentsnollywood-and-the-future-of-african-cinema/. Delabastita, D., and R. Grutman. 2005. Fictional representations of multilingualism and translation. Linguistica Antverpiensia n.s., Themes in translation studies, 4:11–34 Delanty, G. 2009. The cosmopolitan imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Esan, O. 2008. Appreciating Nollywood: Audiences and Nigerian films. Participations 5 (1). http://www.participations.org/Volume%205/Issue%201%20%20special/5_01_esan.htm. Grutman, R. 2006. Refraction and recognition: Literary multilingualism in translation. Target 18 (1): 17–47. Hamilton, K., and Y. Daramola. 2012. Nollywood and the challenge of movie subtitles. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing. Haynes, J., ed. 2000, Nigerian video films. Africa Series no. 73. Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies.

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—. 2010. What is to be done? Film studies and Nigerian and Ghanaian videos. In Viewing African cinema in the twenty-first century, ed. M. ùaul and R. A. Austen, 11–25. Athens: Ohio University Press. Hoad, P. 2012. Tanzania’s VJs bring Hollywood to Africa. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jul/10/tanzania-vjs-hollywoodafrica. Ibbi, A. A. 2014. Subtitling in the Nigerian film industry, informative or misleading. Cinema Journal 4 (1): 48–61. Igboanusi, H. 2002. Igbo English in the Nigerian novel. Ibadan: Enicrownfit Publishers. Jedlowski, A. 2013. From Nollywood to Nollyworld: Processes of transnationalization in the Nigerian video film industry. In Global Nollywood, ed. M. Krings and O. Okome, 25–45. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Krings, M., and O. Okome, eds. 2013. Global Nollywood. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. LaCapra, D. 1985. History and criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Meylaerts, R., and A. ùerban. 2014. Introduction: Multilingualism at the cinema and on stage; A translation perspective. Linguistica Antverpiensia n.s., Themes in translation studies, 13:1–13. Munday, J. 2014. Using primary sources to produce a microhistory of translation and translators: Theoretical and methodological concerns. The Translator 20 (1) 64–80. Munslow, A. 1997. Deconstructing history. London and New York: Routledge. —. 2013. Authoring the past: Writing and rethinking history. London and New York: Routledge. News Agency of Nigeria (NAN). 2015. Nigerian movies: Linguist expresses concern over poor subtitling. http://nannewsnigeria.com/node/39143. NollywoodWeek Paris. 2013. Debate at NollywoodWeek Paris: Film export and translation; Professional encounter 5/7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1AjBwHhfFQ. —. 2013. Debate at NollywoodWeek Paris: Film export and translation; Professional encounter (Eng.) 3/7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i49WXTp4fVY. Noy, F. 2008. Hausa video and sharia law. In Nollywood: The video phenomenon in Nigeria, ed. P. Barrot, 78–84. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Okome, O. 2007. Nollywood: Spectatorship, audience and the sites of consumption. Postcolonial Text 3 (2): 1–21. —. 2010. Nollywood and its critics. In Viewing African cinema in the twenty-first century, ed. M. ùaul and R. Austen, 26–41. Athens: Ohio University Press. Opubor, A. E., O. E. Nweneli, and O. Oreh, eds. 1979. The development and growth of the film industry in Nigeria. Lagos: Third Press International. ùaul, M., and R. A. Austen, eds. 2010 Viewing African cinema in the twenty-first century. Athens: Ohio University Press. Schneider, E. W. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties around the world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Selasi, T. 2005. Bye-bye Babar. The Lip #5 Africa March 3, 2005. http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76. Spivak, G. C. 1985. Subaltern studies: Deconstructing historiography. In Subaltern studies, vol. 4, ed. R. Guha, 330–63. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. TEDGlobal. 2007. Franco Sacchi nos cuenta sobre Nollywood. http://www.ted.com/talks/franco_sacchi_on_nollywood?language=es. The Independent. 2010. Nigeria’s Nollywood eclipsing Hollywood in Africa. April 15. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ films/nigerias-nollywood-eclipsing-hollywood-in-africa-5540975.html. Ugochukwu, F. 2009. The reception and impact of Nollywood in France: A preliminary survey. International symposium on “Nollywood and beyond: Transnational dimensions of an African video industry”, University of Mainz, May 13–16, 2009. —. 2013. Nollywood across languages. Journal of Intercultural Communication no. 33. http://www.immi.se/intercultural/nr33/ugochukwu.html. UNESCO. 2009. Nollywood rivals Bollywood in film/video production. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/media-services/singleview/news/nollywood_rivals_bollywood_in_filmvideo_production/#.V wfKd3qt8cN. Usman, J., and A. Abdulsalam. 2013. Movie subtitling as technique for indigenous language teaching. Journal of Business and Organizational Development 1 (1): 8–14. Uzoatu, U. M. 2012. The transition of Onitsha market literature to home movies. http://www.premiumtimesng.com/arts-entertainment/109722the-transition-of-onitsha-market-literature-to-home-movies-by-uzormaxim-uzoatu.html. Wikipedia. 2015. Reversal film.

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CHAPTER SIX BIBLE TRANSLATION IN POSTCOLONY AFRICA: RECLAIMING HUMANNESS THROUGH BIBLE TRANSLATION PERFORMANCE1 JACOBUS A. NAUDÉ, CYNTHIA L. MILLER-NAUDÉ AND TSHOKOLO J. MAKUTOANE

1. Introduction Postcolony Africa faces a number of challenges that are also prevalent worldwide: globalisation, the revolution in information technology, chronic governmental deficits and excessive energy consumption.2 But postcolony Africa also faces challenges that are not unique, but that are particularly devastating within the African context: urbanisation, corruption, HIV/Aids and Ebola, and violence and political instability. All of these 1

This work is based on research supported in part by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa (Jacobus A. Naudé UID 85902 and Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé UID 95926). The grant holders acknowledge that opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in any publication generated by NRF-supported research are those of the author, and that the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard. 2 We distinguish the term “postcolony” from “postcolonial”. Postcolonial refers to the historical epoch resulting from the aftermath of colonial rule. The term “postcolony” is not historical in orientation but rather sees the conjunction of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial features in a synchronic structure. (The term “postcolony Africa” was coined by Mbembe [1992; 2001], though we do not follow his analysis in all respects.)

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challenges result in alienation and a loss of humanness. In this article, we examine the loss of humanness as a critical factor in postcolony Africa and the role of Bible translation in the assertion of humanity in the face of loss and alienation of humanness.3 In the colonial era, Bible translations were produced largely by missionary organisations with varying degrees of input from mothertongue translators. In the postcolonial era, Bible translations have been produced both by missionary organisations and by national and international Bible societies with increasing input of mother-tongue translators (see Mojola 2002, 2011; Bosman 2015, 256–57; Sanneh 2015). The acceptability of the translations by the communities for which they were produced, however, has varied dramatically–many of the translations are not used or are under-used. This is especially the case in the postcolonial era in which, paradoxically, the increased indigenisation of the Bible translation process did not necessarily result in increased acceptance of the translations (Dye 2009, 89–98; H. Hill 2012; M. Hill 2009, 1–8, Knott 2013, 1–22). In part, this state of affairs relates to the fact that many communities in Africa are still in the oral world or, more precisely, they are oral-written cultures (societies with an oral tradition who also function more or less successfully within socially dominant written cultures).4 By drawing upon the insights of performance criticism for Bible translation (Maxey and Wendland 2012), we consider in this paper, firstly, how performance translation based on an oral-written cultural viewpoint can promote engagement and acceptance of a Bible translation. Secondly, we explore how the restoration of the essentially oral nature of the Bible through performance translation can similarly be an agent of change in a “post-human” world (cf. Milton and Bandia 2009, 1–18). We examine happiness as a basic human value and explore how Bible 3

See United Bible Societies (2014) for summary statistics on Bible translation in Africa as undertaken by UBS and affiliated national Bible societies. For 2015 statistics provided by Wycliffe Bible Translators concerning Bible translations in Africa, see Wycliffe Bible Translators (2015). 4 A contrast of the two Sesotho translations illustrates this point. The first translation was done by missionaries in the colonial era. By producing a literal translation, the orality of the source texts, especially in the Old Testament, remained in the translation. For this reason, the translation was thoroughly accepted and is still broadly used. By contrast, the second translation was done under the auspices of the Bible Society using dynamic equivalence; this translation is not as widely accepted and never replaced the earlier translation. See Naudé and Makutoane (2006); Makutoane and Naudé (2008).

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translation performance, especially in texts relating to happiness, can assist in the restoration of humanness. The article is grounded in three theoretical perspectives: First, the philosophical perspective of Emmanuel Levinas provides a model for assertion of humanity in the face of inhumanity through the face-to-face engagement with the Other (Section 3). Second, the oral-literate interface, both of contemporary Africa and of the ancient biblical texts, provides a means for translated texts in the African context to find new invigoration (Section 4). Third, Biblical Performance Criticism provides a means for the Otherness of the ancient biblical text to be directly engaged and recreated within contemporaneous African societies (Section 5).5 The structure of the article is as follows: In the second section we describe one way to view the post-human world and the state of postcolony Africa. In the third section, we look at various ways in which the term “post-humanism” is currently being used and look at attempts to identify core human values for the future. We also look at the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to assert humanity in the face of inhumanity. In the fourth section, we highlight the oral origins of the Bible and the outcomes of the field of Biblical Performance Criticism for Bible translation. In the fifth section we suggest ways in which humanness can be reclaimed in local communities through the performance of biblical texts relating to happiness. We further outline ways in which various Christian traditions can use a performance-engagement model for the liturgical reading of the Bible.

2. Globalisation and postcolony Africa The world we are living in is changing rapidly. Old technology is replaced with new technology. Old regimes with new regimes. Old paradigms with new paradigms. It is not the world of our parents and certainly not the world of our grandparents. What world are we living in and what is the state of humanity in our world? There are many answers that can be given to this question. One way of answering it has been given by Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum (2011). They identify four main challenges that the world is facing (2011, 17–23, 28–31): globalisation, the revolution in information 5

We describe and employ some aspects of these three theoretical perspectives in previous publications as part of an editorial theory of oral and written biblical texts: Makutoane, Miller-Naudé and Naudé 2015; Miller-Naudé and Naudé 2015, 2016; and Naudé and Miller-Naudé 2016.

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technology, the chronic economic deficits of governments and patterns of excessive energy consumption. Taken together, these four challenges mean that the world has changed in dramatic ways that have enormous implications for humanity. Although they wrote their book for a specifically American audience, the four challenges have even greater implications for postcolony Africa in terms of the disparity in power relations between the “developed” world and the “developing” (or, “underdeveloped”) world. In other words, the disparity between the centre and periphery which was experienced in colonial times between empire and colony remains, especially with respect to economic power and the extraction of resources. Furthermore, the power differential in which postcolony Africa is disadvantaged involves not just the West but also the East and specifically, China (see Corkin, Burke, and Davies 2008). Let us look briefly at each of Friedman and Mandelbaum’s challenges and their implications for postcolony Africa. The essence of globalisation involves the free movement of goods, people, services, capital and cultural expressions across national borders. Following the success of free-market economies of the West during the cold war, other countries decided to follow the western pattern. Globalisation means that the earth is flat and small and intimately interconnected. Globalisation in Africa has had both positive and negative effects. Among the negative effects are the erosion of sovereignty in economic and financial matters, the marginalisation of the African economies in a global market, the loss of cultural identity and the extinction of indigenous development of technology (see Sundaram, Schwanke, and Von Armin 2011; Ibrahim 2013). The IT revolution changed the composition of work, eliminating old jobs and industries and spawning new ones. As a result, the nature of work became more complex and demanding, requiring everyone to be better educated to be secure and to keep a well-paying job. The concomitant educational challenge involves expanding the analytical and innovative skills of people in the workforce. Education must not focus solely on the transfer of knowledge but upon inculcating the ability to analyse, to reason, to infer and to solve problems in creative ways. The challenge of rising national debts and annual deficits also threatens the well-being of citizens around the world. In recent years these have expanded to dangerous levels as governments developed the habit of not raising enough money to pay for government costs through taxes, and then borrowing to bridge the gap. Since 2000, countries have suffered a greater loss of fiscal discipline than ever before in history. We have seen numerous “bailouts” of governments, banks and big industries on an

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unprecedented scale in efforts to avoid the even greater costs of the insolvency of governments and countries. The African economic outlook is also bleak in a variety of ways, including the fall of global commodities prices, low job creation, pervasive poverty and urbanisation without industrialisation (see African Economic Outlook 2015). The final challenge relates to energy and the environment. The threat of fossil fuels to the planet’s biosphere is a direct result of a surge in energy consumption which in turn is a direct result of the growth that has come about through globalization (see Africa Progress Report 2014). If we do not find a new source of reliable, cheap, clean energy, we run the risk of burning up, choking up, heating up and smoking up our planet far faster than previously predicted. Technologies that can supply energy will be the next new global energy. A country with a thriving energy technology will enjoy energy security, enhance its own national security and contribute to global environmental security. A country with a leading role in energy technology will be the next great global leader in industry. In Africa, the problem of energy security is particularly acute. The energy systems are “underpowered, inefficient and unequal” in terms of availability and cost, with millions of Africa’s poorest people paying among the highest energy costs in the world (Africa Progress Report 2015, 14–15). Let us look a bit more closely at the interrelationship between globalisation and the IT revolution (see also Ritzer 2007, 252–82). The merger of these two factors changed everything. Between 1995 and 2005, we saw the first phase of the flat world. There were new markets and new economies overnight with global competition for jobs. The personal computer, laptop and cell phone became inter-operable through the worldwide web with Unicode making digital code flow securely in all directions. Individuals gained the ability to act globally, with everyone a consumer of goods and information. Suddenly, Boston and Bangalore became neighbours (Friedman and Mandelbaum 2011, 57–58). Since 2005, in the second phase of the flat world, the number of cell phones in the world is equal to more than two-thirds of the world’s population. A 2015 survey of cell phone usage in seven Sub-Saharan countries found that cell phone usage ranged from 89% in South Africa (the same percentage as the United States) to 65% in Uganda (Pew Research Center 2015). There is nearly universal connectivity to the internet through cell phone or computer. The cloud holds every imaginable software programme and application, updated seamlessly every moment. The cloud can turn any desktop or hand-held device into a powerful means of communication and creativity. These platforms for connectivity are cheap and powerful–more innovation of all sorts can occur much faster–

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and anyone can come and rent the tools for almost nothing, generating and sharing ideas on the platform. Now Boston and Bangalore and Sisi are neighbours. Where is Sisi, you ask? Sisi is a rural community north of Bangalore. Now Sisi is also a neighbour to Boston (Friedman and Mandelbaum 2011, 59–65). The change from the first phase of the flat world to the second phase meant that people went from being connected to being interconnected to being interdependent–all links are getting tighter. More people can connect and collaborate and partner in deeper ways. Analytic skills become critical because of the importance to analyse and apply the data moving through the networks at the speed of light (Friedman and Mandelbaum 2011, 71). In this new world, the workplace is undergoing a fundamental restructuring. The pressure of greater recession and the hyperconnectivity of the global marketplace mean that more goods and services are being produced with less money and fewer workers. Companies are learning to do more with less–old jobs are not coming back, more new jobs are being done by machines and microchips. As new technologies and networks are developed, more jobs are digitised or outsourced. There are essentially three segments in the job market which are quickly collapsing into two (Friedman and Mandelbaum 2011, 75–78, 102): 1) Non-routine, high-skilled jobs. These workers have functions which cannot be reduced to an algorithm. They involve critical thinking and reason, abstract skills, judgement, creativity, math. Examples of non-routine high-skilled jobs are engineers, programmers, designers, bond traders, athletes, scientists, doctors, lawyers, artists, chefs. 2) Routine, middle-skilled jobs. These workers do standardised, repetitive tasks such as factory assembly line work, filing in a bank, transcribing doctors’ notes. These jobs have been devastated by the IT revolution and globalisation. The IT revolution has eliminated many of these jobs as computerised automation in factories, for example, has eliminated the need for workers. Other jobs are now outsourced to cheaper labour markets as the information can flow quickly over the internet. For example, in the United States, helplines for customer care are often staffed by persons in India. This is possible through the IT revolution. 3) Non-routine, low-skilled jobs. These jobs do not involve critical thinking or advanced degrees. Examples include dental assistants, police men/women and construction workers. These jobs cannot

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readily be outsourced or done by machine robots–so far, we only have human beings and not computers or robots cleaning our teeth! There is increasing job-market polarisation between these three categories–non-routine high-skilled jobs become more lucrative, nonroutine low-skilled jobs pay decently depending upon the economy, but routine middle-skilled jobs vanish or decrease in pay. As a result, we can look at essentially two kinds of workers in the global economy: creators– those doing something unique and irreplaceable–and servers, those who service the creators and other servers. Viewed in this way, we can see four types of jobs (Friedman and Mandelbaum 2011, 78, 98): 1) 2) 3) 4)

creative creators–do non-routine work in a non-routine way routine creators–do non-routine work in a routine way (average) creative servers–do routine work in inspired ways routine servers–do routine work in routine ways (offering nothing extra)

Routine workers are at risk. They may lose their job through outsourcing of work across national boundaries in the global economy. The nature of their work may be digitally performed through automation. In other words, routine workers are at risk of not just losing their jobs but of losing their humanity as they are replaced or made irrelevant. Friedman and Mandelbaum have identified four main challenges that the world faces which threaten humanity and create the context of the loss of humanity and humanness (similarly Eco 2008; contra Pinker 2011). But postcolony Africa also faces challenges that are not unique, but that are particularly devastating within the African context: HIV/Aids and Ebola (Africa Regional Health Report 2014), and violence and instability (including religious violence and child soldiers). Challenges particular to Southern Africa have been identified within six broad clusters of potential threats with implications for humanitarian action: environmental threats, aggregate (economic threats), socio-political shocks, public health threats and loss of aid (Holloway et al. 2013). All of these challenges result in alienation and a loss of humanness.

3. Post-humanism, happiness and the assertion of humanity In the previous section, an overview was provided of circumstances in postcolony Africa which contribute to a loss of humanity or humanness. In

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this section, we examine the term “post-humanism” and consider how humanity can be re-asserted through the cultivation of happiness. The term post-humanism is currently being used in different ways (Aichele 2014; Koosed 2014). First, post-humanism can be used as a criticism against the traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition. In other words, post-humanism is critical of traditional Renaissance humanism which views the human as autonomous, rational and capable of free will. Second, post-humanism can refer to the view that humans do not have an inherently elevated role in nature, but rather are simply one of many natural species. Third, post-humanism can focus on the limitations and fallibility of human intelligence while maintaining the rational basis of humanism. Fourth, post-humanism can be used to view the human not as a unified, defined individual but rather as an emerging one with different identities and heterogeneous perspectives. Finally, posthumanism can be used as a synonym for trans-humanism which promotes the possibility and desirability of a post-human as a hypothetical being as a symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence to eliminate aging and enhance human capacities. In this article, we use post-humanism in a nonphilosophical sense to refer to a loss of humanness or essential human features, characteristics or rights. The question of which human values need to be safeguarded and promoted in the future has been examined by Prof Eugene Cloete at Stellenbosch University. He suggests that the university should focus on the following critical needs, which relate to basic features of life necessary for human existence: clean drinking water, the status of women in Africa, more clean energy, education, employment, equity, agriculture, land and ownership, access to education, energy, food, leadership, transformation and technology, health, housing and hope (Fourie-Basson 2014). As he notes, hope is a two-edged sword when it promises a better life which is not realised, rather than a vision, plan and action for the future. Because of this problem, in what follows we want to focus not on hope for the future but rather on happiness in the sense of well-being or joy in the present. In our view, happiness in this sense is a fundamental feature of humanity and humanness. Happiness has been identified as one of six basic expressions of human emotion–alongside anger, fear, surprise, disgust and sadness–although there are cultural and linguistic factors that may modify the recognition of emotion in cross-cultural contexts (Damjanovic et al. 2010). Happiness also seems to have a deep imprint in language. A study of 24 corpora across 10 diverse human languages revealed a clear positive bias in lexical

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inventory; in other words, words which are emotionally positive are more prevalent (Dodds et al. 2015). The World Happiness Report attempts to quantify happiness and identify those factors which produce well-being worldwide. In the 2015 report, six key variables were identified as accounting for three-quarters of the differences among countries: social support, GDP per capita, healthy years of life expectancy, trust, perceived freedom to make life decisions and generosity (Helliwell, Layard, and Sachs 2015). Two important findings are, first, that the neurological circuits underlying the supports for well-being have plasticity and can be transformed through experience and training. Second, the quality of the social norms and institutions strongly influence all measures of well-being at both the individual and national levels, for example, family and friendships, empathy and trust, and social norms. A developmental approach to happiness focuses on the ways in which happiness is achieved through societal factors. For example, the Capabilities Approach assesses societies with respect to basic social justice by asking “What is each person able to do and to be?” It focuses on individual choice or freedom; it sees happiness as the ability of individual persons to exercise self-determination and self-definition (Nussbaum 2011). Positive Psychology, a new field of psychology founded by Martin Seeligman, has made happiness a legitimate field of scientific inquiry. In Positive Psychology, happiness is not simply a by-product of our external circumstances (Seligman 2002). Happiness is rather something that can be systematically developed in three dimensions of happiness: the pleasant life (through pursuing positive emotions about the past, present and future), the good life (through using one’s signature strengths to obtain abundant gratification through activities that one enjoys in the main realms of one’s life) and the meaningful life (using one’s signature strengths and virtues in the service of something bigger than oneself) (Seligman 2002, 249; Lewis 2007).6 The question of whether happiness is achieved internally (through altering one’s emotional responses or psychological state) or externally (through altering one’s social or material circumstances) is both critical and highly contested. One approach for integrating the two approaches has been provided by the interactionist perspective, in which both internal and 6

The popular press produces enormous qualities of books about happiness. The following magazines in Frankfort International Airport are representative: O’s Little Book of Happiness (Oprah magazine), Happiness, Health and Beauty, Happi-Body, Happy Way, Happinez, Herzstück, etc.

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external paths to happiness are considered important and interrelated. Ahuvia et al. (2015, 13), for example, argue that “external conditions provide potentials for happiness and internal processes act as filters for real world experiences”. These interconnected processes mutually affect each other in the production of happiness. Another attempt to integrate internal and external approaches to happiness is that of the Dalai Lama (Dalai Lama and Cutler 2009). He suggests that one should work towards both personal and societal happiness at the same time–cultivating happiness benefits not only oneself, but also one’s family, community and society at large. Positive emotions, in general, and the supreme positive emotions of compassion and empathy, in particular, lie at the intersection of inner and outer happiness and have the capacity to bring about personal happiness and to provide a potential solution to many of the problems plaguing society today. Compassion and empathy cause specific changes in brain function that alter the way that we perceive and interact with others, causing us to perceive others as being more similar to ourselves. These changes result in relating to others based more on our similarities than our differences, removing the barriers between “us” and “them”. Relating on a basic human level requires building a sense of connection between people based on the characteristics they share as human beings so that cultural or national identity does not obliterate one’s basic identity as a human being (Dalai Lama and Cutler 2009, 6–7, 25). The sense of connection to others and a wider sense of community (beyond the family) play a key role in human happiness, especially in the modern world with the deep deterioration of a sense of community, growing social isolation and the lack of deep feelings of connection among people (Dalai Lama and Cutler 2009, 11–13, 19). Through awareness of how one can connect or relate to others and translating awareness into action, societal bonds can be strengthened, resulting in greater personal and societal happiness (Dalai Lama and Cutler 2009, 17–29). A third approach to happiness, though he does not use the term, is that of the French philosopher Emanuel Levinas, who lived from 1906 to 1995. Levinas was a Jewish man who survived incarceration in the holocaust. Unlike many individuals who went through the horrors of the holocaust, Levinas lost neither his personal faith in God nor his belief in humanity and the value of humanness. Instead, Levinas developed a new philosophical way of reasoning by utilizing the category of the epiphany of alterity (Levinas 1981; 1999; 2006). His concept of “alterity” was established in a series of essays, collected under the title Alterity and

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Transcendence (1999) and influenced in part by the dialogical philosophies of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. Levinas’ account of alterity describes it as an otherness that cannot be circumvented. What he wants to convey is the irreducibility of the other human person. For Levinas, an encounter with the Other, that is, with someone who does not fit neatly into our categories of understanding, confronts us with a unique ethical challenge. How should we respond to the Other? Or, what does it mean to encounter someone who is the Other? Levinas argues that human life of the being or self takes place in the uncontrollable face of the Other. In other words, our own humanity takes place through an encounter with the Other, which we cannot control. The Other is not knowable or comprehended as such and cannot be made into an object of the self, but rather calls into question and challenges the complacency of the self through desire, language and the concern for justice. The self discovers its own particularity when it is singled out by the gaze of the Other. Ethically, for Levinas, the Other is superior or prior to the self; the mere presence of the Other makes demands before one can respond by helping them or ignoring them. In Humanism of the Other (2006), Levinas argues that it is of the highest importance to understand one’s humanity through the humanity of others. We find our humanity, Levinas argues, not through mathematics, rational metaphysics, or introspection. Rather, it is found in the recognition that the suffering and mortality of others are the obligations and morality of the self. In particular, ethics, which makes human life human, is determined by how the space between my face and the Other’s face is bridged, for example by a caress, a blow, a touch of consolation or compromise, etc. The Other is not looked down upon, but rather looked up to–it is only through the Other that we experience our own human existence. For Levinas meaning as expression, that is, signification, originally emerges from the face-to-face encounter as an ethical event. In other words, meaning emerges from encountering the other person as moral command and the self as moral response. The significance of Levinas’ view of alterity for our investigation of post-humanism, happiness and the translation of the Bible is twofold: First, Levinas views the Other not as inferior but as on a higher level than the self. Second, for Levinas, alterity relates to a face-to-face encounter, that is, the oral experience is primary, as a way to assert humanity in the face of inhumanity.7 7

The application of Levinas’ view of the Other to the representation of alterity in translation is explored further in Makutoane, Miller-Naudé and Naudé 2015.

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The focus of this study is the assertion of humanity by means of the role of Bible translation. The developmental role translation plays on the macro-level and micro-level in a Complexity Theory approach to development is argued for by Marais (2014) (see also Mwaniki 2013). Naudé and Miller-Naudé (2011) provide a description of the nature and activity of religious translation in Africa. The impact of Bible translation can be linked to the view of Émile Durkheim (1915) who was perhaps the first sociologist to recognise the critical importance of religion in human societies–on the one hand in its appeal for the individual, but on the other hand in its social impact as a collective act that includes many forms of behaviour in which people interact with others (see also Noble 2000, 161– 71). From a macro-level viewpoint, religion is oriented toward the larger society, but its social support function is best viewed on the micro, or individual, level. For him religion is an integrative force in human society because religious bonds often transcend personal and divisive forces–a perspective that is reflected in functionalist thought today. Religion gives meaning and purpose to people’s lives–these values help society to function as an integrated social system. Religious behaviour is expressed through religious beliefs, rituals and experience. Durkheim’s view is that religious ritual was of primary significance as a mechanism for expressing and reinforcing sentiments most essential to the integration of the society (Durkheim 2015, 299–388). A study by the Pew Forum finds that about 84% of the world’s population adheres to some religion of which Christianity is the largest (32% of the world’s population), the second largest is Islam (23%), followed by Hinduism (15%), Buddhism (7%), folk religions (including African traditional religions, Chinese folk religions, Native American religions and Australian aboriginal religions) (6%), Judaism (0,2%) and other religions including the Baha’î faith, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, Wicca and Zoroastrianism (1%) (Pew Research Center’s Forum 2012, 9; see also Barrett, Johnson, and Crossing 2010). The study finds further that about 16% have no religious affiliation, the third largest religious group behind Christians and Muslims. However, the survey indicates that many of the unaffiliated hold some religious or spiritual beliefs even though they do not identify with a particular faith. Norris and Inglehart (2004) show in their study of seven countries that religious participation in the USA, Mexico and South Africa has increased between 1981 and 2001. The collective nature of religion, as emphasised by Durkheim, is evident in these statistics. The beliefs and rituals can create a positive religious experience. The rites are a manner of acting which takes rise in the midst of the assembled groups and which is

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destined to excite, maintain or recreate certain mental states in these groups.

4. Orality in Bible Translation and the reclaiming of humanity Recent research within the field of Biblical Performance Criticism has implications for understanding better how the Bible was spoken, written and transmitted and provides new avenues for the translation of the Bible.8 Since the ground-breaking work of Gunkel (1930) (see also Miller 2011; Niditch 2015), biblical scholars have accepted the notion that oral traditions lie behind much of the written biblical traditions. Gunkel himself was acquainted with Wilhelm Wundt’s folk psychology which led to a universal, dichotomous characterization of oral cultures and traditions versus literate cultures and traditions. This view is prevalent in that of Havelock (1986, 65) that the oral world describes societies which do not use any form of writing, and that of Jousse (2000) or which never have been introduced to writing. Since the 1930s the oral formulaic theory has been associated with the work of Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord, as well as with the scholars Walter J. Ong and Jack Goody. This simplistic binary division of orality versus literacy has receded into the background as has a universalistic approach to oral cultures. De Vries (2012, 68–98) has criticised as “romantic” the pursuit of an exclusively oral context and that orality is rarely absolute within a culture nor are the features of orality universal across cultures. Instead, the evidence is that many societies produced oral and written literature simultaneously. The oral and the written dimensions are intimately connected, have many points of contact and coevolve (see Weissenrieder and Coote 2015). On the basis of research of Carr (2005), de Vries argues that the literary features of the biblical text serve as reminders of a complex interplay of oral and literary strategies of communication. However, Walton and Sandy (2013) add an additional important nuance of dominance to the categories of oral and written which they view as intimately connected. They utilise the operative contrast of hearing-dominant (traditions were passed on by word of mouth from generation to generation) versus text-dominant cultures (traditions were passed on by scribally-produced texts). The 8

The concepts of orality and Biblical Performance Criticism as described in this section also play a role in our previous research (see Makutoane, Miller-Naudé and Naudé 2015; Naudé and Miller-Naudé 2016; Miller-Naudé and Naudé 2015, 2016).

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transmission of long-duration texts is from mind to mind in a process of indoctrination, education and enculturation of an elite minority. Memorisation (learning by heart) is central to oral tradition–oral performance from memory is the proof that ancient traditions have been mastered, thus setting the performer apart from those who have not internalised the tradition. Written copies of texts were not designed for instant reading off of a page, but were a permanent reference point for an on-going process of largely oral recitation. To be literate in antiquity means that someone had internalised ancient texts and therefore had the ability to recite them and to add to the tradition. The invention of printing by Johann Gutenberg in 1440 changed the world in a dramatic way. Mass production of the translated Bible created the possibility for individual and silent reading from a private copy. Memorisation of long-duration texts became an exception, and the primary mode of existence of long-duration texts ceased to be in the hearts and minds. The transition from the end of the age of printing into the new electronic age is currently underway. Orality is concerned with cultural and aesthetic practices involved in the pre-modern traditions, in modernist representations of the past, or in postmodernist expressions of artistry, such as audio-visual media (Bandia 2011, 108; see also Spencer-Miller 2013 and Horsley 2013). In light of the exposition above and the views of Ong (1982), Fowler (2009, 3–18) and Littau (2011), the media history or technologizing of the Bible can be summarised as presented in Makutoane, Miller-Naudé and Naudé (2015): Hearing-dominant Oral/Aural-written communication/verbal interpretive culture i) Oral/Aural communication (the oral/aural Bible) ii) Handwritten manuscript communication (manuscript Bible) Text-dominant Print communication (printed Bible)/typographic interpretive culture Electronic/media communication (electronic Bible)/digital-media interpretive culture In the western world, the technologizing of the Bible has a historical dimension–the hearing-dominant phase relates to the time before the invention of printing whereas the text-dominant phase follows printing. In Africa and many other parts of the developing world, however, hearingdominant and text-dominant dimensions coexist in varying proportions (Lovejoy 2009). Concerning Bible translation in Africa, two questions are important: How do we translate a source text such as the Bible which

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originated in a hearing-dominant (oral) society in such a way that it is recreated for hearing-dominant cultures in postcolony Africa? How do we use the resources of the text-dominant world in postcolony Africa in a way that promotes the orality of the Bible? (For re-claiming of “colonised” Bibles, that is, Bibles produced from a colonial perspective, see Yorke 2012; Ezeogu 2012; Togarasei 2012; Farisani 2012.) According to Biblical Performance Criticism, academic work on the Bible must shift from the mentality of a modern print culture to that of an oral/scribal culture in order to understand fully the biblical materials in their original context of traditional oral cultures. The attempt is to reconstruct the oral scenarios of ancient performances of the biblical traditions (e.g. Boomershine 2015). Modern performances are thus recreations or oral translations of what were originally oral texts. Biblical Performance Criticism, then, has particular relevance for Bible translation because it reconceptualises the task of Bible translation as involving both translation of performance and translation for performance when it takes into account both the original oral context of the source text and utilises a performance modality for the target text (Maxey 2009). Choices for performance can inform and shape a translation (in accordance with the project’s brief and Skopos). In translation for performance, the focus is on the oral performance rather than the written source text; more on the meaning potential rather than on a single meaning of the text; more on creativity than on faithfulness to the original; more on the potential impact on the audience rather than the intention of the author of the text; more on the collective experience of the community rather than an individual reader; more on the collective experience of the gathered community than on the individual reader; more on the emotional experience of the listeners rather than the cognitive sense made by an individual reader (Rhoads 2012). Marcel Jousse (1886–1967) was a French anthropologist who viewed performance as the main pivot around the development of the oral world where stories were told in a unique way for specific purposes and reasons (Jousse 2000). The basic element of the oral world is that the spoken words have no permanent or visual connotation, but they are seen as events or actions of the universe (Jousse 2000, 30) rather than as things (Loubser 2007, 147). Influenced by Jousse, Finnegan (2007, 45) argues that performance encapsulates elements such as repetition, reduplication, mimicry, gesture, onomatopoeia and ideophones. Jousse’s anthropological, ethnological and psychological perspectives also influenced Ong in the development of his nine, wellknown, systemic features of orality, which play a vital role in enhancing the memorability of an utterance or performance: additive rather than

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subordinative, aggregative rather than analytic, redundant or copious, conservative or traditionalist, close to the human life-world, agonistically toned, empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced, homeostatic, and situational rather than abstract (Ong 1982, 37–56). The importance of repeated formulas and performances for oral literature is highlighted by Bandia (2008, 115) when he says: “Repetition and reduplication play an important role in African oral narrative … and are often used for emphasis or semantic augmentation.” The common denominators that Jousse, Ong and Bandia share encapsulate among others: redundancy, repetitions, rhythms and memory/recollection. Furthermore, oral communication is not a one-way process, but a two-way process between the storyteller and the audience. This implies that the performer takes his or her cues from the audience's moods and reactions and the audience may also participate directly through a variety of responses or interjections. To summarise, Biblical performance criticism has the following characteristics: 1) It places a great value on memory, that is, it connects memory through story (this echoes Jousse’s standpoint). 2) It not only involves storytelling, but it creates the story through performance. 3) The audience not only hears the story, but they experience it; therefore, the audience is not passive, but active (this issue has been endorsed by Jousse, Ong, Finnegan and Okpewho). 4) Biblical performance criticism understands that performance itself is translation. The translation takes place through sound, silence, gestures and interaction with the audience. These aspects are not just the add-ons, but are part of the one integrated act of delivery, that is, performance.

5. Reclaiming humanity through the translation of happiness texts We want to argue that one way to begin to reclaim humanity is through performance translation.9 Recall the claim of Levinas that the oral experience is the primary human experience together with the fact that the originally oral tradition of the Bible has largely been lost. What this means 9

On the role of translation to shape cultural knowledge and to create identity in the South African context, see Naudé (2005b; 2008).

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is that in the exclusively written text of the Bible, there is a distance between the person and the text. This distance from the text is particularly acute for persons in postcolony Africa who are still living largely in the oral world, that is, persons who are illiterate or who are more at home with the oral rather than the written. For these persons in the oral world there is exclusion and alienation–a diminishing of their humanity–when they encounter the Bible as a written, largely inscrutable text (Makutoane and Naudé 2004; Makutoane 2011). For such persons the oral performance of the text allows them to engage cognitively and experientially with the Bible in a way that reclaims their humanity. As we think about the loss of humanity in the post-human world, what texts can most powerfully be performed to enhance the restoration of humanity? Following on the claims made by Friedman and Mandelbaum that what matters most in the global, flat world is the human factors of innovation, creativity and analysis as well as the World Happiness Report concerning happiness as a human value, we suggest that appropriate texts for initial performance are those texts that relate to happiness.10

5.1 Happiness: Source terms and texts In the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), there are a variety of lexemes and expressions relating to happiness. The expression “good of heart”, for example, is used to convey the emotional sensation of happiness (e.g. wϷ‫ܒ‬ô‫ڬ‬ê lƝ‫[ ڬ‬good of heart], 1 Kings 8:66).11 The process of becoming happy is expressed with the corresponding verbal expression “the heart became good” (e.g. wayyî‫ܒ‬a‫ ڬ‬lƝ‫ڬ‬, Judges 18:20). There are a number of verbs relating to the oral expression of happiness.12 Some of these expressions of happiness do not necessarily involve articulate words as opposed to a cry for joy (e.g. blg [cheerful, happy], gyl [rejoice, exult] perhaps as an “enthusiastic cry” [Bergman, Ringgren and Barth 1975, 471], ‫ۊ‬dh (rejoice), ҵlz (exult), ҵls (enjoy, appear glad), ҵl‫( ܈‬rejoice, exult), ĞwĞ (display joy). The common root Ğm‫ ۊ‬can mean either to “be glad”, to 10

Other texts could be appropriated within the model of performance translation as a means to promote humanness. For example, the psalms of lament together with the psalms of thanksgiving could also meaningfully be employed. 11 Transliteration of the Hebrew indicates long, short and extra-short vowels, aspirated and non-aspirated begadkefat letters (as indicated by dagesh lene) and matres lectionis. 12 The verbs described here also have nominal counterparts, e.g. related to the verbal root Ğm‫ ۊ‬is the adjective ĞƗmƝ‫“ ۊ‬happy” and the noun Ğim‫ۊ‬â “happiness, gladness”.

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“take pleasure” or to “rejoice”, that is, to express happiness orally. The heart as the locus of emotion also occurs frequently with these verbal forms: “my heart rejoices (gyl) in your salvation” (yƗ‫ۆ‬Ɲl libbî bîšûҵƗ‫ܔ‬ekƗ, Psalm 13:6),13 “he rejoices (Ğm‫ )ۊ‬in his heart” (wϷĞƗma‫ ۊ‬bϷlibbô, Exodus 4:14), “my heart exults (ҵl‫ )܈‬in the LORD” (ҵƗla‫ ܈‬libbî byhwh, 1 Samuel 2:1), “your heart will rejoice (ĞwĞ)” (wϷĞƗĞ libbϷۚem, Isaiah 66:14). Other lexemes relate to expressions of happiness involving shouts of joy (rnn and rwҵ) and even breaking out in a joyous shout (p‫)ۊ܈‬. In contrast to lexemes conveying the experience or expression of happiness, the Hebrew Bible has a unique word–‫ގ‬ašrê–which expresses the conferral or acquisition of happiness, often in an “intensive exclamation” (F. Brown, Driver, and Briggs 1906, 80). There are two ways that the word is commonly translated in English–either as “blessed” or as “happy” (Köhler and Baumgartner 1994–1999: s.v. ʩʸʍʒ ˇʠʔ [‫ގ‬ašrê]), “fortunate” (Holladay 1971: s.v. ʩʸʍʒ ˇʠʔ [‫ގ‬ašrê]), as illustrated in (1): (1)

Psalm 1:1 Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers (ESV) Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers (NRSV)

As M. E. Brown (1997, 564) observes, in many English translations, ‫ގ‬ašrê is translated with “happy” in so-called “secular” contexts but with “blessed” in so-called “religious” contexts, but the distinction between secular and religious contexts is not applicable to the culture of ancient Israel. He suggests the translation “truly happy” for each occurrence of ‫ގ‬ašrê. The word has the grammatical shape of a plural noun in construct with a following noun or pronoun. The noun is probably either Ҵešer or ҴƗšƗr, both rare words but apparently meaning “happiness”. The word ‫ގ‬ašrê then means “happinesses of” and is used as an exclamation. Psalm 1:1 could then be translated: “The happinesses of the person who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked!” or “How many happinesses does the person have who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked!” To confirm this 13

The nepթ eš (often translated “soul” but with a broader meaning to include the individual human and his/her emotions and appetites) is also the locus of rejoicing; for example: “my soul rejoices [gyl] in the LORD” (wϷnapթ šî tƗ‫ۆ‬îl byhwh Psalm 35:9).

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interpretation of ‫ގ‬ašrê, the term must be contrasted with the word bƗrûۚ (blessed), which in its central meaning refers to the deity conferring blessing (Scharbert 1975), as illustrated in (2): (2) Psalm 118:26 Blessed (bƗrûۚ) is he who comes in the name of the LORD! We bless you from the house of the LORD. (ESV) By contrast, ‫ގ‬ašrê is a “liturgical cry” which “points to an act in which believers seek happiness” (Cazelles 1974, 446). Unlike bƗrûۚ which can be used of God (e.g. Exodus 18:10), ‫ގ‬ašrê is never attributed to a deity (or to non-human entities) (Cazelles 1974, 446). Furthermore, ‫ގ‬ašrê is never used in connection with the heart, in contrast to the verbs surveyed above which convey the expression of happiness; ‫ގ‬ašrê instead conveys the acquisition or conferral of happiness in the sense of good fortune or wellbeing.14 The term ‫ގ‬ašrê will therefore be the focus of our exploration of the performance of texts relating to happiness in the Hebrew Bible. An examination of the contextual fields in which ‫ގ‬ašrê occurs reveals two main divisions: ‫ގ‬ašrê exclamations which affirm happiness that originates outside of the person or group, on the one hand, and happiness that results from the actions of the person or group, on the other.15 We will

14

The superficial similarity of Psalm 40:5 (‫ގ‬ašrê the man who makes the LORD his trust) and Jeremiah 17:7 (bƗrûۚ the man who trusts in the LORD) should not be taken as evidence that ‫ގ‬ašrê and bƗrûۚ are synonymous (pace Keller and Wehmeier 1994, 269). Instead, Psalm 40:5 indicates that the person who trusts in the LORD experiences well-being; whereas Jeremiah 17:7 indicates that the person experiences God’s blessing. 15 DeBlois (forthcoming) in The Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew identifies contextual domains for ‫ގ‬ašrê that were helpful for the analysis here: agriculture (Isaiah 32:20; Isaiah 56:2 [sic]), authority (Qoheleth 11:17), generosity (Psalm 41:2; Proverbs 14:21), God (happy are those who live close to God) (Deuteronomy 33:29; Psalm 2:12; 32:1; 32:2; 33:12; 34:9; 40:5; 65:5; 84:5; 84:6; 84:13; 89:16; 112:1; Proverbs 16:20; 20:7; 28:14; Isaiah 30:18), law justice (happy are those who keep God’s law and maintain justice) (Psalm 1:1; 106:3; 112:1; 119:1–2; 128:1–2; Isaiah 56:2), parenthood (happy are those with certain children or parents) (Psalm 127:5; Proverbs 20:7), recompense (happy are those who have their revenge) (Psalm 137:8–9), recompense (divine) (happy are those who are punished by God) (Job 5:17; Psalm 94:12), temper (happy are those who persevere) (Daniel 12:12) and wisdom (happy are those who seek or listen to wisdom) (1 Kings 10:8 [twice]; 2 Chronicles 9:7 [twice]; Proverbs 3:13, 8:32, 8:34).

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refer to the first type as “externally conditioned happiness” and the second type as “actionally conditioned happiness”. Externally conditioned happiness in the Hebrew Bible results from the actions of a superior, usually in the form of the deity. For example, happiness is conditioned by God’s choice to establish a relationship with the community: (3) Psalm 65:4 (see also Deuteronomy 33:29) Happy is the one you choose and bring near, to dwell in your courts! We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, the holiness of your temple! God’s actions are also an external source of happiness, both when God forgives (4a) and when he reproves or disciplines (4b): (4a) Psalm 32:1 (see also 32:2) Happy is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. (4b) Psalm 94:12 (see also Job 5:17) Happy is the man whom you discipline, O LORD, and whom you teach out of your law, Externally conditioned happiness may also have its origin in the king; a people who have a good king are happy: (5) Qoheleth 10:17 (see also 1 Kings 10:8; 2 Chronicles 9:7) Happy are you, O land, when your king is the son of the nobility, and your princes feast at the proper time, for strength, and not for drunkenness! Actional happiness is most commonly described as the result of a proper relationship with the deity on the part of a person (6a)16 or the community (6b)17: (6a) Psalm 40:4 Happy is the man who makes the LORD his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie! 16

See also Psalm 34:9; 40:5; 84:13; 112:1; 128:1; 128:2; 146:5; Proverbs 16:20; 28:14. 17 See also Psalm 2:12; 84:6; 89:16; 114:15; Isaiah 30:18.

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(6b) Psalm 144:15 Happy are the people to whom such blessings fall! Happy are the people whose God is the LORD! It is clear, however, that the concept of externally conditioned happiness because of the deity’s choice, and actionally conditioned happiness as a result of a proper relationship with the deity are really two sides of one coin in the Hebrew Bible. This is particularly evident when the two concepts appear in parallel lines of poetry; the juxtaposition of the concepts in parallel lines means that they must be seen as intimately related: (7) Psalm 33:12 a. Happy is the nation who the LORD is its God; b. [Happy is] the people whom he has chosen as his heritage! In the (a) line, actionally conditioned happiness is in view; in the (b) line externally conditioned happiness is in view. The second most common type of actionally conditioned happiness results from persons doing what is right. For example, a person who cares for the poor will find happiness: (8) Psalm 41:2 (see also Proverbs 14:21) Happy is the one who considers the poor! In the day of trouble, the LORD delivers him. Actionally conditioned happiness also results from rejecting the counsel of wicked persons (Psalm 1:1), doing justice (Psalm 106:2), behaving in a blameless way (Psalm 119:1), seeking God (Psalm 119:2), keeping the Sabbath (Isaiah 56:2), waiting for the apocalyptic day (Daniel 12:2), executing vengeance on enemies (Psalm 137:8–9), practicing wisdom (Proverbs 3:13; 8:32; 8:34), having children (Psalm 127:4–5), having righteous parents (Proverbs 20:7) and having agricultural success (Isaiah 32:20). In the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, ‫ގ‬ašrê is always translated by the adjective makarios (happy), the cognate verb makarizein (regard as happy) or noun makarismos (happiness) (Muraoka 2010, 157). In Classical Greek usage, makarios initially was used to denote “the transcendent happiness of a life beyond care, labour and death” (Hauck and Bertam 1967, 362); it thus means “to be free from daily cares and worries” (Becker 1975, 215). The term is most commonly

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used in the formula makarios hos(tis) (happy is he who) as a way to congratulate a person on a happy event; in the Septuagint the formula always solemnly ascribes well-being to a man. It is quite different from a benediction (eulogia) which is an authoritative and efficacious word. It is indicative of this distinction that in an act when blessing was a priestly prerogative (Sirach 50:20) laymen had recourse to makarismos. (Becker 1975, 215–16)

Furthermore, makarios in the Septuagint is only used for the rendering of ‫ގ‬ašrê and never for any other term. There is therefore a very tight connection between the two terms, which allows us now to see how makarios is used in the New Testament. In the New Testament, makarios refers to someone being happy “with the implication of enjoying favourable circumstances” (Louw and Nida 1989 s.v. makarios; see also Sæbø 1994, 196). It usually describes actionally conditioned happiness in ways that mirror those of the Hebrew Bible. The greatest concentration of makarios occurs in the so-called Beatitudes (from Latin beati [blessed], which translates makarios in this passage), as illustrated in (9): (9) Matthew 5:3–11 (CEB) Happy are people who are hopeless, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Happy are people who grieve, because they will be made glad. Happy are people who are humble, because they will inherit the earth. Happy are people who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, because they will be fed until they are full. Happy are people who show mercy, because they will receive mercy. Happy are people who have pure hearts, because they will see God. Happy are people who make peace, because they will be called God's children. Happy are people whose lives are harassed because they are righteous, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Happy are you when people insult you and harass you and speak all kinds of bad and false things about you, all because of me.

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The occurrences of makarios in the Beatitudes are often translated with “blessed” in English, either as a statement (10a) or, less frequently, as an exclamation (10b): (10a) Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (NIV) (10b) How blessed are the poor in spirit: the kingdom of Heaven is theirs. (NJB) The New Living Translation explicitates the blessing with the verb “bless”, but this translation makes the reason for the blessing in the second half of the verse awkward: (11) God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs (NLT). We argue that the term makarios should be understood as a continuation of ‫ގ‬ašrê from the Hebrew Bible, on the basis of the tight link between makarios and ‫ގ‬ašrê in the Septuagint. The Beatitudes are then not actually “blessings” but rather expressions of the happiness, true joy and well-being of those who behave in certain ways with respect to their fellow humans in difficult situations. Interestingly, the Beatitudes are structured in such a way as to combine actionally conditioned happiness (e.g. “Happy are those who are hopeless”) with externally conditioned happiness (e.g. “because the kingdom of heaven is theirs”).18 African languages often use expressions of blessing “to refer to what a superior, usually a parent or grandparent, does to show their goodwill to a child or grandchild”, in other words, a “passive reception” of approval (Adeyemo 2006, 1143). The Beatitudes are not talking about this kind of blessedness and other expressions must be used to convey the biblical nuances. In a few instances in the New Testament, the happiness conveyed by the term makarios is not connected to religious concerns: (12) Acts 26:2 (see also 1 Corinthians 7:40) I consider myself happy that it is before you, King Agrippa, I am going to make my defence today against all the accusations of the Jews, 18 We are grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing out this link between the two halves of a beatitude.

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In only one instance is makarios in the New Testament used of externally conditioned happiness:19 (13) Revelation 19:9 Then the angel said to me, “Write this: Happy are those who have been invited to the wedding banquet of the Lamb.” He said to me, “These are the true words of God.” It is important to note that in the narratives of the Gospels and Acts, makarios only appears within direct speech. In other words, makarios is like ‫ގ‬ašrê in relating to an oral pronouncement or exclamation concerning the current or future happiness of the individual. Furthermore, almost all of the uses involve actionally conditioned happiness. In two ways the New Testament uses of makarios differ from ‫ގ‬ašrê in the Hebrew Bible. First, in two instances in 1 Timothy, makarios is used to describe God: (14) 1 Timothy 1:11 (see also 1 Timothy 6:15) according to the glorious gospel of the blessed (makariou) God, with which I have been entrusted. It seems that makarios when used of God approaches the meaning of “blessed” (as conveyed by uses of brk in the Hebrew Bible) (Keller and Wehmeier 1994, 268). Second, makarios is used in one instance to describe hope, an inanimate, abstract item: (15) Titus 2:13 At the same time, we wait for the makarian hope and the glorious appearance of our great God and saviour Jesus Christ. While many English translations render makarios in this verse as “blessed”, it is also possible to see it as “happy”–“the happy fulfilment of our hope” (NET) or the “hope that brings happiness.”

19 The instances of externally conditioned uses of makarios in Romans 4:7 and 4:8 are quotations from the Hebrew Bible.

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5.2 African case studies of biblical terms for happiness Turning to the translation of ‫ގ‬ašrê and makarios in Africa, we discuss first the Afrikaans Bible translations,20 the Sesotho Bible translations,21 a recent Bemba translation22 and finally a recent New Testament translation into Lokaa.23 The Afrikaans Bible translations examined are those of S.J. du Toit (Matthew 1895, Psalms 1907), the 1933 translation (a literal translation) which was revised in 1953, the 1983 translation (a dynamic equivalence translation) and the currently on-going translation (’n Direkte Vertaling [A Direct Translation]) of which the New Testament and Psalms were published in 2014 (see also Naudé 2004; 2005a). The translation of Psalms by S.J. du Toit in 1907 translated ‫ގ‬ašrê with salig (blessed) in Psalm 1:1, 2:12; 40:5, 41:2, 65:5, 94:12, 106:3, 112:1, 119:1, 119:2, 137: 8, 137:9; with gelukkig (happy) in Psalm 32:1, 32:2, 33:12, 84:5, 84:6, 84:13, 89:16, 127:5, 128:1, 128:2, 144:15, 146:5; and with geluksalig (happy-blessed) in Psalm 34:9. The 1933 Afrikaans translation usually translates ‫ގ‬ašrê with welgeluksalig. This term is a compound word consisting of wel (well, good), geluk (happiness) and salig (blessing). This rendering reflects the translation of the Dutch Statenvertaling (1637) welgelukzalig meaning 20

Afrikaans is a creole created in Southern Africa based on the Old Dutch of 17th century colonists with some lexical and syntactic borrowings from Malay, Bantu languages, Khoisan languages, Portuguese and other European languages. It is spoken by over 7 million speakers in South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana and Namibia (Ethnologue 2015). 21 Sesotho (Southern Sotho) is a Southern Bantu language of the Niger-Congo language family spoken by approximately 6 024 000 people, of whom 4 240 000 are in South Africa (the other speakers are in Lesotho and Botswana) (Ethnologue 2015). The information concerning Sesotho comes primarily from Dr TJ Makutoane (University of the Free State). 22 Bemba is a Southern Bantu language of the Niger-Congo language family spoken by over 4 million people, primarily in Zambia and secondarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Ethnologue 2015). All information concerning Bemba comes from Dr Misheck Nyirenda (Bible Society of Zambia and United Bible Societies). 23 Lokaa is a Niger-Congo language spoken by the Yakurr people of the Yakurr Local Government Area of Cross River State, Nigeria. The language is spoken by more than 800 000 people in the eight autonomous communities of Ugep, Ekori, Nko, Mkpani, Agoi, Assiga and Inyima. All information concerning Lokaa is from Rev John Ofem Obono, the leader of the Lokaa translation project and the Director of Language Development for the Nigeria Bible Translation Trust.

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hoogst gelukkig, gezegend (highest happiness, blessed) (Koenen and Endepols 1960, 1293). The rendering welgeluksalig occurs in the 1933 Afrikaans translation of Deuteronomy 33:29; Job 5:17;24 Psalm 1:1; 2:12; 32:1, 32:2, 33:12, 34:8, 40:4, 65:4, 84:4, 84:5, 84:12, 89:15, 94:12, 106:3, 112:1, 119:1, 119:2, 127:5, 128:1, 146:5; Isaiah 30:18, 56:2; and Daniel 12:2 (see Naudé 2004; 2005a). In contexts where the translators interpret ‫ގ‬ašrê as relating to earthly happiness rather than God’s blessing, gelukkig (happy) is used, namely, 1 Kings 10:8 (=2 Chronicles 9:7) and Qoheleth 10:17 for the happiness of the king’s servants; Psalm 137:8–9 for the happiness (not blessing!) of the person(s) who take violent vengeance against the Babylonians;25 and in proverbial sayings (Proverbs 3:13, 8:32, 8:34, 14:21, 16:21, 20:7, 28:14, 29:18). The 1983 Afrikaans translation renders ‫ގ‬ašrê with dit gaan goed met (it goes well with). This rendering occurs in Deuteronomy 33:29; Job 5:17; Psalm 1:1; 2:12; 32:1, 32:2, 33:12, 34:9, 40:5, 65:5, 84:5, 84:6, 84:13, 89:16, 94:12, 106:3, 112:1, 119:1, 119:2, 127:5, 128:1, 146:5; Isaiah 30:18; 56:2; and Daniel 12:12. Like the 1933 translation, the 1983 uses another rendering, namely, hoe bevoorreg (how privileged) in 1 Kings 10:8 (=2 Chronicles 9:7) and gelukkig (happy) in Psalm 137:7–8. Unlike the 1933 translation, the 1989 translation uses dit gaan goed (it goes well) for each instance of ‫ގ‬ašrê in Proverbs as well as Qoheleth 10:17. In Psalm 144:15, the 1989 translation uses gelukkig (happy) in the first sentence, which describes actionally conditioned happiness and dit gaan goed (it goes well) in the second sentence, which describes externally conditioned happiness; this is in contrast to the 1933 translation, which uses welgeluksalig (blessing) in both sentences: (16) Psalm 144:15 (a) Afrikaans 1933 Welgeluksalig is die volk met wie dit so gaan; welgeluksalig is die volk wie se God die HERE is! (Blessed is the people with whom it is thus; Blessed is the people whose God is the LORD!)

24 The 1917 Dutch Statenvertaling, however, renders ‫ގ‬ašrê in Job 5:17 as gelukzalig. 25 The 1917 Dutch Statenvertaling, however, renders ‫ގ‬ašrê in Psalm 137:7 with welgelukzalig (highest blessing) but in 137:8 with welgelukkig (highest happiness). The difference seems to be that in verse 7, the blessing is to those who repay the Babylonians for what they have done; whereas in verse 8, happiness (not blessing) is to those who smash the Babylonians’ children against the rocks.

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(b) Afrikaans 1989 Gelukkig is die volk met wie dit so gaan; Dit gaan goed met die volk wie se God die Here is! (Happy is the people with whom it is thus; It goes well with the people whose God is the LORD!) The 2014 “direct” translation consistently uses gelukkig (happy) for each occurrence of ‫ގ‬ašrê in the Psalms, including Psalm 137:7–8 and both instances in Psalm 144:15. In the New Testament, S.J. du Toit usually used salig (blessed) in Matthew (Matthew 5:3–11, 11:6, 13:16, 24:46) except for one verse where he used gelukkige (happy) in Matthew 16:17. The renderings of makarios in the Afrikaans translations after S.J. du Toit are given in Table 1; the Dutch 1637 translation is given to show its influence on the 1933 translation. Table 1. Translation of makarios (happy) in Afrikaans References

1 2

3 4

5 6

Dutch 1637 Description of people Matthew zalig 5:3–11 Luke 6:20, zalig 6:21, 6:22, Revelation 1:3, 14:13, 16:15, 19:9, 20:6, 22:7, 22:14 Romans zalig 4:7, 4:8 Matthew zalig 11:6; 16:17; Luke 1:45, 7:23, 14:15, John 13:17, 20:29, Acts 20:35, James 1:12 1 Peter 3:14 zalig Matthew zalig 13:16, Luke 10:23, 11:27, 11:28

Afrikaans 1933

Afrikaans 1983

Afrikaans 2014

Preferred translation

salig

geseënd

geseënd

gelukkig

salig

geseënd

geseënd

gelukkig

welgeluksalig

geseënd

geseënd

gelukkig

salig

gelukkig

geseënd

gelukkig

salig gelukkig

voorreg bevoorreg

geseënd geseënd

gelukkig gelukkig

Bible Translation in Postcolonial Africa 7

8

9

10 11

12

13

Matthew zalig gelukkig 24:46, Luke 12:37, 12:38, 12:43 Luke 14:14, zalig gelukkig 23:29, Romans 14:22 Acts 26:2, 1 gelukkig gelukkig Corinthians 7:40 James 1:25 gelukzalig gelukkig 1 Peter zalig gelukkig 4:14 Description of God 1 Timothy zaligen salige 1:11, 6:15 Description of inanimate items Titus 2:13 zalig salig

181

gelukkig

gelukkig

gelukkig

gelukkig

geseënd

gelukkig

gelukkig

gelukkig

gelukkig

gelukkig geseënd

geseënd geseënd

gelukkig gelukkig

goeie

lofwaardige

lofwaardige

gelukkig

geseënd

geseënd

The Dutch 1637 translation uses zalig (blessed) in almost all verses, except for gelukkig (happy) in two verses (row #9) that seem not to relate to God’s blessing and gelukzalig (happy-blessed) in one verse (row #10). The 1933 translation is somewhat more interpretive, using salig (blessed) for descriptions of humans (rows #1–2, 4–5), descriptions of God (row #12) and description of hope (row #13), but gelukkig (happy) for some descriptions of humans (rows #6–11). The use of welgeluksalig (wellnesshappiness-blessing) in Romans 4:7–8 (row #3) reflects the fact that these verses are citations of Old Testament verses containing ‫ގ‬ašrê; the New Testament translation matches that of the Old Testament verses. The 1989 translation is still more interpretive, using the older term salig (blessed) for the Beatitudes of Matthew (row #1) as a reflection of the well-known 1933 version (itself reflecting the Dutch 1637), but using geseënd (blessed) to describe humans (rows #2, 3, 11) alongside the use of gelukkig (happy) (rows #7, 8, 9, 10), voorreg (privileged) (row #5) and bevoorreg (privileged) (row #6). The description of God uses goeie (good) (row #12) and the description of hope uses gelukkig (in the phrase die gelukkige dag wat ons verwag [the happy day for which we wait]) as an explicitative translation of the Greek ʌȡȠıįİȤંȝİȞȠȚ IJ੽Ȟ ȝĮțĮȡ઀ĮȞ ਥȜʌ઀įĮ (waiting for the blessed hope). The 2014 translation uses geseënd (blessed) in descriptions of humans (rows #1–6, 8, 10–11) alongside gelukkig (happy) (rows #7, 9). In descriptions of God, lofwaardige (worthy of praise) is used (row #12), while geseënd (blessed) is used to describe hope (row #13).

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By following the three categories suggested by Arndt and Gingrich (1957, 487–88) in their lexical entry on makarios, we are able to suggest preferred translations for Afrikaans.26 In contexts in which makarios describes humans, usually in the sense of privilege, as the recipient of divine favour, the translation gelukkig (happy) conveys this idea of wellbeing and privilege (rows #1–11), regardless of whether the context has a religious colouring or not. In contexts in which makarios describes God who is the source of blessing and good fortune, the translation lofwaardige (worthy of praise) is appropriate. In contexts in which makarios describes inanimate things, such as hope in Titus 2:13, the translation geseënd (blessed) is appropriate. These proposed translations further preserve the link between ‫ގ‬ašrê in the Old Testament and makarios in the New Testament and maintain a distinction between these terms and those used in Hebrew and Greek for blessing. The Sesotho Bible translations are the 1909/1961 translation (a literal translation) and the 1989 translation (a dynamic equivalence translation). Both of them consistently translate ‫ގ‬ašrê in the Psalms as lehlohonolo. The term means “fortunate, blessed” in the sense of a state of affairs which is continuous and does not stop.27 Sesotho speakers reject the idea of a word for happiness (e.g. thabo [happy]) being used in the Bible instead of lehlohonolo.28 In the New Testament, lehlolonolo is the usual translation of makarios in both translations.29 An exception is 1 Corinthians 7:40 in the 1909/1961 translation: (17) 1 Corinthians 7:40 Sesotho 1909/1961 Leha ho le jwalo, molomo w aka, ke re: ha a ka itulela feela, a ka iketla ka ho fetisissa. (Even so, my own opinion, I say, if she can just stay, she will be in comfort exceedingly, and I suppose that I too have the spirit of God.)

26

Gingrich (1983, 121), an abridgement and revision of Arndt and Gingrich (1957), has two lexical categories for makarios–as describing humans and as describing the deity. 27 This definition is from Dr TJ Makutoane, who collected the Sesotho data for the Psalms. 28 Personal communication Dr TJ Makutoane (14 September 2015) and Mr MJ Motsapi, Director of Sesotho Lexicography Project, University of the Free State (7 October 2015). 29 The Sesotho New Testament data were collected by Mr JS Thinane.

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The 1989 translation has lehlohonolo in this verse. The latest revision of the Bemba Bible (2014) uses the term balishuka to translate Greek makarios. This term is a stative sentence complete with a subject (ba- [they] [third person common plural]) and a verb (shuka). The connective li is the equivalent of Greek İੁı੿Ȟ (they are). The verbal root shuka has a complex semantics. It can mean “lucky” as in “fortunate” but it can also mean “blessed” as in “favoured with goodwill” from some perceived benefactive with a perfective sense. Such a person is set apart from others by the manifestation of favour in various spheres of human endeavour. The Lokaa New Testament was completed in 2005; the Old Testament translation is currently in progress. Many Nigerian Bible translations have found the translation of makarios to be problematic and this is true also of the Lokaa translation. There is no indigenous word for “blessed”. The usual equivalent for “happy” connotes an emotional state. The usual equivalent for “fortunate” means “to have good luck”. The Lokaa translators used the reduplicative phrase ͔yiyi ͕yiyi (“it is well” or “happy is”; the phrase literally means “happy happy”) to translate makarios. In this way, the translators indicate that the happiness involved is not an ordinary emotional state, but rather a special kind of happiness.

5.3 Performance translations of the happiness texts We now consider the passage with the greatest concentration of “happiness” texts in the New Testament, namely the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:3–12, with respect to biblical performance criticism. Oral aspects of this passage have been examined by Lee (2014), who notes that the Matthean version of the Beatitudes has amplified the sound patterns in ways that the Lukan version has not. In terms of performance translation, we want to explore how these texts could be performed within a Christian faith community and how such performances might help the alienated persons within society to reclaim their humanity. One way to perform the Beatitudes in English has been suggested by the translation of The Dramatised Bible (Perry 1989). In this translation, the parallel structure of each verse is understood as an antiphonal recitation between Jesus and his “students”, the disciples. The passage is structured in this way “to reflect classic rabbinical teaching methods” (Perry 1989:7), which prominently used dialogue between rabbi and students:

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(18) Matthew 5:3–12 (The Dramatised Bible) Jesus Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor; Students The Kingdom of heaven belongs to them! Jesus Happy are those who mourn; Students God will comfort them! Jesus Happy are those who are humble; Students They will receive what God has promised! Jesus Happy are those whose greatest desire it to do what God requires; Students God will satisfy them fully! Jesus Happy are those who are merciful to others; Students God will be merciful to them! Jesus Happy are the pure in heart: Students They will see God! Jesus Happy are those who work for peace; Students God will call them his children! Jesus Happy are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires; Students The Kingdom of heaven belongs to them! Jesus Happy are you when people insult you and persecute you and tell all kinds of evil lies against you because you are my followers. Be happy and glad, for a great reward is kept for you in heaven. This is how the prophets who lived before you were persecuted. In a performance of the translation, the speaking role of the “students” could be filled by the congregation. In this way, the central text addressing happiness within a world of poverty, mourning, degradation, violence and persecution can provide an appropriate starting point for addressing the issue of happiness in a post-human world. Furthermore, by performing this passage in the social context of a faith community, each and every member of the community can be affirmed as an equal member of that community regardless of his/her social standing. Through performance each person enters into the life of the community and the distance between the biblical text and the person who is speaking/hearing the text is reduced. In this way the humanity of humans can be reclaimed, reaffirmed and restored. A recent performance translation of the Beatitudes into Sesotho also uses antiphonal voices in performance. Note also the use of singing and

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silence which serve both to frame the performance and to divide it into sections:30 (19) Sesotho performance translation of Beatitudes31 Pina: Bosiu bo kgutsitseng (Song: Silent Night [verse 1]) [Bontate (The fathers)] Moruti (The priest): Ho lehlohonolo bafumanehi moyeng, (Blessed are the poor in spirit,) Phutheho yohle (The whole congregation): hobane mmuso wa mahodimo ke wa bona (for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.) Moruti (The priest): Ho lehlohonolo ba llang, (Blessed are those who mourn,) Phutheho yohle (The whole congregation): hobane ba tla tshediswa. (for they shall be comforted.) Moruti (The priest): Ho lehlohonolo ba bonolo, (Blessed are the humbled ) Phutheho yohle (The whole congregation): hobane ba tla ja lefa la lefatshe. (for they shall inherit the earth.) Moruti (The priest): Ho lehlohonolo ba lapelang ho loka, (Blessed are those who are hungry for righteousness,)

30 This translation was first performed at the Christmas Eve Service held at the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa in Rehauhetswe (Bloemfontein, South Africa) on 24th December 2015. 31 The translation is by Dr TJ Makutoane as is the analysis of its oral and performance features which follows.

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Bontate (The fathers): ba nyoretsweng hona, (thirst for it [righteousness]) Bomme (The mothers): hobane ba tla kgoriswa. (for they shall be satisfied.) Motsotso wa kgutso (Moment of silence) Moruti (The priest): Ho lehlohonolo ba mohau; (Blessed are the merciful;) Batjha (The youth): hobane ba tla hauhelwa. (for they shall receive mercy.) Moruti (The priest): Ho lehlohonolo ba pelo di hlwekileng, (Blessed are those whose hearts are pure,) Phutheho yohle (The whole congregation): hobane ba tla bona Modimo. (for they shall see God.) Pina: Bosiu bo kgutsitseng (Song: Silent Night [verse 2]) [Bomme (The mothers)] Motsotso wa kgefutso (Moment of silence) Moruti (The priest): Ho lehlohonolo ba etsang kgahiso; (Blessed are those who make peace;) Phutheho yohle (The whole congregation): hobane ba tla rewa bana ba Modimo. (for they shall be called the children of God) Moruti (The priest): Ho lehlohonolo ba hlorisetswang ho loka; (Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake;)

Bible Translation in Postcolonial Africa

Bana ba sekolo sa Sontaha (The Sunday school): hobane mmuso wa mahodimo ke wa bona./ (for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.) Moruti (The priest): Le tla ba lehlohonolo! (Blessed are you!) Bontate (The fathers): ha ba le hlapaola ka baka la ka, (when others revile you on my account,) Batjha (The youth): ba le hlorisa, (and are persecuting you,) Bomme (The mothers): ba le bea bobe bohle ka bohata. (and saying all kinds of evil against you falsely.) Moruti (The priest): Thabang! (Rejoice!) Bontate (The fathers): le hlasemolohe ka ho nyakalla; (and be glad;) Bomme (The mothers): hobane moputso wa lona o tla ba moholo lehodimong; (for your reward is great in heaven;) Phutheho yohle (The whole congregation): hobane ba hlorisetse jwalo baporofeta ba bileng teng pele ho lona (for so they persecuted the prophets who came before you.) Motsotso wa kgefutso (Moment of silence) Phutheho yohle e bina pina: “Bosiu bo Kgutsitseng” (The whole congregation sings “Silent Night”)

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The most conspicuous feature of performance is the division of the text among different groups to portray different voices or characters participating in the production of the orally performed text. This clearly shows that the participatory mode of communication is the main axis around which a performed oral translation revolves. In addition, the following important oral features can be identified in the translation: First, repetition plays a prominent role. The phrase ho lehlohonolo ba (Blessed are those) at the beginning of each beatitude is repeated throughout the text. This helps the readers as well as the performers to be ready to listen to the following information. In other words, the repetition triggers the preparedness and the eagerness of the listener as well as the performer for what is going to follow since the word lehlohonolo (blessed) carries a deep theological connotation. Another important component that is repeated throughout the text is the causal particle hobane (for). The causal statement hobane ba tla (for they will) gives more information about the reason for the blessings. In addition, the sentence mmuso wa mahodimo ke wa bona (the kingdom of heavens is theirs) appears in verses 3 and 10, and the phrases ho loka (to be righteous) and ho hloriswa (to be persecuted) are repeated in verses 11 and 12. Second, additives were made to keep the flow of the translation and to make it more appellative. In verse 7, in the sentence ho lehlohonolo ba hauhelang ba bang (Blessed are those who are merciful to others), the phrase ba bang (others) has been added to make the translation more appealing. In the causal statement of the same verse, the phrase le bona (they themselves) has been added in the sentence hobane le bona batla hauhelwa (for they themselves shall receive mercy). In verse 9, the affirmative particle e (indeed) has been added to the causal statement hobane batla rewa bana ba Modimo (Indeed for they shall be called the children of God). In verse 10, in the introductory statement ho lehlohonolo ba hloriswang (Blessed are those who are persecuted), the phrase ba hlorisetswang ho loka (persecuted for being righteous) has been added to create some rhythm. In verse 11, in the statement le tla ba lehlohonolo haholo (You will greatly be blessed!), the phrase haholo (greatly) has been added to intensify the argument. In verse 12, in the statement empa lona thabang ke hona! (But Rejoice!), the contrasting particle empa (but) has been added to keep the flow of the argument. In the statement hobane ruri moputso wa lona o tla ba moholo lehodimong (for surely your reward will be great in heaven), ruri (surely) has been added as an emphasising particle. In the statement, Jwale le se tshohe, hobane ba hlorisetswe jwalo baporofeta ba bileng teng pele ho lona (So do not be afraid, for the

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prophets who came before you were persecuted in that same way), the phrase Jwale le se tshohe (So do not be afraid) has been added. Each of these additives plays a vital role in bringing the performed text closer to the reader or the listener. Each statement in this text is not merely a statement that is performed for enjoyment but it carries a deep theological message based on numerous theological concepts like mohau (mercy) in verse 7; Bana ba Modimo (children of God) in verse 9; tlhoriso (persecution) in verse 10; thabo (happiness); and moputso (reward) and tshabo (fear) in verse 12. These concepts are clearly explicitated with these additives. Thirdly, this oral translation combined wording of the two previous Sesotho translations for the benefit of the audience. The words ba llang (those who are crying) from the 1909 version and the words ba mahlomoleng (those mourning) from the 1989 are both incorporated into the oral translation. The result is a better translation for the reader since ba mahlomoleng (those mourning) explicitates ba llang (those who are crying) more clearly. A second example of a performance translation of the Beatitudes comes from the Bemba language of Zambia:32 (20)

Bemba performance translation of Beatitudes 3 Balishuka abapina mu mitima, (They are favoured, those who are poor in the heart,) pantu ubufumu bwa mu mulu bwabo. (because the Kingdom of heaven is for them.) 4

Balishuka abaloosha, (They are favoured, those who mourn,) pantu Lesa akabatalalika. (because God will comfort them.) 5

Balishuka abamutembo, (They are favoured, those who are meek) pantu bakapokelapo icalo. (because they [for it] they will receive the earth.)

32

The translation and analysis of Bemba was provided by Dr Misheck Nyirenda.

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Balishuka abansala ne cilaka icakucita ifyo Lesa afwaya, (They are favoured, those who are hungry and thirsty to do what God wants) pantu Lesa akalenga bakaleikuta. (because God will facilitate for them to be perpetually satisfied [in the future].) 7

Balishuka abaluse, (They are favoured, those who are merciful,) pantu nabo bakabelelwa uluse! (because they also they will receive mercy!) 8

Balishuka abamitima yakaele, (They are favoured, those who have innocent hearts,) pantu bakalamona Lesa! (because they will be seeing [future perfect] God!) 9

Balishuka abalenga icumfwano, (They are favoured, those who cause reconciliation) pantu Lesa akabeta abana bakwe. (because God will call them his children.) 10

Balishuka abaculila pa mulandu wakucita ifyo Lesa afwaya, (They are favoured, those who suffer because of doing what God wants) pantu ubufumu bwa mu mulu bwabo. (because the Kingdom of Heaven is for them.)

11

Mwalishuka nga abantu balamusaalula, balamucusha, Mwalishuka nga abantu balamubepesha ifibi fya misango na misango pa mulandu wa ine. (You [pl.] are favoured, when people demean you, trouble you,) (You [pl.] are favoured, when people falsely accuse you of evil things of various types because of me.)

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12

Mulesansamuka no kwanga, (You must rejoice and celebrate,) pantu icilambu cenu cikalamba mu mulu. (because your reward is great in heaven.)

Ala efyo bacushishe na bakasesema abamutangilile. (Behold that is how they troubled even the prophets who preceded you.) The translation into Bemba is relatively easy for two reasons. First, the source text is speech, thereby inviting a like-for-like translation. Second, the natural speech quality of the original saying attributed to Jesus is reflected in the Greek. Each beatitude is shaped as a verbal declaration of a stative condition introduced with the nominative makarios and then the rationale for the declaration introduced by oti (because). The Bemba revision of 2014 captures the performance nature of the text in general and the complex semantics of makarios, as discussed above. What is very important for the performance of the text is the shift that occurs from the use of balishuka (they are fortunate) in verses 3–10 to mwalishuka (you [plural] are fortunate) in verse 11. In Bemba this shift is very noticeable and emphatic, making the speech move from a remote reference (verses 3– 10) to a direct reference of (or, challenge to) the immediate audience of the performance in verse 11. A third example of a performance translation of the Beatitudes comes from West Africa. The Lokaa New Testament translation was translated with particular care to emphasise the oral and poetic aspects of the source text. The translation of the Beatitudes is as follows: (21) Lokaa translation of the Beatitudes (2005) 3 Ӑyiyi ӑyiyi obҥ yanҽn bimina bҥ yayi kҽ yajҥu mbҥ yadҥ Good good with persons those who know that they are (Happy are the people who know that they are) yakpoiyҽҽn, kҥ abloong kudҥnna poor at things spiritual (poor in spiritual matters) kҥ ӑgҽna mbҥ nҥ yadҥ yanҽn bҥ nҥ yayau kҥ kӑkpamma Lҽbӑӑlkҥm kawӑnga

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for reason they will be persons of will stay at leadership kingdom heaven- of (for they would be with God in his kingdom) 4

Ӑyiyi ӑyiyi obҥ yanҽn bimina bҥ yayau kҥ kӑpina, Good good with persons those who are at frowning, (Happy are those who are mourning,) kҥ ӑgҽna Ӑbasҽ nwҥ nҥ ӑfawa bҽ ntҽҽm for reason God him will comfort them heart (for they shall be comforted.) 5

Ӑyiyi ӑyiyi obҥ yanҽn bimina bҥ yayikaa wool libҽ, Good good with persons those who bring down self them, (Happy are those who humbly themselves,) kҥ ӑgҽna mbҥ nҥ yayeni ekpoon. for reason they will have earth. (for they shall own the earth.)

6

Ӑyiyi ӑyiyi obҥ yanҽn bimin bҥ yӑwaa yoyui tҥ yanҥi kedindinҥ Good good with persons those who hunger worry for doing righteousness (Happy are those who hunger for righteousness,) kҥ ӑgҽna mbҥ nҥ yadoo. For reason they will satisfied. (for God would satisfy them.) 7

Ӑyiyi ӑyiyi obҥ yanҽn bimina bҥ yayenҥi ekutҽҽm obҥ yanҽn, Good good with persons those who have mercy-heart with people, (Happy are those who are merciful to others,) kҥ ӑgҽna Ӑbasҽ nҥ oyeni ekutҽҽm obҥ mbҥ. for reason God will have mercy-heart with them. (for they would receive mercy.)

8

Ӑyiyi ӑyiyi obҥ yanҽn bimina bҥ ntҽҽm mbҽ nsanga kҽ,

Bible Translation in Postcolonial Africa

Good good with persons those who heart them holy, (Happy are those whose hearts are holy,) kҥ ӑgҽna mbҥ nҥ yakҥҥ Ӑbasҽ for reason they will see God. (for shall see God.) 9

Ӑyiyi ӑyiyi obҥ yanҽn bimina bҥ yanҥngi wӑfai, Good good with person those who making peace, (Happy are those who are peace makers,) kҥ ӑgҽna mbҥ nҥ yadҽ bҽҽn bҥ Ӑbasҽ. for reason they will be children of God. (for they shall children of God.) 10

Ӑyiyi ӑyiyi obҥ yanҽn bimina bҥ yakҥi likpakpawai ӑsҽnga obҥ Good good with persons those who see stumbling because (Happy are those who are persecuted because of) kҥ yanҥngi bloong bҥ yҽdadalai Ӑbasҽ ҽtҽҽm, of doing things of sweeting God heart, (they do what is pleasing to God,) kҥ ӑgҽna mbҥ nҥ yadҥ yanҽn bҥ nҥ yayau kҥ kӑkpamma Lҽbӑӑlkҥm kawӑnga. for reason they will be people who will stay at rulership kingdom heaven- of. (for they would inherit the kingdom of God.) 11

“Ӑyiyi ӑyiyi obҥ, abaa kҥ yanҽn nҥ yablenҥ baa, yayeni yaduu Good good with, you when people will disgrace you, and beat (Happy are you, when people would disgrace and beat you up) baa lotҥmҥ yayeni yabaa baa abeem yҥ abuuwҥ ebҥҥ ӑsҽnga obaa ami. you punishment and accuse you lies that bad all because of me.

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(and punish you, accuse you with lies for my sake.) 12

Baa nangai, ntҽҽm tҥ nyeni ndaal baa, ӑsҽnga obaa limlҽnga You rejioce, hearts to also sweet you, because of result (You rejoice, let your heart be glad, because your reward.) libaa lituum lisoo kҥ Lҽbӑӑlkҥm kawӑnga. Aajaa ndҥ yanikҥlҥ yours is much many at kingdom heaven- of. So that is theyhave-before (is much at the kingdom of heaven. That is how they earlier) yablenҥ kҽ yatӑnganҽn bҥ Ӑbasҽ bҥ ijaani. disgrace speaker people of God of old. (disgrace my prophets of old.) This performance translation of the Beatitudes has been embraced by the Christian community and has been set to music. It is now a song that is commonly sung in churches.33 Precisely how the performance translations of biblical texts relating to happiness are shaped will depend upon the linguistic, socio-cultural and religious setting.34 The role of Scripture in public worship differs widely depending upon both the Christian tradition or denomination and the socio-cultural context. Generally speaking, performance translation can be used in any context where the public reading of Scriptural texts would be used. Although it is perhaps most obvious how to produce a performance translation of the Gospel narratives (e.g. Nässelqvist 2012), the Psalms (e.g. Makutoane, Miller-Naudé, and Naudé 2015) or the Old Testament stories, performance translation has also been effectively used with the epistles of the New Testament (e.g. Wendland 2012) and the prophets of the Old Testament (e.g. Mathews 2012). In some Christian traditions, various kinds of performances of Scripture are already a part of the liturgy as designated by lectionaries for the church calendar (see Thompson 1961). In Christian traditions with liturgical traditions, such as the Catholic tradition, the Anglican tradition 33

The description of the Lokaa translation is by John Obono. Performance translation is one type of Scripture engagement. On Scripture engagement generally, see H. Hill et al. (2013) (these resources have been extensively used in Africa), Global Scripture Impact (2012), Dye (2009), Knott (2009) and Lovejoy (2009). 34

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and the Orthodox tradition, parts of the liturgy have a long history of performance as song or chant. To take one example, in the Anglican liturgical tradition, there is a long tradition of singing the Psalms involving both the choir and the congregation. It is a very short step to performance of the Psalms in a performance translation. Similarly, the dramatic readings of the passion narratives in the days leading up to Easter are very similar to performance translations. What has not been done as a part of the Anglican liturgy is a translation for performance in these settings as opposed to the performance of the standard, authorised translations, especially as found in The Book of Common Prayer. In addition, the performances of translation often have involved the dramatic reading of the text rather than the memorisation of the text. In the Christian traditions that are descendants of the Protestant Reformation, the proclamation of the Word is the centre of the worship experience. In situations where there are not fixed lectionaries for the reading of Scriptural passages, the pastor and congregation have far greater choice in what Scripture to use in connection with the preaching. There are therefore enormous opportunities for performance translation because of this flexibility. One possibility for performance translation of happiness texts that is not connected to the liturgical year is suggested by the Scripture engagement materials developed by the British and Foreign Bible Society entitled “The 40 Day Bible Experience: ‘The Least of These’” (2008). During 40 Sundays, Scripture readings and discussion questions focus on selected passages relating to poverty and justice as a way to promote compassion and activism for the poor. The topics and biblical texts include: people (Genesis 1:26–27), power (Psalm 72:1–7), literacy (Luke 10:25–28), body (1 Corinthians 12:19–26), food (Leviticus 19:9–10), tree (Deuteronomy 20:19–20), children (Matthew 19:13–15), land (Proverbs 23:10–11), toilet (Deuteronomy 23:12–14), persecution (Luke 21:10–19), victims (Matthew 2:16–18), tools (1 Samuel 13:19–21), Bible (Matthew 4:2–4), water (Isaiah 41:17–20), mission (Luke 4:16–21), addiction (Proverbs 23:29–35), differences (Galatians 3:23–29), restoration (Isaiah 58:6–12), pennies (Mark 12:41–44), immigrants (Jeremiah 22:1–5), refuge (Numbers 35:9–28), passion (Amos 3:13–4:3), cash (Matthew 6:24), prison (Hebrews 13:1–3), prayer (Mark 11:15–19), peace (Psalm 120:6– 7), school (Proverbs 1:1–7), home (Luke 2:5–12), sword (Isaiah 2:2–4), weights (Leviticus 19:35–37), widow (James 1:26–27), obedience (Acts 5:29–42), redeemer (Job 19:13–27), talk (Jeremiah 9:1–6), plague (Mark 1:40–45), abuse (Genesis 38:1–30), entrapped (Psalm 142:1–7), health (Matthew 10:5–15), chains (Deuteronomy 26:4–10) and women (John 4:3–26). Although this plan for Scripture engagement does not explicitly

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involve performance of the biblical texts, there is no reason why performance could not be incorporated into the plan. A comparable collection of texts regarding happiness could be used in performance translation over a number of Sundays to focus on reclaiming happiness within a post-human world. These could include the following: Table 2. Happiness texts for performance HAPPINESS FROM OUTSIDE Happiness is being chosen (Psalm 65:4) Happy is the one you choose and bring near, to dwell in your by God courts! We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, the holiness of your temple! (also Deuteronomy 33:29) (Job 5:17) Look! Happy is the one Happiness is experiencing whom God reproves; therefore so not God’s despise the discipline of the Almighty. discipline/correction (Psalm 94:12) Happy is the person whom you discipline, O LORD, and whom you teach out of your law, (Psalm 32:1–2) Happy is the one whose Happiness is experiencing transgression is forgiven, whose sin is God’s forgiveness covered. Happy is the person against whom the LORD counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. (Ecclesiastes 10:17) Happy are you, O Happiness is experiencing land, when your king is the son of the good government nobility, and your princes feast at the proper time, for strength, and not for drunkenness! See also 1 Kings 10:8 (//2 Chronicles 9:7) HAPPINESS FROM INSIDE Happiness is taking refuge in (Psalm 34:8) Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Happy is the God person who takes refuge in him! (Psalm 40:4) Happy is the person Happiness is trusting God who makes the LORD his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those

Bible Translation in Postcolonial Africa

Happiness is being part of the community of faith Happiness is rejecting the influence of evil

Happiness is showing compassion for the poor

Happiness is promoting justice Happiness is children

Happiness is parents who have integrity Happiness is exercising wisdom

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who go astray after a lie! (Psalm 84:12) O LORD of hosts, happy is the one who trusts in you! (Psalm 84:4) Happy are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praise! Selah (Psalm 1:1) Happy is the person who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; (Matthew 5:7) Happy are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. (Psalm 41:1) Happy is the one who considers the poor! In the day of trouble the LORD delivers him; (Proverbs 14:21) Whoever despises his neighbor is a sinner, but happy is he who is generous to the poor. (Psalm 106:3) Happy are they who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times! (Psalm 127:5) Happy is the man who fills his quiver with children! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate. (Proverbs 20:7) The righteous who walks in his integrity– Happy are his children after him! (Proverbs 3:13) Happy is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding, (Proverbs 8:32) And now, O sons, listen to me: Happy are those who keep my ways. (Proverbs 8:34) Happy is the one who listens to me [wisdom], watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors.

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Happiness is humility

Happiness is experiencing God’s comfort Happiness is gentleness Happiness is desiring righteousness Happiness is a pure heart Happiness is being a peacemaker Happiness is the privilege of knowing God

Happiness is faithfulness

Chapter Six

(Isaiah 32:20) Happy are you who sow beside all waters, who let the feet of the ox and the donkey range free. (Matthew 5:3) Happy are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:4) Happy are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. (Matthew 5:5) Happy are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:6) Happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. (Matthew 5:8) Happy are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. (Matthew 5:9) Happy are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. (Matthew 13:16) But happy are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. (Matthew 16:17) And Jesus answered him, “Happy are you, Simon BarJonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” (John 20:29) Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Happy are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” (Psalm 119:1–2) Happy are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the LORD! Happy are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart,

Bible Translation in Postcolonial Africa

Happiness is giving rather than receiving

Happiness is hope that brings happiness Happiness is faithfulness in difficulties

Happiness is dying in faith

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(Acts 20:35) In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more Happy to give than to receive’. (Titus 2:13) waiting for our Happy hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, (Matthew 5:10) Happy are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:11) Happy are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. (1 Peter 3:14) But even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be Happy. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, (1 Peter 4:14) If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are Happy, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. (James 1:12) Happy is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him. (Revelation 14:13) And I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Write this: Happy are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” “Happy indeed,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them!”

One or more of the biblical texts within each happiness theme could be performed by the congregation in order to affirm an aspect of happiness.

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6. Conclusion In conclusion, we summarise the trajectory of our argument. In many ways, humanity finds itself in a post-human world in which individuals are devalued and denied basic human rights. One of the most clearly human characteristics is the ability to experience happiness and happiness is at risk in a post-human world. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas developed a philosophy for the ethical treatment of the Other which grew out of his experience as a survivor of the holocaust. He views the experience of the Other, even when the Other is hostile and dehumanising, as critical for the development of the self. For Levinas the oral, face-toface experience is primary. Levinas’ ethical subjectivity thus provides the means for reasserting humanness in a post-human world (Katz 2013). It is this notion of orality that provides a link for reclaiming humanity through Bible translation. The originally oral background of the biblical text in ancient Israel suggests that the oral performance of the text provides a way for individuals in a post-human world to cognitively enter into the biblical text. In this way, humanness can be reasserted and recreated, especially in the performance of those texts relating to human happiness. Biblical performance translation provides a means for oral communities to engage with Scripture in a dynamic way. As the community of faith embodies the translation through participation in performance, the worshippers enter into the world of Scripture. Performance translations thus enhance the acceptance of vernacular translations of the Bible by the communities for which they are produced. Furthermore, performance translations mean that the translation process is always fresh and new as new performers and new audiences recreate the experience of the biblical text.

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Littau, K. 2011. First steps towards a media history of translation. Translation Studies 4 (3): 261–81. Loubser, J. A. 2007. Oral and manuscript culture in the Bible: Studies on the media texture of the New Testament. Stellenbosch: SUN Press. Louw, J. E., and E. A. Nida, eds. 1989. Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament based on semantic domains. 2nd ed. New York: United Bible Societies. Lovejoy, G. 2009. Orality, Bible translation and scripture engagement. Unpublished manuscript. Beekman lecture. 2009 Bible Translation Conference. Dallas, TX. https://orality.imb.org/resources/?id=247. Makutoane, T. J. 2011. Re-animating orality: The design for a new translation of the Bible into Sesotho. PhD diss., University of the Free State, South Africa. —. 2015. Personal communication. September 14. Makutoane, T. J., C. L. Miller-Naudé, and J. A. Naudé. 2015. Similarity and alterity in translating the orality of the Old Testament in oral cultures. Translation Studies 8 (2): 156–74. Makutoane, T. J., and J. A. Naudé. 2004. Reanimating orality: The morality play Everyman/Elkerlijk in Southern Sotho. Journal for Semitics 13 (2): 159–85. —. 2008. Towards the design for a new Bible translation in Sesotho. Acta Theologica 28 (2): 1–32. Marais, K. 2014. Translation theory and development studies: A complexity theory approach. Routledge Advances in Translation Studies. New York: Routledge. Mathews, J. 2012. Translating Habakkuk as performance. In Translating scripture for sound and performance: New directions in biblical studies, ed. J. A. Maxey and E. R. Wendland. Biblical performance criticism 6. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Maxey, J. A. 2009. From orality to orality: A new paradigm for contextual translation of the Bible. Biblical performance criticism 2. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Maxey, J. A., and E. R. Wendland, eds. 2012. Translating scripture for sound and performance: New directions in biblical studies. Biblical performance criticism 6. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Mbembe, A. 1992. Provisional notes on the postcolony.” Africa 62:3–37. —. 2001. On the postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Miller, R. D. 2011. Oral tradition in ancient Israel. Biblical performance criticism 4. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Miller-Naudé, C. L. and J. A. Naudé. 2015. The translation of quotative frames in the Hebrew Bible. Folia Orientalia 52:249–69.

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—. 2016. The intersection of orality and style in Biblical Hebrew: Metapragmatic representations of dialogue in Genesis 34. In Doubling and Duplicating in the Book of Genesis: Literary and Stylistic Approaches to the Text, ed. E. R. Hayes and K. Vermuelen, 57–77. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Milton, J., and P. Bandia. 2009. Introduction: Agents of translation and translation studies. In Agents of translation, ed. J. Milton and P. Bandia, 1–18. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Mojola, A. O. 2002. Bible translation in Africa: What implications does the new UBS perspective have for Africa? An overview in the light of the emerging new UBS translation initiative. Acta Theologica Supplementum 2: 202–13. —. 2011. Bible translation in Africa. In History of Bible translation, 2nd ed. Ed. P. A. Noss. Manchester: St. Jerome; Rome: Edizioni de Storia e Letteratura. Motsapi, M. J. 2015. Personal communication. October 7. Muraoka, T. 2010. A Greek-Hebrew/Aramaic two-way index to the Septuagint. Louvain: Peeters. Mwaniki, M. 2013. Language practice as games: Implications for sociology of translation in development contexts in Africa. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 31 (4): 481–93. Nässelqvist, D. 2012. Translating the aural gospel: The use of sound analysis in performance-oriented translation. In Translating scripture for sound and performance: New directions in biblical studies, ed. J. A. Maxey and E. R. Wendland, 49–67. Biblical performance criticism 6. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Naudé, J. A. 2004. Representation of poetry in the Afrikaans Bible translations: A corpus-based translation analysis. Language Matters 35:233–54. —. 2005a. The representation of parallelisms in the Afrikaans Bible translations of the Psalms: A corpus-based analysis. Old Testament Essays 18 (3): 763–76. —. 2005b. The shaping of cultural knowledge in South African translation. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 36:35–58. —. 2008. The role of pseudo-translations in early Afrikaans travel writing. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 26:97– 106. Naudé, J. A., and T. J. Makutoane. 2006. Reanimating orality: The case for a new translation in Southern Sotho. Old Testament Essays 19 (2): 723–38.

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Naudé, J. A., and C. L. Miller-Naudé. 2011. Colonial and postcolonial encounters with the indigenous: The case of religious translation in Africa. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 29 (3): 313–26. —. 2016. The translation of biblion and biblos in the light of oral and scribal practice. In die Skriflig / In Luce Verbi 50(3), a2060. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ids.v50i3.2060. Niditch, S. 2015. Hebrew Bible and oral literature: Misconceptions and new directions. In The interface of orality and writing: Speaking, seeing, writing in the shaping of new genres, ed. A. Weissenrieder and R. B. Coote, 3–18. Biblical performance criticism 11. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Noble, T. 2000. Social theory and social change. Houdmills: Palgrave. Norris, P., and R. Inglehart. 2004. Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. 2011. Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Okpewho, I. 1992. African oral literature: Backgrounds, character, and continuity. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Ong, W. 1982. Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen. Pew Research Center’s Forum. 2012. The global religious landscape: A report on the size and distribution of the world’s major religious groups as of 2010. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center. 2015. Cell phones in Africa: Communication lifeline. Numbers, facts and trends shaping the world. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Pinker, S. 2011. The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. New York: Penguin. Rhoads, D. 2012. The art of translating for oral performance. In Translating scripture for sound and performance: New directions in biblical studies, ed. J. A. Maxey and E. R. Wendland, 22–48. Biblical performance criticism 6. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Ritzer, G. 2007. Contemporary sociological theory and its classical roots: The basics. 2nd ed. Boston: McGraw. Sæbø, M. 1994. ʸˇʠ Ҵšr. In Theological lexicon of the Old Testament, vol. 1, ed. E. Jenni and C. Westermann, 195–96. Trans. M. E. Biddle. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. Sanneh, L. O. 2015. Translations of the Bible and the cultural impulse. In The new Cambridge history of the Bible: From 1750 to the present, ed.

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John Riches, 83–123. Vol. 4 of The new Cambridge history of the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scharbert, J. 1975. ʪʸʡ brk; ʤʕʫʸʍʕ ˎ berƗkhƗh. In Theological dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. 2, ed. G. J. Botterweck and H. Ringgren, 279– 308. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Seligman, M. E. P. 2002. Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. New York, NY: Free Press. Spencer-Miller, A. 2013. Rethinking orality for biblical studies. In Postcolonialism and the Hebrew Bible: The next step, ed. R. Boer, 35– 68. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. Sundaram, J. K., O. Schwanke, and R. von Armin. 2011. Globalization and development in sub-Saharan Africa. Department of Economic and Social Affairs working paper 102. New York: United Nations. Thompson, B. 1961. Liturgies of the Western church. Philadelphia: Fortress. Togarasei, L. 2012. The Shona Bible and the politics of Bible translation. In Postcolonial perspectives in African biblical interpretations, no. 13, ed. M. W. Dube, A. M. Mbuvi and D. R. Mbuwayesango, 185–98. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. United Bible Societies. 2014. Global access report. Swindon, UK: United Bible Societies. Walton, J. H., and B. Sandy. 2013. The lost world of scripture: Ancient literary culture and biblical authority. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Weissenrieder, A., and R. B. Coote. 2015. The interface of orality and writing: Speaking, seeing, writing in the shaping of new genres. Biblical performance criticism 11. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Wendland, E. R. 2012. Comparative rhetorical poetics, orality, and Bible translation: The case of Jude. In Translating scripture for sound and performance: New directions in biblical studies, ed. James A. Maxey and E. R. Wendland, 139–78. Biblical performance criticism 6. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Wycliffe Bible Translators. 2015. Scripture and language statistics 2015. http://www.wycliffe.net/statistics. Yorke, G. L. 2012. Bible translation in Africa: An Afrocentric interrogation of the task. In Postcolonial perspectives in African biblical interpretations, no. 13, ed. M. W. Dube, A. M. Mbuvi and D. R. Mbuwayesango, 157–70. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

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Biblical Versions cited Bibele Halalelang [Bible in Sesotho]. 1909. Rev. 1961. Bible Society of South Africa. Bibele Phetoleloo e Ntjha [Bible in Sesotho]. 1989. Bible Society of South Africa. Bijbel: Staten-General der Vereenigde Nederlanden. 1917. British and Foreign Bible Society. Di Evangeli vollens Mattéus. 1895. Trans. S. J. du Toit. Paarl: D.F. du Toit & Co, Beperkt, Drukkers en Uitgewers. Di Psalme (in Afrikaans fertaald). 1907. Trans. S. J. du Toit. Paarl: Paarl Drukpers Maatschappij, Beperkt. Die Bybel in Afrikaans. 1933. Rev. 1953. British and Foreign Bible Society / Bible Society of South Africa. Die Bybel in Afrikaans: ’n Nuwe Vertaling. 1983. Bible Society of South Africa. English Standard Version (ESV). 2011. Crossway Bibles. Ishiwi Lyakwa Lesa [Bemba]. 2014. Bible Society of Zambia. New English Translation (NET). 2004. Biblical Studies Press. New International Version (NIV). 1984. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. New Jerusalem Bible (NJB). 1985. Ed. H. Wansbrough. Darton, Longman & Todd Limited and Doubleday. New Living Translation (NLT). 2007. Tyndale House Foundation. New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). 1989. Glasgow: Collins Publishers. Nuwe Testament en Psalms: ’n Direkte Vertaling. 2014. Bible Society of South Africa. Nwene Ya Obase Kokpoo Kopekopewa [The New Testament in the Lokaa Language of Nigeria]. 2005. Jos, Nigeria: The Nigeria Bible Translation Trust in cooperation with Wycliffe Bible Translators. Statenvertaling 1637 [Dutch]. Repr. Dordrecht: Importantia Publishing, 1995. The Common English Bible (CEB). 2013. Ed. J. B. Green. Nashville: Abingdon. The Dramatised Bible. 1989. Ed. M. Perry. London: Marshall Pickering; HarperCollins.

PART ONE: AFRICA RESPONDENT: PAUL F. BANDIA

The articles in this subsection entitled “Africa” cover a wide range of topics, themes and conceptual and methodological approaches to studying translation phenomena in Africa. They have as a common premise and conceptual framework the view of their geographical locus of interest as a construct better understood beyond the prevalent postcolonial discourse and theories. There is a clear desire to cast the searchlight on Africa by focusing on African translational experiences and–in an interesting twist– referencing the colonial métropole as counters or foils for a better explanation and understanding of African cultural history and interlingual practices and transactions. In this regard, the term “postcolony” becomes pivotal in all the articles, signalling its ideological charge or intent to transcend the Western-based conceptualisation of postcoloniality, which so far assumes a centrifugal posturing by highlighting views and concepts hatched in the métropole often without much relevance to the reality and concerns of the postcolony. Credit is due to the Cameroonian scholar, Achilles Mbembe, who coined the term “postcolony”, ridding it of the trappings of temporality and the binary opposition or dualism between the Global South and the Global North that had long characterized the discourse on postcolonialism. For Mbembe, the “postcolony” is conceived as a concept that combines precolonial, colonial and postcolonial features in a kind of simultaneous temporality and synchronicity. Postcolonial theory has come under a great deal of criticism and scrutiny for its apparent lack of concern for reality on the ground in former colonies as well as its perceived preoccupation with the written text or fictionalized literature far removed from the lived experiences in the postcolony. In fact, it has been dismissed as another Western idea or construct enabled by postcolonial subjects living in the West, having little or no regard for reality in the postcolony either through self-alienation or abnegation or surrender to the exigencies of Western academies. The merits of these claims or charges are of little importance in current academic discourse

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about imperial designs and subaltern struggles. Rather, what seems significant and noteworthy is the conscious effort to carry the discussion beyond the overwrought dualist paradigm of postcolonial theory to highlight research with a more centripetal focus on the postcolony itself. Decades after decolonisation, postcolonial reality has evolved, and generations have been born for whom colonialism is a distant memory or a historical artefact. Neocolonialism, the Cold War and globalisation have reshaped the culture, economy and ecology of former colonies, and incidentally, the way forward seems to be looking inwardly at the Self rather than at the Other. This is not to deny the ever-present shadow or ghost of the imperial Other but rather to address the ubiquitous machinations of postcolonial power hierarchies or structures that govern life in contemporary postcolonial society. This developing inward-looking approach can only be beneficial and complementary to the sustained efforts over the decades of postcolonial research. Marais’ article touches on a sorely missing link in postcolonial translation studies, namely the relation between translation and development which, by its very nature, is bound to draw attention to the material conditions of life in the postcolony. The article is conceived with the conviction that translation studies “has within its conceptual apparatus the ability to assist the world in understanding its (the world’s) development”. And for translation studies to do so, it must expand its object of inquiry beyond language or translation proper to include a biosemiotics framework likely to enable the conceptualisation of the social and the cultural in human society. There is a link between translation and development as the latter “presupposes biosemiotic interactions between human beings, which … presupposes translation”. Development therefore “entails a biosemiotic and thus a translational aspect”. Development is described as a process based on the translation of systems of meaning into further systems of meaning, be they economic, political, cultural or legal. Development is a “meaning-constructing movement” as humans are in constant interaction with their environment and respond to various stimuli by translating them into better and more developed experiences. In this regard, development does not necessarily harbour a negative or positive connotation as it is an evolving process contingent upon spatial and temporal factors, hence the article’s captivating title, “We have never been un(der)developed”. There is no pre-set goal to attain for the development of human society. Therefore, rather than asking how we can all achieve the standards of Western society, we should explore how humans construct responses to their environment and “to the agency of the Other”. By linking translation and development, it is hoped that postcolonial discourse

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(or discourses about the postcolony) will begin to account for the material conditions prevalent in the postcolony and thus avoid the culturalist reductionism (or relativism) characteristic of such discourse. Marais’ theoretical stance is quite innovative and has the potential to enhance translation research in postcolonial contexts. However, his discussion of the semiotics of housing in Africa in relation to housing on the campus of the University of the Free State (UFS) raises some questions as to the purpose or objective of a semiosic-cum-development approach to translation. UFS seems to be taken to task for making architectural choices that are translated from a system that has no connection to African semiotic systems and therefore negates or ignores the latter. Yet, a counter-argument is presented as also valid. UFS might be building a university with strong links to Western semiotic systems in order “to create a university with a universal, not tribal, semiotic universe”. What therefore is the rationale or raison-d’être of a semiosic-development translation approach if it does not emphasize or prioritize the semiotic systems of the postcolony? The systematic undermining of the historically rich Swahili literary culture by British colonists through a series of devious translation strategies is the subject of Talento’s paper, which highlights the limitations of Pascale Casanova’s concept of literary consecration through translation. Talento has recourse to the sociology of translation in order to cast a better light on the issue of literary exchanges driven by an exogenous authority, a factor that is sorely missing in Casanova’s broad theoretical postulations. The quasi-absence of scenarios of literary exchanges outside Europe in historically marginalized contexts allows a mainly felicitous definition of the concept of literary consecration. Talento proposes to see the other side of the coin, as it were, describing the deliberate manipulation of Swahili literary culture through the suppression of Swahili poetry in translation as a form of “deconsecration”. British colonialists are quick to engage Swahili prose in translation, pointing out the limitations of the language while deliberately ignoring the rich heritage of Swahili poetry. In this context, therefore, the exposure of Swahili literary culture to the West or the global literary community is not at all consecration but rather “deconsecration”. Talento’s point is well-taken, although the term “deconsecration” may not carry the same literary significance as its opposite, consecration, since it is dificult to argue that whenever an aspect of a literary culture is being ignored through silence in translation, it is being deconsecrated; there has to be prior consecration for deconsecration to occur.

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Mazrui’s paper is dressed as another telling example of a need to go beyond the postcolonial paradigm when studying events that are turned inwardly with a gaze at the strictly “postcolony”. The argument goes that the moment a translation project loses its international import or relevance and focuses mainly on the postcolony, postcolonial theory as a research paradigm becomes obsolete. The notion that events initially commandeered by external forces such as the imperialist CIA and the KGB with the intention of controlling and determining the outcome of political events in the postcolony are no longer in the realm of postcoloniality–hence the limitations of postcolonial theory–seems a bit of a stretch. The coopting of imperialist translation projects by local parties to enhance a mainly local or inward agenda in the postcolony does not efface the overshadowing presence of such imperialist or colonialist forces or negate the very reason for which there is a political struggle in the postcolony in the first place. These struggles and conflicts are remnants of a colonial order and the ensuing postcolonial reality. They may today be decribed in terms of tribalism, ethnic strife, class conflict, et cetera, but they generally flow from a postcolonial state of being. The term “postcolony”, which seems to be used in an attempt at distancing from “postcolonial theory”, is itself quite revealing of its attachment to postcolonial concerns. Can it really be argued that the struggle between socialist and capitalist forces in Africa (as is the case here in Tanzania) and the political strife by postcolonial elites for the inheritance of colonial privileges (such as in Kenya) are far from the concerns of postcolonial scholarship? What then are the scientific parameters tailor-made for studying such locally oriented phenomena in the postcolony? With respect to translation, the domesticating strategies adopted for the translations of Animal Farm and Mother into Swahili or Gikuyu are indeed subversive, disruptive, experimentalist, innovative, appropriative, identitarian, minoritizing, et cetera, which are all concepts and notions prevalent in postcolonial translation theory and practice. As Mazrui points out, the domesticating strategies were, at least in the translation of Animal Farm, in conformity with the imperialist agenda while the staunch Kenyan capitalists, targets of the translations, were in consort, as implied, with external imperial forces. It is not the case therefore that once events are turned inwardly or “redirected towards a new and local signification” in the postcolony, they cease to be of postcolonial concern. However, it is fair to point out that postcoloniality as a research construct is not restricted to the colonized-colonizer paradigm, and its basic premise of power differential or inequality can be extended to include local structures of power and authority behind the class conflict that divides the elite and the masses in the postcolony.

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Using theatre translation as a backdrop, Thurman’s article explores the translation of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly those with a colonialist overtone, to ascertain their treatment and ideological implications in the postcolony of South Africa and what he refers to as the “postcolony in the Global North”, in this case, the “postcolony in Germany”. While the notion of the postcolony in South Africa is fairly understandable, the notion of the postcolony in the Global North seems interesting in that it refers to postcolonial diaspora communities in the West, with or without historical colonialist links, and the treatment reserved for artistic productions in light of the presence and concerns of that community. It therefore pans out as the German treatment of sensitive, colonialist or racially-charged items in the translation of Shakespeare’s works mindful of the presence of postcolonial subjects and non-European immigrant communities. It would be interesting to see how Germans would construe the expression “postcolony in Germany”, especially given that, as stated by Thurman, East and West Germans consider themselves to have been under some form of colonial domination at different historical times by the Soviet Union and the Western Alliance respectively. It is also worth considering that Germany had lost all its colonies following the aftermath of WW1. How does German society square with the fact that what are fairly recent immigrant communities are referred to as “postcolony”? This is why, in spite of its great potential as a research construct, the term “postcolony” has its own pitfalls as it may be extended to include any subaltern reality enhancing an appeal to victimhood with or without colonial incursion. Without a sense of its historical temporality, the term becomes applicable to situations of minoritized or dominated cultures as is already the case in several areas of cultural studies, namely gender and queer studies. Furthermore, rich and developed settlement colonies such as Canada and Australia are adamant about their status as “postcolony”. Even within Canada, the province of Quebec lays claim to a special status as “postcolony”, presumably having been once colonized by their Englishspeaking compatriots. Both “Shakespeare-in-German” and “Shakespeare-in-English […] in South Africa” are fraught with ideological and political ramifications, although the latter plays out in different and distinct ways. In South Africa, like in many African countries formerly colonized by the British, “Shakespeare-in-English” was epitomized as a symbol of British intellectual excellence and a marker of the superiority of the British civilization. The colonized native was kept in awe of the English language and was never thought to be able to attain such excellence in the colonizing language. This may explain why the British colonizers devoted

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their resources to encouraging vernacular language literacy rather than promote excellence in English language acquisition. The reverence for the English language engendered a relationship of power with the language, leading ultimately to select Shakespearean plays being translated, adapted and staged for their potency as a medium for politically-charged expression. “Shakespeare-in-German” in the time of the postcolony has a lot more to do with translating for performance on stage, in particular the performance of race and racial identity. There is a translation and adaptation process (“tradaptation”) which stands between the need to rid Shakespeare’s plays of the racist idioms used by some of his characters or simply “play Shakespeare straight” by reproducing or highlighting, or even exaggerating, this racist language and performance. Thurman successfully demonstrates the complexities of cultural-political translation in the process of translating for performance on stage. Staying within the realm of translation and performance, FuentesLuque discusses issues related to audio-visual translation in the context of film production in the postcolony. Nollywood is indeed an exciting homegrown phenomenon, which has single-handedly catapulted African cinema to the leading ranks of film and cinema production in the world. Before Nollywood, there was African cinema but not with the kind of prominence and influence that Nollywood has garnered in a relatively short period of time. As pointed out in Fuentes-Luque’s paper, African francophone cinema has been around much longer with its own renowned and popular festival, yet there has always been the unshakeable feeling that African francophone cinema was not an entirely African affair as it seemed to operate under the aegis of the former colonial power. It is thought that its highly artistic nature and slow pace are dictated by a kind of mimesis of French metropolitan cinema. That said, comparing African francophone cinema with Nollywood productions is like comparing apples and oranges as both cinemas do hail from very distinct historical and cultural patrimonies and serve different purposes as evidenced in the marked difference in target audience. While African francophone cinema seems to follow the French penchant for doing art for art’s sake with an emphasis on artistry and aesthetics, Nollywood (as its name would suggest) is reminiscent of the American mass production and consumption or “fast food” culture where the objective is mainly capitalist, making money, and providing instant or short-lived gratification. In other words, the one is not necessarily better than the other as the two types of African cinema respond to different needs. Having developed fairly recently, Nollywood is obviously more attuned to current reality in the postcolony, showcasing life as it is lived

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by ordinary folks either through language, popular culture or belief systems. It captures quite well the tension between tradition and modernity at the basis of the hybridity and heterogeneity of urbanity in the postcolony. The rudimentary means of production, the ingenious application of limited or scarce technology as well as the summary or basic economic and marketing strategies reveal a kind of urgency to catch up with the developed world. What is particularly striking is how Nollywood has inspired many other filmmakers, resulting in several offshoots across the continent. This can only be good for the people and the economy as it reinforces a sense of autonomy and pride in self-reliance without waiting for hand-outs in the guise of development aid. Regarding translation proper, two things come to mind that seem quite worrisome, namely the lack of attention to issues related to the poor quality of audiovisual translation and the preponderance or dominance of English (including pidgin English, the local hybrid variety), both seemingly determined by the desire for profit. There is an urgent need to develop institutions for training audio-visual translation professionals and for regulating their work. The importance of such institutions and professionalisation must be driven home to ensure the longtime survival and respect for the cinema industry in Africa. It might be argued that, given the multiplicity of languages in Africa as well as the need to reach an eclectic diaspora, prioritizing the use of a global language such as English is sound business strategy. Yet, for an industry that seeks to assert its Africanness in the context of rapid urbanization and globalisation, it is important to produce films in the native languages of the people whose life-experiences are being displayed onscreen. Examples of film production in non-global languages such as in German, Swedish, Danish or Norwegian point to the viability of filming in African languages. This is where translation becomes crucial, as the global success of African cinema would rely heavily on the quality of audio-visual translation. While, in spite of its poor quality, subtitling has been embraced, African filmmakers view dubbing with suspicion and consider it a form of betrayal. Though there is some merit to these concerns, given Africa’s postcolonial status and the risk of silencing the subaltern speaker or expropriating his or her identity, dubbing can enhance the spread and acceptance of Nollywood films worldwide without diminishing their essence, owing to their unique features and unmistakeable cultural identity. Like all the contributions in this section on Africa, that of Naudé et al. deals squarely with what they refer to as “postcolony Africa”, a rather awkward term apparently coined by Achilles Mbembe, which locates Africa in terms of “the conjunction of precolonial, colonial and

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postcolonial features in a synchronic structure”. The paper laments the alienation and loss of humanness in “postcolony Africa”, laying the blame on the effects of globalisation (is there ever anything positive about globalisation?) as well as “urbanisation, corruption, HIV/Aids and Ebola, and violence and political instability”. This state of affairs is rather daunting and feeds into the “Afro-pessimism” characteristic of intellectual discourse on Africa. The article therefore proposes a way out to assist “postcolony Africa” to find or assert its humanity again through Bible translation performance of texts relating to happiness. What makes this feasible is the oral-written cultures which are common to both Africa and the ancient cultures at the basis of biblical texts. The oral-literate interface therefore is conducive to Bible translation performance of texts relating to happiness, resulting in the restoration of the essentially oral nature of the Bible and likely to gain greater acceptance due to the performance dimension of the translations. The rationale for this approach is grounded in Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy regarding alterity, which serves as a “model for assertion of humanity in the face of inhumanity through the face-to-face engagement with the Other”. Although significant and relevant to Bible translation for “hearing-dominant” cultures (more engaging and always new and fresh), it is not clear how the translation and performance of happiness texts can help restore some humanity to “postcolony Africa” faced with the rather calamitous state of affairs presented in the article. Would it not be wonderful if the translation and performance of the Beatitudes, for instance, could help Africans overcome the predicament of their condition as described here? Also, it would be interesting to know why, in the postcolonial era, “the increased indigenisation of the Bible translation process did not necessarily result in increased acceptance of the translations”. Was it due to the lack of a performance dimension or the absence of biblical texts relating to happiness? How does the state of “alienation and a loss of humanness” in the postcolonial era compare to that of contemporary “postcolony Africa”? On the whole, these articles on Africa draw our attention to the importance of focusing research on the postcolony itself in various and unique ways by going beyond the postcolonial to explore theories or avenues that are likely to account for the materiality or real-life experiences within the postcolony. Giving priority to realities in the postcolony that are determined or shaped by postcolonial subjects themselves or their immediate social, cultural and political ecology, and not entirely dependent upon the imperial relations with the colonial métropole or the global north, is a welcome projection into the future of postcolonial translation studies.

PART II THE GLOBAL SOUTH

CHAPTER SEVEN TRANSLATING SILENCE: APPLYING INTERSEMIOTIC TRANSLATION TO INTERDISCIPLINARY SYSTEMS CAROLINE MANGEREL

1. Introduction If there is such a thing as a “Global North”, Canada is certainly a part of it. As a country built on immigration, and which immigration continues to “feed” more than ever—despite recent attempts to curtail its flow—, Canada has a common characteristic with the postcolonial world: it is a multilingual country. To the traditional bilingual paradigm of the “two solitudes”—French and English—must now be added two other linguistic dimensions. One is the allophone population from immigration, either grouped along linguistic or cultural lines, or having attained varying degrees of integration, hybridity and/or creolisation with the French or English-speaking “core” inhabitants, some since several generations. For instance, many Italian-Canadians have been in Eastern Canada for at least three generations; Haitian-Canadians for two; and the Vietnamese community was celebrating, in 2015, the fortieth anniversary of the arrival of the Boat people to the Canadian shores. A number of Syrian and Iraqi refugees are poised to add to the so-called Canadian mosaic. Thanks to all these people and communities, Canada can claim a small part of the Global South as its own. However, there is a fourth linguistic and cultural dimension in Canada: the many nations which form the Aboriginal peoples. Comprised of First Nations (61%), Métis (32%) and Inuit (4%) (2011 census: Canada 2011, 4–5.), the Aboriginal population, making up 4.3% of the Canadian population, represent another dimension of the postcolony in Canada1. This particular power imbalance comes from 1

Of course, this division is not meant to group together all languages spoken by Aboriginal people in Canada, no more than languages spoken by immigrant

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within and is in fact much more of a colonial nature than a postcolonial one. According to a collective perception fed by certain pervasive colonial discourses, Natives in Canada are socio-economically, culturally, linguistically and even geographically remote, an Other to the rest of Canada. In a nation built on immigration, where ethnic and cultural differences are so welcome as to have special mentions in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, this emphasis on irreconcilable differences simply does not hold water. And while the first two linguistic and cultural Canadian spheres present complex dynamics and roles still steeped in imperial and colonial situations, with England, France, and between each other, Aboriginals in Canada hold a particular position: until very recently, they were still colonised, removed from national debates and, in a variety of ways, silenced. This paper examines relationships within different communities in Canada and between First Nations and the Canadian government, specifically as it concerns political influences and linguistic matters. The postcolony is very much in question, as Aboriginal peoples, in Canada and in many other regions of the world, still live in conditions very similar to the colonial situation. The colonial power balance still has a stronghold here, within the global context of the postcolony, while postcolonial discourse about those relations is blossoming. After drawing a detailed contextual picture of the multiple-identity situation in Canada, I will examine the political implications of translation between linguistic communities. I propose a theoretical framework to examine intersemiotic translation and more specifically translation between disciplinary systems, taking into account the great variety of fields, or disciplines, involved in this silencing and in the systems underlying the language and culture matters. Looking at these translations and examining the elements that are left out in the process allows to point out the conditions in which crucial elements are left out—silencing, obscuring or confusing of information—and whether they are deliberate or rather a product of insufficient training or skills, or lack of resources. Although political agendas are often the culprits of these silences, especially when it comes to drafting a bill or passing a law, there are other forces at work which will be described.

communities. Rather, separating the linguistic “paradigms” in four semiospheres actually disturbs the bilingualism usually considered to be one of the defining characteristics of Canada and paints a more realistic portrait of the situation. The diverse languages spoken by Aboriginal people also have distinct statuses from one community to the next.

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The great Canadian political scientist Alan C. Cairns had to contend with the fact that there is a certain irony in a researcher presenting research about Aboriginal people while decrying the colonial paradigm that permeates, precisely, research about Aboriginal people. I certainly share this cautious feeling, but it is my opinion that the greatest challenge to Aboriginal socioeconomic equality in Canada remains basic racism. The latter is fuelled by political discourse, by the media and by other influential actors who play on collective atavistic fears to divide and conquer while carefully avoiding to contextualise or level the playing field in any way. Re-examining the epistemological bases of the discourse on Aboriginals in Canada is essential, and it must include native thinkers and contributors—though not exclusively—just like any other decolonising project.

2. Conceptualising interdisciplinary systems Professional translation is normally known as taking place between languages and is ordinarily divided into areas of specialisation: medical or scientific translation, for instance, or legal translation, or economic translation. What if we could add translation between disciplines rather than languages? If translation skills and competencies are divided into specialisations, it usually means that one specialist cannot necessarily handle two disciplines with the same ability. Just like different languages, such as German, French or Arabic, the medical and legal and economic disciplines all refer to specific bases of knowledge. Would it then not make sense to recognise the role of translation between these specialisations, categories of knowledge or disciplines? In order to explore this approach, I have used Youri Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere and the dynamics that he describes as part of this concept. A system featuring porous membranes, complex internal movements and precise relationships between elements of meaning, all of which combine to explain the semiotic workings of cultural relations, the semiosphere is an ideal base for this framework.

2.1 Processes at work in interdisciplinary systems In Lotman’s work, the semiosphere is described as resembling a biosphere or perhaps an animal cell. The semiotic sphere’s core, or nucleus, corresponds to a culture’s institutions and standards. Its border, or membrane, which is in contact with the outside and with neighbouring semiospheres, constitutes the “area of semiotic dynamic” (Lotman 1990,

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26) that provides the necessary tension for the constant movement and renewal of culture. This sphere has several dynamics and fluxes such as the movement from the border to the centre. Certain practices, languages or art forms, considered to be marginal—and therefore coming from the border—end up making their way to the centre and becoming institutionalised and governed by rules and standards such as cinema in the 20th century or more recently, graffiti. Just as the centre is rigid, the border is a chaotic churning of heterogeneous elements borne of contact with the surrounding semiospheres: new ideas, different languages. A contamination of sorts occurs, which ensures constant meaning production. Although the semiosphere does not directly represent the movement of translation, the latter nevertheless plays a significant role in this process as the coding and decoding force of the border. I have called the fields or disciplines put into communication by this type of translation interdisciplinary systems (Mangerel 2016). They can be pictured as resembling the semiosphere and comprise various mechanisms, both from a macro and a micro perspective. Yet, they must have data and meaning relations converted from one to the other—translation. Within the same natural language, or even between several languages, a text or similar element of meaning will have to be converted and re-interpreted (meaning that it will have to become semioticised) according to the framework of the discipline into which it enters. One of Lotman’s principles is that the semiosphere requires at least two languages. The interdisciplinary-system framework builds upon this principle by recognising that no field of knowledge can stand alone but exists necessarily in the presence of others. A given topic can put in contact any number of spheres. Heavyweight, controversial, public-policy debates could mean translation between, for instance, the political sphere, the justice system, the financial markets and the fields of medical research, statistics and risk analysis. This is precisely the interest of this concept: Applying this framework to the study of complex phenomena that are essentially transdisciplinary reveals links between apparently unrelated dynamics which are in fact different facets of the same reality. Much work has been done on similar theoretical and epistemological approaches. Besides Lotman’s theory and other significant contributions to “systems” thinking in the field of culture, such as Luhmann’s systems theory2 and Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory,3 more relevant work has 2 3

See, for instance, Niklas Luhmann’s (2004) Law as a social system. See Itamar Even-Zohar’s 1990 work, Polysystem studies.

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been produced in very different fields. Among others, Bertalanffy built his general systems theory from mathematics and physics, seeking to identify isomorphies and define relationships in all fields of empirical knowledge.4 The methodology I propose, while drawing elements from some of these well-established frameworks, is definitely grounded in semiotic theory and has a decolonising objective. It also has complexity-theory implications, although this aspect will not be developed in the present work.

2.2 Intersemiotic translation Lotman describes translation as occurring at all levels of semiotic space and as “a generator of information” (Lotman 1990, 123). Thus, it is a central component of our basic understanding of the world that surrounds us. Translation taking place between systems that are not strictly linguistic in difference is what Jakobson called “intersemiotic translation or transmutation, an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (Jakobson 1959, 127). This type of translation is the most difficult to circumscribe as it not only involves the translation of codes between very different semiotic systems, but also demands an understanding of both (or all) codes involved.5 (Mangerel 2016, 6).

Nevertheless, just as all translation takes place at the border of the semiosphere, intersemiotic translation occurs when an outside element is filtered inside, triggering a decoding and encoding function as well as meaning-making mechanisms contextualised in terms of the semiosphere’s specificity. The process of interdisciplinary translation is already conceptualised, to a point, in the fields of public policy and administration. The term translation can be found fairly often, for example: while ideas and interests are clearly important determinants of publicpolicy outcomes, they must be mediated through institutions in order to be translated into public policy. (Kelley and Trebilcock 2010, 10–11)

4 See Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s (1974) General system theory: Foundations, development, applications. 5 For example, “translating” between the legal and medical fields in order to map a bill regulating new advances in medicine requires delicate, and likely rare, expertise in both fields.

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There is a number of such interdisciplinary translations in the scientific world. Research centres, especially in the medical and pharmaceutical fields, employ multidisciplinary teams where basic researchers, medical doctors, biochemists, biostatisticians, knowledge-management experts, researchers in various medical specialties, data analysts, computer engineers and legal experts join their individual skills, knowledge, expertise and data towards a common, well-subsidised goal. Even closer to this research is the branch of the medical field called translational research. A proper field of investigation with its own research centres, journals and conference cycles,6 translational research (TR), or translational science, is described as both “the interface between basic science and clinical medicine” and effective translation of the new knowledge, mechanisms, and techniques generated by advances in basic science research into new approaches for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. (Woolf 2008, 211)

TR is a successful model of interdisciplinary research that has been widely accepted as an essential, “in-between” scientific activity. It is my belief that just as translational researchers are recognised for their expertise and the importance of their role in mediating between disciplines, other types of interdisciplinary translators can be identified as such, and their activities can be described and reframed. Furthermore, there is a clear direction to the movement of the elements being passed between fields of research, mirroring Lotman’s principle of asymmetry (Lotman 1990, 124–27). These elements could be conceptualised as being more specific to the discipline as one moves towards the centre of the sphere. At the very edge is discourse—political discourse, medical discourse, legal discourse—modelled on the semiosphere’s porous border. Discourse is both a reflection of the discipline and a communication tool between two systems. It lets information in just as it lets it out, which is why translation is needed and why there are silences that lead to tangible, material results. The notion of power, and power imbalance, is very much a component of this study. It will be examined mostly through the breaches in the translation process. The hypothesis is that these silences in translation reveal the places where both systems do not “fit”—where the interfaces do not overlap. Looking at colonial and post-colonial dynamics through a 6

See for instance the American Journal of Translational Research, the Translational Research Institute of Australia, the Innovation and Translation in Imaging Summit 2016.

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translation approach to interdisciplinary systems allows one to identify the fields that come into play, the ways in which they interact with one another, at the discourse level, and the semiotic dissonances that arise from non-translation.

3. The cultural and linguistic landscape of Canada In the dynamics of translation, there is always an attempt to find balance in the boundaries between the self and the Other. In translation theory, just as in the colonial and post-colonial contexts in which translation has played such a significant role, violence has been consistently identified, described and weighed as both a driving force and an inevitable consequence of textual intimacy with the other. Here, it plays a historical part in this “complex domestic coexistence that has to be worked out within a single political community” (Cairns 2001, 27). One of the main problems with Canadian multiculturalism, and the reason why it is so easy to manufacture threat from differences for electoral purposes, is precisely its particular brand of management of multiple identities. In order to understand it, one must first look at the main colonial dynamics at play.

3.1 Post-colonial dynamics in English Canada The political entity known as Canada is itself a country born out of colonisation and still exhibiting post-colonial dynamics. Canada established its independence from England in 1867 but still recognises the Queen of England as its head of state. A part of the Commonwealth, it still has links of an imperial nature with England, both administratively and culturally, and Canadian citizens, who remain subjects of Her Majesty, pay for their groceries with bills and coins featuring her likeness. As in most countries that were once part of the British Empire, there remain various cultural ties that keep fuelling complex cultural power relations between English Canada and Britain. One of the most noteworthy manifestations of the latter is, perhaps, conservative former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s penchant for everything British and traditional, from his several-million-dollar commemoration of the War of 1812 (in which Canada did not fight) to his 2011 order that all Canadian embassies and missions abroad display prominently a picture of the English monarch (Chase 2011).

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3.2 Two solitudes As if this external relationship were not complicated enough, Canada’s cultural, linguistic and political fields are dominated by a long-standing domestic dispute pitting English-speaking Canadians—or Anglophones, as they are called in this context—against their neighbours and compatriots, French-Canadians. A large chunk of Canadian history—meaning, of course, what happened once Europeans set foot on the continent—comprises battles between the French colonisers and the English conquerors, as well as their respective Native allies. Over the past 50 years, French-Canadians have all but escaped their power relationship of social, economic and linguistic domination with English-Canadians whereby no French-Canadian worker could hope to rise in the ranks of a company, any sort of interaction between Francophones and Anglophones always took place in English, and French-Canadian cultural manifestations of any kind had no place in the English side of the country. Tensions and power struggles remain, of course. This country’s Two Solitudes (a term coined by writer Hugh MacLennan in 1945) are separated by a rift that has been exacerbated in the past years by government’s intent on using divisive politics to their electoral advantage.

3.3 Canadian immigration To the century-old one-on-one has been added, over the course of the past 100 years, a multiple, infinitely complex set of colonial and postcolonial dimensions with the arrival of people from all corners of the planet. From the beginning of the 20th century to the 1970s, non-French and non-English Europeans settled in Canada, after which “visible minorities” from all of the Americas, Asia and Africa added to the economic and population growth (Kelley and Trebilcock 2010). After World War II and the independence of a number of British colonies, Prime Minister Mackenzie King affirmed key values in Canadian immigration policies, which would remain the default until at least the 1960s: Canada is perfectly within her rights in selecting the persons whom we regard as desirable future citizens. It is not a “fundamental human right” of any alien to enter Canada ... The people of Canada do not wish, as a result of mass immigration, to make a fundamental alteration in the character of our population” (Kelley and Trebilcock 2010, 317).

Linked to the national economy, immigration laws became progressively more stringent while, after 1960, non-European immigrants started to

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arrive in great numbers, deepening the complexity of imperial, postcolonial and trans-colonial relationships between communities as well as between immigrants and the administrations. Multiculturalism is the term of choice to define the policy of the Canadian government regarding interactions between its communities, and its official purpose is to recognize and promote the understanding that multiculturalism reflects the cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society and acknowledges the freedom of all members of Canadian society to preserve, enhance and share their cultural heritage. (Canada 1985)

The implications of this situation will be described in more detail. In Canada as in many other countries, the cultural practices flowing from immigrants, refugees and their descendants have become a significant part of theory on identity and hybridity, which in turn makes up a large part of the postcolonial paradigm.

3.4 Indigenous colonialism If all previously described power relations between communities can be associated with postcolonialism, the remaining one—the often forgotten indigenous reality within a global Canada—has more characteristics of a colonial phenomenon (Cairns 2001; Green 2004; Browne, Smye and Varcoe 2005). Neither colonisers nor newcomers, Aboriginals have always been approached as a problem to contend with, whether by lawmakers, the Church or law enforcement. This Native “problem” has been “solved” through displacement, assimilation, deletion, invisibility. Aboriginals’ attempts at having their voices heard, participating in civil society, defending their cultural and territorial spheres or even going about their own affairs have been framed, for the public’s benefit, as the tantrums of unruly children, from the early Church who depicted Aboriginals as child-like primitives in need of stern education to recent governments who still use that image under more politically correct appearances. Cultural representations of the “Indian”, exoticised replications of the western-movie “savage” that are still active throughout the world, are only one example of how First Nations, Métis and Inuit have been represented in colonial discourse and silenced in terms of knowledge production. Since the 1970s, there has been significant progress in Aboriginal power gains, as well as publications by Aboriginal researchers in disciplines such as history, philosophy and anthropology. Recent

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contributions by Aboriginal scholars include Georges Sioui’s essay on history, For an Amerindian autohistory (1992), and John Borrows’ Recovering Canada: The resurgence of indigenous law (2002) is only one recent example of the extensive work that has been done in the legal field on Aboriginal rights.

4. Translation and politics in Canada: An overview French and English are the two official languages in Canada. At the federal-government level, this implies absolute access to services in both languages, especially when it comes to the judicial system. However, multiculturalism has been enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms since 1982 (the Canadian Multiculturalism Act), and other languages are also recognised and accommodated. The Charter specifies that a party or witness in any proceedings who does not understand or speak the language in which the proceedings are conducted or who is deaf has the right to the assistance of an interpreter. (Canada 1982)

However, just as English and French do in reality not hold the same status, all other languages spoken in the country have different “values” based on a variety of factors, namely the comparative clout that a given community has in terms of economic significance, electoral votes and visibility. Such interlinguistic tussles, as a gateway into the wider intercultural dynamics, are naturally expressed through the practice of translation, and interlingual translation is a fitting illustration for the application of an intersemiotic-translation framework. In the Canadian context, just as everywhere else, the activity of translation can be divided into various categories: professional and pragmatic, regulated for government use, literary and poetic, cultural, experimental, theoretical, et cetera, and it takes on very different roles according to type, target language, and target audience.

4.1 French-English power struggles through translation Cultural translations, literary, poetic or theatre, between French and English have carried a heavy political weight. Their various roles—as barometers, as mirrors, as buffers—have since the 1970s been shown by a number of translation scholars such as Pierre Cardinal, Jean Delisle, Sherry Simon and Edwin Genztler, to name only a few. They illustrate

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quite eloquently the (postcolonial) concept of power relations in translation. For instance, Québec’s quiet revolution and the ensuing movement for independence in the 1960s and 1970s caused an outpouring of cultural productions and an explosion of literary translations from French into English (Delisle 1990). Activist translation, such as, recently, the “Printemps érable” project, is in itself another category. Historically, it takes place primarily between French and English audiences, usually involves the media and is generally one-sided: from French into English. It is usually based on the need to “export” a Québec reality into the rest of Canada, disseminate information and, also in this case, change the discourse. In 2012, the large student strike that took place in Québec to protest against the provincial government’s tuition hikes were covered by news networks in the rest of Canada with obvious bias. The strike took on ample proportions with politicians taking sides, and the turn of events ended up toppling the government when elections were called. Media coverage of these events was done along political, ideological and linguistic affiliations to the extent that outside of the province of Québec, English-language newspapers reported almost exclusively the anti-student discourse, framing students as spoiled children and their protests as tantrums. The collective translation project aimed at dispelling this bias, or at least instilling some balance in the coverage of events, by making available English translations of French-language newspaper articles on the topic.7 Interestingly, “pragmatic” translation in Canada also carries political weight. The need for professional translators grew enormously after the 1950s and the start of French-Canadian nationalism, both at the government and corporate levels (Cardinal 1978, 142–43). As a barometer, the status of translation both reveals a change in socioeconomic balance and paints a portrait of the situation between communities at the time as translations were done overwhelmingly from English to French—a sign of the dominance of Anglophones in both sectors (Cardinal 1978, 144)—and the opposite direction of literary and cultural translation at the same era. It should be pointed out that, at a much earlier time, the balance of power both visible in and impacted by translation used to occur between newcomers, the French, and local inhabitants, Eastern Canada First

7

For more information about the role of activist translation in these events, see R. Colón-Rodríguez’s (2015) study, “La traducción colaborativa activista contemporánea en canadá y en brasil: comunidades de traducción 1.0 y 2.0 en evolución”.

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Nations peoples. Today, however, the politics of translation in Canada take place almost exclusively between the French and English spheres.

4.2 Aboriginal issues in translation and interpretation Cultural and literary translation does take place between Aboriginal and Southern Canadian languages though at a much lower rate than French-English translations. In particular, a number of Haida stories have been translated, especially oral traditions. The most famous of these transcriptions-translations is probably A story as sharp as knife, a collection of stories, poetry and fiction dictated to John Swanton in 1900– 1901 and translated and rewritten by Robert Bringhurst. In terms of pragmatic linguistic practice, interpretation is the most important activity between the Aboriginal and Southern Canadian languages, especially in the legal system. Its challenges are generally not political in nature, unless one counts indirect causes such as more repressive laws on repeat offenders and small charges, which, unfortunately, affect a high percentage of the Aboriginal population compared to their Southern Canadian counterparts. It is difficult to regroup some of the challenges that present themselves to the Aboriginal peoples of Canada as they are very different peoples from West to East and from North to South with completely different languages, cultures and socio-economic statuses. However, some common constraints can be identified for the whole of these communities. One of the main problems is the distances between towns in the huge, sparsely populated territories where the majority of Aboriginal communities are found, namely Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Another challenge is the diversity of dialects, for instance, the Eastern and Western versions of Inuktitut (which has sixteen sub-dialects), despite long-standing efforts to standardise the language (Akeeshoo 1993, 37). Both sets of constraints are reflected in interpreter training as well as in the performance of interpreters in court, both of which share many geographical conditions. Until recently, distance made it difficult to get educational material with occurrences of students having to wait for weeks for training kits lost in the mail (Sammons 1993, 47) and being re-shipped, by plane of course, between very faraway locations. The distance issue also impacts working legal interpreters—though not necessarily negatively. The prohibitive price of plane tickets between Yellowknife and Iqaluit (2,260 km apart) persuaded the courts to hire interpreters to work full-time at one specific location instead of transporting them back and forth.

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5. Silences in translation Silence, absence and invisibility are three declinations on one theme. Various types of silence in discourse have been described and examined in recent studies: the right to silence, guilty silence, saving face by being silent, silence as rhetorical choice. One of the most interesting for the purpose of this study is the case of political discourse where it can be recognised that concepts such as secrecy, revelation and transparency play a significant role in democracy (Schröter 2013, 90). As for the absence of translation, it can be caused by several factors, anchored in several distinct categories: censorship (political), taboo (cultural/social), temporal irrelevance (economic/cultural), et cetera. Untranslatable does not mean untranslated, and vice-versa. In more specific areas such as news translation, silence can have similar effects to silence in political discourse. In all these instances, silence is either forced upon the source or target audience, as in the case of censorship, or determined by specific contexts and an absence of correspondence. These can be cultural, as in the case of taboo, or linguistic, as can happen when two very different languages are put in contact. Silence is a multifaceted mechanism with several meaning-making mechanisms. A lack of intersemiotic translation is one of these, which in turn is only one of the consequences of the bigger picture: the systematic erasing and invisibility that has taken place on many levels and through many disciplinary networks and systems. In Lotman’s theory, non-translation means nonsemiotisation, that is, whatever is out of the semiosphere stays out and never becomes meaningful. In other words, the Other crystallises into Otherness, becoming increasingly foreign. I have shown some of the ideological and political battles that still rage between communities and the government as well as in public opinion. Translation between disciplinary systems shows gaps, either deliberate or accidental, that affect whole spheres of knowledge. However, this silence of translation is also manifested through different meanings. Silence is what characterises the relations between Aboriginals and White Canadians. It is in our lack of everyday contact, in the First Nations’ virtual absence in history books, in the former government’s refusal to dwell on “the problem”. It has been engineered, also, in many ways and for a long time. Canadian institutions managed to erase from the collective memory the First Nations’ presence and heritage and everything we owe them, starting with the very survival of the pioneers, from our cultural DNA to our actual DNA.

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The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada published their report in June 2015. They used the term cultural genocide to qualify the federal government’s systematic efforts to assimilate Aboriginals over several decades. The Conservative government refused to accept that term, even though Chief Justice McLachlin of the Supreme Court, among others, endorsed it without compromise (Galloway and Curry 2015). Of course, this deliberate, cynical, political denial is very much part of the silence that characterises the Aboriginal question in Canada, an easy study of the discourse at the interface of politics, law, history and other disciplines involved in this phenomenon. The discourse is further supported by the ease with which the previous government controlled the media towards framing the issues. This control was one of the Canadian Conservative government’s favoured tactics, and it has been for a number of years. Previous governments employed other methods, but the aim was always the same: silencing, muzzling and ultimately pushing into oblivion certain groups, namely the Aboriginals. The TRC’s Report states that [f]or over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada ... (TRC of Canada 2015, 1; emphasis added— CM)

The fact that this phenomenon was not mentioned in official history manuals for education purposes is yet another type of silencing. For over 100 years, Aboriginal children were removed from their families and sent to institutions called residential schools. The government-funded, church-run schools [were] established with the purpose to eliminate parental involvement in the spiritual, cultural and intellectual development of Aboriginal children. (TRC of Canada 2015, 1)

The effect was to erase cultures and languages, thereby silencing not only the individuals (children) but also the community as a whole. The infantilisation of historically disadvantaged communities, of which natives are part in North America and throughout the world, is a common, time-tested way of negatively influencing the collective discourse. There are a number of “historically mediated images—pervasive in the media, public venues and everyday conversations—of Aboriginal people as irresponsible, dependent wards of the state, as ‘getting everything for

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free’, and as passive recipients of government” (Browne, Smye and Varcoe 2005, 30) that elicit irate reactions, especially visible in certain online forums and especially profitable for certain politicians. The neoconservative, Randian discourse aiming at holding everyone responsible for their own choices is largely based on this type of framing, whatever the targeted communities. The objectives of these types of discourses are to evacuate from the public discussion any reference to the real problems in all their complexity and in particular to minimize demands for real solutions from the elected representatives. Justin Trudeau’s new Liberal Canadian government has positioned itself as progressive and, since its election in October 2015, made concrete steps to prove it. The Minister of Justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould, is an Aboriginal woman, and a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls has been launched. There seems to be hope for the re-semiotisation mechanism. Deliberately influencing the public discourse and collective perception of a whole set of communities contribute effectively to silencing them, symbolically and semiotically. As a method of generating alterity and deappropriating subjectivity, it can certainly be considered as one of the tools of cultural genocide.

6. Translating between disciplinary systems: Discourse in the Canadian postcolonial context The situation of First Nations, Métis and Inuit in Canada involves countless disciplinary spheres and is further complicated by conflicting discourses—postcolonial, postcolonial relativist, assimilationist, parallelist—which makes it an ideal subject of analysis for the interdisciplinary-systems translation framework.

6.1 A colonial dynamic The colonisation of Canada was realised partly through treaties in which First Nations ceded their lands to Europeans and, over time, were confined to reserves. Medical facilities and schools were often included in the agreements—two topics which would become especially problematic and still are today. Indeed, “persistent inequities in health and social status are indicators of longstanding, historically mediated disadvantages and economic and political conditions that affect many Aboriginal peoples” (Browne, Smye and Varcoe 2005, 18), as the inadequacy and lack of access to these resources represent the main material constraints preventing indigenous communities from reaching equal status with the

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rest of Canada. Health and education were also efficient instruments of colonisation, ways of replacing traditional practices, and as such, they brought about numerous abuses such as forced assimilation through schooling and the coercive sterilisation of women.8 Therefore, there is no doubt that the present dynamic between natives, the federal government and various national institutions can be defined as colonial, “a standard term, coolly employed by scholars and passionately wielded by Aboriginal activists” (Cairns 2001, 19).

6.2 Conflicting paradigms The relations between Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian population —and what was seen as fundamental differences between them—were dominated by two main paradigms: assimilationism and parallelism. The former, dominant for the first century after Confederation, focused entirely on the state’s long-run concern for inclusive community of standardized citizens, but had no sympathy for any enduring positive recognition of Aboriginality. (Cairns 2001, 91)

As for parallelism, it displays considerable sensitivity to the desire of Aboriginal peoples for some positive recognition, including self-governing powers, but pays lesser attention to what holds us together, to what prevents us from being strangers. (Cairns 2001, 92)

Each of these paradigms holds live potential for extremism. Assimilation, of course, has shown tremendously abusive practices such as the creation and exploitation of residential schools to scrub indigenous identities, including mother tongue, out of children. Parallelism is a softer expression of separatism and echoes Canadian multiculturalism as previously described. This vision of cohabitation for seemingly incompatible groups, geographic neighbours yet cultural strangers, is what characterises the socalled Canadian mosaic (the answer to the U.S. melting-pot). At its worst, multiculturalism is a dynamic of interaction without shared cultural elements. It becomes a sort of segregation the corresponding discourse of 8 Karen Stote (2015) documents this practice in her recent study An act of genocide: Colonialism and sterilization of aboriginal women.

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which is steeped in cultural relativism. The postmodern interpretation of multiculturalism questions the hegemonic culture while insisting on each distinct identity’s rights, which means no common ground between cultures. In Lotman’s conception, it amounts to well-defined, closed cultural spheres with very little porosity, meaning that the neighbouring community is unsemiotised, and there is barely any “translation” or interaction of any kind to allow the Other in. In fact, rather than representing a solution, multiculturalism can only describe a situation where different groups exist in the presence of one another. The same type of identity management used in the Canadian multicultural context at institutional levels also poses a risk of going too far in the “decolonisation” process. Multiculturalism should not mean that specific communities are allowed to practice their own laws if these are contrary to Canadian law, just as the decolonisation of classrooms, work environments or mentalities should not mean forfeiting all “Euro-centric” scientific or philosophical bases. Cultural relativism of this kind, coupled with extremist politically correct discourse, often with Orwellian tendencies, can lead to avoiding the issues or even denying them altogether.9 Contextualising health issues, for instance, is important in order for the figures to make sense. However, the discourse used to put things in perspective should not take precedence to the actual objectives of the medical study.

6.3 Changing the discourse Research in Aboriginal communities aims to study material constraints under which many Aboriginal families live, and ... structural conditions that marginalize people from educational, economic, and political opportunities that might enhance health, social status, and community well-being. (Browne, Smye and Varcoe 2005, 18)

Attempts at using postcolonial methodologies, in the medical field for instance, have been met with mitigated results because of diametrically opposed views of the role of indigenous communities within Canada. The colonializing potential of research has been stressed (Battiste 2004; 9

For a particularly vigorous discussion on this topic, refer to Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard’s controversial essay Approaches to aboriginal education in Canada: Searching for solutions (2013). For a synthesis of the debate, see Alex Shimo’s (2009) “Tough critique or hate speech? A Calgary prof’s paper on the ‘Aboriginal industry’ starts a war”.

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Browne, Smye and Varcoe 2005; Ralston Saul 2008) as it tends to describe specific problems and find solutions without the participation of the communities and individuals who are the objects of the research in question. Such an approach is reminiscent of old paternalistic attitudes aiming at civilising “savages” under a protectionist pretence and leads to resistance: The banning of customs, the estrangement of children from their parents by the residential school experience, the attack on traditional ways of governing, and the demeaning experience of being treated as wards meant that protection was a code word for cultural aggression. ... In general, as is typically the case in colonial situations, there was a gap between the public, visible behaviour of Indian people, and an underground life that constituted a kind of defiance of white rule and Indian subject status. (Cairns 2001, 66)

A number of Native voices have described their historical role as “not passive objects of colonial policy, but ... active agents” (Cairns 2001, 66). Furthermore, research has been described as feeding the negative discourse. In their article on applying postcolonial perspectives to research in Aboriginal health, Browne, Smye and Varcoe (2005) mention the importance of constantly contextualising figures and statistics about HIV and mental health to avoid reinforcing negative stereotypes (Browne, Smye and Varcoe 2005, 30–31). As previously mentioned, negative discourses and perceptions still define relations between Aboriginal peoples and Euro-Canadians (sometimes referred to as “southern Canadians”, or even simply “Canadians” in that context [Cairns 2001, 20]). Therefore one of the priorities for equality, as much as directing resources for health and education to the poorer communities, should be changing the discourse. While this can seem frivolous compared to the realities with which many Aboriginal people living on reserves must contend today, it is in fact an integral part of the series of processes that contribute to the racism, divisiveness and paltry living conditions that have been brought to the attention of the public in the past few years. Identifying power discrepancies is not enough and neither is the process of “decolonising”. Rather, discourse should be considered as one of the constitutive elements of the problem, just as tangible as faulty service delivery or assimilationist national policies. As discourse is the locus of translation in the semiotic structure, it reveals the value systems which are communicated between disciplinary spheres. As it is the primary influence of public opinion, it also weighs in in terms of votes, public policy, laws and therefore the

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general welfare of the population. Silences in this translation have to be identified as either deliberate or accidental, which also sheds light on either the motivations or the failures being vehiculated in the source system. Diversity. Inclusion. Complexity. We are gradually returning to attitudes that predate the racially based, European-driven divisions of the late nineteenth century. (Ralston Saul 2008, 20)

New attitudes towards the aboriginal colonial subject include the introduction of Aboriginal humanities, hybrid methodologies and complex thinking in academic and institutional settings. It is also reflected in a growing interest for theoretical frameworks, within the humanities and outside of them, conceptualising humans as part of the biosphere rather than on top of it. The latter include ecocriticism and biosemiotics as well as an injection of environmental concerns in many traditional fields such as the economy, politics and the law. The influence of these approaches are also seen in health sciences and biology with multidisciplinary teams in Canadian university centres studying the blending of traditional and Western spheres of knowledge and approaches on topics such as medicinal plants. Not only can the collected data show interest in hybrid topics but so can the methodology, using for instance “phenomenological research design paired with critical theory philosophy” (Aamodt, Dahms and Gendron 2015).

7. Conclusion In an interview with Chatelaine magazine, conservative then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, when asked about the much higher crime rate among First Nations than the rest of Canada: “We have a lot of studies and a lot of data and we haven’t really seen anything that says there are actually knowledge gaps there” (Onstad 2015). There are in fact many deliberate gaps and silences in the translation between interdisciplinary systems, and the discourse that carries the information is being redirected for electoral purposes, in order to affect other systems of information. In this study, I looked at cultural and translation issues and the power dynamics in which they occur—admittedly a fairly traditional postcolonial approach. However, I also defined principles for translation between interdisciplinary systems and showed the benefits of applying them to the topic at hand in order to take the power analysis to the semiotic level. The potential applications of this framework are multiple. It can be applied to exploring the process whereby scientific findings are translated

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into law. The translation of scientific findings into news, or of law into news, raises comparable challenges, as do various other types of adaptations between systems. Furthermore, this research can be applied just as successfully in Global North and Global South contexts. Gaps in translation are the cause of a perpetuation of disenfranchisement in poorer communities in both geopolitical entities and especially with historically undermined, subordinated or dominated groups, in particular women and children. It is my belief that this theoretical framework can help bypass the binary debate between postcolonialism and nationalism. Theoretically speaking, this first application of the framework for translation between interdisciplinary systems will give rise to further exploration and in-depth definition in forthcoming publications. Among the aspects that will be developed are the specification of essential components and working dynamics based on links with existing theories, concepts and methodological approaches such as cultural semiotics, complexity theory, isomorphic relationships and translatability.

References Aamodt, A., T. Dahms and F. Gendron. 2015. Can we decolonize the online classroom by attempting to bridge Western and indigenous science? Lecture, October 1, First Nations University of Canada. Akeeshoo, A. 1993 Legal interpreting in Canada’s Eastern Arctic. Meta 38 (1): 35–37. Battiste, M. 2004. Unfolding the lessons of colonization. In Unhomely states: Theorizing English-Canadian postcolonialism, ed. C. C. Sugars, 209–20. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Borrows, J. 2002. Recovering Canada: The resurgence of indigenous law. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bringhurst, R. 1999. A story as sharp as a knife. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre. Browne, A. J., V. L. Smye, and C. Varcoe. 2005. The relevance of postcolonial theoretical perspectives to research in aboriginal health”, Canadian Journal of Nursing Research 37 (4): 16–37. Cairns, A. C. 2001. Citizens plus: Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Canada. 1982. Canadian charter of rights and freedoms. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-15.html. —. 1985. Canadian multiculturalism act. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-18.7/FullText.html.

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—. 2011. Statistics Canada: Aboriginal people in Canada. http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-011-x/99-011x2011001-eng.pdf. Cardinal, P. 1978. Regard critique sur la traduction au Canada. Meta 23 (2): 141–47. Chase, S. 2011. Canadian embassies have till Sept. 15 to hang the Queen’s portrait. The Globe and Mail, September 7. Colón-Rodríguez, R. 2015. La traducción colaborativa activista contemporánea en canadá y en brasil: comunidades de traducción 1.0 y 2.0 en evolución. Tradução em Revista 18 (1): 159–90. Delisle, J. 1990. The language alchemists: Société des traducteurs du Québec (1940–1990). Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Even-Zohar, I. 1990. Polysystem studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Galloway, G., and B. Curry. 2015. Residential schools amounted to “cultural genocide,” report says. The Globe and Mail, June 2. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/residential-schoolsamounted-to-cultural-genocide-says-report/article24740605. Green, J. 2004. Autodétermination, citoyenneté et fédéralisme: Pour une relecture autochtone du palimpseste canadien. Politique et Sociétés 23 (1): 9–32. Jakobson, R. 1959. On linguistic aspects of translation. Repr. in The translation studies reader, ed. L. Venuti, 113–118. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Kelley, N., and M. Trebilcock. 2010. The making of the mosaic: A history of Canadian immigration policy. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press. Lotman, J. 1990. Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Luhmann, N. 2004. Law as a social system. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Mangerel, C. 2016. “The power of silence in interlinguistic and intersemiotic translation”. In New semiotics: Between tradition and innovation; Proceedings of the 12th World Congress of Semiotics, ed. K. Bankov. Sofia: NBU Press. http://www.iass-ais.org/proceedings2014/view_lesson.php?id=53. Onstad, K. 2015. The Chatelaine Q&A: Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Châtelaine, September 14. http://www.chatelaine.com/living/politics/election-2015-thechatelaine-qa-prime-minister-stephen-harper. Ralston Saul, J. 2008. A fair country: Telling truths about Canada. Toronto: Viking.

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Sammons, S. 1993. Challenges in minority language programming in Canada’s Eastern Arctic: The training of aboriginal language interpretor-translators. Meta 38 (1): 45–50. Schröter, M. 2013. Silence and concealment in political discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Shimo, A. 2009. Tough critique or hate speech? A Calgary prof’s paper on the “Aboriginal industry” starts a war. MacLean’s, February 25. http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/tough-critique-or-hate-speech. Sioui, G. 1992. For an Amerindian autohistory. Montreal and Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Stote, K. 2015. An act of genocide: Colonialism and sterilization of aboriginal women. Toronto: Fernwood Publishing. TRC of Canada. 2015. Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future. Winnipeg: TRC of Canada. Von Bertalanffy, L. 1974. General system theory: Foundations, development, applications. New York: Braziller. Widdowson, F., and A. Howard. 2013. Approaches to aboriginal education in Canada: Searching for solutions. Edmonton: Brush Education. Woolf, S. H. 2008. The meaning of translational research and why it matters. Journal of the American Medical Association 299 (2): 211–13.

CHAPTER EIGHT THINGS FALL APART AS PUBLISHED IN BRAZIL: SEARCHING FOR A MOUTH WITH WHICH TO TELL THE STORY AMARÍLIS ANCHIETA AND FERNANDA ALENCAR PEREIRA

“I have never seen such a large crowd of people. Is it true that Okonkwo nearly killed you with his gun?” “It is true indeed, my dear friend. I cannot yet find a mouth with which to tell the story.” (Things Fall Apart, p. 36)

1. Introduction Besides constituting the core of the title, the quotation above from Things Fall Part by the acclaimed Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe is a guideline for the reflections presented here, and it is an example of the rich linguistic and cultural atmosphere of the novel. The poetics of Achebe’s writing fosters translation challenges and opens possibilities of theoretical reflections concerning its social and cultural context of origin. In the text, one finds words and expressions in Igbo, which may be translated or paraphrased, composing the linguistic scenario of the narrative. However, Achebe constructs his literary language also by introducing proverbs or expressions translated directly from Igbo into English such as “I cannot yet find a mouth with which to tell the story”, which is translated from the Igbo “E nwebegbi m onu m ji ako akuko ahu” (Ogbaa 1992, 223). Literary strategies such as these promote an estrangement effect that warns the readers of the territory they are entering. This posture is part of Achebe’s project to build literary references for his people while claiming the colonial language as his own and participating in the postcolonial search for voice and legitimacy. The “colonial discourse has fixed Africans as a

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people without history” (Gikandi 1991, 27), and according to this dominant discourse, they “gain history” after colonisation. Writers such as Chinua Achebe promoted a shift on this kind of reasoning by elaborating a literary project that was both politically and aesthetically successful. The idea of choosing this quotation as title is exactly to reflect upon which “mouth” a translator may have to find in order to “tell the story” of this people, that is, in order to translate such a novel. Literary texts considered as postcolonial are those marked by an aesthetics of a split between cultural worlds. That is the case in Things Fall Apart where Achebe uses the language and literary form brought by the coloniser to make room for the culture and habits of his ethnical group. As a cultural mediator, he intervenes in temporal and historical issues of his society to construct a written past. Achebe’s experiment with language had a large impact on African literature. Drawing on traditional Igbo oral culture, Achebe depicted, in Things Fall Apart and a number of his writings, this parallel between the modern world of colonisation and traditional beliefs of the Igbo people. The translator of such a novel may undertake the task of protecting this political charge, allowing it to resonate even when these literary works are geographically, chronologically or culturally distant. This postcolonial writing implies a plurilingual reading. In such cases, therefore, the translator must go through an analytical and critical process to understand the linguistic construction of authors such as Chinua Achebe so that they can review the multilingualism that is essential to the aesthetics of these texts. It is important that the translator be aware of this multicultural existence in order to recognise it in the texts. In this article, we analyse the Brazilian translation of Things Fall Apart and the context surrounding it. We shall proceed to a brief comment on the Brazilian linguistic and translation context, especially concerning the translation of literature from Achebe’s country. It is also important to note the main thoughts on translation studies related to postcolonialism, even from Brazil, in order to examine the contributions of a former colony to this field of study. We shall, finally, conduct an investigation into the Brazilian translation of Things Fall Apart by analysing some aspects of its paratexts and its translated text.

2. The Brazilian context Even though Brazil is a former colony, therefore also a postcolony such as Nigeria, the linguistic scenarios in the two countries differ. As a result of a late colonisation process, English became the official language

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of Nigeria, but the majority of its population did not share it when Achebe started publishing. In contrast, in Brazil, the violent colonisation period, which started in the 16th century, had turned Portuguese into the language of the greatest part of its inhabitants by the time Brazilian literature started to flourish in the 19th century. The Brazilian literary system has a long tradition in translation, starting in the 19th century. A good example is the wave of poets that started to translate French poets such as Charles Baudelaire and were consequently influenced by their (the French poets’) work (Candido 1989, 23–24), moulding therefore the romantic poetry of the country. During the 20th century, many important writers translated canonical literature (De Sousa et al. 2014). Some examples of these authors and translators are Graciliano Ramos, who translated La Peste (1947); Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Les paysans (1855); Cecília Meireles, Orlando—a Biography (1928) and Mário Quintana, À la recherché du temps perdu (1913). Translation has always been part of the Brazilian literary tradition. The editorial market nowadays presents a great volume of translated literature and the focus is not only on canonical European books. Many African writers, of which many are Nigerian, have had BrazilianPortuguese versions of their novels. The palm wine drinkard by Amos Tutuola was the first Nigerian translated work in Brazil. Under the title O bebedor de vinho de palmeira, translated by Eliane Fontenelle, it was published in the 1970s by the publishing house Nova Fronteira and Círculo do Livro (Dinis and Reis 2008, 9). In the context of Nova Fronteira, it was part of the collection called “Romances da Africa” [African Novels], which has published at least four other novels since 1976. Soon afterwards, Ática publishing house released another collection entitled “Autores africanos” [African Authors], which was published between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. Ática released 27 books, ranging from novels to anthologies of short stories and poetry. The collection was mostly composed by works written in Portuguese, which amounted to 18 books of Angolan, Cape Verdian and Mozambican authors. Only nine of the 27 books were not written in Portuguese and were translated. Six of them were translations of books by Frenchspeaking authors from Congo, Ivory Coast, Guinea and Senegal. Only three were translations from English: two from Nigeria and one from Somalia. This editorial project was a laureate of the prestigious Jabuti Award for best editorial production, in 1980, and best edited collection in Brazil, in 1984. These awards demonstrate the recognition obtained by this

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collection because of its importance and because it introduced to Brazilians a part of African culture that was previously unknown. They form a portrait of the editorial production of African literature in a specific period of history, and therefore, these choices have political, economic and cultural implications. The collection also stands out because of the prefaces or introductions, which preceded each novel. The selection of covers, prefaces and glossaries demonstrate that the publisher was worried about introducing works by African authors to the Brazilian readership. Ática publishing house used the strategy of publishing the novels as a collection, gathering writers from different countries under the label of “African authors”. However, the cluster-shaped collection reinforces a symbolic and imaginary construction of the African continent: It is important to note that regarding other literatures, like the European or North American literatures, their books are not usually gathered in a continental collection, for example, a collection for Danish and North American authors, and classified by continental criteria, as in the case of African literature, at least in the 1970s and 1980s in Brazil. Ática publishing house took the responsibility to make use of the epithet, considering that at the time these literatures were almost unknown to the general, potential Brazilian readership. Moreover, such strategy has been currently been avoided by most publishing houses ... that have published writers as Luandino Vieira, Mia Couto, José Agualusa, Nadine Gordimer, JM Coetzee, Chimamanda Adichie, not including them in a specific collection, and not reiterating their status as African or their respective nationalities. (Souza and Ribeiro 2011, 7)1

Things Fall Apart was published twice in Brazil, firstly in 1983 as part of the “African Authors” collection with the title “O mundo se despedaça” [The world tears apart]. It was then republished in 2009 by Companhia das Letras publishing house with a few differences: It received a new front cover, and some footnotes became glossary entries, signed by the historian and diplomat Alberto da Costa e Silva. The glossary did not exist in the first edition. However, the footnotes in the first edition present the same texts as the glossary entries in the second edition. In addition, both publications present the same introductory text. Companhia das Letras also published two other novels by Achebe, an essay collection and a children’s book. On the front covers of the three novels, it is possible to note an effort to standardise the illustrations, which could link the novels to one another. This strategy is interesting if we 1

Our translation – AA & FAP.

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consider that Achebe’s first three novels, Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1962) and Arrow of God (1964), are generally gathered together as a trilogy as shown by the 2010 edition of Everyman’s Library publisher, The African Trilogy, which is introduced by Chimamanda Adichie. It thus seems that, in English-speaking countries, it is also possible to find a generalised view when it comes to classifying African works as evidenced in the fact that Achebe’s three novels that specifically deal with the Igbos’ reality in Nigeria are often grouped under the name of “African Trilogy”. In the case of these three novels, it is possible to justify the use of this label since these pieces have marked the literary production in English across the continent, laying the foundation for future productions and building models that justify the investigation of an African literary system being set before the foundation of national systems. Currently, Nigeria has its own literary tradition that is evident in the dialogues between the works, which constantly refer to each other. Nigerian literature has developed more than those of other neighbouring countries, and literary criticism itself also gained strength. Thus, Nigeria has drawn the attention of scholars and readers from other countries. In Brazil, despite the large gap between the first wave of translation of African writers (1970) and the new wave (since 2006), we today see a considerable increase in the number of novels translated into Brazilian Portuguese. Starting with the translation of the novel Beasts of the Nation (2005), by the American-Nigerian writer Uzodinma Iweala, other Nigerian authors contributed to translations in Brazil, including Chimamanda Adichie and the Nobel Prize laureate, Wole Soyinka. The table below lists Nigerian literary works translated and published in Brazil. Even though many other African authors, from other countries, are contemplated in this new wave of translations, we chose to list only Nigerian writers who are more directly linked to Chinua Achebe. The list is ordered according to the publication dates in Brazil: Table 1: Nigerian authors translated in Brazil Author

Title/ Year

Amos Tutuola

The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952)

Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart (1958)

Title in Portuguese O bebedor de vinho de palmeira (1976) O mundo se despedaça (1983)

Translator Eliane Fontenelle

Vera Queiroz da C. Silva

Publishing House Nova Fronteira Círculo do Livro Ática

Things Fall Apart as Published in Brazil Cyprian Ekwensi Uzodinma Iweala Chimamanda N. Adichie Chinua Achebe Biyi Bandele Chinua Achebe Chimamanda N. Adichie Chinua Achebe

Wole Soyinka Chinua Achebe Chinua Achebe Sefi Atta

Chimamanda N. Adichie Chimamanda N. Adichie

People of the City (1954) Beasts of no Nation (2005) Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) Things Fall Apart (1958) Burma Boy (2007) Arrow of God (1964) Purple Hibiscus (2003) The Education of a BritishProtected Child: Essays (2009) The Lion and the Jewel (1959) No Longer at Ease (1962) How the Leopard got his Claws (1973) Everything Good will Come (2005) Americanah (2013 ) We Should All be Feminists (2014)

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Gente da cidade (1983) Feras de lugar nenhum (2006) Meio sol amarelo (2008)

Sérgio F. G. Bath Cristina Baum Beth Vieira

O mundo se despedaça (2009) O menino de Burma (2009) A flecha de Deus (2011)

Vera Queiroz da C. Silva Heloísa Mourão Vera Queiroz da C. Silva Júlia Romeu

Companhia das Letras

A educação de uma criança sob o protetorado britânico (2012)) O leão e a jóia (2012)

Isa Mara Lando

Companhia das Letras

William Lagos

Geração Editorial

A paz dura pouco (2013) As garras do leopardo (2013) Tudo de bom vai acontecer (2013) Americanah (2014) Sejamos todos feministas (2014)

Rubens Figueiredo Érico Assis

Companhia das Letras Companhia das Letras

Vera Whately

Record

Júlia Romeu Cristina Baum

Companhia das Letras Companhia das Letras

Hibisco roxo (2011)

Ática Nova Fronteira Companhia das Letras

Record Companhia das Letras Companhia das Letras

As it is evidenced in the table above, Chinua Achebe is the most published Nigerian writer in Brazil. However, his translations have been published much later than the original publications, which also happened to Wole Soyinka. In contrast, younger authors with more recent

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publications, such as Adichie and Bandele, had Brazilian versions only one or two years after the original. Adichie’s first novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), for example, is a bestseller, winner of the British Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007. Perhaps this international acclaim has aroused the interest of the Brazilian publishing market, or maybe there is greater interest in works originating from the African continent. The Angolan writer, José Eduardo Agualusa, compares the Brazilian publishing market to that of Portugal: Nowadays you go to bookstores to find books by Nigerian writers, for example, which are not published in Portugal, curiously. So it is another Africa, because in Portugal, a lot of attention is given to Portuguesespeaking Africa, but not the other Africa. But the Portuguese-speaking Africa yes, you have to think that Mia Couto is the second best-selling author in Portugal after José Saramago, with first editions of 30,000 copies. Therefore, all Portuguese publishers know they can make money out of Africa. In Brazil, it starts to happen something that happened in Portugal ten years ago. The situation was more or less equivalent. I believe that in five years, African authors will sell enormously in Brazil. (Agualusa 2006)2

We note that, in Brazil today, there are in fact many translations of books written in French and English by African authors. In 2003, the Brazilian government implemented a law, numbered 10.639/03, which provides for new curriculum guidelines for the study of Afro-Brazilian and African cultures and history in schools. This law, which is an important instrument for the fight against racism, intends to emphasise African heritage as one of the most relevant constituents of Brazilian society. Besides economic reasons that fostered investment by publishing houses in different literary scenes, this law has also enhanced curiosity, interest and the need to publish African authors.

3. Postcolonial translation studies and the Brazilian anthropophagic contribution Siting Translation (1992), by Tejaswini Niranjana, marks the beginning of the discussion of postcolonial translation, relating history, philosophy, poetics and representation in the colonial context. The general proposal regarding translation is to say that, in the way it addressed certain issues, the traditional theory of translation could not cover the peculiarities of the 2

Our translation – AA & FAP.

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texts from the former colonies. Niranjana initially brought up the question of historicity. According to Niranjana, in a postcolonial context: the problematic of translation becomes a significant site for raising questions of representation, power, and historicity. The context is one of contesting and contested stories attempting to account for, to recount the asymmetry and inequality of relations between peoples, races, languages. (Niranjana 1992, 1).

Postcolonial studies marked the beginning of a new perspective in translation studies and still arouses much discussion, especially concerning the attempt not to turn the translated text into a mere reproduction of exoticising discourses. The effort is for translation to become a modelling practice, which happens within these asymmetrical power relations inherent to colonialism. According to Niranjana (1992, 186), translation must abandon certain containing strategies for representing the other because these strategies end up reinforcing hegemonic versions of the colonised. For a long time, the history of the colonised peoples was that of the anthropologist, ethnographic narratives. It was difficult, therefore, to think that the theory of translation, up until that time, could exist for the contexts of postcolonial literary writing. Achebe is one of the authors who testified against the violence of the Western representation of Africa: He devoted one of his most famous, and controversial, essays to the racist imagery of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). One of the goals he sought to achieve with his fictional writing, therefore, was to give voice to the history which had occurred prior to colonisation and to provide forms of cultural representation that are different from those perspectives that regarded Africans as “objects without history”, as Edward Said (1979, 66) puts it. There is, nevertheless, “the desire of colonial discourse to translate in order to contain (and to contain and control in order to translate, since symbolic domination is as crucial as physical domination)” (Niranjana 1992, 34). Thus, literary representations of colonised subjects were, for some time, cultural translations of a certain reality, contaminated by colonial perspectives. Such a negative scenery, however, opened a space for writers such as Chinua Achebe to claim a different space of cultural representation. Therefore, even though containing strategies, translation contributed to the dissemination of these cultures, namely as static and immutable, that is, without a historical construction. Hence, paradoxically, translation also provides a place in “history” for the colonised. Rethinking translation and

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its theory in such texts is imperative so that translated postcolonial texts can also become a space for resistance. In their introductory text to the volume entitled Post-Colonial Translation, Theory and Practice, Bassnett and Trivedi (1999) describe the cannibalism practiced by members of a Tupinamba tribe in Brazil in the 16th century, and they compare this practice with the act of translation, which is explained after considering the following assumptions: First and very obviously: translation does not happen in a vacuum, but in a continuum; it is not an isolated act, it is part of an ongoing process of intercultural transfer. Moreover, translation is a highly manipulative activity that involves all kinds of stages in that process of transfer across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Translation is not an innocent, transparent activity but is highly charged with significance at every stage; it rarely, if ever, involves a relationship of equality between texts, authors or systems. (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999, 2).

At this point, Bassnett and Trivedi (1999) see translation as a forum for the discussion of conflicts and cultural struggles. Activism began to play a role in translation. It was also from that moment on, according to Bassnett and Trivedi (1999), that contemporary writings within the field of translation studies followed the trend of challenging the notion of “original” text. As Niranjana proposes at the conclusion of her study, to discuss the “instability of the original” within the postcolonial texts and reality is in line with this trend. Niranjana comments on the translation of an excerpt from the Vacanas,3 addressing important issues for postcolonial translation. She starts by stating that the representation of identity in this context is always fragmented. Such fragmentation is perceivable in the denomination of the period. Theorists and writers, such as Ama Ata Aidoo (1991), are concerned about the suffix “post” and what it evokes. The discussion revolves around the question whether the colonial period was indeed followed by a post, an afterwards (Aidoo 1991, quoted in Mongia 1996). Amid the very instability of the nomenclature of the period, Niranjana defines the instability of the “original”, the instability of the fragmented identity and fragmented speech. This inconstancy, as she mentions, can be, but not necessarily is, revealed by translation, that is, through meticulous work, as the author puts it, to discover the identification signs of the so called “original”. The translator may take distance from the hegemonic

3

Sacred poem of South India from the 12th century, decoded in the 15th century.

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attitude of the colonisers and contribute to demonstrating the complexity of post-colonial identity: The vacanas “claim” the postcolonial translator by problematizing the issue of representation, which is crucial in a context where nationalist myths of identity and unity are collapsing. It seems more urgent than ever to be aware of the instability of the “original”, which can be meticulously uncovered through the practice of translation. The arbitrariness of what is presented as “natural” can be deconstructed by the translator or her/his alter-ego, the critical historiographer. The drive to challenge hegemonic representations of the non-Western world need not be seen as a wish to oppose the “true” other to the “false” one presented in colonial discourse. Rather, since post-colonials already exist “in translation”, our search should not be for origins or essences but for a richer complexity, a complication of our notions of the “self”, a more densely textured understanding of who “we” are. It is here that translators can intervene to inscribe heterogeneity, to warn against myths of purity, to show origins as always already fissured. Translation, from being a “containing” force, is transformed into a disruptive, disseminating one. That deconstruction initiated by retranslation opens up a post-colonial space as it brings “history” to legibility (Niranjana 1992, 186).

Moving on to the Brazilian context, following these discussions on translation and original texts, a Brazilian poet flirted with similar ideas. Haroldo de Campos is one of the most well-known translation thinkers from Brazil. Acting as a critic, poet, intellectual, writer and translator, Campos proposed a theory, which also questioned the hierarchical position of the original text, when compared to the translated text. Vieira (1999), in her article “Liberating Calibans”, discusses the relationship between the concept of Antropofagia, also mentioned by Bassnett, and the poetic concepts of transcreation coined by Haroldo de Campos. As a concept, Antropofagia has been spread in Brazil by Oswald de Andrade’s manifestos in the 1920s. According to Vieira: Disrupting dichotomous views of source and target, Antropofagia and its application to translation entails a double dialectical dimension with political ingredients; it unsettles the primacy of origin, recast both as donor and receiver of forms, and advances the role of the receiver as a giver in its own right, further pluralizing (in)fidelity. (Vieira 1999, 95)

The concept as developed by Andrade would be enough to provoke a discussion of postcolonialism in Brazil. However, Vieira argues that the concept has quickly been swallowed by theorists with no digestion or forceful critical movement to fully understand its complexity. For this

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reason, Vieira highlights the importance of a second moment, in the 1960s, in which the concept has been recreated, mainly by Haroldo de Campos. By revisiting Antropofagia, Campos explored the term of translation and thus created several neologisms to describe the translation process such as “verse making”, “reinvention”, the “project of recreation”, “transtextualisation” and “transcreation”. Campos questioned logocentric issues used to describe the origin and thought about the literature, which was emerging in Brazil, as “the non-origin”, as the obstacle. According to him: The translation of creative texts is always recreation or parallel creation, the opposite of a literal translation. … Translation that unsettles the single reference, the logocentric tyranny of the original, … translation that disturb linear flows and power hierarchies … the poetics that disrupts the primacy of the one model—a rupture and a recourse to the one and the other. Translation can be servitude, translation can also be freedom. (Campos 1997, quoted in Vieira 1999, 110)

For Campos, translation is also a space for creation. The translator should have the chance to feel the freedom to develop her/his own work. Hence, he also questions the notion of authorship itself and opens up various possibilities for dealing with multilingual literary works, which were by themselves questioning their own origin. This is the case of authors such as Chinua Achebe, considered as “translated writers” (Casanova 2002) even before going through a formal process of translation, for he somehow “translates” his Igbo culture into English. Achebe is a mediator between the Igbo culture and the Western world, which is consistent with this notion of writers in the in-between, commonly occupied by translators: Translation as metaphor for post-colonial writing, for example, invokes the sort of activity associated with the etymological meaning of the word: translation as the activity of carrying across (…). In this sense, postcolonial writing might be imagined as a form of translation … Interlingual literary translation provides as analogue for post-colonial writing. (Tymoczko 1999, 20–22)

It can be said, therefore, that Chinua Achebe plays this role of a cultural translator. The activity of cultural translation reflected in his literature is intrinsic to the work of such writers. Nigerian literature, for example, rises in importance through constant translations. Note that written translation as it is traditionally seen only began, in some parts of the continent, with the arrival in Africa of Christian missionaries, in the

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19th century, who brought along with them the Latin alphabet. Since then, translations have had a considerable impact on African literature, and the most important result is the emergence of a written culture. The translation of literature such as Achebe’s offers the possibility of theoretical refection and opens space for a decolonisation of the translation practice. This is the notion of postcolonial translation that I defend: One that wants to escape from the commonplaces of dominant discourse. Bearing this notion in mind, I now analyse the Brazilian translation of Things Fall Apart, O mundo se despedaça.

4. Things Fall Apart in Brazil Even though postcolonial theory has been widely debated in academic circles and have even influenced some Brazilian authors, Brazilian publishing houses have not been influenced by it to the same extent. Most of the translations published in Brazil do not seem to be aware of the multiple implications of postcolonial texts. The publishing market has grown significantly in Brazil, especially since the 1990s when it became more professional and competitive. The data for this chapter have been collected from reports compiled in the survey of production and sales of the publishing industry annually done by the National Union of Book Publishers (SNEL) and the Brazilian Book Chamber (CBL) since 1990. Between 1990 and 2014, the number of titles published in the country almost tripled, increasing from 22,479 to 60,829, which offered a greater variety in the market. The larger supply of books enabled the publishing market to increase the number of pieces translated from Nigeria as seen in Table 1 above. However, the boom in the market has encouraged the production of translations, which were less critical and disconnected from the discussions in universities. O mundo se despedaça (2009), the Brazilian translation of Things Fall Apart, is a good example of this editorial reality. Thought on postcolonial translation could have provided interesting alternatives for this novel. Things Fall Apart could have been a suitable stage for enacting a different kind of translation practice, one that would recreate the “original” text or even try to respect its political charge. However, this is not what happened. Our epigraph (“I cannot yet find a mouth with which to tell the story”) is translated as “Até agora não tive ânimo para contar a história.” (Achebe 2009, 67). The word “mouth” is not translated as the equivalent “boca”. Instead, we read “ânimo”, which means “mood” or even “mind”. Thus, the translated text in Portuguese “empties” the estrangement effect of Achebe’s text in English. The presence of another language under the

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expression in English is flattened in Portuguese. Other examples in the translated novel are: As the Igbo say: “When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.” (Achebe 2010, 9) Como dizem os ibos: “Quando a lua está brilhando, o aleijado anseia por um passeio a pé” (Achebe 2009, 30) [As the Ibo say: “When the moon is shining, the handicapped yearns for a walking tour.] The saying of the elders was not true—that if a man said yea his chi also affirmed. Here was a man whose chi said nay despite his own affirmation. (Achebe 2010, 92) O ditado repetido pelos anciãos—de que, se um homem dizia sim, seu chi também o fazia—não era verdadeiro. Pois ali estava alguém que, apesar de afirmar-se com força, tinha um chi que dizia não. (Achebe 2009, 151) [The saying repeated by the elders—that if a man said yes, his chi also did as such—was not true. For there was a someone who, despite strongly asserting oneself, had a chi saying no] There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him. Mr. Smith danced a furious step and so the drums went mad. (Achebe 2010, 130) Havia um ditado em Umuófia que dizia: o batuque dos tambores acompanha o modo de dancar de cada homem. O sr. Smith dançava de modo frenético, e por isso os tambores também enlouqueceram (Achebe 2009, 207). [There was a saying in Umuofia which said: drumbeats follow the way each man danced. Mr. Smith danced frenetically and so drums also went mad]

In the underlined examples above, a tendency for formalising becomes evident. The word “anseia”, in the first excerpt, is the equivalent of “yearns”. So it does not carry the poetic image of “becomes hungry”. The choices for words and structures in Portuguese make the text less oral: The repetition of “man” is avoided in the translated text, breaking the rhythm of the sentence. The structures are more formal: “tambores acompanham o modo de dançar de cada homem” [drumbeats follow the way each man danced] is closer to “the drums accompany each man’s way of dancing”. These examples illustrate how the translation choices follow a certain norm, which may be well aligned with editorial standards but does not reflect the opportunity of “recreating” or “transcreating” the translated text in order to shed light on its specificities.

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According to Gerard Genette (1997, 27), paratexts are “a certain number of verbal or other productions, such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations. The paratext is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public.” Hence, I shall comment on the preface, the translator’s notes and the glossary of O mundo se despedaça. The preface of the novel (Silva 2009, 7–15), entitled Introdução: Este livro de Chinua Achebe, was written by the diplomat and historian Alberto da Costa e Silva who has lived in Nigeria. As the title of the text claims, it is a type of introduction to Achebe’s first novel. It is interesting to note that the content of this preface is mostly historical and anthropological, explaining the specificities of Igbo culture. The author comments on how Igbo society was organised before the coloniser’s arrival, and he explains some details such as the nature of titles received by the wealthy men of the tribes. This preface examines Achebe’s fiction as a sort of anthropological document and leaves the literary analysis to its last paragraphs: Achebe is a storyteller. In the best tradition of the Igbo people who love eloquence, who has the gift of speech in the highest regard, who knows how to play with it, although repetitively, as evidenced by the taste for proverbs. It is true that the author of Things Fall Apart sometimes abdicates concise and direct style and falls into repetition, ready-made phrases, worn metaphors, commonplaces. However he raises when he lets characters talk, or when he simply narrates4

These comments on Achebe’s style disregard his use of repetition as a way of introducing a certain flair of orality into the written text. The preface does not consider the literary contributions of Achebe’s written prose to African literature, his struggle to find a space for Igbo culture and language inside a text written in English. It does not comment, for example, on the epigraph of the novel taken from a poem by Yeats, which goes as follows: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere 4

Our translation (AA & FAP) from: “Achebe é um contador de histórias. Na melhor tradição dos ibos, povo que ama a eloquência, que tem o dom da palavra no mais alto conceito, que sabe jogar com ela, embora de modo repetitivo, como o prova o gosto que tem pelos provérbios. É certo que o autor de O mundo se despedaça algumas vezes abdica do estilo conciso e direto para cair nas repetições, na frase feita, na metáfora gasta, no lugarcomum. Disso pronto se reergue quando põe suas personagens a dialogar, ou quando simplesmente narra” (Silva 2009, 14).

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anarchy is loosed upon the world” (Achebe 2010, 4). Yeats’ epigraph illustrates Achebe’s notion of universality and approximates the European poetics of his African reality. Instead, by highlighting the historical value of Achebe’s narrative as a document attesting Igbo values, the author of the preface intensifies the local aspects of the novel and diminishes its literary relevance. Another aspect of this introductory text that must be emphasised is its anticipatory and explanatory nature. There is an episode in Things Fall Apart in which one of the characters says that White people “have no toes” (Achebe 2010, 53). The author of the preface anticipates this episode by saying: “The same was true in Umuófia where a chalk white man without toes—because he wears shoes—was legendary and improbable”.5 He explains why the inhabitants of Umuofia describe the White people as toeless beings (because they wear shoes) whereas Achebe’s narrator does not do that. The narrator, instead, lets the readers imagine and guess it by themselves. This kind of explanatory attitude refrains the potential resistance of the text. According to Doris Sommer: Some books resist the competent reader, intentionally. By marking off an impassible distance between reader and text, and thereby raising questions of access or welcome, the strategy of these books is to produce a kind of readerly “incompetence” that more reading will not overcome. (Sommer 1994, 524)

Things Fall Apart is the kind of book that proposes a kind of resistance such as that described by Sommer. However, the eagerness to explain the meanings of a different culture may preclude the reader from trying to answer the “questions of access” since they are given the answers beforehand. The construction of meaning, which belongs to the literary text and to its relationship with the reader, is blocked. The presence of a glossary at the end of the novel performs the same function, that is, it works as a kind of support for the reader, explaining every word in Igbo even though Achebe writes in a fashion that does not ask for the aid of glossaries.

5

Our translation (AA & FAP) from: “O mesmo se passava em Umuófia, onde o homem da cor de giz e sem artelhos – porque usava sapatos – era um ser lendário e improvável” (Silva 2009, 11).

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“Every year,” he said sadly, “before I put any crop in the earth, I sacrifice a cock to Ani, the owner of all land. It is the law of our fathers. (Achebe 2010, 14)6 Glossary: Ani—The goddess of the earth.7

As a cultural and linguistic mediator, Achebe introduces many words in Igbo in his novel, and he does so in a way that it is possible to infer meaning from the text itself. Even when he does not directly explain the words and expressions, the estrangement effect of a foreign word in the text is also part of the meaning of the text. In the example above, it is completely clear that Ani is a god or a goddess for she receives sacrifices, and the phrase “owner of the earth” makes it even clearer by establishing her domain. The glossary entry is therefore unnecessary. The translated text is even more obvious because the chosen word in the excerpt is “deusa” [goddess], instead of “dona” [owner]. Another example is the following: Unoka went into an inner room and soon returned with a small wooden disc containing a kola* nut, some alligator pepper and a lump of white chalk. (Achebe 2010, 6)8 Glossary kola: Walnut of the tree fruit of the sterculioideae family (of which the most common is the Cola acuminata), widely used in West Africa as a stimulating and refreshing drink. When chewed, its taste acrid, but its aftertaste is pleasant. It is usually offered to visitors, and also used as worship food to gods and ancestors. In Bahia [in Brazil], it is known by its Yoruba names, such as obi and orobô.9 6

In Portuguese: “- Todos os anos – disse ele, abatido – antes de colocar uma só semente na terra costumo sacrificar um galo a Ani, a deusa da terra” (Achebe 2009, 37). 7 Our translation (AA & FAP) from: Ani – A deusa da terra (Glossary in Achebe 2009, 233). 8 In Portuguese: Unoka foi até o quarto anterior e, de volta, trouxe um pequeno disco de madeira, com uma noz de cola, um pouco de pimenta e um pedaço e giz branco. 9 Our translation (AA & FAP) from: Noz do fruto da árvore da família das esterculiáceas (das quais a mais comum é a Cola acuminata), muito usada na África Ocidental como estimulante e refrescante. Mascada, seu gosto é de início acre, mas depois deixa na boca uma sensação muito agradável. Geralmente oferecida aos visitantes, é também uada como alimento de ofertório aos deuses e

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The narrative of O mundo se despedaça explains by itself the meaning and the importance of the kola nut. This kind of posture reveals an anthropological interest that culminates in a kind of transformation of the literary text in an ethnographic document. The glossary is the paratext that closes the book, but throughout the text, the reader comes across translator’s footnotes which also call attention to meanings and explanations: After a few more hoe-fuls of earth he struck the iyi-uwa. … Okagbue emerged and without saying a word or even looking at the spectators he went to his goatskin bag, took out two leaves and began to chew them*. (Achebe 2010, 60)10 * According to the African logic, the act of digging up the iyi-uwa would decrease the life force, then eating the leaves would restore this force11 As soon as he found one he would sing with his whole being, welcoming it back from its long, long journey, and asking it if it had brought home any lengths of cloth* (Achebe 2010, 5)12 *The cloth is a symbol of the African people history; some cloths carry a special meaning: in the tradition of the Peul people, for example, a folded cloth means the past13

In the second note, in order to explain the text, even though it does not require explanation, the translator adds a piece of information that does not directly relate to the text and mixes different African cultures and peoples. Firstly, the translator writes about “the African people history”, referring to a single history and a single people. Then, the example mentions the Peul people and their special use of cloth as well as the aos ancestrais. Na Bahia é conhecida pelos nomes que toma em iorubano, obi e orobô (Achebe 2009, 233). 10 In Portuguese: “Depois de mais algumas pazadas de terra, encontrou o iyi-uwa. ... Okagbue emergiu da cova e, sem dizer uma palavra ou sequer olhar para os espectadores, caminhou até o local onde deixara sua bolsa de pele de cabra, retirou de dentro dela duas folhas e começou a mastiga-las*” (Achebe 2009, 103). 11 Our translation (AA & FAP) from: “De acordo com a lógica africana, o ato de desenterrar o iyi-uwa diminuiria a força vital, daí comer-se as folhas que detêm essa força” (Achebe 2009, 103). 12 In Portuguese: “Tão logo a avistava, punha-se a cantar com todo o seu ser, a darlhe as boas vindas, após a longa viagem, e a perguntar-lhe se trouxera, de volta à casa, alguns metros de tecido (Achebe 2009, 25). 13 Our translation (AA & FAP)from: “O tecido simboliza a história do povo africano; certos tecidos têm significados especiais: na tradição peul, por exemplo, um tecido dobrado significa o passado (N.T.)” (Achebe 2009, 25).

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meaning it holds for them. However, Achebe’s text does not say anything about Peul people, who are known as “Fula” or “Fulani” in Nigeria and in English-speaking African countries, and they do not even live in the same region as Igbo people on whom Achebe bases his characters. In addition, in both notes, there is the generalising notion of an African unity concerning logic and history. Grouping authors in a collection used to be an explicit way of making a cultural generalisation. The generalised view may not be as evident as it used to be, but it is clearly there. Notes may become an implicit way of generalising African peoples as we have demonstrated. Those paratexts of the translated text do not express the anthropophagic will of translation as recreation nor do they propose a decolonising form of translation, one that would consider the literary text for its aesthetics and not for its anthropological content. Instead of bringing this Other closer to the Self, it emphasises difference, thus establishing distance. The literary representations constructed by founding writers such as Chinua Achebe are aware of “Orientalizing” (Said 1977) views concerning African socio-political and cultural realities. This awareness takes specific aesthetic forms within the text, marked by ironic lines that outline the construction of meaning. Despite this clear growing interest in the African continent by the Brazilian audience, shown by the number of published translations of African literature from all over the continent after 2000, some of these novels are still published as something exotic that must be penetrated with the help of glossaries and notes. Those paratexts ultimately homogenise the peoples’ cultural richness as shown in the exemplifying analysis of O mundo se despedaça. Today, Nigeria has a literary system in an advanced stage of development with literary events that evoke a consolidated tradition, and it should, therefore, receive more editorial care in their presentation. There are not yet as many translators with historical and political consciousness in order to escape the generalising classification of “African literature”. We cannot forget that Africa is a vast continent and populated by a rich cultural diversity. It is important, nevertheless, to highlight the initiatives of Brazilian publishing houses that have shown an increasing interest in publishing African authors. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the “African Authors” and the “African Novels” collections were published, it would have been possible to understand not only the editors’ decision of grouping the authors in collections but also the need to write explanatory notes and introductory texts, helping the Brazilian readership to perceive this foreign world of

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African literature and its contexts. Those collections aimed at introducing African literature to readers who had little or no knowledge of African productions. Nowadays, those collections do not exist anymore, and the authors are individually published. However, we observed that some Brazilian translations still carry the need to explain everything that could be “different” from what we are used to find in canonical literary pieces. This behaviour ends up reinforcing the idea of Africa as a uniform continent.

5. Conclusion In conclusion, we point out that, despite having conferred with postcolonial theories and ideas of recreation and rewriting, the Brazilian translation of Things Fall Apart preserves a certain formality and lack of innovative aesthetics, which may even flatten the aesthetic achievements of Chinua Achebe’s artwork. There is still room for further investigation and linguistic creation in order to confer more richness on Nigerian novels and their various possibilities of implementation into Brazilian Portuguese. The search for an adequate “mouth” to tell this story must continue.

References Achebe, C. 2009. O mundo se despedaça. Trans. V. Q. da Costa e Silva. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. —. 2010. The African trilogy: Things fall apart, No longer at ease, Arrow of God. New York, London, and Toronto: Everyman’s Library Agualusa, J. E. 2006. Interview with O Tempo Magazine, September 9. http://www.otempo.com.br/divers%C3%A3o/magazine/no-brasiln%C3%A3o-existe-paran%C3%B3ia-racial-1.318636 Bassnett, S., and H. Trivedi. 1999. Of colonies, cannibals and vernaculars. In Post-colonial translation: Theory and practice, ed. S. Bassnett and H. Trivedi, 1–18. London and New York: Routledge. Candido, A. 1989. Educação pela noite e outros ensaios. São Paulo: Ed. Ática. Casanova, P. 2002. A república mundial das letras. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade. Silva, A. C. 2009. Introdução: Este livro de Chinua Achebe. Introd. to O mundo se despedaça by C. Achebe, trans. Vera Queiroz da Costa e Silva. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras,

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De Sousa, G., S. Puttini, C. Mariath, A. Bispo, and J. Nunes. 2014. Escritores tradutores brasileiros e a tradução dos nomes próprios. Translationes 3 (1): 100–20. Dinis, N., and E. L. M. Reis. 2008. Três traduções de “I and my wine tapster in the dead’s town”, de Amos Tutuola. Belo Horizonte: FALE/UFMG. Genette, G. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation. Trans. J. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gikandi, S. 1991. Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and ideology in fiction. London: James Currey Publishers. Mongia, P. 1996. Contemporary postcolonial theory. London: Arnold. Niranjana, T. 1992. Siting translation. Berkely, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press. Ogbaa, K. 1992. Gods, oracles and divination: Folkways in Chinua Achebe’s novels. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Said, E. 1977. Orientalism. London: Penguin. —. 1979. An exchange on deconstruction and history. Boundary 2 8 (1): 65–74. Sommer, D. 1994. Resistant texts and incompetent readers. Poetics Today 15 (4): 523–51. Souza, J. M. E., and Ribeiro, M. F. M. 2011. De silêncios e memórias: A coleção “Autores Africanos” e a legitimação das literaturas africanas no Brasil. In: XI Congresso Luso Afro Brasileiro de Ciências Sociais. Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais. Salvador: UFBA. Tymoczko, M. 1999. Post-colonial writing and literary translation. In Post-colonial translation: Theory and practice, ed. S. Bassnett and H. Trivedi, 19–40. London and New York: Routledge. Vieira, E. R. P. 1999. Liberating Calibans: Readings of Antropofagia and Haroldo de Campos’ poetics of transcreation. In Post-colonial translation: Theory and practice, ed. S. Bassnett and H. Trivedi, 95– 113. London and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER NINE LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE IN LATIN AMERICA: TRANSLATING THE DREAM OF A DIFFERENT WORLD TANIA HERNANDEZ

1. Introduction Postcolonial studies have consistently scrutinised the existence of internal and external hierarchies of power that developed during colonial and postcolonial periods. Specifically concerning postcolonial approaches to translation, the emergence of literary fields within former colonies and their undeniable relationship with former colonial powers (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999; Tymoczko 1999) has attracted scholarly interest. Other spaces of cultural production such as journalism have received less attention. In his analysis of the social space, Pierre Bourdieu (2000) emphasises the relations of power that characterise the interaction within and between social agents, fields and practices, hence the pertinence of adopting a Bourdieusian framework to describe journalism in general and the role of translation in Le Monde diplomatique’s (LMd, henceforth) internationalisation in particular. Other sociological approaches to translation have also emphasised the significance of delving into the different stages and actors involved in the publishing industry to understand translation processes (Buzelin 2005; Heilbron and Sapiro 2002). To a lesser or greater extent, such approaches have drawn on Bourdieu’s concepts to either suggest possible ways to further their explanatory power or to illuminate other constraints that might affect translation, its agents, its practice and its products. Again, these approaches have focused on the literary field. Hence the need to resort directly to Bourdieu’s own studies on journalism and then to incorporate translation as a practice to study the power relations between different national journalistic fields. Studying the foreign editions of Le

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Monde diplomatique entails dealing with relationships of domination established between nations having either a colonialist or a colonised past but that are not necessarily bound to each other by this specific type of relationship. This adds a dimension to the interaction between the editions that require being considered under a postcolonial approach. Bringing together a Bourdieusian and a postcolonial-studies approach allows me to shed some light on the more or less subtle ways in which relationships of power and domination may be established through the adoption of certain practices and/or cultural products by other national fields with a colonial past.

2. On journalism according to Bourdieu When the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu drew on different microcosms of the social field—such as the scientific, intellectual, political and artistic fields—to illustrate the concepts of field, capital and habitus, he could not help but refer to the journalistic field. Interestingly, Bourdieu’s only work specifically devoted to the subject of mass media is On Television and Journalism (1998). Perhaps as a way to justify both the tone of the book and its brevity, Bourdieu stresses in the introduction that he wrote it primarily to reach an audience that does exactly not consist of scholars and intellectuals only. Based on his previous research on literature and art, Bourdieu’s analysis of both television and the print press aims to reveal “the invisible structures and forces” that shape what he designates as “the journalistic field” (Bourdieu 1998, 44). Along this line of reasoning, journalists and, I add, translators are social agents striving to meet both the objectives of their own field and those of other social domains. For Bourdieu, journalism constitutes a specialised and semiautonomous sphere of social action derived from a process of differentiation from other spheres. These spheres of action compose the social world, designated by Bourdieu as “social space” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Therefore, to understand and explain journalism as a “field”, it is necessary to discuss this concept, which was developed by Bourdieu to examine social realities and the actions that unfold within them. In analytic terms, a field may be defined as a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions. These positions are objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupants, agents or institutions, by their present and potential situation (situs) in the structure of the distribution species of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to the specific profits that are at stake

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Thus, a field is a structured system of positions occupied by agents or institutions that relate to one another through the establishment of relationships of power. Each field has its own structure and logic as well as a particular power of attraction or capital. Indeed, the field is structured around two poles: the autonomous pole and the heteronomous pole. Whereas the autonomous pole represents the specific capital of the field, the heteronomous pole represents those forces that are foreign to the field. A field consists of oppositions between the respective positions occupied by agents and between those agents’ varying degrees of access to and possession of capital. Bourdieu (2010, 469) regards such oppositions to be “fundamental oppositions within the social order”, that is, the oppositions established between dominant and dominated, between economic power and cultural power.1 The status of dominant or dominated can be accounted for in terms of the distribution of the capital that any given field regards as valuable. This means that a field is also a structure of power relationships between the agents or institutions engaged in the struggle to secure and organise the distribution of a specific capital that has been accumulated in the course of previous struggles and that influences the present as well as the future positions that agents might occupy within a given field. The dominant agents and practices are closer to the autonomous pole, and the dominated agents are further from this pole. The orientation of a field towards one pole or the other will define its degree of autonomy or dependence. The closer a field is to its heteronomous pole, the more likely it is that external forces will influence it. Conversely, if a field is closer to its autonomous pole, it is less likely for that field to be affected by external influences. According to Rodney Benson, field-theory and media scholar, there appears to be a general consensus among fieldtheory scholars to define such external influences as “primarily economic” (Benson 2006, 190).

1 The designation of economic power as the dominant force over cultural power highlights the priority attributed to economics in Bourdieu’s model. In order to substantiate this attribution, Bourdieu set out to analyse the alleged autonomy of the cultural field vis-à-vis the economic field. The French sociologist argued that the genesis and history of the cultural field are intrinsically influenced by economic factors, hence his characterisation of the cultural power as ‘dominated’ and of the economic power as ‘dominant’.

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The tensions between the positions occupied by agents and institutions exist in all fields as well as across fields. In consequence, no field is entirely autonomous but rather semiautonomous. Therefore, fields can be differentiated according to their specific capital and their degree of autonomy in relationship to other fields, most notably the economic and political fields (Benson 1999). This means that, while fields have their own rules and functioning logic, they also overlap and influence each other (Bourdieu 1998). The extent of such overlap varies across fields. In Bourdieu’s representation of the social world, the economic field is considered to be the predominant field (Benson 2006) although the journalistic field also occupies a privileged position. Nevertheless, the extent of the influence of the journalistic field on other fields is mediated by its subjection to the economic field. To understand journalism from a Bourdieusian perspective, it is necessary to theorise its position vis-à-vis the field of cultural production—a field where “various sorts of writers, artists, musicians, and scientists engage in symbolic production” (Benson 1999, 465)—and the economic and political fields. News is considered a cultural product within Bourdieusian approaches to journalism, which means that journalists and their practices are bound by relations of interdependence with other cultural products, other positions, other agents and other universes of social action (Benson and Neveu 2005). From this, it follows that, to exist in a field and thus to be able to change and introduce changes, fields, agents and products must be related to the other fields, other agents and other products. This means that, whereas fields have a certain degree of autonomy, they also influence each other: One can only really understand them through the analysis of “some particularly invisible structures” (Bourdieu 1998, 30), namely, the relationships between actors and fields. To analyse such structures and understand the “network of relationships”, it is first necessary to locate the position of the field in question. In On Television and Journalism, Bourdieu calls for a certain degree of caution when assigning a position to the journalistic field within the social space, mostly due to this field’s subjection to and influence on other fields. He therefore locates the journalistic field within the field of cultural production (Bourdieu 1998, 46). In turn, the field of cultural production and, by extension, the journalistic field are located within the field of power, that is, the field “at the dominant pole of the all-encompassing field of social classes” (Benson 1999, 465). Nevertheless, proving the prevalence of economic capital over cultural capital, the field of cultural production is dominated by those fields closer to the field of power, thus exhibiting what Bourdieu calls “a structural subordination” (Bourdieu 1996). Ultimately, the distance

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between any field and the field of power is the basis on which the inner hierarchy of fields within the cultural production field is founded. The following section addresses the inner hierarchy of the different editions of Le Monde diplomatique.

3. The internationalisation of an international monthly LMd is a “French monthly specializing in international politics having a ‘radical-left wing’ editorial line” (Harvey 2010, 298). This idiosyncrasy has been and still remains central to LMd’s agenda since it was first released in Paris in May 1954 as an international supplement of the French daily, Le Monde. LMd’s emphasis on ideological and editorial features has varied over the decades in keeping with the four individuals that have to date directed this publication: François Honti (1954–1973), Claude Julien (1973–1990), Ignacio Ramonet (1990–2008) and Serge Halimi (2008– present). Even so, it is fair to say that the work of the French journalist Claude Julien at LMd is widely considered to have paved the way for the current structure and editorial line of this publication. According to Ramonet (2005), LMd … owes him all the aspects of its identity: its editorial line ... his ethics of austerity and modesty, and his main ideas of refusal to any geopolitical hegemony.

Julien sought to provide LMd with economic and editorial independence and, thus, position it as a leading and autonomous publication in the field of opinion journalism. As part of this positioning strategy, Julien promoted what is currently described as the internationalisation of LMd, which, in hindsight, has comprised two main actions. Firstly, aiming to secure their editorial autonomy, LMd began enlisting foreign contributors to replace the journalists of the international section of Le Monde. For Julien, the critical views on specific foreign policies, political actors or events were bound to be more effective and legitimate if they were articulated from the inside, that is, by journalists, intellectuals and specialists who were either born or based in the country whose policies or issues were being criticised (Harvey 2009). Traditionally, international news has been tied to the level of economic interaction between nations (Williams 2011). Elite nations and countries are more likely to become news. Nonetheless, there are differences between news gatekeepers in ranking the importance of foreign news, and these are based on their cultural background (Galtung and Ruge 1965; Gans 1980).

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Coverage of other parts of the world could be characterised as episodic, as having little engagement with on-going politics and everyday life. Secondly, aiming to increase LMd’s geographical scope and distribution, Julien also fostered the launch of foreign editions. This second form of internationalisation started in the 1970s with the emergence of foreign editions in Portugal (1976), Greece (1977) and Mexico (1979). Later in the 1980s, other foreign editions of LMd were released in Argentina (1986), Hungary (1991) and Lebanon (1987). For more than forty years, foreign editions have been launched all over the world (Vidal 2006). Furthermore, although it has had some ups and downs,2 the foundation of foreign editions has remained constant under the editorships of both Ramonet and Halimi, to the point that it has become one of the defining features of the international spread of the French monthly. As a result, translation has become essential for the production and expansion of the French monthly as not all of the new contributors are able to write in French3 and as editions of LMd have emerged in different national territories. In the case of these editions, considered as foreign from the point of view of the French edition, there seems to be no regular policy regarding the translated status of the texts: Whereas some editions opt to include the name of the translator in each translated text, others just include the name of the translator in the general directory of the publication without specifying which texts have been translated by a given translator. Finally, other editions do not include any evident sign to indicate that some of the texts presented to the reader may have originally been written in another language. For more than four decades now, LMd and its foreign editions have been bringing the “dream of a different world” (Vidal 2006) to languages and national fields across the world. In Spanish, the presence of LMd has been uniquely consistent: At least one edition has been published in Spanish since the beginning of this form of internationalisation. However, this consistency does not mean that the editions have been published following the same model. In fact, as I shall try to illustrate in the next section, the editions in Spanish have experienced almost every translation and publishing model that has been available in the internationalisation of 2

For example, in 2006, there were more than 60 foreign editions of LMd, and it was translated into 25 languages. In 2009, there were 72 editions. In July 2015, the number of editions and languages has decreased to 37 and 20, respectively (Le Monde diplomatique 2015). 3 Despite the growing need for translators, their professional identity and the fact that the text offered to the reader might be a translation has never shown in the print or the online edition of LMd.

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LMd. At the time of writing, there were 37 foreign editions in 20 languages, and eight of those editions were published in Spanish in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Spain and Venezuela (Le Monde diplomatique 2015). The launch of the foreign editions is based on the premise that their content is composed mainly of translated articles from the French edition. However, for as long as this form of internationalisation has existed, different translation and publication models have been set in accordance with the publication guidelines established by LMd and with the economic, technological and informational resources available to the editions. This essay deals with the internationalisation of LMd in Latin American, Spanish-speaking countries, a process that has been fuelled by the journalistic prestige of the French monthly and shaped by the informational needs and specific journalistic fields of the countries where LMd has been distributed.

3.1 Le Monde diplomatique in Spanish: Dispersion of a translation project In the mid-1970s, LMd began an internationalisation process that consisted of the embracement of a more leftist editorial line with a sharper focus on third-world issues; of the contribution of foreign journalists, scholars and specialists; and of the launch of foreign editions. In an attempt to organise the emergence of the foreign editions, Vidal (2006) classifies them in two waves. The first wave comprises those that witnessed the launch of editions in Portugal, Greece, Mexico, Argentina, Hungary and Lebanon between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. During the second wave, in contrast, the emergence of editions has spread all over the world with foreign editions being published in such countries as Spain, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Argentina, China, Japan, England, Chile, Colombia and Venezuela, to mention but a few. As mentioned, at least one edition in Spanish has been available to Spanish-speaking readers of Latin America since the French edition started to be translated to other languages. It has also been mentioned that the story of LMd in the Spanish-speaking world reveals different translation and editing models. Along with the number of editions, the second wave also witnessed the beginning of a new translation model. The following paragraphs will describe each model, and at the same time, the underlying power relations that might arise from each model will be addressed. The translation of LMd in Spanish started in January 1979 when a “group of Latin Americans were given the concession to translate and edit” (Julien 1986) the content of LMd into Spanish. The edition was

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called Le Monde diplomatique en español. LMd’s early edition in Spanish was translated and published in Mexico City and distributed to various Spanish-speaking countries such as Costa Rica, Argentina, Uruguay, Spain and Venezuela. Unlike its European counterparts at the time, Le Monde diplomatique en español did not limit its content to the translated articles of the French edition and included a special supplement composed by articles originally written in Spanish that addressed Latin American topics. A new practice emerged with the launch of this edition: that of allowing the editors of the foreign editions to publish original articles which, in the case of this edition, were originally written in Spanish. At the time, there were only a few conditions: that the texts were included in a separate supplement, which, in total, should not be longer than six pages. These conditions were modified, perhaps as consequence of the quarrel with the editors of Le Monde diplomatique en español. The quarrel was about whether articles published in the special supplement should cover only Latin American issues. Accordingly, it seems reasonable to posit that restrictions to publish original articles in a foreign edition have changed in keeping with the editorial needs of LMd and with the particular interests of each edition. For example, Carlos Gabetta, journalist and former editor of the Argentinean edition (1999–2010), explained: It does not mean that you cannot publish about those topics, it is just that it does not make sense because they [LMd] already cover them very well. (Gabetta 2012)

In July 1986, the editors of the French edition of LMd accused those of Le Monde diplomatique en español of neglecting the quality of the translation of the articles of the French edition and of the articles in Spanish and of having poor circulation figures. There was a disagreement between the editors of the French edition and those of the edition in Spanish. As a result, the rights to translate and publish LMd in Spanish were given to another publishing group. This led to the emergence of another edition also called Le Monde diplomatique en español. In spite of losing translation and publishing rights, the editors of the “first edition” of Le Monde diplomatique en español continued publishing their edition.4 According to the contract signed between the French and the Mexican 4

It is not the objective of this essay to delve in the coexistence of these editions (cf. Hernández 2014). For the time being, I would like to point out that this unusual event was facilitated by the logic of the Mexican journalistic field which “saturated larger markets, but each survived disproportionately on political subsidies” (Hughes 2012, 381).

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editors, the “new” edition was also entitled “to add a special supplement called ‘Sección especial de la edición en español [Special Section of the Edition in Spanish]’” which was to be composed “exclusively of texts dealing with Latin America” (Julien 1986, 2). The length of this section should not exceed 25 per cent of the whole content. These rules may function has cultural grids that shape the topic and the ways of writing of the articles included because, as stated in the contract, “it should have the same quality and editorial line than the mother edition” (Julien 1986, 2).5 Accordingly, the French edition’s symbolic value can be imported to the foreign editions only. The editions, however, seem to have little room to contribute to such value. In the meantime, a new foreign edition of LMd in Spanish was launched in Buenos Aires in 1986. Like its Mexican counterparts, this edition included original articles to cater for its local readers. However, instead of producing their own translations, they acquired translations from Mexico. Like its predecessor, the translations of the “new” Mexican edition were acquired and included in the edition published in Buenos Aires. This procedure allowed the Argentinean edition to cut down on expenses and thus to emerge as a new agent and circulate the editorial line of LMd in neighbouring countries such as Uruguay and Chile. In contrast, by selling their translations to the new edition, the Mexican edition converted its linguistic skills into economic capital. Translation therefore is transformed into a capital that changes its form as it travels across national journalistic fields. This stage of LMd’s internationalisation was aimed at maintaining the uniformity of the translated content while allowing a slight diversity in the original content. To do so, LMd demanded that at least 70 to 80 per cent of the content of the foreign editions be composed of translated articles from the French monthly. The launch of the Argentinean edition led to some changes in the internationalisation of Le Monde diplomatique. Firstly, it facilitated the distribution and availability of the monthly within the Spanish-speaking countries of the Southern Cone. Secondly, it entailed the fragmentation of the content originally written in Spanish because each edition was producing its own articles for the special supplement. The translated content, nonetheless, remained practically the same. The two Mexican editions stopped appearing in November 1988. At that time, the Argentinean edition was already producing its own translations, and it kept on distributing Le Monde diplomatique en español in South America and 5

Contract between the editors of Le Monde diplomatique and Le Monde diplomatique en español, signed by C. Julien and F. Fasano, 1981

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Spain. The edition finally went out of circulation in 1990.6 With some adjustments, this “translation model” became the economic and symbolic platform that enabled the multiplication of editions in Latin America a decade later. In 1997, a new edition of LMd appeared in Mexico City. This edition was preceded by Le Monde diplomatique edición española (the Spanish edition), which was founded in Madrid by Ignacio Ramonet in November 1995. However, like the prior editions published in this city, Le Monde diplomatique edición mexicana produced its own translations and included local articles originally written in Spanish. An edition of LMd in Buenos Aires followed soon after. This edition was called Le Monde diplomatique, el Dipló, edición Cono Sur. However, unlike the edition of the 1980s, the new Argentinean edition did not buy the translations from its Mexican counterpart. Accordingly, LMd was translated into three different Spanish variants by the late 1990s. This situation did not last for long, and after a few years, the Spanish editions began to share a single translation.

3.2 The turn The end of the 1990s marks the beginning of the most powerful and long-lasting internationalisation wave that has reached Latin American shores to date. It all started with one edition in Mexico City and one in Buenos Aires, and other editions followed soon after. Table 1 lists all the editions that have been published in Spanish.

6

The next venture of LMd in Spanish was led by the Argentinean journalist Carlos Gabetta (2012) who, “after several conversations with Julien and Ramonet” released cuatro semanas y Le Monde diplomatique in February 1993. This new edition was translated and published in Madrid. Two years later, Carlos Gabetta launched cuatro semanas y Le Monde diplomatique in Madrid. Like the previous editions in Spanish, in addition to the Spanish translation of the articles of LMd, cuatro semanas y Le Monde diplomatique included its own texts originally written in Spanish. This publication disappeared after only 18 months. In spite of the short life of this edition, the Spanish-speaking readers did not wait long for a new edition of LMd: Le Monde diplomatique edición española was released in Madrid in November 1995.

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Table 1: Editions in Spanish of LMd (Le Monde diplomatique 2015; Hernández 2014)7 Country Argentina

Bolivia Chile Colombia Honduras Mexico

Peru Puerto Rico Spain Venezuela

Name of the edition Edición Latinoamericana de Le Monde diplomatique de Francia en español8 Le Monde diplomatique, edición Cono Sur, el Dipló Le Monde diplomatique, edición boliviana Le Monde diplomatique edición chilena Le Monde diplomatique, el Dipló, edición Colombia Le Monde diplomatique, edición Honduras Le Monde diplomatique en español Le Monde diplomatique en español Le Monde diplomatique, edición mexicana Le Monde diplomatique para México, Centroamérica, y Estados Unidos Le Monde diplomatique edición peruana Le Monde diplomatique edición de Puerto Rico [international supplement of the Puerto Rican monthly Compartir] cuatro semanas y Le Monde diplomatique Le Monde diplomatique en español9 Le Monde diplomatique edición venezolana

As can be observed in Table 1, the internationalisation of LMd in Spanish has had its ups and downs. This table also illustrates that, at different points, there have been up to seven editions of LMd circulating in Spanish, and up to six editions have been published in Latin American countries at the same time. However, the differences between the first and the second internationalisation wave in Spanish are not limited to the number of editions available. More interestingly, they have to do with the specific way in which the content of the French edition is circulating 7

Some of the counrtries listed here have witnessed the emergence of more than one edition. The dates included have been secured through documentary research. However, they must be considered has having a tentative character only. 8 Originally, Edición Latinoamericana de Le Monde diplomatique de Francia en español was launched via an agreement established between the editors of Le Monde diplomatique en español and the Argentinean intellectual Hugo Kliczkowski. However, while the conflict over the rights to publish LMd in Mexico City was unfolding, Kliczkowski was able to terminate the relationship that linked him to Le Monde diplomatique en español and reached an agreement with the editors of LMd (cf. Hernández 2014). 9 Perhaps to avoid confusion with the Mexican editions of LMd that were published in the 1980s, the edition of LMd published in Spain was initially called Le Monde diplomatique edición española when it was launched in November 1995. Then, after March 2008, it changed its name to Le Monde diplomatique en español.

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among the editions and the relations of power that arise as a result of this circulation. To a large extent, the purpose here is to outline LMd’s internationalisation as a one-way process and, more specifically, to draw attention to the power relations that mark the unfolding of this process in Latin America. For Vidal (2006), the “big editions” of the Diplo—the Italian (1998), the German (1995), the Spanish (1995) and the Argentinean (1999)—have all been founded in the second internationalisation wave. According to him, the “production of original content” to “cater for the specific needs of their readership” (Vidal 2006) and the coexistence of both print and electronic editions are all defining characteristics of the second wave. As mentioned above, the first edition published in Spanish was actually the first to pioneer the adventure of publishing original content in accordance with the editorial line and publishing guidelines of LMd’s French edition. As will be explained in the upcoming paragraphs, the editions published in Spanish were also going to be pioneers in what in this article is considered as the distinctive feature of LMd’s the second internationalisation wave: the emergence of a translation and text-production network where the editions are more or less central, depending on whether they produce translations and original texts or not. Each edition seems to be trying to imitate the original French edition and impose not only their version of the French texts but also their original articles. In the 1980s, only one version of LMd in Spanish was distributed among readers from Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Costa Rica and Venezuela. During the late 1990s, there were three editions producing both translations and original texts in Spanish. This situation changed by the turn of the millennium with the emergence of the Chilean edition when, instead of producing its own translations, this edition acquired translations that were produced from the Argentinean edition. A few months later, the Spanish and the Mexican followed suit. This practice has been implemented by most of the later editions. Along with the translated texts, the editions acquire the articles produced by Le Monde diplomatique, edición Cono Sur, el Dipló. While allowing the new editions to cut down expenses, this procedure has also helped the Argentinean edition to make some money. Besides this economic role, the circulation of translated and original texts has generated a network where translation is the main practice enabling the emergence and continuity of editions is enabled. Writing, in contrast, has allowed all the editions to have an editorial voice, however limited, of their own. The limits of this voice are clearly marked by the fact that the texts that are produced by the Latin American editions of LMd are hardly ever

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included in the original French edition. This position would seem to differ from LMd’s foundational mission of becoming a “newspaper of opinions” (Harvey 2014; Vidal 2006). Moreover, considering what has happened with the editions published in Mexico (Hernández 2014) and Peru, it would seem reasonable to postulate that LMd’s incursion in foreign countries has been done without the necessary knowledge of the new countries’ local contexts. Furthermore, more often than not, translation has been essential to bring in a cultural item originally produced in a national field with a colonial past. As such, translation has contributed to perpetuate certain colonial perceptions. Firstly, it is through translation that the content of LMd is made available to non-French readers. Secondly, the selling of the translated content has also allowed some editions to secure some financial stability. Thirdly, the circulation of texts, both translated and original, has also led to the emergence and consolidation of an asymmetrical network where the editions occupy more or less central positions in accordance with the number of translated and original texts they produce or consume. Editions rarely challenge accepted reportorial techniques or established news values and practices. The editions struggle to practise journalism in a meaningful and distinct way. Against the backdrop of the Latin American editions, it would seem fair to postulate that domination seems to be altogether subtler because there has not been a direct colonial-colonised relationship between France and the countries where the editions of LMd have been launched. Perhaps this could explain the willingness of the individuals to participate in the internationalisation of LMd and to give up their editorial freedom. In exchange for this freedom, the editors of the different Latin American editions have gained the opportunity to be part of a prestigious journalistic project and disseminate it in their respective countries. There have been some occasions when the foreign editions of LMd have fulfilled other roles than those that are originally attributed to them. For example, the early editions published in Mexico City were used to secure financial subsidies from the Mexican Government. This is illustrative of how the structure of the specific journalistic field where the editions are released shapes their development. In any event, at least in the case of the early Mexican editions, it is worth mentioning that they were launched at a time when the flow of international news was heavily dominated by USA newspapers and news agencies (González 1964). Hence, in spite of the fact that the editions were used to secure economic and political capital within the Mexican social space, they did interrupt the monotony of Mexican journalism, particularly in regard to international news.

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From a postcolonial perspective, LMd’s internationalisation could be described as a one-way process rather than a reciprocal one: The articles from the French edition are translated to Spanish to be acquired and published by the Latin American editions. However, texts produced by the foreign editions are rarely included in the French edition. The French edition controls the production of the news as well as the editorial guidelines to which all the texts of the foreign editions must adhere. The French edition has always preserved a practically total autonomy in relation to the foreign editions, and the legitimacy of its centralised consecrating power remains unchallenged. Furthermore, the limited access that the contributors of the foreign editions have to the pages of the mother edition is reminiscent of the tendency of central and hyper-central cultures to perceive themselves as “determining” peripheral cultures while simultaneously blinding themselves “to the reverse dynamic” (Pratt 2007, 4). It could thus be argued that some internationalisation models might hinder the very practices they intend to encourage. What happens if the mother edition does not have other interest than spreading its editorial line in a unidirectional way? Against a backdrop that suggests that there is little room for a two-way dialogue but that, nonetheless, indicates that there have been some strategies of resistance and negotiation—for instance, the inclusion of locally produced articles— the exploration of such strategies will illuminate how, although not openly recognised by the mother edition, translation might lead to productive forms of writing (Gentzler 2003).

4. Concluding remarks The internationalisation of LMd is still taking place, and as shown, it remains particularly visible in Spanish-speaking countries. The edition published in Buenos Aires now provides the other editions published in Spanish-speaking countries with the Spanish translation of the original French articles as well as with articles that were originally written for publication in the Argentinean edition called Le Monde diplomatique, edición Cono Sur, el Dipló. This means that, to some extent, this edition has become a kind of “translation and resource hub”. Each of the editions published in Spanish-speaking countries adapts the translation supplied by Le Monde diplomatique, edición Cono Sur, el Dipló to the dialectal idiosyncrasies of the receiving country. Additionally, each of these editions is free to include in their printed and online format any article written originally for Le Monde diplomatique, edición Cono Sur, el Dipló. The fact that all the editions published in Spanish-speaking countries only

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use one translation of the articles published in the French edition lowers production costs. In turn, the circulation of original articles published by Le Monde diplomatique, edición Cono Sur, el Dipló across individual editions of LMd published in Spanish could be gradually paving the way for a homogenisation of their respective editorial line. In contrast, the existence of various editions in Spanish, in both printed and online formats, forces them to compete not only with other media outlets but also with other editions of LMd. Instead of gathering a range of opinions under the same title, LMd could thus be regarded as a platform for the circulation of opinions that are aligned with the editorial line of the mother publication (Harvey 2009). This alignment proved to be crucial for the launch of LMd-Spanish 1. In the late 1990s, Latin American political refugees exiled in Paris between the 1970s and the 1980s launched foreign editions of LMd in Spain, Argentina and Chile. In spite of the prominent role played by the French edition, there still is an important variety in the use of different framings, translation and writing practices and strategies, as well as of different journalistic values. The ways translation and, for that matter, internationalisation are conceived and carried out are shaped by the socioeconomic and political contexts upon which they draw. In LMd’s model of news production, writing, not translation, is the practice that fulfils a decolonising role. In the case of LMd, more than one culture, more than one language, more than one journalistic tradition stands behind the texts to be translated. Translators of LMd are constrained by a fixed text. Contributors, who often act as translators, are constrained also by texts, by a myriad of preceding texts and by the editorial line drawn by these texts. The two types of textual production now converge in a similar edition; they are no longer separated by the means of a supplement. This may be a suggestion that the dialogue between texts and authors is open and occurring, at least regarding the editions published in Latin America. Translators participate in powerful acts that create knowledge and shape culture. Studying news production, distribution and consumption in terms of post-colonial translation makes us reflect upon the current ways in which former colonial powers continue to influence former colonial territories. Several years after the colonial period, the journalistic fields of former colonial powers have been able to go on maintaining some sort of language, content and editorial domination. Translation as a practice is pivotal in the writing and dissemination of postcolonial literature. It plays a central role in the struggle of marginalised cultures for acceptance and recognition in the global

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journalistic space. The use and practices of colonial languages are a defining attribute of postcolonial literature (Ashcroft 1989). A postcolonial perspective on the international dissemination of the news allows taking into account the transnational dimensions at play and providing a framework for understanding “power relations and relations of alterity” (Simon and St-Pierre 2000, 13), and it confronts the political and ideological underpinnings of an intercultural exchange characterised by a certain unevenness. Unlike postcolonial writers, postcolonial news translators are transposing a text, a culture, a way of understanding and representing the world and what is worth reporting about it (Williams 2011). The interaction between one of the leading left-wing publications and, in this case, its Latin American branches also hints at the internal logic of the press traditionally associated with said political stance. Against this consideration, it seems reasonable to posit that the political stance of the Left in the countries hosting a foreign edition may be influenced by the way in which their political counterparts, however geographically distant, articulate their positioning. Finally, the role of translation in the emergence and expansion of the foreign editions of LMd in Latin America is somehow similar to the role played by this practice in other Latin American fields of action such as the publishing, political and philosophical fields (Castro-Ramírez and Foz 2013; Wilson 2004). Such resemblance is promising in the sense that other studies could be conducted in order to illuminate what roles translation has played in the social field in other postcolonial Latin American nations at different points in time.

References Ashcroft, W. 1989. Intersecting marginalities: Postcolonialism and feminism. New Literatures Review 28–29:176–89. Bassnett, S., and H. Trivedi, eds. 1999. Postcolonial translation: Theory and practice. London: Routledge. Benson, R. 1999. Field theory in comparative context: A new paradigm for media studies. Theory and Society 28 (3): 463–98. —. 2006. News media as a “journalistic field”: What Bourdieu adds to institutionalism, and vice versa. Political Communication 23 (2): 187– 202. Benson, R., and E. Neveu, eds. 2005. Bourdieu and the journalistic field. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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Bourdieu, P. 1996. Journalisme et étique. Les cahiers du journalisme 1:10–17. —. 1998. On television and journalism. New York: New Press. —. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 2010. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P., and L. Wacquant. 1992. An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago: University Press. Buzelin, H. 2005. Unexpected allies. How Latour’s network theory could complement Bourdieusian analyses in translation studies. The Translator 11 (2): 193–218. Castro-Ramírez, N., and C. Foz 2013. La circulación de las ideas positivistas en Argentina y en México: editores y traductores (1850– 1950). MonTI: Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación 5:366–89. Gabetta, C. 2012. Skype interview with T. Hernández. September. Galtung, J., and M. Ruge. 1965. The structure of foreign news. Journal of Peace Research 2:64–91. Gans, H. 1980. Deciding what’s news: A study of CBS News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek. London: Constable. Gentzler, E. 2003. Translation, postcolonial studies, and the Americas. Entertext 2, no. 2 (summer). https://www.brunel.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/111146/EdwinGentzler-Translation,-Postcolonial-Studies-and-the-Americas.pdf. González, P. 1964. La Democracia en México. Era: Mexico City. Harvey, N. 2009. L’internationalisation du Monde diplomatique: entre “cosmopolitisation” et homogénéisation éditoriale. Pôle Sud 1 (30): 85–97. —. 2010. Le Monde diplomatique (France/transnational). In Encyclopedia of social movement media, ed. J. Downing, 298–99. Thousand Oaks: SAGE. —. 2014. L’internationalisation du Monde diplomatique: un concept éditorial hybride au confluent du journalisme, de l’université et du militantistme. Paris: L’Harmattan. Heilbron, J., and G. Sapiro, eds. 2002. Les échanges littéraires internationaux. Special issues, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 144. Hernández, T. 2014. Whither Le Monde diplomatique? A Bourdieusian approach to the role of translation in the Mexican editions of Le Monde diplomatique of the 1980s. PhD diss., University of Manchester.

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Hughes, S. 2012. Democracy in the newsroom: The evolution of journalism and the news media’ in The Oxford handbook of Mexican Politics, ed. R. Ai de Camp, 367–97. Oxford: University Press. Julien, C. 1986. Letter to the editors of Mexican newspapers and magazines. Julien, C., and F. Fasano. 1981. Contract between the editors of Le Monde diplomatique and Le Monde diplomatique in Spanish on June 18, Paris. Le Monde diplomatique. 2015. Editions internationales. http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/diplo/int/. Pratt, M. L. 2007. Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge. Ramonet, I. 2005. Claude Julien. Le Monde diplomatique. http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/carnet/2005-05-12-Claude-Julien. Simon, S., and P. St-Pierre, eds. 2000. Changing the terms: Translating in the postcolonial era. Ottawa: University Press. Tymoczko, M. 1999. Translation in a postcolonial context: Early Irish literature in English translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. Vidal, D. 2006. L’internationale du “Diplo”. http://www.mondediplomatique.fr/2006/11/VIDAL/ 14139. Williams, K. 2011. International journalism. London: SAGE. Willson, P. 2004. La constelación del Sur: Traductores y traducciones en la literatura argentina del siglo XX. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores Argentina.

CHAPTER TEN TRANSLATION AND THE ETHOS OF A POSTCOLONY: THREE CASE STUDIES MARIA TYMOCZKO

1. Introduction It is not easy to form a nation, but it is particularly difficult when the national territory emerges from colonisation. This essay explores three case studies of the role of multilingualism and translation in the transition from colony to nation, illustrating some of the diverse forms that translation can take and the diverse roles that it can play in independence movements and emerging nations. The cases discussed are the consolidation of the United States of America (USA)1 as a nation, the transition of the Spanish colonies in South America to independent nations and the struggles for identity and polity in Ireland with the dual emergence of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland in 1922. Let us begin with the meanings of the English word nation. The word derives from Latin natio, “race breed” (via Old French nacion and Middle English nacioun), and its first meaning is “a people, usually the inhabitants of a specific territory, who share common customs, origins, history, and frequently language”. The second meaning is “an aggregate of people organised under a single government; a country”. This is a geopolitical definition of the word, perhaps the meaning most commonly used in current discourses.2 The primary concept of a nation as a people who share distinct customs, culture and language as well as laws and rules that inform group governance continues, for example, in the designation of tribes of Native Americans as “First Nations”. 1 2

In some cases, just US, for stylistic reasons. Citations are from the American Heritage Dictionary, s.v.

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Both colonising powers and colonies can be multilingual, but it is rarely the case that the linguistic profile and dominant language of a colonising power and those of its postcolonies are the same. Postcolonies often struggle to constitute a geopolitical nation because colonies are often constituted from multiple groups or populations that are nations in the primary sense of the English word. Thus diverse peoples of postcolonies often speak different languages and adhere to different cultural practices, values and religious beliefs, which must be adjudicated. Such struggles are normally resolved by the time a country becomes a colonial power. For example, there are at least 1300 languages spoken in Africa but only 54 recognised states. The diverse languages, cultural profiles, allegiances and histories at times create internal hostilities within emerging countries that motivate conflicts, massacres and civil war in postcolonies. In some cases, such conflicts can be traced to arbitrary borders established by the colonisers at the time of independence that join former enemies or divide peoples that see themselves as one nation. The two forms of difficulty are exemplified by the arbitrarily drawn borders of Iraq which divide Sunni and Shia cultural groups while joining some of each of these traditional enemies in one country. The arbitrary division of peoples is also seen in the case of the Kurds in the Mideast and the boundary west of the Great Lakes dividing the USA from Canada that bifurcates a number of First Nations. In Africa, the problems are exemplified by Rwanda, South Africa and many other countries. Such features of postcolonies make it difficult to establish cohesive governments, laws, regulations, national standards, educational systems, behaviour norms and national holidays, not to mention publication standards related to the usual functions of a country. All such divergences can potentially destabilise and disturb the peace of a multifaceted society. The problems faced by postcolonies at present are not unique. There are ample precedents for many of the contemporary contentious issues faced by postcolonies that can be traced in the history of earlier countries and in empires that subdued and colonised other peoples: the Chinese empire, the various dynasties of Egypt, the Roman Empire, the indigenous empires of Central and South America and the Ottoman Empire, for example. Moreover, many nations of Europe that now pride themselves on order and civility not so long ago struggled with similar problems that led to bloodshed, the ejection of those who were different and so forth. Germany under the Nazis is a signal example, but that infamy is preceded by the slaughters during the religious wars in earlier centuries. Massacres can be found in the history of France during the violence against Protestants in

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the 16th century and in the Reign of Terror. The English are notorious for the systematic destruction of Irish culture in the 17th century and its cruelty during the potato famines that resulted in Ireland’s population being halved in the mid-19th century. The USA has its own shameful record of massacres and mistreatment of First Nations, and the records of Russia, the Soviet Union and China are no better. Similarly, many former colonisers pride themselves on the “rule of law” and take a patronising view of the difficulties of postcolonies but are blind to their own history. It is easy to erase the reality of the foundational era of an established nation. In the case of the USA, the early decades included significant fragmentation and a reluctance to cede any power of the individual states to the central government. The dysfunction of the USA included its failure to pay national debts and led to an uprising called Shays’ Rebellion in 1786–87, ten years after the declaration of independence from England. The insurgents almost succeeded in capturing the national armoury and inciting a civil war. The war in US history that resulted in the greatest number of casualties ever—far beyond the number in World Wars I and II together—was the Civil War fought in 1861–65, in which 750,000 soldiers (and an indeterminate number of civilians) died, at least ten per cent of the adult male population. The fighting was motivated by the interlocked questions of whether the country would remain united as a slave-holding state, whether the united country would repudiate slavery or whether the country would separate into two nations, one of which would be slave-holding. The US Civil War was fought 85 years after the Declaration of Independence and 80 years after the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. It erupted because of problems that had failed to be resolved when the country was founded. In view of the long period required for the consolidation of the USA as a nation, I find it problematic to reproach current postcolonies for being disorderly or slow to function well as established nations. The history of the USA provides a necessary corrective for assessing the difficulties of postcolonies that gained independence during the 20th century. In this discussion, I take it as axiomatic that widespread multilingualism is a characteristic of most postcolonies and that multilingualism and translation are almost always intertwined. This relationship conditions the types and roles of translation found. Communication is always a central concern in multilingual territories, but often, multilingualism has been a norm just as it is now globally (Bialystok, Craik, and Luk 2012, 240; Thurman 2015, 33). Thus, many populations and geopolitical entities have employed link languages, enforced dominant languages in official transactions or contexts, required normative multilingualism or used

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official translation as means of holding nations and empires together. Such cultural practices have been standard features of large, aggregate and diverse human societies for thousands of years: They are not solely the phenomena of contemporary postcolonies.3

2. Multilingualism, translation and the shaping of the USA as a postcolony The USA is seldom considered in discussions of postcolonial issues, but in many ways, its early history epitomises important aspects of current multilingualism and translation in postcolonies. The population of the English colonies that coalesced as the USA at the end of the 18th century was highly diverse in terms of language: It is a grave mistake to imagine the territory of the USA either then or now as a population of monolingual English speakers. A principal locus of linguistic and cultural diversity was the First Nations, the Native Americans who inhabited the land before European contact. By 1776, many of these people had been decimated by European diseases, displacement, annihilation and assimilation, but many Native Americans remained. Most of their vernaculars persisted well into the 20th century, and there are numerous native languages that continue to be vigorous. Moreover, in order to claim territory in the Americas, multiple European powers had franchised, financed or introduced populations to parts of the territory of the original Thirteen Colonies, notably France, England, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden; these populations continued to speak their languages in 1776. Speakers of other languages had immigrated to the colonies as well. They included Celtic populations from the British Isles—the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh—and Germans, who had come as settlers, some in search of religious freedom, speaking various Germanic dialects. For decades, the Dutch colony associated with New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan dominated the Hudson Valley and what is now the oldest area of New York City. There were (and still are) indigenous French-speaking groups descended from French colonists of what is now Canada. They spread southwards to New England, the Great Lakes area and down the Mississippi River as well as outward from French Louisiana. Spanish speakers were found in the Gulf littoral in what is now Florida and Louisiana. Throughout the colonies, 3

These social features and practices are feasible because the developing brains of human infants are keyed to multilingualism as a default rather than to unilingualism (cf. Tymoczko forthcoming, ch. 3).

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there were also Africans (mostly brought as slaves) and their descendants, some of whom continued to speak African languages. Many of the cities were conspicuously multilingual, and thus ordinary citizens often negotiated multiple languages. The two main link languages holding this diverse population together were English and French. English served as the dominant language in the British Isles and in most parts of the colonies that declared independence in 1776. French was dominant in territories that became part of the USA that had been originally explored and colonised by France, and French was a link language in other circumstances, including communication with various First Nations. Equally significant, French served as a link language throughout the Americas among the educated classes because it was the dominant link language of Europe from the beginning of the modern era (particularly from the 17th century onward) to the end of World War II. It was seen as an essential language for educated (generally male) citizens and part of cultural literacy; along with Latin it was taught by tutors and schools in the Thirteen Colonies. Most of the leading English-speaking patriots who gathered together to sign the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776 had some knowledge of French, and many were fluent.4 Translation taking the form of target texts that closely represent their sources was not a primary factor in the independence movement of the USA. Nonetheless, principles and ideas enunciated in Latin and French texts found their way into documents central to the American Revolution. Though at times the actual source texts were pre-existing English translations or summaries, the multilingualism of the educated population in the colonies and the use of French as a living language in much of North America meant that there was an extensive movement of ideas originating in both English and French throughout the population before and after the Revolution. Texts written in both French and English underpinned and motivated the revolutionary activities in the USA and France alike. The translation of ideas from French texts to English ones and vice versa can be clearly documented, as we shall see below. In many ways, it is impossible to separate the American Revolution and the French Revolution because of the multilingualism of leaders of each, the efficacy of link languages, the migration and rewriting of ideas across languages and the extensive contact between the two nations, including French support for the American Revolution. Though their 4

Some, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, were able to read and speak French sufficiently to serve as diplomatic ministers to France and to negotiate treaties with France.

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starting points were quite different, a common set of political ideas and ideals links the two revolutions.5 In the case of both the USA and France, conceptions about the polity and the state were derived from texts and authors read by both educated English and French speakers. Both movements were indebted to the leading writers of the Enlightenment, notably Locke whose ideas about the “natural rights of man” to life, liberty and property were foundational; Rousseau who promoted the idea of citizens being linked by a “social contract” and Montesquieu who contributed the formative idea about the separation of powers within the structure of governments.6 The French Revolution was also inspired in part by the example of the American Revolution and the documents of the independence movement, including the Declaration of Independence. Shared philosophical underpinnings, political ideals and a common store of texts—as well as personal friendships, letters and oral communication —reciprocally link the two revolutions and the formation of the nations that resulted from the revolutions. To understand translation in a postcolony, it is helpful to turn to André Lefevere’s work on translation as a form of rewriting. Within this framework, a source text and a target text can differ considerably because the rewriting process of translation is often governed by broader considerations than linguistic transposition alone. Such rewritings construct an interpretation and image of source texts and can differ widely

5

Differences include the long established tradition of rights in English common law inherited by the English colonies, including the Magna Carta of 1215 and the Carta de Foresta (Charter of the Forest) of 1217. This tradition stressed rights pertaining to property, freedom from interference by the government and access to common resources such as the forests, with the Charter of the Forest guaranteeing protection of the commoners from both the king and the aristocracy. A reassertion of the rights of the people vis-a-vis the English king was inscribed in the so-called English Bill of Rights of 1689 associated with the restoration of the English monarchy. The acceptance of English common law and hence the English tradition of rights were written into the US Constitution. Levy (1999) discusses other important differences: The American territories of England had skipped a feudal stage, there was no aristocracy, and the status and wealth of citizens were relatively uniform. Together these cultural features made discourses about rights natural to the leaders of the Thirteen Colonies. 6 Montesquieu is the author most frequently quoted before the Revolution in English America (see Lutz 1984). Locke’s Treatises on Government (1689) also contributed to the view that government is a social contract that can be modified or revoked by the people.

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among themselves, depending on their purpose.7 In the case of the American and French revolutions, one of the clearest textual examples of translation-as-rewriting of ideas across the two languages and the two revolutionary movements is the relationship between the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, hereafter “Déclaration”), adopted and finalised by the National Constituent Assembly of France on 27 August 1789, and the US Bill of Rights, the result of a series of amendments to the Constitution adopted by the First Congress of the USA on 24–25 September 1789 for ratification by the states.8 Both documents were framed, debated and finalised almost simultaneously, and both are indebted to the Declaration of Rights (drawn up by George Mason) that stands at the head of the constitution of the state of Virginia and was adopted on 12 June 1776, a few weeks before the Declaration of Independence was signed on 4 July 1776 (cf. Levy 1999, 9, 272–80; Soria 1987, 213).9 In both countries, moreover, there had been lively discourse about formal statements of rights for some time. The issue had arisen at the outset of the Thirteen Colonies’ decision to declare independence, and by 1780, most states had included some form of a declaration of rights in their constitutions. The matter had been actively debated during the Constitutional Convention that framed the US Constitution in 1787. The lack of a Bill of Rights in the Constitution was one of the most controversial issues that impeded its adoption after it was sent to the states for ratification, and the willingness to add a bill of rights was one of the points that candidates for election to the First Congress took a stand on in 1788. Thus when Congress was convened in March 1789, the issue was part of the mandate for many members of Congress. Similarly, the question arose at an early stage of the French Revolution. As early as 12 January 1789, Jefferson (who served as a US diplomat to France during 7

See Lefevere (1992) for his most extensive statement about this aspect of translation. 8 Ten of the proposed changes became the first ten amendments of the Constitution after having been ratified by the requisite number of states in December 1791. 9 The Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, is another important part of this textual lineage, and it too is full of the language of the rights of citizens and of a people, most famously the statement at the outset “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” and closing with the assertion that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES and that they are Absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown” (quoted from Rossiter 2003, 528, 532 sic).

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the period 1784–90 and as minister to France in 1789) was privy to the revolutionary process in France and wrote to James Madison: Every body [sic] here is trying their hands at forming declarations of rights. As something of that kind is going on with you also, I send you two specimens from hence. The one is by our friend [Lafayette] of whom I have just spoken.10

Thus Madison was furnished early on with French models of a declaration of rights. The filiation of the texts becomes even more apparent when the specifics of the processes by which each document was adopted are considered. The question of the rights of man and the need for a constitution were discussed in the French Assembly in June 1789, and a constitutional committee was formed which recommended that a statement of rights be the first article of the constitution (Sydenham 1965:46, 56; Soria 1987:213). On 11 July, the Marquis de Lafayette formally proposed a statement of rights based on the Virginia Declaration of Rights (possibly furnished by Jefferson, a Virginian like Madison). In drawing up his document, Lafayette had consulted with Jefferson and furnished Jefferson with the proposed text. A copy of the document annotated in Jefferson’s hand survives (Thompson 1985, 87). Other competing forms of a declaration of rights were also presented to the committee, a number of drafts were considered, and on 27 July, the committee reported back to the Assembly (Soria 1987, 213). When the Assembly abolished feudal rights on 4 August 1789, the need for a statement of rights became imperative because the Assembly had eradicated the foundation of the Ancien Régime. It was necessary to establish a new order based on a solid de jure foundation. Thus on 4 August, the Assembly also decided that a Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen should stand at the head of France’s constitution (Sydenham 1965, 63). On 12 August, a new committee of five was named to prepare the Déclaration des droits (Soria 1987, 215). A number of rival proposals were again considered, and the committee reported back to the Assembly on 19 August with a text in 24 articles based on the American model presented by Lafayette but much more far reaching (Thompson 1985:88, Soria 1987:221). The text was then debated, modified in the Assembly, eventually agreed upon in 17 articles and announced with the 10

Texts of the correspondence quoted in this section can be found online at founders.archives.gov. A convenient collection of the Madison-Jefferson correspondence is found in Lloyd (n.d.-b).

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last pieces of text finalised on 27 August (Thompson 1985, 81; cf. Soria 1987, 215). Almost every article of the Déclaration related directly to some abuse by the old order (Sydenham 1965, 63). The adoption process of the US Bill of Rights has similarities to the process leading to the Déclaration des droits. Many of the constitutions of the individual states included some form of protection for the people’s rights similar to the Declaration of Rights in the Virginia constitution, but the Articles of Confederation, the first governing framework for the USA, did not. Although the Articles worked well enough to coordinate the war effort against England, they failed to raise sufficient taxes to fund the operations of the new nation and to pay the nation’s debts. Shays’ Rebellion was only one of the many signs of the insufficiency of the Articles of Confederation, but after the Rebellion, it became clear that a stronger federal form of government was needed to hold the nation together.11 A Constitutional Convention was convened in 1787 to frame a new document that would better serve the needs of the emerging nation. The Convention worked in secret for four months and submitted the proposed Constitution to the states for ratification in September 1787. By September 1788, eleven of the states had ratified it, and the transition to Constitutional government was begun. The omission of a bill of rights in the Constitution had been one of the main objections to the ratification of the document in 1787, in part because many ordinary citizens throughout the new nation wanted the reassurance of guaranteed freedoms if the federal government were to be strengthened in replacing the Articles of Confederation.12 Madison, a Virginian and a leading figure in the Constitutional Convention, promised to work toward such a goal if elected to the First Congress. After winning a seat in the House of Representatives, he resumed correspondence about a bill of rights with Jefferson. Ironically, Jefferson was available in person for the discussion of human rights with Lafayette while with Madison he was a trans-Atlantic correspondent. Like Lafayette, Madison began his work on a bill of rights with the Virginia constitution, but in the interim, many other statements about rights had been written for the constitutions of most of the states. The states had also made suggestions for amendments related to a bill of rights during the process of ratifying the Constitution. Madison collated these various statements into a series of proposed amendments for the US Constitution, also incorporating what was best from the various statements 11

Failure to give American soldiers their promised payment after the War of Independence was an important factor motivating Shays’ Rebellion. 12 See Rossiter (2003, 509–15), Levy (1999, 10–43).

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about rights in the state constitutions.13 He also had to hand drafts of the French Déclaration. Madison presented his proposed amendments on the floor of the House of Representatives in a stirring speech on 8 June 1789 (the same month in which the rights committee was formed by the Assembly in France). The subsequent progress to adoption of the Bill of Rights was complex and lengthy, but ten of the amendments were ratified in December 1791. Grouped together at the end of the Constitution (rather than inserted directly into the original text), they were even more conspicuous than Madison had envisioned and became known as “the Bill of Rights”. Most of Madison’s ideas were retained, even as his text was streamlined, improved and made stronger.14 Because Madison’s amendments were designed to be a set of restraints on the US government, their aim was very different from the goal of the Déclaration des droits, which served as a philosophical and legal foundation for government. That is, the two rewritings of the Virginia Declaration of Rights had very different goals and results, even though their beginnings and processes were similar. The links between the two traditions of rights are traceable to personal communication and consultation with Thomas Jefferson who is key to the evolution of both the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Bill of Rights. He knew the antecedent English and American discourses about rights and their philosophical foundations. He was also the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and responsible for its opening and closing statements, asserting the rights of the colonists to end their ties with Great Britain. By omitting any reference to rights pertaining to property in the 13

The Massachusetts constitution provided the strongest legal basis for the finished Bill of Rights in part because of its strong wording throughout (shall rather than ought to) and because, as the last constitution to be written by the original colonies, it was also the most comprehensive statement of rights (see Levy 1999, 10). I am indebted on this point to Alexei Tymoczko J.D. 14 The proposal’s progress through Congress was slow. The proposed amendments were assigned to a committee (including Madison) which reported back in a week, adding additional freedoms. The debate in the House of Representatives brought significant changes, principally the decision to append the amendments to the Constitution rather than insert them directly into the text. After the amendments passed the House, they went to the Senate where the proposal passed with significant changes. The text went to a conference committee where the different congressional bills were reconciled, and the final document was passed by the two houses of Congress on 24–25 September 1789, a month after the Déclaration des droits was completed by the French Assembly. It took an additional two years in the USA for the amendments to be ratified by a sufficient number of states, however, and they were only added to the Constitution on 15 December 1791.

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opening of the Declaration of Independence, he eliminated language (“property”) that could be construed as limiting the purview of “all men” with respect to gender or race (by those who considered African slaves primarily as property). As the idea for the French Déclaration took shape, Lafayette consulted with Jefferson who read and annotated a draft of Lafayette’s document. Simultaneously Jefferson was also corresponding with James Madison who was drafting the Bill of Rights for the Constitution of the USA and who received versions of the French document from Jefferson. Jefferson’s support of a Bill of Rights and his articulation of the reasons for the document were decisive in Madison’s own views of the question and in Madison’s efforts to secure the passage of the amendments to the Constitution (see Levy 1999, 31–35). The translational relationship between the two texts was thus mediated by specific individuals and key friendships linking bilinguals in the early days of the USA as a postcolony. Here the friendship of Jefferson with both Lafayette and Madison is emblematic of how translation can occur in the context of a postcolony.15 As Jefferson corresponded with Madison from France about the Bill of Rights and later when he returned to North America, he in turn became an envoy of French ideas and the French view of human rights to the USA when he returned in 1790 to serve as the first US Secretary of State, in which capacity he oversaw the ratification of the Bill of Rights. This example illuminates the role of personal affiliations, multilingualism and both oral and written interchange across languages, revolutionary movements and documents in emerging nations. The process of translation in this instance epitomises translation as rewriting. It involves interlingual and intralingual linguistic transposition, cultural adaptation, specificity of location and context, political affiliations of translators and the collective alteration of texts during group and legislative processes of adoption, among other non-standard features of

15

Jefferson had close ties with these two men framing the documents about human rights in France and the USA. Lafayette had been a supporter of the American Revolution from the time of his youth and was a friend of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Jefferson. Jefferson is known for his achievements as a military leader in the American Revolution. Less than a decade later, Jefferson worked with Lafayette while the latter was involved in drafting the Déclaration. Lafayette knew about the text of the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Bill of Rights and the 1787 American discourses about the necessity of a Bill of Rights in a constitution, if only from conversations with Jefferson. Similarly Jefferson had personal ties with Madison, who was also a Virginian, had been Jefferson’s protegé and had worked closely with Jefferson in the USA.

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translation (cf. Marais 2014).16 Translation in such circumstances, specifically postcolonies in this case, can result in a wide divergence of texts even as the texts resulting have great importance both locally and internationally. Note that, in this case study, the outcome of the translational activity resulted in very different reformulations of text and also very different text types—namely a declaration of foundational and universal rights, on the one hand, and a set of constitutional amendments, on the other. The texts diverge in intent as well: One specifies the universal foundation of the relationship between citizens and any government while the other specifies a citizen’s precise legal rights with respect to a specific nation in a specific political context. The two documents also stand out because there is no identifiable translator or group of translators for either one. Both were subject to decisions by a variety of groups at multiple stages of framing the initial text and then debate by legislative constituencies. Thus, they reflect the interests, ideas, interpretations, formulations and words of many voices. That process of collective writing, alteration and rewriting in both cases is one cause of the divergence of the two statements about rights. In the case of France, the document became an eloquent statement stressing the rights of human beings everywhere and at all times. This occurred in part because the National Constituent Assembly was establishing a foundation for government from the ground up and because it represented the motivations, interests and views of a much broader set of classes, races and ethnicities among the revolutionaries than was found among those in the legislative bodies that discussed and ratified the amendments to the Constitution of the USA. The framers of the Bill of Rights in the USA were not only less varied with respect to class, race and ethnicity, they also included a substantial number of slave holders.17

16

In the case of the USA, the Bill of Rights had 17 articles when it was approved by the House of Representatives, 12 when approved by the Senate, 12 when approved by Congress, but only 10 were ratified by the states, which became the ten amendments added to the Constitution. At each stage, changes in language were introduced. (The full texts at each stage are found in Levy [1999; cf. Lloyd n.d.-a] under the rubric “Bill of Rights”.) Similar stages characterize the development of the Déclaration, which was presented to the Constituent Assembly in the form of 24 articles but approved as 17 articles. 17 We should note, however, that the rights enunciated by both the Déclaration and the Bill of Rights were interpreted as reserved for men. Women were initially excluded from those public rights in both countries, leading to immediate dismay and outcry on the part of female revolutionaries in France. In the USA, there is still no constitutional guarantee of equal rights for women.

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A fundamental difference thus is that the French document makes a universal statement about human rights while the US document is limited in its focus to an individual’s precise legal entitlements with respect to a specific nation in a specific political context. Soria (1987, 222) characterises the Déclaration as a “morale politique” whereas the Bill of Rights is “une instrumentation juridique”. In part, the universalist ethos of the French declaration about human rights was blocked in the development of the US Bill of Rights because of the ethos of the emerging nation as a slave-holding nation. The southern states in particular were heavily invested in and committed to the refusal to recognise the human rights of a large number of their citizens, namely the slaves.18 This refusal is reified in the original text of the Constitution adopted in 1787, which does not recognise slaves as full persons. Their lack of full standing is embodied in the original text of Article I, section 2, which established a slave’s worth (for such things as representational value in Congress and tax levies) as being 3/5 the value of a free person. This provision was voided by the fourteenth amendment to the US Constitution ratified in July 1868 after the Civil War was won by the north. The US Bill of Rights was thus shaped by and entailed an accommodation to slavery, which was overturned and changed only by massive bloodshed, and the focus on legal rights versus human rights remains in the Bill of Rights. Thus the French Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen is rightly the basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in December 1948. The differences in the ethos of the two documents and in the contexts of France and the USA at the time tell us a great deal about the USA as a postcolony and about postcolonies in general. This example illustrates that postcolonies often inherit and continue some of the worst features of the original colonial structures and that such features shape the emergent postcolony. Neither the political structure nor the ethos that supports a postcolony is easy to change. In the USA, it took almost a century, culminating in a devastating war, to gain a formal commitment to the ideal of universal human rights, a commitment that is still not fully actualised in practice either with respect to race or gender.19 The problems and ethos of 18 Ethos is defined in this essay in its ordinary-language sense, namely “the disposition, character, or attitude peculiar to a specific people, culture, or group that distinguishes it from other peoples or groups; fundamental values or spirit; mores” (American Heritage Dictionary, s.v.). 19 The residual conflict over this ideal is illustrated by the atrocities in the USA at present with respect to police treatment of Black citizens and the movement that has resulted, namely Black Lives Matter.

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a colony and the colonising power are often—perhaps usually—inherited by a postcolony. They are manifest and can be traced, as in this case, in textualised forms of translation as well as in historical events. The links between the cultures of France and the USA, the discourses shared, the common philosophical frameworks and the revolutionary documents all indicate that it is impossible to adequately understand the emergence and growth of the USA as a postcolony without incorporating some consideration of the realities of multilingualism, link languages and reciprocal international translational processes that take unexpected forms, including epistolary exchanges, oral consultations, the annotations of drafts of a related document and group processes of rewriting, involving multiple translators with specific vested interests. They illustrate as well the role of rewriting and translational activity in determining the ethos and historical directions that postcolonies take in nation formation, directions that can require many decades or centuries to correct.

3. The translation of the colonies in Hispanic America to independent nations Like the independence of the USA, the revolutionary movements in Hispanic America constitute an important stage of the independence of colonies worldwide. Compared to the translational activity discussed above in relation to the formation of the USA, translation in the history of the independence movement in Hispanic America is relatively straightforward: There are source texts and target texts, translators and audiences, paratexts and editors, censors and publishers, and other familiar features commonly discussed in descriptive studies of translation. Because the role of translation in these independence movements has been well documented by the research group at the Université de Montréal led by Georges Bastin, here I base my argument on their findings, specifically the article by Georges Bastin, Álvaro Echeverri and Ángela Campo (2010), “Translation and the Emancipation of Hispanic America”. They have mapped the extensive program of textual translation into Spanish of documents that emerged from the revolutions in the USA and France, and they have analysed the roles these translations played in Hispanic America. Thus, there is a linear relationship between the translation program considered in the previous case and the liberation of Spain’s American colonies. By the 18th century, the criollos (those of Spanish descent born in the colonies) of Hispanic America included an educated core familiar with Enlightenment ideals: They read books by Enlightenment authors, owned

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libraries, supported a lively publishing industry and circulated ideas through regional periodicals (cf. Bastin, Echeverri and Campo 2010, 42– 48). A great deal of this information circulated orally, but print culture was essential for developing a broad community of support for political change and for building a revolutionary movement large enough to achieve independence. The foundational materials of the Enlightenment and the early revolutionary writings of the period were in French or English. Thus translation into Spanish was essential for the development of a broad base committed to independence.20 Unlike the English colonies in North America where there was little or no censorship of the press during the revolutionary period and relatively little difficulty importing books and other written materials, Spain had tightly controlled the flow of information to its colonies through an institutionalised program of censoring materials exported to the colonies, including embargoes on the importation of proscribed books, a system inherited from the Inquisition (Bastin, Echeverri and Campo 2010, 45). The Déclaration des droits de l’homme was banned for circulation in the Spanish territories by the Tribunal of the Inquisition of Cartagena within months of its promulgation in 1789, and Spanish authorities tightened their control over printed materials and ideas originating in France in 1790 (ibid., 50). Thus the free circulation of revolutionary materials in Hispanic America was limited, though in fact it was impossible to fully control the entire coast line of South America. Moreover, proximity to English and French islands in the Caribbean also gave access to materials in those languages (ibid., 45). As Bastin, Echeverri and Campo indicate, translations into Spanish were made of many of the key documents produced by the revolutions in the USA and France, and many of these documents circulated despite the efforts of the Spanish authorities. They were translated into Spanish by Latin American patriots for a broad range of residents in Spain’s American colonies, and many of the translators were also physically engaged in resistance against the colonial power. In discussing the role of translations into Spanish related to the revolutionary movements of Hispanic America, Bastin, Echeverri and Campo focus on the translation of the following documents: the 1789 version of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme; the longer 1793 version of the Déclaration; the Declaration of Independence of the USA; the Constitution of the USA; the constitutions of various 20

Note that educated Hispanic Americans, like those in England’s colonies in North America, also used French as a link language, and many could read French. Hence their revolutions are particularly indebted to documents associated with the French Revolution.

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states of the USA; excerpts of writings by Thomas Paine; a summary of USA history by John M’Culloch (1807) titled A Concise History of the United States, from the Discovery of America till 1807, including an account of the USA independence movement; and the “Lettre aux Espagnols américains”, written in French ca. 1792 by the exiled Peruvian Jesuit Juan Pablo Viscardo who denounced the Spanish crown for its abuses of the Hispanic colonies in the Americas, justified independence based on arguments by Montesquieu and urged Hispanic Americans to fight for independence (Bastin, Echeverri and Campo 2010, 54). Noting that these are simply a few of the important documents that illustrate the role of translation in the independence movement, they write, “published between 1789 and 1812, these translations are central elements of the ideological bedrock of emancipation in Hispanic America”, indicating that the texts “fostered ideas and textual models for those who led the revolutionary movement in the Spanish territories in Hispanic America” (ibid., 48–49). The translators of these documents were not timid, invisible or transparent (Bastin, Echeverri and Campo 2010, 60). Some, like Francisco de Miranda (ibid., 54), were actively engaged in revolutionary conflicts: Miranda is known as El Precursor, he had fought in France as a general and travelled in the USA, he networked with Mill (ibid., 57), the text he translated served as model for a famous letter by Bolívar, and he planned an invasion of Venezuela (ibid., 56). Another translator, Columbian Antonio Nariño, joined the revolutionary movement (ibid., 50). Juan Picornell was active in planning conspiracies (ibid., 52), and still another of the translators, Manuel García de Sena, had fought in battle under the command of Bolívar’s father-in-law. Thus, as in the case of Lafayette and the Déclaration des droits de l’homme, the translation movement in Hispanic America is characterised by the involvement of translators who were direct combatants, those who took up arms and who, in some cases, lost their freedom or lives as a consequence. The translators were politically committed (ibid., 60), and their translations were self-initiated and show a clear political agenda (ibid., 60). Translation was part of the activist work of the translators who were demonstrably successful in their endeavours. For example, three of the translations of the USA Constitution were used to model republican constitutions in Hispanic America, including the one by de Sena (ibid., 51, 60). The translations demonstrate again the willingness of translators to rewrite source texts in order to achieve specific political purposes, and

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they illustrate the “manipulation of texts” by translators.21 Many of the changes detailed by Bastin, Echeverri and Campo are substantial. For example, in translating selections from the writings of Thomas Paine, de Sena omitted “references to contemporary conditions in North America, considering them of little interest to his compatriots” (Bastin, Echeverri and Campo 2010, 58). The translators also used dedications and forewords, paratexts, footnotes, personal comments and exhortations in their translations to convey revolutionary views (ibid., 54, 58–60). Bastin, Echeverri and Campo argue that the teleological nature of the translations justified the domestication (ibid., 54–55). In manipulating and rewriting the source texts, the translators attempted to advance their own projects for independence and to construct “a distinct and separate identity” for their compatriots that would shift affiliation away from Spain (ibid., 56). As a consequence, the texts became weapons of propaganda (ibid., 56), and in disseminating ideas to which the translators were profoundly committed, translation was a means not an end in itself (cf. ibid., 61). The texts were manipulated for both better reception by readers and more effective mobilisation of resistance to Spain, and they contributed to shaping the nations that emerged. In some cases, the manipulation was intended to circumvent resistance to the ideas in the texts by specific sectors of the society. A good example is the attempt to minimise the importance of the separation of church and state found in documents from the USA and the secularisation (laïcisme) of the state in France. Bastin, Echeverri and Campo (2010, 58–59) interpret the textual shifts related to religion as being motivated by the revolutionary leaders’ fear of opposing the Church and rousing the Church’s opposition to the independence movement. Such caution would have been natural in a context where freedom of religion was not protected. Thus, in order to avoid motivating the Church to support the colonial power, the separation of church and state was explained, downplayed or eliminated in the translated documents. The shifts in the translations put the emphasis on the primacy of the citizens versus the monarch, leaving the hierarchy of the church in place in the emerging new nations. The large role of religion in the state is a pattern that continued in many of the Hispanic postcolonies to the 20th century and, in some cases, can still be traced in the present. This role of the Church is a significant feature of the ethos that differentiates Hispanic America from the USA where freedom of religion was guaranteed in various constitutions of the states and in the Bill of Rights. 21 The concept of translation as manipulation was introduced in the collection edited by Hermans (1985).

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An important aspect of the analysis of this translation movement is that translation in this case is “a form of activism in the pragmatic sense of the term, a subversive activity used by a repressed group struggling to resist domination, the criollos . . . [who resisted] the oppression of the Spanish Crown” (Bastin, Echeverri and Campo 2010, 43). Although the translations were successful in inciting opposition to the crown, they also led to “collusion with established structures of power”, and the result was both “emancipation and oppression” (ibid., 63). The translations were instrumental in maintaining a dominant role for the Catholic Church in Hispanic America, thus perpetuating a fundamental power structure of the colonial regime. Moreover, the translations also led to an ironic result that can be traced to the present because they served the goals of the criollo elite to establish and consolidate their domination and control over the less empowered social classes and ethnic minorities in Spanish-speaking America. Translation certainly fueled the impetus for emancipation, but it also gave the controlling minority the means to perpetuate the social inequalities that continue to be characteristic of Hispanic America. (Bastin, Echeverri and Campo 2010, 62–63)

As a result, although translation in this instance takes a more conventional form than in the previous case, the contours of the results of translation for the ethos of the emerging postcolonies show a similar pattern of continuity with the colonial frameworks of society. Thus, there is a similarity in the outcomes of translational activity in the revolutionary movement in the USA and those of the colonies in Hispanic America. In both cases, the methods and results of translation reveal the shaping of the ethos of the postcolonies by translation choices during the independence movements and the early years of the emergent nations. Both cases illustrate the role of translation in the continuity between problematic aspects of the colonies (slavery in the USA, oligarchy and the power of religious hierarchies in Hispanic America) and the independent nations that emerged. In both cases, social bias traceable in the translations and documents associated with the choices of activist translators came to characterise the postcolonies. At present, in fact, some nations in Hispanic America continue to be marked by a culture of inequality maintained by power differentials, intimidation and violence, often orchestrated by corrupt politicians and drug lords. Aspects of these social problems are tangible reverberations of the ethos in the colonial and revolutionary periods that persist in the present, and they have proved difficult to eradicate.

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4. Translation in Ireland after independence The previous case studies illustrate that translation can be a useful index to the ethos and shaping of a postcolony in the era before independence, during the revolutionary period and in early decades of the emerging nation. I have also traced the role that multilingualism plays in postcolonies. Here I turn to translation in Ireland, England’s first colony, in which many facets of England’s harshest colonising strategies were first tested. I examine contrasting translations produced a half century and more after the independence of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland in 1921 in order to show that the same is true of translation in the long durée. In this instance, the multilingualism in play is the relation between Irish, the native language, and English, the language of the colonisers that became dominant after the great potato famines of the mid-19th century. Knowledge of Modern Irish and literature written in Irish from the earliest period to the modern era was promoted as an index of Irish patriotism during the Irish Revival that led up to the war of independence in Ireland. The two nations were formed after a three-year war for independence which ended with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921 between Great Britain and the self-proclaimed Irish Republic that had conducted the war for liberation. The treaty resulted in the creation of two nations rather than one because an article in the agreement permitted six counties of the north to opt out of separation from Great Britain. Thus, translations from the two nations offer an index of the divergent cultural patterns of postcolonies after independence.22 The similar point of departure for the two postcolonies sets in relief the relationship between ethos and translation in post-independence nations. In this case study, I consider the translation of a third text type as an index of the shaping of a postcolony, namely literary translation, rather than translation of state documents and political treatises examined above. These text types are not as different as might be supposed, however: Descriptive studies of translation have established that literary translations are often vehicles of significant ideological and political statements, and this is particularly true of Ireland. Most Irish literature since the 16th century (the date of England’s decisive Tudor conquest of Ireland) has had a political thread, a characteristic of the earlier native Irish literary

22

Moreover, because both countries were formed from a single political entity before independence, the research variables in the period before independence are also diminished, making comparison more significant than it would be in comparing two totally separate postcolonies.

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tradition as well.23 In this case study, I compare book-length translations by Ireland’s two most eminent poets since World War II: Thomas Kinsella’s The Táin (1969), a translation of a group of hero tales in Old and Middle Irish (which includes an epic-length heroic narrative), in relation to the ethos of the Republic of Ireland and Seamus Heaney’s translation of the English epic Beowulf (1999), the only surviving fulllength Old English heroic epic, in relation to the ethos of Northern Ireland.24 The source texts of both translations date from approximately the same medieval period, and both are rooted in the Indo-European heroic ethos, making the texts ideal for comparison.25 In my earlier work on translation in Ireland, I detail the ideological role of literary translation in shifting the self-image of the Irish to counter stereotypes imposed by the English on the Irish and in representing the Irish to the world, most of which occurred before independence and contributed to building the independence movement (see Tymoczko 1999; cf. 2009). The results of the independence movement were not, however, straightforward because the treaty that ended the war with Great Britain in 1921 did not result in an independent Ireland. Instead, the island was subject to partition into two countries, the Irish Free State (precursor to Éire, ‘Ireland’, also called the Republic of Ireland) and the six counties that became Northern Ireland, a separate nation that remains part of Great Britain. Before that division was accepted, however, the Irish fought a bloody civil war over whether or not to accept partition. Here I focus on the use of translation to claim new identities in these two countries after independence, illustrating that translation offers a key to understanding the evolution, historical development and ethos of a postcolony long after independence. Both nations have been sites of religious tension. In the industrialised north, Catholics (the minority) were the targets of discrimination, 23

See Tymoczko (1999; 2009) for Ireland, as well as examples from other nations in Hermans (1985), Lefevere (1982) and Tymoczko (2010). 24 Heaney (1939–2013) is well known for having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995; he is also the finest Irish lyric poet since the early Yeats. Kinsella (1928–) is Heaney’s equal in contributions to Irish literature in the second half of the 20th century: an excellent poet, working in a broad formal range; an astute critic of Irish culture and literature; and a writer fluent in Irish and outstanding for his deep knowledge of the dual tradition of Ireland, the literature in both Irish and English from the earliest period. 25 The earliest text of Táin Bó Cúailnge is usually dated to the 9th century (with some elements of the text possibly earlier and some of the stories in Kinsella’s collection later). The text of Beowulf is dated variously between the 7th and the 10th centuries but usually toward the end of that period.

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exclusion from equal participation in the polity and unequal opportunity for employment. They were also subject to intimidation and periodic violence. During World War II, as part of Great Britain, Northern Ireland was at war with Germany and in danger of German attacks. Its citizens were mobilised for the war effort, recruited as combatants and engaged in the industrial production of war materials. After the war, Northern Ireland was a beneficiary of the welfare state embraced by Great Britain, but public life and education were geared toward English norms, and Catholics continued to be the target of prejudice and diminished opportunity. In the late 1960s, a Civil Rights movement began, in part modelled on the Civil Rights movement in the USA. Initially nonsectarian supporters staged peaceful demonstrations and asked for equal rights and equal opportunity in the nation. Ultimately, the movement turned to non-violent civil disobedience and was met with violence on the part of various groups of Protestants, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (the police force in Northern Ireland) and British soldiers. In the south, Protestants were in the minority, and the nation turned toward defining itself as a predominantly rural, Catholic and Irish (vs. English) country. Native Irish culture and language were valorised, peasant life was celebrated, and the nation invested in its indigenous heritage by collecting Irish folklore, promoting Irish music and dance, teaching the Irish language and emphasising Irish history to school children. They also established a branch of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies focused on early Irish (and Celtic) language, literature and culture. National efforts brought native Irish history, literature, language, concepts and vocabulary into the mainstream of culture. These cultural priorities were reified economically as well: Subsidies were provided for Irish-speaking households (located primarily in the rural west), knowledge of the Irish language was required for those in civil service positions, and so forth. Catholic norms were written into the constitution adopted in 1937 when the Republic of Ireland replaced the Irish Free State, and Catholic values were inscribed in laws and social norms, including rigid gender roles and strict moral codes. The result was Catholic hegemony, a narrowed range of freedoms and ethical choices, and a gradual diminishment of the percentage of Protestants. Neutrality during World War II bred an isolationist mentality and an inward turn away from world affairs, but it sheltered the citizens from the devastating effects of the war. In certain ways, however, for almost a generation, citizens missed out on the post-war wave of modernisation and cultural change that swept the world. Thus the country remained marked by poverty through the 1970s.

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Throughout Ireland’s history, literature and literary figures have been central to the culture, and literature continued to be important in both nations after partition.26 By the 1950s, however, literature and literary movements in the two countries began to diverge. Though some writers in Northern Ireland identified with literary movements in the Republic, many of the younger writers and critics did not, particularly a group educated at Queen’s University in Belfast. Instead, in the 1950s a group of emerging literary figures in Northern Ireland began to identify with and turn their aspirations to be one of the regionalist modernist movements in Great Britain. Seamus Heaney and the critic Seamus Deane were initially part of this group. In the Republic of Ireland, by contrast, literary culture was actively pursued in both Irish and English, and it had a more autonomous identity. The English-language branch of the literary movement grew organically out of the Irish Revival. It continued to be centred on the legacy of the giants of modern Irish literature in English from the 1890s onward, including Yeats, Joyce and the writers associated with the Irish theatre movement. Public policy also encouraged a flourishing literary movement in Modern Irish. The two branches together—complemented by the Irish folk literature that was being collected and promoted—constituted a vigorous multi-dimensioned literary field that nurtured artists writing in Irish and English. Because the Republic of Ireland maintained censorship policies, however, many writers felt restricted in their literary expression by the straitjacket of mores and laws in the Republic. Nonetheless, most leading writers in the south embraced modernism and international literary developments. The nation was intent on creating its own national literature in two languages and on deploying native myths, stories, genres, character types and so forth as the foundation of literary models, archetypes and allusions. The movement aspired to claim an independent place for Ireland in European and world literature. Most writers of the generation raised after independence in the Irish Free State grew up learning Irish and became speakers of the language with varying degrees of facility. They had studied Irish history in their youth and were familiar with the genres, texts and writers of the literary tradition in the Irish language. They did not necessarily have a reverent attitude toward the tradition, however, no more than did their Irishspeaking precursors in the Middle Ages, who wrote parodies, inserted humorous episodes into narratives and specialised in satire, irony and the 26 An excellent introduction to 20th-century Irish literature is found in Kiberd (1995).

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like.27 A non-sanctimonious approach to the literary heritage became one way to follow figures such as Yeats and Joyce without remaining in their shadow, and it also became a means of escaping the constraints of the parochial religious morality that was officially promoted by the state.28 Many writers also looked toward the USA rather than England for literary models, particularly after World War II, a natural orientation in view of the strong links between Ireland and the Irish immigrant communities in the USA. Although many (principally Catholic) writers and critics in Northern Ireland knew some Irish and were familiar with the Irish-language literary heritage, by the late 1960s and 1970s, some displayed a competitive attitude towards the vigorous literary movement in the Republic, among other things criticising it for being parochial because of its focus on the Irish-language heritage. This divisive attitude became even sharper after Bloody Sunday when things in Ireland both north and south became tense (cf. Deane 1977). Catholic writers and critics in Northern Ireland began to deliberately differentiate themselves from the literary movements in the Republic of Ireland. These various features of the historical, cultural and literary contexts provide a framework for assessing the translations examined below that epitomise the diverging ethos of Ireland’s two postcolonies. In 1969, Thomas Kinsella published his translations of a celebrated group of early Irish hero tales under the title The Táin, including the epiclength text Táin Bó Cúailnge, “The Cattle-Raid of Cúailnge”. The translation was issued by the prestigious Dolmen Press located in the Republic of Ireland. Lavishly illustrated by Louis le Brocquy, the volume was reprinted by Oxford University Press in 1970 and made available in paperback. Because I have already written about many facets of Kinsella’s translations (see Tymoczko 1999; 2009), here I focus on the ethos of the

27

A good example of the masterful performative possession of this complex Irish literary tradition is Brian O’Nolan who wrote under several pseudonyms, chiefly Flann O’Brien, which was used for his English-language novels, and Myles na gCopaleen, which was used for his Irish-language novel An Béal Bocht (1941) and his satirical columns in the Irish Times under the banner “Cruiskeen Lawn”, ‘the full little jug [of alcohol]’, often on the subject of the Irish language. Under the name Flann O’Brien, O’Nolan is the author of the great modernist Irish novel At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) which is populated with characters from the principal myths and folk types of early Irish literature. 28 On Joyce’s use of Irish literature and archetypes in his writing, see Tymoczko (1994; 2002; 2004).

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translations as an index of the historical development of the Republic of Ireland. In his translations, Kinsella offers a new representation of the tales, preserving and even highlighting the humorous, irreverent and parodic aspects of the texts. He relishes the fantastic, grotesque and sexual elements as well. At times, he shifts between manuscripts of the source texts so as to privilege passages or elements that enliven his translations in these directions rather than sticking to a single version. With respect to the formal aspects of the texts that surprise and dislocate the modern reader and that differentiate early Irish texts from other medieval European literatures, Kinsella does not assimilate them to English-language standards: He reproduces the mixture of prose and poetry of various types, the long lists of names and feats, the itineraries contained in the stories, the alliterative prose passages, and so forth. He savours and often reproduces some of the spicy locutions in the medieval texts. He maintains many Irish words of the source texts in his translations and provides a guide to the pronunciation of the medieval names of characters and places in the translations so that the Irish linguistic basis, cultural framework and conceptual structure of the texts are preserved, and he gives close representations of Irish rhetorical devices as well. The translations are thus defamiliarised for an English reader but are otherwise in standard English, and there is no representation of an Irish dialect. The result is a sophisticated series of translations that are conspicuously Irish. Kinsella reproduces the distinctly Irish features of the source texts, presenting textual genres and tonalities that differ significantly from those that most readers expect in both medieval literary traditions and modern texts. At the same time, he inserts the translations comfortably into English literature. Even as he represents the texts carefully, Kinsella also challenges the social mores of the Republic of Ireland and those of the Irish Revival by reproducing various elements of early Irish literature and culture that diverge from Victorian and Catholic standards. His translations move Irish culture into the framework of contemporary Anglophone culture in the late 1960s and 1970s, which was challenging the inherited values pertaining to decorum, sexuality and propriety in both North America and the British Isles. Although Kinsella represents the heroic heritage of Ireland, he does not glorify or romanticise the violence of the texts in a way that evokes or reanimates Ireland’s patriotic history. Thus, in a sense, Kinsella’s translations define a new ethos for Ireland, promoting the valorisation of native Irish culture but redefining that heritage to include aspects that had been suppressed by the Irish Revival and by scholarly representations subsidised by the Republic after independence. Kinsella makes room for

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the coexistence of the violent and the peaceful, the humorous and the tragic, the sexual and the noble, the beautiful and the grotesque. His translations honour and make peace with the past, even while offering a new vision for his own time and the future. It was the first modernist translation of these early Irish texts, presenting a view of early Irish literature that appeared at a specific moment in time and that has endured. Nonetheless, as he once said to me, it is not clear that he could have produced these translations just a few years later. The tone of the translations conflicted with the sombre context caused by the political conflicts, the oppression of the Catholic population and the internecine violence in Northern Ireland. Shortly after Kinsella’s translations appeared, the Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland increasingly became the target of violence with attacks by the police, Protestant groups and British soldiers. The situation came to a head on so-called Bloody Sunday in January 1972 when British soldiers attacked a peaceful demonstration in the Bogside area of Derry and shot 26 unarmed civilians, killing 13 of them outright. Three decades of violence ensued in Northern Ireland, known as “the Troubles”, during which the country became increasingly dangerous and dysfunctional. Protestant Orangemen took up arms and formed paramilitary organisations, the Provisional IRA was reanimated, and general violence followed. Bombings and assassinations occurred with appalling frequency. The jails filled with Catholic prisoners whose hunger strikes caught the world’s attention. Although some of the violence spilled over into the Republic and although the situation in Northern Ireland increased the animus in the Republic against the Orangemen, awakening old memories and old allegiances, by and large the Republic stayed calm and was spared the violence and chaos. The situation only abated with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, an accord negotiated for power sharing with the help of George Mitchell, the envoy sent by US President Bill Clinton, and ratified by a referendum in May 1998. In response to these developments, many writers in Northern Ireland coalesced around activist writing and literary projects, and their activities drew attention to the writers of the North. One of the most successful initiatives was undertaken by the Field Day Theatre Company, launched in 1980 with the staging of Brian Friel’s Translations. Based in Derry, Field Day presented plays annually as a response to the violence and political divisions in Northern Ireland. They also published pamphlets that addressed political issues and initiated a discourse of Northern Ireland as a

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postcolonial nation.29 The result was the invigoration of literature in the North as a form of resistance to the continued violence and discrimination to which Catholics were being subjected. At the same time, in the south, some felt that the project appropriated the right to speak for Ireland in an exclusionary way. This is the broad context in which Seamus Heaney came to the fore as a leading Irish poet. Heaney was formed as a writer in Northern Ireland. Educated at Queen’s University Belfast (1957–61), a venerable English institution, he studied English literature and showed an early aspiration to be counted among regional British modernists. Shortly after the violence of Bloody Sunday, however, Heaney moved south to the Republic of Ireland, resigning his teaching position in Belfast. He settled down in a rural area in Wicklow south of Dublin where he concentrated on writing. In much of his work, Heaney’s Irishness appears in representations of Ireland’s physical landscape and countryside, its topography and natural objects, its rural customs and modes of speaking English, and its country people. He also has poems about archaeological subjects, pilgrimage sites and history. When he settled in Wicklow, however, he began a translation of the early Irish tale Buile Suibhne, “the frenzy of Suibhne”, and worked on it during the period 1972–73.30 The text is the 12th-century story of Suibhne Geilt, a king from the north of Ireland driven mad by battle, who flees from civilisation and spends the rest of his life in the woods composing poetry. In certain respects, Suibhne became an alter ego for Heaney after he fled the violence in Northern Ireland and took refuge in the countryside of the Republic, not least because of the rhyme between “Sweeney” and “Heaney”. After receiving a teaching position in Dublin in 1976, however, Heaney moved to Dublin, and the Republic of Ireland became his permanent residence thereafter. In 1979, Heaney was visiting professor at Harvard, having been taken under the wing of the well-known critic and scholar Helen Vendler, a Harvard faculty member. During this period, at one of the principal centres of Irish studies in the USA, Heaney again took up his translation of Buile Suibhne, and in 1983, it was published under the title Sweeney Astray by the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry.31 29 Under the leadership of Seamus Deane, for example, essays by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said were issued as pamphlets and later published together as Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990). 30 Buile is literally ‘blow, stroke’, so the title is literally ‘Suibhne’s stroke/blow’. 31 For a detailed account of this translation, see Tymoczko (2000). Heaney’s indirect translation is based primarily on the facing English translation in J.G. O’Keeffe’s edition rather than the Irish source text.

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Vendler’s patronage of Heaney was instrumental in his receiving a continuing position at Harvard, and her later nomination of Heaney was instrumental in his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Vendler (1998) reads Heaney as essentially a lyric poet rather than a political one, and she concentrates on the symbolic structures of his poetry. It may be that Vendler saw Heaney as someone who had lived in both countries of the divided island and could thus represent a voice for peace on behalf of both Irish nations as a united people, particularly in light of Heaney’s identification with Suibhne. Like Suibhne, Heaney can be seen as a lyric poet who fled war. By contrast, after the Troubles began, Kinsella’s Táin was criticised by some writers and critics from the north as glorifying war and heroic deeds. In proffering an alternative in the form of Sweeney who refuses war, Heaney’s translation of the story of Suibhne could be read as a repudiation of the violence of his nation(s), enhancing him as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Coming from Northern Ireland but choosing to reside in the Republic, Heaney could also be viewed as a voice for the unity of Ireland. It was during this period that Heaney began to demur when he was described as a “British” writer and to insist that he was Irish, evidenced most clearly in his poem “An Open Letter” written in response to being included in the 1982 edition of The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry. He wrote, “be advised / My passport’s green. / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast The Queen.” This long trajectory as “a man of peace” makes it all the more ironic that Heaney should have published a translation of Beowulf in 1999, issued by the English house Faber and Faber, four years after he received the Nobel Prize. The ideological implications of Heaney’s translation of Beowulf contrast in significant ways with those of Kinsella’s translations of early Irish texts despite the fact that the source texts themselves are quite similar: Both are medieval hero tales from approximately the same era, both focus initially on a young hero defending a territory from predation, both glorify heroic warlike deeds, and so forth. In fact, Beowulf is a much more traditional medieval epic text than any of the early Irish tales translated in Kinsella’s volume The Táin. Not only does Beowulf presuppose that men have the social duty to engage in heroic deeds and engage in war to protect their people, but violence is central to the text. Heaney’s translation of the English epic came relatively late in his career, and it is worth asking how his decision to translate an English heroic epic about violence, fighting and armed conflict should be interpreted. In view of the earlier criticism of the violence of Kinsella’s translation, of Heaney’s distancing himself from violence in leaving

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Northern Ireland after Bloody Sunday and of Heaney’s choice to identify with and translate the story of Suibhne who rejects violence, how can Heaney’s turn to English heroic epic be understood? Is this a statement about his primary affiliation with English literature and a renunciation of allegiance to Irish literature? A generous interpretation of Heaney’s position here is that his choice to translate Beowulf reflects the English orientation of his education in Northern Ireland and the affiliation of the North with Great Britain: Among other things, Heaney had been educated in an institution oriented towards English culture, he was a professor of English literature, and he was more expert in Old English than Old Irish.32 It is likely, moreover, that he appreciated medieval English literature more than medieval Irish literature and was thus more inclined and more able to translate the English medieval text than an Irish one. Moreover, as a translator of Beowulf, Heaney focuses on the poetic form of the text and the challenge of a poetic epic per se. The prosimetrum structure of Irish literature (mixing prose and verse) was more foreign to his literary bent. A striking statement in Heaney’s preface to his translation is that he had “a strong desire to get back to the first stratum of ‘the language’”, by which he means English, and to “assay the hoard” (Heaney 1999, xxii). He says that he was motivated to translate Beowulf in part because it was “a kind of aural antidote, a way of ensuring that my linguistic anchor would stay lodged on the Anglo-Saxon sea-floor”, faced with “the unmoored speech of some contemporary American poetry” (ibid., xxii) in the USA where he was teaching. Heaney here expresses very strong sentiments of affiliation to an “Anglo-Saxon” orientation, indicating a puristic affiliation to English per se reminiscent of Orwell. Thus one must ask about the implications for his view of Irish dialects of English: Did he at some level also consider them “unmoored”, like American speech? This is a very different view of English and the language of an Irish writer from that promoted in the Republic of Ireland or from Joyce’s view of language and English, for example. Heaney is clearly ambivalent about the issue of language. On the one hand, he says that “an understanding I had worked out for myself concerning my own linguistic and literary origins made me reluctant to abandon the task” of translating Beowulf because “part of me . . . had been writing Anglo-Saxon from the start” and he considered “Beowulf to be part of my voice-right” (Heaney 1999, xxiii). On the other hand, he indicates 32

In the preface to his translation of Beowulf, Heaney discusses studying AngloSaxon and Beowulf as a university student and developing “a feel for the language” (Heaney 1999, xxii).

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that “to persuade myself that I was born into its language and that its language was born into me took a while” (ibid., xxiii). He also writes that he was pleased to use words derived from Irish in his text (ibid., xxix), that he used local Ulster words in the translation (ibid., xxix) and that he wanted his Beowulf “to be speakable by one of [his] relatives”, namely his father’s people (ibid., xxvii). Heaney states that he chose language for the translation accordingly—presumably “unmooring” his English deliberately —so he could attend to his “original vernacular” (ibid., xxviii). He seems implicitly to recognise the contradictions by concluding that his translation was “one way for an Irish poet to come to terms with that complex history of conquest and colony, absorption and resistance, integrity and antagonism” of Northern Ireland (ibid., xxx). A way to interpret Heaney’s translation would be to say that, even as he indicates a primary affiliation to England by translating Beowulf, he also tries to appropriate this foundational text of English literature for the Irish, particularly those of the North, articulating the ancient epic in the voice of an Irishman on behalf of Ireland. This interpretation of Heaney’s Beowulf suggests that the translation is a statement of his belonging to English tradition and his entitlement to English tradition and, simultaneously, the assertion of his entitlement to rewrite that tradition despite his Irishness. In this reading, metonymically, Heaney stands for Ireland in his gesture of appropriation, an appropriation of the foundation of English literature on behalf of his northern Catholic countrymen particularly. This act of translation—his choice of Beowulf in particular— nonetheless represents a form of privileging English tradition over the Irish heroic heritage. Whatever one’s interpretation, Heaney’s investment in the English medieval epic is particularly ironic in light of the earlier criticism of the interest in early Irish heroic literature by writers of the Republic of Ireland because of its putative violence and in light of Heaney’s self-proclaimed identification with the non-violent Irish Suibhne. I am not the first to point to Heaney’s ambivalence. Deane (2000, 63) writes of Heaney’s “contradictory sense of himself: his authority and his uncertainty”. John Wilson Foster (1995, 19) refers to him as “Janus faced”. Just in this brief sketch, we see that Heaney’s translations reveal him to be inconsistent about language, about his affiliations to Ireland and to Britain, about his identity, about which Irish nation is his and about violence. This divided consciousness is quite different from the dual orientation cultivated in the Republic that is the focal point of Kinsella’s translations, poetry and critical essays. The disparity reifies some of the differences in ethos of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland that formed these two Irish poets. This case study indicates that postcolonies

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(such as the Republic of Ireland) that attempt to reconcile their heritage of multiple traditions and languages will produce citizens with very different attitudes towards personal and cultural identity compared with postcolonies (such as Northern Ireland) that continue to be conflicted about such fundamental heterogeneous features of the population. The two translations examined in this case study epitomise cultural vectors followed by the two Irish nations after independence. In Ulysses, Joyce has Stephen say that he is “a servant of two masters”, one English and one Italian (Joyce 1986, 1.638), namely the English monarch and the Catholic Church. With the partition of Ireland, each of the resulting postcolonies remained in the grip of one of those two masters: arguably the British monarch in the case of Northern Ireland and the Catholic Church in the case of the Republic of Ireland. Each needed extrication from one of the two masters. With his no-holds-barred approach to representing early-Irish heroic literature, Kinsella offers liberation from the constricting dominance of Catholic morality in the Republic, namely from the Italian master in Joyce’s metaphor. In turn, by appropriating Beowulf and speaking it in his own prestigious Irish voice as a Nobel Prize winner, Heaney attempts to claim the bedrock of English culture for himself and his own people and to assert an equal right to its possession, thus symbolically displacing the authority of the British monarch, whatever his own personal unease and ambivalence about that displacement. In both cases, the poets use their translations to move the postcolonies of their birth away from the cultural bondage and stasis of their times. Here translation in postcolonies sheds light on important issues pertaining to the struggles and identities of postcolonies and of individual citizens born into those nations. At the same time, translation again serves as a lens on the history and ethos of postcolonies, made palpable in this case in the divergence of two nations that emerged from a single colonial context and hence began their distinct histories as nations from a similar starting point. This example demonstrates as well that a translation can both reify the difficulties of a postcolony and can also serve to redefine, reconstruct and renew the identity and ethos of a people. It indicates that translation in postcolonies can be a vehicle of later cultural reorientation and change, offering a new beginning that moves beyond the cultural constrictions imposed by colonisation.

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5. Conclusion Scholars do well to pay attention to what is translated and why in a postcolony. To ask what ethos is embodied in translations and how that ethos relates both to new aspirations and to old patterns inherited from the colonial power. To engage with self-reflexivity about a nation’s patterns of translation and the unique lens they offer on the history of the postcolony and the dilemmas of individuals in the postcolony. As the case studies here illustrate, examining the history of translation in a postcolony can illuminate the shaping and ethos of an emerging nation. Translations offer perspectives on how and why emergent nations are the way they are. My examples have been chosen to highlight the role that translations can play in independence movements, in the shaping of documents used to establish and govern a new nation and in later cultural developments and shifts in postcolonies. In each case, the translations analysed offer insight into the ethos of the times, illustrating that independence movements of colonised nations often reproduce problematic aspects of the colonial regime and carry them forward to be changed later at considerable social cost, sometimes decades after independence has been gained. I have also identified translations in postcolonies that work to create new identities and possibilities that rectify some of the inherited problematic cultural frameworks and structures established by colonisation, again at times decades after independence. The road to nationhood is a rocky one and difficult. Translation can both help the nation along that road and also perpetuate problems inherited from colonisation. We see in the case studies presented that using translation as a lens illuminates the long historical trajectory of postcolonies as well as shortterm contexts having to do with the period of the translation itself. Bastin, Echeverri and Campo (2010, 43) posit that studies of translation have much to teach with respect to decolonisation: They indicate that “translation can act as a lens providing an alternative perspective on the materials of history”. Here I have shown that analyses of translation movements related to decolonisation are also useful in illuminating the ethos and struggle for identity of an emergent nation at various stages after independence. Although the examples are from Europe and the Americas, the investigations here can be extended to other postcolonies around the world. Examination of key translations in African and Asian postcolonies will reveal important issues and point to profitable areas of inquiry as well,

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illuminating specific issues that postcolonies continue to struggle with at present.

References Bastin, G., A. Echeverri, and A. Campo. 2010. Translation and the emancipation of Hispanic America. In Translation, resistance, activism, ed. M. Tymoczko, 42–64. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Bialystok, E., F. I. M. Craik, and G. Luk. 2012. Bilingualism: Consequences for mind and brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16 (4): 240–50. Deane, S. 1977. The literary myths of the revival: A case for their abandonment. In Myth and reality in Irish literature, ed. J. Ronsley, 317–29. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. —. 2000. The famous Seamus. New Yorker, March 20, 54–79. Eagleton, T., F. Jameson, and E. Said. 1990. Nationalism, colonialism, and literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foster, J. W. 1995. The achievement of Seamus Heaney. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Heaney, S., trans. 1983. Sweeney astray: A version from the Irish. Derry: Field Day Theatre Company. —, trans. 1999. Beowulf. London: Faber and Faber. Hermans, T., ed. 1985. The manipulation of literature: Studies in literary translation. London: Croom Helm. Joyce, J. 1986. Ulysses. Ed. H. W. Gabler. New York: Random House. Kiberd, D. 1995. Inventing Ireland. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kinsella, T., trans. 1970. The Táin: Translated from the Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailnge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lefevere, A. 1982. Mother courage’s cucumbers: Text, system, and refraction in a theory of literature. Modern Language Studies 12:3–20. —. 1992. Translation, rewriting, and the manipulation of literary fame. London: Routledge. Levy, L. W. 1999. Origins of the bill of rights. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lloyd, G. n.d.-a. Bill of rights: The four stages of approval of the bill of rights in congress and the states. TeachingAmericanHistory.org. —. n.d.-b. Bill of rights: The Madison-Jefferson exchange on ratification and the bill of rights. Parts 1, 2, and 3. TeachingAmericanHistory.org.

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Lutz, D. S. 1984. The relative influence of European writers on late eighteenth-century American political thought. American Political Science Review 1:189–97. Marais, K. 2014. Translation theory and development studies. New York: Routledge. Morris, W, ed. 1969. The American heritage dictionary of the English language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Rossiter, C, ed. 2003. The Federalist papers. New York: Signet. Soria, G. 1987. Grande histoire de la Révolution française. Vol. 1. Paris: Bordas. Sydenham, M. J. 1965. The French revolution. London: B. T. Batsford. Thompson, J. M. 1985. The French revolution. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Thurman, J. 2015. A loss for words. New Yorker, March 30, 32–39. Tymoczko, M. 1994. The Irish Ulysses. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press. —. 1999. Translation in a postcolonial context: Early Irish literature in English translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. —. 2000. Wintering out with Irish poetry: Affiliation and autobiography in English translation; Essay on and review of Sweeney Astray by Seamus Heaney. The Translator 6 (2): 309–17. —. 2002. “What ish my culture? Who talks of my culture?” Interrogating Irishness in the works of James Joyce. In Irish and postcolonial writing: History, theory, practice, ed. G. Hooper and C. Graham, 181– 201. London: Palgrave Macmillan. —. 2004. Cú Chulainn, Finn, and the mythic strands in Ulysses. ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies 6:41–58. —. 2009. Censorship and self-censorship in translation: Ethics and ideology, resistance and collusion. In Translation and censorship: Patterns of communication and interference, ed. E. Ní Chuilleanáin, C. Ó Cuilleanáin, and D. Parris, 24–45. Dublin: Four Courts. —. 2010. Translation, resistance, activism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Vendler, H. 1998. Seamus Heaney. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

PART III THE GLOBAL NORTH

CHAPTER ELEVEN BEYOND THE POSTCOLONIAL READING: THE CHALLENGES OF TRANSLATING CURRENT SUB-SAHARAN LITERATURE1 CHLOÉ SIGNÈS

1. Introduction As a consequence of the arbitrary distribution of the continent among different Western powers during the Berlin Conference and the subsequent processes of colonisation and decolonisation, Africa is nowadays a multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual space in which translation is a crucial element of life for its inhabitants. At the same time, the current process of world-scale globalisation and the new economic and social African circumstances have triggered a true diaspora of its population. Moreover, one of the consequences of this rapprochement of the African identity to Western regions is the ever-growing presence of a series of literary texts which are characterised by their origins as well as by nomadism and métissage. That is why, now, after the recent celebration of the 50th anniversary of the independence of most nations on the continent, it is a good time to take stock. According to Le Bris and Mabanckou, we are witnessing to the birth of a new Africa: Une nouvelle Afrique, qui entend prendre sa place dans le siècle qui a commencé. Une Afrique qui met à mal nos discours convenus [….] un continent entier qui se met en marche et, dans le mouvement, s’invente.2 (Le Bris & Mabanckou 2013, 7) 1

Translated from Spanish by David González-Iglesias. “A new Africa that pretends to take its place in the century which has already began. An Africa that undermines our conventional discourse … a whole continent that starts to walk and, in moving, invents itself” (own translation – CS). 2

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This concept of a (re)invention of Africa through different writings creates the possibility of a deterritorialised (re)union in line with Glissant’s (1997) chaotic idea of the “tout-monde”, which necessarily requires putting an end to the folk representation spread by colonial literature but also to abandoning the already obsolete framework of postcolonial relationships in which African literature is often enclosed. It is essential to change the scale on which we interpret African literary phenomena and to consider discourses from a global perspective to listen to the nuances of the multiple voices. In this regard, the role of translation is clearly a central one because it assumes a large part of the responsibility of spreading these polyphonic expressions which defy not only the work of professionals but also the schemes that had been taken for granted such as the very notions of original and translated text, source language and target language, equivalence and so on. In the accurate words of Tymoczko (1999, 17), translation is “one of the most significant means by which one culture represents another”. However, and in spite of the recent development of translation studies in the African continent (Inggs and Meintjes 2009), there are almost no Western “readings” of African literatures from a translation standpoint. For all these reasons, the aim of this article is to contemplate recent sub-Saharan literary production in French and its translation into Spanish as a paradigm of the challenges of hybrid literatures for translators. Taking into account the transcendence of fiction as a means of communication (Miampika 2003), I shall first set out the paradoxes behind the term “francophone African literature” and analyse the current difficulties of translation in a global and “liquid” society (Bauman 2000). Building on those observations, I shall consider the possibility, or even the necessity, of going beyond the postcolonial readings that have so far been considered an ideal framework with which to approach “minor literatures” (Deleuze and Guattari 1975). In a second part, as to illustrate the situation and try to define the post-postcolonial needs, I shall analyse some examples of recently translated contemporaneous novels to outline the representation of Africa that they transmit to their readers in Spain, a country which plays an important role as a frontier space.

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2. The current francophone African novel: Characteristics of a post-colonial hybrid writing A number of playfully conflicting anecdotes illustrate the difficulty of accurately defining what we are referring to when we discuss “African literature”: “Don’t let them define you, or confine you, or buy your silence … Be a counter antagonist, break their anti-myths,” declared Nigerian author Ben Okri in A way of being free (1997, 14–15) while Kossi Efoui, a Togolese playwright, did not hesitate to state that “la littérature africaine est quelque chose qui n’existe pas”3 (quoted in Mongo Mboussa 2002, 140), and Dany Laferrière, a Haitian who lives in Quebec, is famous for his controversial Je suis un écrivain japonais (2008)4 as the FrenchLibanese author Amin Maalouf reminded us in May 2015 when he (Maalouf) replied to Laferrière’s reception speech given at the Académie Française (Maalouf 2015).5 With the title of this last piece, Laferrière expressed the extent to which identity can hide further interpretations as well as his liberty to adopt the nationality of his personal imaginary. It is obvious that the expression “African literature”, which encompasses the writings of an entire continent made up of 54 countries (with otherwise artificial borders, the result of an arbitrary distribution which did not take into account the situation of Africa), inhabited by 900 million people and speaking more than 2,000 languages, is perforce reductionist in nature. Moreover, this reductionist view has to be interpreted as stereotypical from a Western cultural space which tends to look at the periphery from a clearly superior perspective. Therefore, any attempt to unify everything under a common label is doomed to fail although we might consider that, somehow, it establishes the link between those writings and the experience of tensions with the imperial power. We also have to consider the fact that most of the authors have developed identity strategies which are related precisely to their postcolonial status. In order to measure the complexity of this issue, we can observe what happens in most Western bookstores: Whenever there is a space set aside for the African continent, which is usually in a remote corner if it exists at all, one would be surprised to find novels by Kourouma or maybe by Monenembo and only very occasionally Okri or Ben Jelloun. These writers are “victims” of their success, and their books are to be found next to other works of English or French literature, respectively. What are then 3

“African literature is something that does not exist” (own translation – CS). I am a Japanese writer, translated by Daved Homel in 2011. 5 This speech is published on the Académie française website. 4

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the criteria that should be applied here? The place of birth of the authors? The colour of their skin? The country in which they publish their books? The themes of their novels? Accurately defining what is understood by “African literature(s)”, despite here using a more welcoming plural voice, is so hard that no consensus has been reached on the matter. However, what I want to highlight here is the fact that, already well into the 21st century, the paradoxical situations that have been described reveal the identity discomfort of our globalised society as well as the strength of the Western clichés about the “Dark Continent”. Clearly, national categorisations, let alone continental ones, cannot account for the multi-ethnic, multilingual and multicultural diversity or reality in which we live. There is an increasing number of adherents to “place polygamy” (Beck 1998) who live in transnational spaces of this planet and to whom, undoubtedly, “roots” have been replaced by the “routes” (Gilroy 1993) of exile, doomed to occupy “paratopic spaces” (Louviot 2010, 460). In the recent words of Dany Laferrière, when he occupied his seat in the Académie française6: C’est un étrange animal que celui qui vit hors de sa terre natale. Sa condition d’exilé lui permet d’ourdir une littérature qui n’est ni tout à fait de là-bas, ni tout à fait d’ici, et c’est là tout son intérêt.7 (Laferrière 2015)

And if this situation is per se particularly complex, it becomes even more complicated and controversial when African literatures are tagged as “francophone”. The use of the language of the ex-coloniser, French in this case, is not a neutral choice though it is somewhat essential for those who aim to be read. In fact, in the words of Vidal Claramonte: La literatura africana es una de las literaturas en las que la elección de la lengua más implicaciones políticas ha tenido desde siempre, sobre todo por las actitudes de los escritores africanos hacia las lenguas europeas.8 (Claramonte 2010, 58)

Indeed, as Blanchet states (quoted in Tchindjang, Bopda, and Ngamgne 2008, 42), “Une langue n’est pas qu’un outil de communication,

6

This speech is published on the Académie française website. “Someone who lives out of his native country is a strange animal. His exile status allows him to weave a literature that is not wholly from one place or the other. That is why it is interesting” (own translation – CS). 8 “African literature is one of the literatures in which the choice of language has had the largest political implications, particularly due to the attitude of African writers towards European languages” (own translation – CS). 7

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elle est également une façon d’être au monde.”9 The stance of writers with regard to the use of this language is, therefore, what will define their writing, what will constitute the essence of their texts, because language is precisely the place where tensions crystallise. Also, it places African authors under an eternal suspicion of illegitimacy which in some way forces them to justify themselves. In the francophone area, it is appropriate to remember that the language of Molière was imposed on the elite through a strict school system (meant for a few men and attempting to erase the so-called autochthonous “dialects” (Kesteloot 2009, 449)) while the French military command developed the petit nègre for the famous tirailleurs sénégalais, a simplified version of the language in accordance with the consideration of their intellectual capacities as understood by the military authorities. Furthermore, by being imposed as an administrative language in the different colonies, French started to spread naturally among the population, evolving in contact with the different social, cultural and linguistic spheres. The first literary texts written in French by Africans in the first quarter of the 20th century are characterised by an idyllic view of the “Dark Continent” and of the excellent work carried out by the colonial powers to subdue their savage impulses. I am referring to the so-called colonial literature, whose authorship has led to many a debate. In fact, in a short period of time, those texts have come to coexist with other much more critical narratives which present themselves as “true” and which drift apart from the canon of colonial writing and denounce the symbolic violence exerted by the French language. Therefore, next to the development of a pan-Africanist current in Europe and the appearance of several publications which take an interest in African roots, the foundations of Négritude are laid. This movement, theorised by Senghor, Césaire and Damas, aimed to rehabilitate the Black race, to “revaloriza[r] los sustratos culturales”10 (Díaz Narbona 2007, 59). By using irreproachable French from the point of view of linguistic rules and in order to dismantle the stereotype of the clumsy, good-natured Black person incapable of assimilating the finest nuances of the French language, the followers of this current undertook an enterprise which is perfectly summarised in this verse written by Senghor in 1940 (1984): “Mais je déchirerai les rires Banania de tous les murs de France.”11 9

“A language is not only a communication tool. It is also a way of being in the world” (own translation – CS). 10 “… to revalue their cultural substratum” (own translation – CS). 11 “I will tear off the Banania grins from all the walls of France” (own translation – CS).

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Based on the movements of independence and in line with a certain feeling of bitterness and disappointment, this founding movement is followed by a stage which could be described as Afro-pessimistic and violent. Writers, in line with the famous quote by Soyinka, “A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude, it acts”, realistically depicted the difficulties of Africa and the complicated situation of exiled people. At this point, they wrote away from the norm and expressed themselves in a “third code” (Bandia 2006) which showed the shortcomings of French as a language that could express their reality. Therefore, their works are filled with characteristic elements from translated discourse, manifestations of transculturality and linguistic hybridisation or “indigenisation” (Zabus 2007). They are all particularly relevant from a postcolonial perspective because they represent an answer to the Empire (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1989), their spaces of resistance and their negotiation with the hegemonic power in an attempt to seek “reparation” (Bandia 2008). However, it is necessary to point out that, very recently, we have faced a new evolution of the social and literary paradigms. As Mabanckou and Thomas pointed out, More recently, new translational constituencies have emerged from immigrant and diasporic networks, and various transnational/transcolonial alignments now offer alternative ways of approaching Francophone African Literature. (Mabaanckou & Thomas 2012, 3)

In other words, and in the terms of Chevrier, we can declare that this is a shift De la négritude à la migritude: À l’ère de la négritude a succédé le temps de la “ migritude “, un néologisme qui indique clairement que l’Afrique dont nous parlent les écrivains contemporains n’est plus celle qui servait de cadre à la plupart de leurs devanciers, mais, si l’on peut ainsi dire, d’une Afrique extracontinentale dont le centre de gravité se situerait quelque part entre Belleville et l’au-delà du boulevard périphérique. Une situation qui ne va pas, on s’en doute, sans engager une problématique identitaire qui nous ramène à ce concept d’hybride, naguère vilipendé par Cheikh Hamidou Kane, aujourd’hui en passe de réhabilitation puisque, semble-t-il, il s’accorde de plus en plus à l’évolution de notre monde en voie de globalisation.12 (Chevrier 2004, 96) 12

“After the négritude era, the time of migritude has come. This neologism clearly indicates that the Africa contemporary writers talk about is no longer the same Africa which was the setting for most of their predecessors, but an extracontinental Africa, whose centre of gravity could be somewhere between Belleville

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Many contemporary writers, born after the independence of their countries of origin, openly reject labels such as “African author”, “francophone” or “postcolonial”, not because they do not feel they correspond to them but because, given their life and professional circumstances, they do not identify with the associations of protest and resistance offered by these terms. The binary representation, fossilised in the stereotype of Africa and the West as opposed entities, two continents doomed to clash perennially on behalf of a historical violent past based on oppression, seems to have already vanished. Freed from the “missions” undertaken by their predecessors, they assume the colonial language as their own, and they move away from the linguistic dichotomy, demanding to be read from the wider framework of the littérature-monde. What matters to them, as is clearly highlighted by Chevrier, is writing: Si le concept d’africanité fait désormais l’objet d’une mise en crise—la couleur … n’apparaît plus comme dépositaire de valeurs essentielles— c’est, nous expliquent-ils, parce qu’ils entendent d’abord être des écrivains à part entière, sans épithète.13 (Chevrier 2004, 97)

And they wish to write in their language, clearly a hybrid one, but understood from a positive and enriching approach which is openly free of complexes. Accordingly, Congolese author Alain Mabanckou does not hesitate to claim the following: Je crois qu’il y a une fusion permanente entre les sonorités de mes langues africaines, le lingala, le kikongo, le bembé et le français, une sorte de grondement de langues, et il arrive que celles de mon Afrique natale viennent au secours du français qui me sert d’instrument de création, lorsque, cherchant dans le dictionnaire, je constate avec amertume que je ne peux pas écrire comme je le souhaiterais. Est-ce à ce moment précis que commence pour moi l’invention d’une autre langue française?14

and beyond the boulevard périphérique. Of course, this situation presents an identity issue that brings us back to the concept of hybrid, once reviled by Cheikh Hamidou Kane and now in a process of rehabilitation because it suits better the evolution of our globalizing world” (own translation – CS). 13 “If the concept of africanity is now going through a critical time —colour … is no longer a depositary of core values— that is because, according to them, they pretend to be full writers, without any epithet” (own translation – CS). 14 “I think there is a permanent fusion of the sounds of my African languages, such as Lingala, Kicongo, or Bembe, and French, a kind of languages roar. Sometimes, those of my native Africa come to the aid of French, which I use as my instrument

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(Mabanckou 2011, 74; italic original)

For his part, Togolese author Sami Tchak also highlights that, whenever he is asked, with a certain reproachful tone, why he writes in French, this question is mainly due to the discomfort of French Francophones who are not capable of finding their own place in their relationship with Black writers: La langue que nous avons en partage … rend moins facile notre identification comme l’Autre alors que nous ne pouvons être que l’Autre.15 (Mabanckou 2011, 74)

The new generation of Black-African writers, therefore, after appropriating a traditionally western literary genre and owning the language of their past colonisers, are really stating their wish to belong to the littérature-monde, to be recognised as one of the multiple voices which make up the “vaste ensemble polyphonique, sans souci d’un quelconque “impérialisme culturel”16, in the words of the “Manifeste pour une littérature-monde en français”17, published in March 2007. Their hybrid nature, therefore, assumed and integrated into themselves, becomes then their sign of identity, even a literary strategy (Louviot 2010) and, undoubtedly, opens for them the doors of creativity, judging from the number of published works as well as from the recognition they currently enjoy.

3. Translating in the global era: The new paradigms of rewritings in a liquid society On their journey from the periphery to the centre of what Casanova (1999) has termed the République mondiale des lettres,18 African writings

of creation, when, after looking in the dictionary, I note with bitterness that I cannot write as I would like to. Is it at this precise moment when the invention of another French language begins for me?” (own translation – CS). 15 “The language we share … makes our identification as the Other less easy, while we can only be the Other” (own translation – CS). 16 “The wide polyphonic ensemble for which any question regarding ‘cultural imperialism’ disappears” (own translation – CS). 17 “Manifesto towards a world-literature in French” (own translation – CS). 18 Translated as The world republic of letters by M.B. DeBevoise (Casanova 2004).

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are increasingly subject to translation and even to re-translation because, in the words of Bandia: The translation of African Europhone literature is a form of rewriting accomplished through a process of double transposition … The EuroAfrican text is itself a “translated” discourse, which can only be carried into another language through a complex creative process tantamount to retranslating a translated text. (Bandia 2008, 162)

In order to translate such complex works in which a hybrid language is the reflection of mixed identities and a transcultural heritage, it is obvious that the traditional concepts regarding translation, which focus on absolute equivalence as well as purely linguistic aspects, are not enough. For some decades now, ever since the cultural turn of the 1990s and the development of poly-systems theory, the cultural and ideological identity is claiming central importance because it involves, above all, the use of one of the most powerful weapons in existence: the word. Therefore, translation, insomuch as it is an invisible and even hidden activity, manages to occupy a central position in the study of intercultural relations and of the eventual asymmetries which may arise from them. In this regard, Bandia (2005, 957) reminds us that, although translation has always been present and plays an important role in the process of identity construction on the African continent, with the Imperial period, a new “vertical” dimension is added (Bandia 2009, 5). This new dimension creates different asymmetrical power relations and highlights the suitability of the postcolonial approach to explain “the result of negotiating the distance between the African and the European language cultures” (Bandia 2008, 166). By conceptualising translation as a dialectic activity between one set of identities and “other” identities, in the words of Spivak with her concept of “Othering”, “the process by which imperial discourses creates its ‘Others’” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 171), by raising the questions of deterritorialisation and transculturality as central elements to approach translation, according to Bhabha (1994) through his definition of the “third space”, or by denouncing the construction of the East by the West, as Said did (1978), theorists of postcolonial studies laid the foundations which made it possible to grasp, read and rewrite peripheral narratives such as African ones. Therefore, as Vidal Claramonte reminds us, the results of this translating activity can only be understood as: Versiones de realidades provisionales, coyunturales, frágiles y ambiguas, interesantes e interesadas, que se van contextualizando, rectificando y

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traduciendo continuamente con los trayectos hermenéuticos y éticos de la persona.19 (Claramonte 2015, 348)

It is clear then that the development of postcolonial studies and its application in translation studies paved the way for a much-needed redefinition of translation, which has to be more critical, more dialogical and also more unstable. Consequently, as Sales Salvador argues: Cabe reconocer que traducir es intervenir, actuar, comprender que las categorizaciones no son ni universales ni naturales, sino narrativas socialmente elaboradas, porque el lenguaje construye la realidad, en muchos sentidos, y siempre exhibe ideología, está preñado de valores, creencias y puntos de vista que la traducción pretende poner en común, comunicar, debatir o compartir en la medida de lo posible.20 (Salvador 2010, 8)

Paradoxically—since I am discussing here the reading of Frenchwritten narratives with all the nuances that we have already pointed out— postcolonial studies have not been subject to much attention in France until very recently. However, what is interesting here is to highlight that postcolonial studies started to arouse interest in the French scholarly community at the same time that studies on globalisation and its consequences were being developed with the remarkable increase of published literary texts from border areas of the Francophone sphere and with the start of reflections on littérature-monde and on the claims of hybrid writers. In my opinion, this situation explains, at least to a certain extent, the critical reception of the postcolonial apparatus (Collier 2015). In fact, the theories derived from the philosophical approaches of the generation of Derrida and Foucault and developed by Anglophone scholars such as Said, Ashcroft, Bhabha and Spivak, to name just a few, were passionately rebutted in France by others. French anthropologist Amselle (2008), for instance, claims that postcolonial theories tend to maintain a binary interpretation of the world by presenting the East and 19

“Versions of provisional realities which are temporary, frail and ambiguous, interesting and interested, which are constantly contextualized, rectified and translated in line with the hermeneutical and ethical journeys of each person” (own translation – CS). 20 “We can say that translating means intervening, acting, understanding that categorizations are not universal or natural, but socially constructed narratives, because language builds reality in many senses, and it always reveals an ideology, it is laden with values, beliefs and points of view which translation tries to spread, communicate, debate or share as far as possible” (own translation – CS).

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the West as two opposing poles, two unchangeable categories, which are not related to the global and liquid reality (Bauman 2000) of the 21st century. Somehow, Amselle believes that, in enthusiastically denouncing Western colonialism, these theories ultimately articulate a defence of the authenticity and essence of colonised cultures which does not take into account their hybrid character or the specific features of the global world in which we live. Although the postulates of Amselle reflect a very radical point of view, which in my opinion excessively schematises postcolonial thought, they also reveal the specific needs of the present-day globalised and mixed society. In order to approach the concept of globalisation, although it is a very poorly defined and understood one (Beck 1998), it is necessary to highlight here that, far from being under the homogenising standards that were once predicted, we are currently living in a deeply unequal and asymmetrical world (Vidal Claramonte 2010). The apparent disappearance of frontiers; the multiplication of interconnections; and the ever increasing transfer of news, products and people may create, fostered by the discourses spread by the dominating powers, the illusion of a harmonious society in which communication is fluid. However, this clearly reductionist and simplistic view undoubtedly hides a far more complex reality, and we may even claim that the globalisation movement, rather than erasing differences, has made them all the more evident. Moreover, in order to unveil what these discourses hide or, in the words of Fanon (1952), to remove White masks from Black skins, the perspective of translation presents a particularly rich and illuminating field. Regardless of the fact that translation is mainly invisible and tends to melt into the original discourse, it is one of the constituent elements of the global world to the point that Cronin (2006, 70) refers to the contemporary people as “translated beings”. As I pointed out above, language is a powerful tool through which, subtly and surreptitiously, identities are built and presented as real even though they may reflect and perpetuate power relations (Gentzler 2012). In the case of young African authors, who, in a sense, are representative of globalised society, of the displaced and hybrid populations within it, constructed identities show us images of a radically different society according to the stereotypes which are still prevalent in the Western world. In this way, it contributes to maintaining their essence as peripheral texts and their authors as “others”, in opposition to what “we” are. In order to illustrate this, I could observe for example that, in the Spanish translation of Le ventre de l’Atlantique, by French-Senegalese author Fatou Diome, certain elements from the African sphere tend to

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preserve the translation strategy proposed by Diome in the original version since the author is aware that the target reader is French. I would like to quote here the fragment in which the main character fondly remembers a traditional dish from her native island, Niodior (Diome 2003, 27). In his text, Serrat Crespo takes a literal approach from the original text and makes it possible for the Spanish reader, like the French one, to see and even smell the stew: “¡Hum! ¡Un talalé que huele a especias, un manjar real! No cabe duda, no hay como una mujer que sepa elaborar un cuscús de pescado tan delicioso” (Diome 2004, 28; italics in original)21. However, when the African elements drift apart from a stereotypical image in the Western world (which includes exotic and spiced cuisine, as in the previous example), when the text, for instance, becomes thick with references to authors from the African literary canon, we observe that the situation is radically different. Diome typographically underlines some intertextual references to call the attention of the reader to the presence in her writing of works and authors who are part of her African background: “Bref, je lui dois mon Aventure ambigüe” (Diome 2003, 166); “Il avait été un nègre à Paris et s’était mis … à entretenir les mirages qui l’auréolaient de prestige” (ibid., 88; italics in original).22 The signs which are meant to capture the attention of Western readers disappear completely in the Spanish version since Serrat Crespo chose to remove all typographical marks, and he even modified in quite a striking way the title of Dadié’s work: “No había sido más que un pobre negro en París”23 (Diome 2004, 92; italics added). I also observe that many of the references to the Paris experienced by African immigrants, who play a vital role in the novel, tend to be silenced in the translation. Diome (2003, 37) mentions, for example, the department store Tati, located in Barbès, a neighbourhood largely 21

“Hum! A talalé which smells of spices, a royal delicacy! There is no doubt, only a woman could prepare such a delicious fish couscous” (own translation from the Spanish – CS). The original version in French is, “Hum! Un talalé fleurant bon les épices, un vrai mets royal ! C’est sûr, il n’y a que les femmes de chez nous pour réussir un aussi délicieux couscous de poisson” and has been translated in English by Norman and Schwartz (2006) as: “You can smell the spices in the talalé, a dish fit for a king! Our women are the only ones who can make such delicious fish couscous and that’s a fact!” 22 “In short, I owe my Ambiguous Adventure to him” and “He had been a Negro in Paris and […] started to maintain the mirages that heighten its prestige” (own translation – CS). Diome refers here to three seminal works of African literature: L’aventure ambigüe by C. H. Kane (1961), Un nègre à Paris by B. Dadié (1959) and Les mirages de Paris by O. Socé (1937). 23 “He had merely been a poor black in Paris” (own translation – CS).

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inhabited by African immigrants. In the Spanish version, Tati becomes “la tienda de Cati”24 (Diome 2004, 40). With this, instead of the image of a lower middle class neighbourhood and a store in which mediocre-quality clothes and fabric can be found at very low prices, it seems that the Spanish reader is transported to the Paris of fashion and small boutiques, associated in the social imaginary with the chic side of the French capital. If the textual analysis in itself clearly reveals the exotisation of the discourse through translation or, in other words, the re-territorialisation of writing which denies it its hybrid nature, it is surprising to notice that these strategies are even more remarkable when applied to the paratextual elements, to the book as an object and to the images it transmits. Indeed, the apparent neutrality of the cover chosen by the French publisher (although undoubtedly the presence of a black and white photograph of the writer may in itself be a subject of controversy) is contrasted with an image which combines multiple stereotypes on the African continent in the book published in Spain by Lumen: extreme poverty, wild beauty, traditional dresses … All of this is in contrast with a title which leaves no room for doubt regarding the fact that we are reading it in the land of Cervantes, En un lugar del Atlántico. If any suspicion remains, the text on the back cover reminds us immediately of the most emblematic work of the Spanish literature: “En un lugar del Atlántico de cuyo nombre pocos suelen acordarse …”25

24

“Cati’s shop” (own translation – CS). “Somewhere in the Atlantic, in a place whose name few people care to remember …” (own translation – CS, based on the latest English version of Don Quixote by Edith Grossman).

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It all happens, therefore, as if the translation of the novel had been carried out with the intention to ajustar[la] a la categoría de lo exótico, a los estereotipos que ya están asentados en las culturas receptoras occidentales, y a las relaciones entre las culturas implicadas, entre Oriente y Occidente, entre los hemisferios norte y sur o entre el centro angloamericano y el resto. (Rodríguez Murphy 2015b, 107–8)26

Likewise, the Spanish critics received the translation of Verre Cassé, by Alain Mabanckou, as a “clear homage to Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral” and even as the “Congolese version of the Peruvian novel”.27 Such comments are clearly the result of a reading which again encloses “world-writing” into a framework which is excessively narrow. In fact, in this novel, which is written without a single period, Mabanckou endlessly multiplies the intertextual references and invites the readers to become carried away by a whirlwind of texts and sensations which go far beyond allusions to magic realism. Translation, in this case, seems to contribute to the spread of a reductionist view of the dialogic and heteroglossic writing of a multifaceted author who does not hesitate to define himself as a “migratory bird”.28 Indeed, it is worth mentioning that translation silences most of the numerous allusions to African works since the book was published without any kind of footnotes or notes in the margin. Whereas the absence of most of the Sub-Saharan referents may be explained by a mere lack of knowledge and the consequent lack of identification, there are other particularly striking cases. For example, Mabanckou (2005, 25) plays with the similarity of sounds and appropriates the biblical reference with a clear humorous intention when he says: “les gens … ne rendent plus à Césaire ce qui est à Césaire”. In this context, it is surprising that Mireia Porta (2007, 21), the novel’s translator into Spanish, reverts to the original expression. With this choice, not only does she erase the significant reference to the father of the Négritude literary movement, Aimé Césaire, but she also flattens a comic 26

“Adjust it to the category of the exotic, to the stereotypes which are already fixated in the western receiving cultures, and to the relations between the cultures involved, between the East and the West, the northern and southern hemispheres or the Anglo-American centre and everywhere else” (own translation – CS). 27 These statements were made by Félix Romeo during a presentation of the novel published by the Spanish daily newspaper ABC on March 10, 2007. 28 In 2011, A. Mabanckou did publish an essay called Écrivain et oiseau migrateur (Paris, André Versaille) in which he presents an inventory of his passions, his memories, his readings, his friends and, ultimately, his life.

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trait in the novel which is clearly essential in Mabanckou’s writing. Strangely enough, Steemers (2014, 122) also underlines the same disappearance of this poet’s trace in Helen Stevenson’s English translation of Broken glass (Mabanckou 2010:11): “[P]eople … fail to render unto Ceasar what is Ceasar’s.” Is it a mere coincidence? It is difficult to come to a conclusion without a more exhaustive comparative study of the English and Spanish texts, but it is clearly an element which seems to confirm that, in the process of translation, that is, of universalisation of a work, the writings of the “enfants de la postcolonie” (Waberi 1998) tend to lose a significant portion of the hybrid nature which defines them. Given this situation, I share with Bielsa (2015) the need to initiate a cosmopolitan turn of translation which allows us to overcome the dichotomies and the simplistic views based on traditional Western stereotypes. Based on the post-universal concepts of cosmopolitanism developed particularly by Beck (2005) and Delanty (2006; 2009) and in accordance with the development of the sociology of translation29 (Wolf and Fukari 2007), Bielsa (2015, 369) insists on the fact that “los procesos de hibridación y localización [son] maneras importantes de redefinir lo local y lo nacional a través de su interacción con lo global”.30 She defends a rapprochement between translation studies and social theory in order to contribute to the “comprensión cultural, cuya importancia es central en los procesos de cosmopolitización de la realidad”31 (Bielsa 2015, 371–72) and, ultimately, to “trascender el etnocentrismo a través de la traducción” (ibid., 380). It becomes necessary and urgent to leave aside binary oppositions and to finally enter “[l]a transmodernidad translatoria, la traducción transmoderna”32 (Martín Ruano 2015) which takes into account the deep hybridisation of the globalised world, the central role that translation plays in it (not only on a textual level) and the “illusion de l’altérité”33 (Mouralis 2007). It is essential to take into account the fact that, in our liquid society, identities are always fragmentary, unstable constructs which are constantly 29 It is worth mentioning that these interesting theories have recently and successfully been applied to other types of hybrid literatures, particularly Chicano literature (López Ponz 2014). 30 “The processes of hybridization and localization are important ways to redefine what is local and national through their interaction with what is global” (own translation – CS). 31 “Cultural understanding, the importance of which is essential in the processes of cosmopolization of reality” (own translation – CS). 32 “Translative transmodernity, transmodern translation” (own translation – CS). 33 “The illusion of alterity” (own translation – CS).

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rewritten and renegotiated through our discursive practices. The time has come to consider that the concept of a “third space” can now be applied to other people and not only to marginalised sectors of society. The “inbetween” is, ultimately, the space in which we can all share our hybrid experiences. In other words, it is necessary to understand that the premises on which the relationships between the Self and the Other were developed by postcolonial studies and their applications in the field of peripheral literature and their diffusion are no longer an end in themselves but have become starting points. As Bandia remarked in a recent interview (Rodríguez Murphy 2015a), we have entered a “post-postcolonial era”, and there is a rapidly multiplying number of symptoms that show the need to transcend the references to the empire and the history of a people when the new generations fight to escape the very clutches of that stereotype. Postcolonial theories allowed the readers, and also the translators as the first readers, to gain awareness of the interstitial spaces which hide behind any discourse, and although these postulates are nowadays commonly accepted, the analysis of texts, as I have shown here with a few examples, reveals that we are still far from their application in practice. Therefore, I believe that we must keep on researching and spreading concrete results in order to find the way towards a truly ethical and dialogical translation practice, taking into account the fact that both writing and translating are subtle and paradoxical tasks which require acceptance of the imperfect dimension of language (Vidal Claramonte 2015).

4. Conclusion Dealing with “African” literature from the perspective of translation, with the tools available in a discipline which has enlarged its scope and multiplied its potential approaches, is an enriching experience which reveals the deep asymmetries of a globalised society. In this regard, we must recognise that postcolonial studies and its application in translation studies have provided some crucial tools of analysis and a series of basic concepts which are currently widely accepted as a means of understanding the subtle details of the translation task when it is applied in texts of “minor literatures”. However, the progressive globalisation of the world, the development of new theories related to cosmopolitanism and the evolution of the writings of the “enfants de la postcolonie” (Waberi 1998) reveal that it is now necessary to take a new turn which will move us away from binary oppositions and from a

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universalist approach with homogenising tendencies and which will consequently move us away from colonial and postcolonial frameworks. It is therefore important to insist on the central role played by translation in the construction of stereotypical narratives and identities. Likewise, it is essential to highlight the responsibility of the translator and the other agents involved in the publishing of books and discourses. The quest is not only to identify spaces of resistance but to discover and reveal the palimpsests with a clear awareness of their fragile nature, the result of interactions on both the local and global levels. Therefore, it may be possible to develop new models for a translation praxis which are truly capable of establishing a dialogue, of listening to the polyphonic concert offered by the hybrid and colourful narratives of a generation which aims to be received with a “cosmopolitan view” (Beck 2005).

References Amselle, J.-L. 2008. L’occident décroché: Enquête sur les postcolonialismes. Paris: Stock. Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin. 1989. The empire writes back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures. London and New York: Routledge. —. 2000. Postcolonial studies: The key concepts. London and New York: Routledge. Bandia, P. F. 2005. Esquisse d’une histoire de la traduction en Afrique. Meta 50 (3): 957–71. —. 2006. African Europhone literature and writing as translation: Some ethical issues. In Translating others, vol. 2, ed. T. Hermans, 349–61. Manchester: St. Jerome. —. 2008. Translation as reparation: Writing and translation in postcolonial Africa. Manchester: St. Jerome. —. 2009. Translation matters: Linguistic and cultural representation. In Translation studies in Africa, ed. J. Inggs and L. Meintjes, 1–15. London and New York: Continuum. Bauman, Z. 2000. Liquid modernity. Oxford: Polity Press. Beck, U. 1998. ¿Qué es la globalización? Falacias del globalismo, respuestas a la globalización. Trans. B. Moreno and M. R. Borrás. Barcelona: Paidós. —. 2005. La mirada cosmopolita o la guerra es paz. Trans. B. Moreno Carrillo. Barcelona: Paidós. Bhabha, H. K. 1994. The location of culture. London and New York: Routledge.

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Bielsa, E. 2015. Apertura cosmopolita al otro: Una aproximación al papel de la traducción en la teoría social del cosmopolitismo. Papers: Revista de sociología 100 (3): 365–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.5565/rev/papers.2104 Casanova, P. 1999. La république mondiale des lettres. Repr., Paris: Seuil, 2008. —. 2004. The world republic of letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chevrier, J. 2004. Afrique(s)-sur-Seine: autour de la notion de “migritude”. Notre librairie 155–156:96–100. Collier, A.-C. 2015. Traduire les études postcoloniales en France. Convergences francophones 2 (1) : 56–71. http://mrujs.mtroyal.ca/index.php/cf/index Cronin, M. 2006. Translation and identity. London: Routledge. Delanty, G. 2006. The cosmopolitan imagination: Critical cosmopolitanism and social theory. The British Journal of Sociology 57 (1): 25–47. http://www.oneworlduv.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/ 06/cosmopolitan_imagination.pdf —. 2009. The cosmopolitan imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1975. Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Díaz Narbona, I. 2007. Literaturas del África subsahariana y del Océano Índico. Cádiz: Publicaciones Universidad de Cádiz. Diome, F. 2003. Le ventre de l’Atlantique. Col. Le livre de poche. Repr., Paris: Seuil, 2005. —. 2004. En un lugar del Atlántico. Trans. M. Serrat Crespo. Barcelona: Lumen. —. 2006. The belly of the Atlantic. Trans. L. Norman and R. Schwartz. London: Serpent’s Tail. Fanon, F. 1952. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil. Gentzler, E. 2012. Translation without borders. Translation. http://translation.fusp.it/articles/translation-without-borders Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. London: Verso. Glissant, E. 1997. Traité du tout-monde. Paris: Gallimard. Inggs, J., and L. Meintjes, eds. 2009. Translation studies in Africa. London and New York: Continuum. Kesteloot, L. 2009. Historia de la literatura negroafricana: Una visión panorámica desde la francofonía. Trans. A. Lozano and S. Andrés. Barcelona: El Cobre.

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Laferrière, D. 2008. Je suis un écrivain japonais. Paris: Boréal. —. 2015. Discours de réception. Académie française. http://www.academie-francaise.fr/discours-de-reception-de-danylaferriere Le Bris, M., and A. Mabanckou. 2013. L’Afrique qui vient. Paris: Hoëbeke. López Ponz, M. 2014. Juego de capitales: La traducción en la sociedad del mestizaje. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Louviot, M. 2010. Poétique de l’hybridité dans les littératures postcoloniales. PhD diss., Université de Strasbourg. http://scd-theses.ustrasbg.fr/2083/01/LOUVIOT_Myriam_2010.pdf Maalouf, A. 2015. Réponse au discours de réception de Dany Laferrière. Académie française. http://www.academie-francaise.fr/reponse-audiscours-de-reception-de-dany-laferriere Mabanckou, A. 2005. Verre cassé. Col. Points. Repr. Paris: Seuil, 2006. —. 2007. Vaso roto. Trans. M. Porta i Arnau. Barcelona: Alpha Decay. —. 2011. Écrivain et oiseau migrateur. Paris: André Versaille éditeur. Mabanckou, A. 2010. Broken glass. Transl. H. Stevenson. Berkeley: Soft Skill Press. Mabanckou, A., and D. Thomas, eds. 2012. Francophone literature in global contexts. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Martín R., and M. Rosario. 2015. La transmodernidad translatoria, la traducción transmoderna. Anthropos 241:59–68. Miampika, L.-W. 2003. Literaturas africanas: Entrevista a Landry-Wilfrid Miampika por A. Lozano. El Fingidor 19–20:14–16. Mongo-Mboussa, B. 2002. Désirs d’Afrique. Paris: Gallimard. Mouralis, B. 2007. L’illusion de l’altérité: Études de littérature africaine. Paris: Honoré Champion. Okri, B. 1997. A way of being free. London: Phoenix House. Rodríguez Murphy, E. 2015a. An interview with Professor Paul Bandia. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 23 (1). http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2015.1003708 —. 2015b. Traducción y literatura africana: Multilingüismo y transculturación en la narrativa nigeriana de expresión inglesa. Granada: Comares. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. London: Penguin. Sales Salvador, A. 2010. Traducción, lo contrario de la muerte. In Traducción y asimetría, ed. A. Vidal Claramonte, 8–15. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Senghor, L. 1984. Hosties noires. Paris: Seuil.

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Steemers, V. 2014. Broken glass or broken text? The translatability of Alain Mabanckou’s Verre cassé (2005) into English. Research in African Literatures 45 (1): 107–24. Tchak, S. 2014. La couleur de l’écrivain: Comédie littéraire. Ciboure: La Cheminante. Tchindjang, M., A. Bopda, and L. A. Ngamgne. 2008. Langues et identités culturelles en Afrique.” Museum International 60 (3): 40–54. Tymoczko, M. 1999. Translation in a postcolonial context. Early Irish literature in English translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. Vidal Claramonte, A., ed. 2010. Traducción y asimetría. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. —. 2015. Traducir al atravesado. Papers: Revista de sociología 100 (3): 345–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.5565/rev/papers.2143 Waberi, A. 1998. Les enfants de la postcolonie: Esquisse d’une nouvelle génération d’écrivains francophones d’Afrique noire. Notre Librairie 135:8–15. Wolf, M., and A. Fukari, eds. 2007. Constructing a sociology of translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Zabus, C. 2007. The African palimpsest: Indigenization of language in the West African Europhone novel. 2nd ed. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi.

CHAPTER TWELVE FRACTALISATION: THE HUMAN CONDITION AS A TRANSLATIONAL CONDITION1 HOLGER SIEVER

1. Introduction The world is changing, and so we can refer to the Book of Ecclesiastes (chapter 3, verses 1–8) or its popularised version sung by the birds: “For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven”, slightly (post)modernising its lyrics: a time for modernity and a time for post-modernity, a time for colonialism and a time for the postcolony, a time for modern philosophy and a time for postmodern philosophy. There is even a time for new thoughts and a new complex way of seeing things, which will override older concepts, ideas and philosophies. The world is changing, but do we reflect these changes in more complex thinking and theorising? There have been two main currents in world history since World War II: firstly, the decolonisation of most African, Asian and Caribbean nations and, secondly, after the end of the Cold War, globalisation, that is, the integration of most nations into the global political and economic system. Decolonisation stands for freedom, autonomy and equal rights for both nations and individuals whereas globalisation, among other things, stands for the free flow of capital, goods and human beings (i.e. migration). Globalisation (as a long-term phenomenon) experienced a renewed boost after the turning point in the years 1989–1991: (1) The fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union led to a political revolution and to the end of both the Cold War and the East-West divide (which 1

Paper and original German quotes translated by my colleague, Sarah Olivia Signer.

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ultimately also rendered discussions on the Third World or non-aligned states obsolete). (2) The increased use of computer and Internet-aided technology precipitated the digital revolution and the birth of the Internet age. (3) A restructuring of the economy and the deregulation of financial markets led to an economic revolution as well as to the restructuring of the economy from commodity capitalism to financial capitalism (see Rosa 2005, 335–36). These developments are—and this is most apparent in the case of the Internet and the financial markets—accompanied by the deterritorialisation and the temporalisation of living conditions. If we refer to Wallerstein (1974) or Luhmann (1996), we can assume that only one world-system or global society exists in the 21st century. This system’s problems are naturally unlike those experienced during colonialism or the Cold War. The main issue of the political and social agenda in the age of deterritorialised and temporalized financial capitalism can be described as inclusion vs. exclusion. This involves, on the one hand, integration into social functional systems (or integration into society) and, on the other hand, the possibility to access capital, power, work, education, water, food, Internet, information, et cetera. Or, from a holistic and abstract perspective, it involves access to political, social, technological and natural resources. Similar modes of inclusion or exclusion can be found all over the world and at all levels due to a disparate state of inclusion into the various functional systems (politics, economics, law, science, education, art, etc.) for, inter alia, states, regions, towns, nations, ethnicities, persons, businesses, organisations. I describe this circumstance as fractalisation. Applying Spencer-Brown’s (1969) concept, fractalisation can be described, to some extent, as the re-entry of a specific form at different analytical levels. Benoit Mandelbrot (1982) coined the term fractal to describe repeating or self-similar patterns in mathematics or nature. One of the main characteristics of fractals is that the same patterns occur at small and large scales. Fractal patterns have been proven to appear in almost all of the physiological processes within human bodies. Even weather patterns, stock-market price variations and galaxy clusters have all proven to be fractal in nature. Fractals—in the sense used here—are repeating or self-similar patterns in the scientific description of the world. For example, if you use the form of dichotomies like centre/periphery or rich/poor, or the form of trichotomies like pre-modern/modern/postmodern to describe today’s world in a sociological or political manner, you will find these forms to be fractals because they emerge on each analytical level. There are centres

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and peripheries on a global level but also on a national, regional or local level. On a global level, there are rich and poor states; on a national level, there are rich and poor regions; on a regional level, there are rich and poor towns; on a local level, there are rich and poor quarters. Also, you have big cities—let us say Berlin, London, New York, Mumbai, Cape Town or Rio de Janeiro—where you can find individuals living in accordance with a pre-modern, modern or postmodern mind set or belief system. For the purpose of this paper, I propose a conceptual differentiation of three periods of time: (1) the period prior to the turning point (1989/1991), which I will refer to as classic modernity; (2) the period between the turning point and the global financial crisis (2005/2008) that I call postmodernity; and (3) the period since the global financial crisis which I designate as hypermodernity. This tripartite division is especially expedient as each period is related to a different type of metalinguistic description. In modernity, the metalinguistic description is based on representation, which was successfully analysed and replaced with the notion of construction in post-modern discourse. The concept of translation (see Renn 2006, 16–17) can be used for the metalinguistic description of hypermodernity. Based on Joachim Renn’s (2006) recommendation, social conditions in hypermodernity can, in my opinion, be best described as translational conditions. Translation is therefore no longer merely a concept found in translation studies but has developed into the basic concept of social analysis in the 21st century. Translation and fractalisation are complementary concepts. While fractalisation emphasises the structure of the hypermodern world by describing recurrent patterns on different levels, translation is the basic concept to focus on the relations between those structures, on the one hand, and on the relations between the individuals trying to cope with those structures, on the other hand. In the following, we must clarify (a) the meaning of hypermodernity, (b) to what extent fractalisation contributes to an appropriate description of the global society in the 21st century and (c) why the human condition in the hypermodern global society is best described with the concept of translation.

2. Postmodernity vs. hypermodernity There seems to be no doubt about the fact that the past decades have constituted a period of change and transition, despite diagnoses returning very different results. The scientific world has reacted to this phenomenon

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with terms such as postmodernity, late modernity, second modernity, liquid modernity or reflexive modernisation. Postmodernity implies the end of a certain era, referred to as modernity, and the dawn of a new, different era, which is insufficiently described with the prefix post. The societies of the West are not alone in experiencing rapid reconstruction. This situation also affects the societies of the East, North and South. Every transition must end someday, and the same holds true for reconstruction. This reconstruction was induced by the technological, economic, medical and political developments of the last 50 years. In the past five decades, we have experienced a phase of reconstruction from classical modernity to postmodernity, or even hypermodernity. My theory is that while postmodernity and hypermodernity are derived from classical modernity, chronological derivation (post— after) may be less relevant than an inherent increase in complexity (hyper—beyond, augmented). Following Baudrillard (1990), I prefer the term hypermodernity over postmodernity to describe the latest stage of today’s world as postmodernity, on the one hand, is reactionary insofar as it emphasises chronological succession and, on the other hand, connotes discontinuity over continuity. In this way, it outlines the break with the antecedent (see the broad discussion on the end of the project of modernity). In this sense, it stands as a term for a certain historical interim period. The fact that there is discontinuity on the micro-level is beyond question. I, however, consider continuity on the macro-level far more significant. On the one hand, the diagnosis of a categorical break between modernity and postmodernity is based on a static view and, on the other, on a perspectival contraction that completely underestimates the dimensions of time in terms of temporalisation and social acceleration (see Rosa 2005, 444). I do not believe that the project of modernity has ended but rather that it has merely altered its historical shape. In this respect, postmodernity or hypermodernity—depending on which term you prefer—constitutes nothing but stages of a comprehensive process. Postmodernity is too vague a term for the description of that which is currently developing in the course of global, social reconstruction. By contrast, hypermodernity implies that this new stage pursues the essential features of modernity, meaning that the project of modernity was not set aside but that it embarked on a new journey, instead. The prefix hyper implies that these features are expedited to the extreme, are developed in an exaggerated form, span all areas of life and do not only affect a certain part of the world but have, instead, become universal features.

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The concept of hypermodernity emphasises the fact that there is no unilinear succession of first pre-modern, then modern and nowadays postmodern living conditions and belief systems but that this chronological succession has led in almost all countries to a situation where pre-modern, modern and postmodern features could be detected at the same place and at the same time. Therefore, hypermodernity stands for the increased complexity of the synchronicity of the asynchronous. On the one hand, the concept of hypermodernity addresses continuity and, on the other hand, an increase of complexity regarding the three key features that have defined and characterised the development of modernity since early modernity: the globalisation, temporalisation and differentiation of functional systems. Incidentally, all three features induce increased insecurity and contingency. In this case, globalisation does not, as is often the case, stand for the particular era that is associated with the most recent surge in globalisation, following the implosion of the Soviet Union, but instead for the development of a universal capitalist society or, in Wallerstein’s (1974) words, a world-system, instated by the explorations of Vasco da Gama, Magellan and Columbus. With this in mind, globalisation can be understood as the intensification of the time-space-compression (Harvey 1990), which inversely correlates with a time-space-distanciation (Giddens 1995). Both instances describe a centuries-long process that has led, and continues to lead, to a continuous increase in the range of temporal and spatial coordination. The term temporalisation refers to certain societal changes. These include the transition from tradition to innovation, the divergence between world-time and life-time (Blumenberg 1986), the acceleration of the pace of life and the adjustment of the hope of salvation from atemporal transcendence (eternal life in heaven after death) to accelerated immanence (life in the fast lane). These types of temporalisation are all conducive to the adaptation of complexity that goes hand in hand with the transition from stratified to functional differentiation of society. This logic behind temporalisation of complexity (Rosa 2005, 293), in which unrealised opportunities are rescinded for the future, is a continuous feature spanning modernity as well as postmodernity/hypermodernity. Innovation favours the new over the traditional and was thus transformed into a key concept of social semantics in early modernity. The semantic campaign for the implementation of the new as the desirable (or more desirable) in societal self-description was mainly waged in the Renaissance and baroque periods. The technological developments of the last 50 years clearly prove that products (e.g. Windows 10) must

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nowadays be advertised as new. A statement such as “I would rather stick with Windows 3.11 as it has proven itself over a long period of time” is almost unthinkable due to technological development. On a social level, innovation results in a preference for individuals who are more at ease with (technological) innovations. This leads to a long-term revaluation concerning the appreciation for old age and youth: while old age was held in the highest esteem in pre-modernity, hypermodernity is characterised by youth and youthfulness. Many “old” people today feel uncoupled from societal developments or even shunted to the side line. Pre-modern society’s time consciousness is either circular or linear with a locked temporal horizon. A linear time consciousness with an open temporal horizon prevails in (hyper)modern societies (Rosa 2005, 281). As a consequence, world-time (or history) and life-time (individual life span) incur a long-term contrary relationship. The divergence between world-time and life-time as diagnosed by Blumenberg (1986) puts pressure on individuals. The lifestyle of medieval individuals was geared towards the goal of transcendent life after death while modern (and hypermodern) individuals care more about their individual life in this world and attempt to garnish it with as many good experiences as possible. The idea that an accelerated life or accelerated exploitation of options (which the world provides all individuals) can patch the gulf between world-time and life-time governs modernity, postmodernity and hypermodernity (Rosa 2005, 289): As the number of possibilities increases the faster individual stages, episodes or events are experienced, acceleration constitutes the most promising, indeed the only strategy with which to converge world-time and life-time. (Rosa 2005, 291; translation: SOS)

Temporalisation is noticeable in the economic field due to, for example, the acceleration of the manufacturing processes, the production cycles, financial transactions or the intensity of consumption. In order for temporalisation to be in any way effective, modern societies needed to get used to clocks first (see Mumford 1934). Respecting the laws of capitalist time management and the associated compulsion to grow and accelerate were hallmarks of modernity, and they remain a governing factor of temporal logic in hypermodernity (Rosa 2005, 272). An essential component of temporalisation is the commodification of time itself (Rosa 2005, 258), in other words the transformation of time into a scarce commodity that needs to be efficiently cultivated. Benjamin Franklin summarised this condition very early on with the phrase “Time is money”. However, temporalisation as an acceleration of the pace of life is also

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ubiquitous and tangible in the lifeworld (Habermas 1985). The mobility facilitated by our modern vehicles enables us to cover great distances and thus experience more. The transition from transcendence to immanence was once summarised by Nietzsche in his saying “God is dead”. In the course of secularisation, the hope of salvation was transformed from timeless transcendence, which assured eternal life in the hereafter, to accelerated immanence in this world (vigorous life in the fast lane). Money took the place of God in contingency management during the process of modernisation (Rosa 2005, 285). This is one of the fundamental reasons for the hostility of religious (and especially, but not exclusively, Islamist) fundamentalism toward the “godless” West and the USA in particular. As capital, money assumed the role of transforming the indeterminable into determinable complexity (see Deutschmann 1999, 100): When faced with the fundamental uncertainties surrounding the future, it is no longer dedication to a reassuring god, who has intervening power over the contingencies, that puts the individual at ease—the comfort found in many prayers is based precisely on the idea that whatever may happen is in God’s hands and therefore good—but instead, now the functional equivalent is the notion that having as much money and as many options as possible enables the individual to appropriately react to future contingencies, i.e. new needs and new threatening situations. (Rosa 2005, 285; translation: SOS)

The fear of damnation (hell) or, in a more positive light, the hope for salvation (paradise) experienced a fundamental transformation thanks to the process of modernisation and secularisation. (Hyper)modern people’s basic fear is no longer the fear of eternal damnation (exclusion from paradise) but, instead, the universal concern of being irrevocably uncoupled, losing touch as well as decisive options, or finding oneself left too far behind (exclusion from communication) (Rosa 2005, 285). The response in (hyper)modernity is to accelerate the pace of life. According to Rosa (2005, 292), individuals who are infinitely accelerated need no longer fear death as the annihilator of options: The pure, concealed, yet culturally highly effective “promise of salvation” in social acceleration ... consists in the fact that it seems to offer a secular, functional equivalent for the notion of “eternal life”, and can thus be understood as modernity’s response ... to death. (Rosa 2005, 287; italics in German original; translation: SOS)

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Finally, the differentiation of functional systems means that the increase in societal complexity has led to certain areas, such as politics, economics, law, science, education and art being designed as autopoietic systems (Luhmann 1996). This differentiation once again creates a renewed complexity boost. While in earlier, pre-modern times it was possible to say that individuals were integrated into society once others recognised them as full members (e.g. after completing initiation rituals), such a simple description is no longer possible today. Once functional systems have been differentiated, we are faced with the problem of inclusion and exclusion. Each individual must now actively strive for inclusion in selected functional systems. In hypermodernity, a member can be included in one or more functional systems while being excluded from other functional systems. We are faced in hypermodernity with individuals who are partially included at the same time as being multiply excluded (Rosa 2005, 296). Today, inclusion, such as in the functional economic system, is no longer regulated in the same way as during colonialism, namely through territorial occupation in order to use new territories as markets or to exploit raw materials. Rather, inclusion takes place through development and control over the flow of goods. The same applies mutatis mutandis for inclusion in other functional systems. This transition from space of place to space of flows, which can also be referred to as fluidisation, is a result of time-space convergence: The space of flows is characterised, above all, by its networked, nonhierarchically stabilised—but instead operating via temporary consolidations and reversible inclusions—decentralised organisation. (Rosa 2005, 344; italics in German original; translation: SOS)

Fluidisation invalidates the distinction between separate places and between centre and periphery, provided that these places are identified as nation states. Neither centres nor peripheries exist in a network of flows, only junctions and more or less intensively used connecting lines. Thus, fluidisation plays a role in the process of fractalisation. Under the terms of modernity, one-dimensional thinking was very helpful: East vs. West, North vs. South, good vs. evil, right vs. left, poor vs. rich, centre vs. periphery, colonial countries vs. colonies, et cetera. One-dimensional locations are no longer feasible due to the fluid conditions of hypermodernity. Ascription occurs in a three-dimensional, or if time is included, four-dimensional matrix. This increase in complexity

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at the object level must also be reflected, as proposed by Morin (2008), in the metalinguistic description. Under hypermodern conditions, a human being is not rich or poor but is regarded as being rich or poor on a specific level. This means that the same human being can be considered to be rich on a regional level but poor on a national level. The rich-poor dichotomy is a fractal pattern, which means that the ascription of wealth (a) is always to be related to a specific level and (b) can change from one level to the other. The rich-poor fractal form is traditionally used in relationship to the economic system, but it can also be applied to other functional systems. In the educational system, for instance, the rich-poor fractal reproduces itself according to the social capital that individuals accumulate (Bourdieu 1984). The processes of globalisation, temporalisation and differentiation of functional systems are characterised by the logic of acceleration that drives growth’s and acceleration’s relationship of intensification at the structural, cultural and economic level. The logic of acceleration remains the link between modernity and postmodernity: Economic rationale acts as the primary accelerator for technical acceleration, the logic of progression drives acceleration of the pace of life, and the structural principle of functional differentiation accelerates social transformation in a historically unprecedented manner (Rosa 2005, 310; translation: SOS).

Overall, this results in Rosa’s (2005, 441) theory that social acceleration must be understood as the irreducible and dominant principle of (hyper)modernity and (hyper)modernisation, which interlinks the various stages of the modernisation process. The concept of hypermodernity reflects the increase in complexity in today’s world exactly because it focuses on the synchronicity and coexistence of pre-modern, modern and postmodern living conditions, working conditions, belief systems, mind sets, et cetera.

3. Fractalisation The processes of deterritorialisation and temporalisation are components of hypermodernity and together lead to a ubiquitous synchronicity which results in a fractalisation of the world. Deterritorialisation leads to coexistence of formerly separated phenomena or, in other words, to a proximity of the distant while temporalisation results in the synchronicity of the asynchronous. Fragments formerly separated in terms of location

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and time can be found today in the shape of fractals in the same place and at the same time. Fractalisation is more than mere fragmentation whereas fragmentation is naturally a prerequisite of fractalisation. The conceptual surplus consists of individual fragments repeating themselves in various areas, at various levels, in differing magnitudes and at differing times. Fractalisation takes place at both the spatial and the temporal level. A fragment can be determined in terms of content while a fractal is determined according to its form. Typical fractals in the realm of society (or sociology) are the dichotomies of centre-periphery, rich-poor, included-excluded, independentdependent, literate-illiterate, powerful-powerless, colonial states-colonies, et cetera. Fractalisation means that fractal forms can increasingly be found at each and every level (global, national, regional, local) and within each and every functional system. Under the terms of hypermodernity, the evaluation of these fractals may differ from level to level and from functional system to functional system (and/or from time span to time span). Hypermodernity is characterised by a nesting of separate spaces and divergent times. Legal, economic or historical forms formerly considered asynchronous, such as monarchies, democracies, dictatorships, state formations, state disintegrations, communism, capitalism, colonisation, decolonisation, constitutional states, social states and clan structures only exist simultaneously in parallel in a fractalised form. Consider, for example, the simultaneous existence of communism as a political framework and capitalism as an economic framework in post-Mao China. One might also think of mobile phones or televisions used by an indigenous people such as the Yanomami in the Brazilian rain forest or perhaps the undemocratic clan structure of street gangs or the mafia in democratically governed USA cities. Colonialism can, in a broader sense, be defined as a particular stage of the globalisation process, as an attempt to integrate Africa, Asia and Latin America into the global economic system. Decolonisation changed the political environment (from political dependence to political autonomy) but left the manner in which economies are incorporated into the global economy intact. The term postcolony normally indicates continued economic dependence on the former colonial countries despite accomplished political autonomy. The notion of the post-colony suggests that we are dealing with monolithic nation states, which are either former colonies or former colonial states. In my opinion, the term post-colony, as it is used by many

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authors of the postcolonial discourse, is not capable of appropriately broaching the differentiation of Western and non-Western societies in functional systems and the effect these various functional systems have on the different world regions. Nations states are no longer monolithic at all The notion of the post-colony should therefore not be understood as the designation of specific geographically delimited areas such as nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America but instead as a designation for all independent states or domestic regions that were exploited as colonies. Inclusion in the local or global economic system is then not based on autonomy and reciprocity but on dependency. In addition, the notion of the post-colony should always be used in relationship to a specific functional system. The location on the map of those territories, regions and areas considered post-colonies changes according to the underlying functional system. As is true for individuals, one could say that those post-colonies are simultaneously partially and multiply included in several functional systems while being partially and multiply excluded from others. The notion of the post-colony should be understood and used as a fractal pattern to describe (a) the dichotomy of being politically independent but at the same time economically dependent and/or (b) the dichotomy of being included in the political system while being excluded from other functional systems (economy, education, etc.). This means that the notion of the post-colony not only applies to specific nation states in Africa, Asia or Latin America but also to specific peripheral regions within African, Asian or Latin-American countries, and even to peripheral regions within Western countries. Thus, being in a post-colonial condition is not limited to former colonies but could be considered as a widespread phenomenon all over the world and on different analytical levels. Seen as a fractal, the notion of the post-colony could also be combined with the systems-theoretical dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion used to describe the degree of (dis)integration into specific functional systems. Thus, we could stop perceiving nation states as one-dimensional and monolithic players while advancing to a more complex, multidimensional view that claims that nation states should be considered as compounds of interwoven and interrelated fractals. In the political sphere, modernity is characterised by the dominance of nation systems and the spatial-geographical division into monolithic blocks (West vs. East, North vs. South). This division leads to a distinct friend-foe formula. In contrast, hypermodernity is characterised by interaction between supranational organisations (UN, EU), nation states, sub-state entities (regions) and extra-national organisations (NGOs, international corporations). This has an effect on the types of cooperation

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and confrontation. The European Union considers itself a good actor on the world stage. Individual European states (e.g. the United Kingdom) or individual regions (e.g. Bavaria), however, often consider the EU a bad actor that is more often than not blamed for national problems. In hypermodernity, the ascription of dichotomous formulas (friend-foe, goodbad) depends on the observer’s perspective as well as its embeddedness in political, societal, religious and other contexts. The prevailing discourse during the Cold War, that is, in the period between the end of World War II (1945) and the implosion of the Soviet Union (1991), made it possible to attach evaluative attributions to geographic areas constituted by nation states: the good capitalist West vs. the evil communist East; the safe, rich North vs. the dangerous, poor South. China has not assumed the Soviet Union’s former position as ideological counterpart to the USA even though it officially remains a communist state and the Communist Party of China is still the main power factor in the country. Instead, the Party acts as a partner in the capitalist global system. Wars were traditionally waged between states and all citizens of a hostile state were considered enemies and ran the risk of, for example, internment in war times. Ever since George W. Bush proclaimed the War on Terrorism, Islam has been eyed with suspicion. This has gone so far that innocent Muslims are considered suspicious in the USA and Europe: Do you think he or she is a terrorist? Al-Qaida is merely a small group of Islamist terrorists, but the differences between Islam and Islamism are often overlooked. Manichaean thinking in ontological dichotomy (good vs. evil, etc.) fits in well with Cold War thinking in monolithic blocks, but it is unable to adequately label hypermodernity’s fractalised political landscape. Fractal forms like good-bad and rich-poor are, of course, still widely used in hypermodernity, maybe even more than in past times. The crucial difference is that, in a fractalised world, the same political actor is considered good or bad not on an ontological basis (Manichean thinking) but in accordance with the analytical level involved (observer-based thinking). Outbreaks of violence are no longer limited to war, civil war or revolution. We now also see “wars” between a state (or a community of states) and a terrorist group. In addition, outbreaks of violence occur more and more frequently in civil society: “Normal” citizens feel the need to resort to violence against foreigners and asylum seekers in order to protect themselves against alleged foreign infiltration. Socially deprived adolescents run amok in schools. These are but a few example of the

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different levels at which violence-peaceful coexistence (another fractal form) can occur. In classical modernity, this phenomenon was not considered uniform, that is, it was not reduced to the common form but treated separately as either a foreign or a domestic issue. The poor-rich mode reproduces horizontally and vertically. Here, horizontal means that poor and rich states exist at a global level. Vertical refers to the existence of poor and rich regions at a national level. As it were, this mode also ramifies at all levels. At the regional level (the firstlevel horizon), there are poor and rich towns. At the urban level (the second-level horizon), there are poor and rich neighbourhoods, et cetera. In the 1970s, it was still possible to believe that poverty in the “rich” North was merely a—soon to be completely eradicated—marginal phenomenon. Today, however, we must accept that poverty has returned to Europe. Both major events combined (end of the Cold War, globalisation) led to an erosion of solidarity in European societies. This can be illustrated using the examples of wealth distribution and criminality. The redistribution of wealth within nation states increasingly occurs from the lowest to the topmost levels: Over the course of the last 25 years, the rich have been getting richer. A 2015 Oxfam study proves this point: In 2014, the richest 1% of people in the world owned 48% of global wealth, leaving just 52% to be shared between the other 99% of adults on the planet. Almost all of that 52% is owned by those included in the richest 20%, leaving just 5.5% for the remaining 80% of people in the world. If this trend continues of an increasing wealth share to the richest, the top 1% will have more wealth than the remaining 99% of people in just two years (Hardoon 2015).

The global issue of wealth distribution is unfortunately also a topic that applies to Germany in particular: In no other euro area country is wealth distributed as unevenly as in Germany. ... The so called Gini coefficient, an index used to measure inequality for comparison on an international scale, places Germany at 0.78. A value of one expresses maximal inequality while zero expresses perfect equality. In France, by comparison, the value is 0.68, in Italy it is 0.61. (Die Zeit 2014; translation: SOS)

Residential areas or neighbourhoods with a high share of migrants (euphemistically referred to as social hotspots in Germany) are increasingly turning into the equivalent of slums or favelas, a phenomenon that classical modernity only associated with the “Third World”. This is

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related to the fact that globalisation, which was rapidly accelerated by the discontinuation of the East-West conflict, has put pressure on the European welfare state. The results were massive cuts in social services and the development of the so called two-thirds society. A two-thirds society is a society in which a third of the population is excluded from social participation (access to work, education, recreation etc.). This trend has led—amplified by the international financial crisis and the subsequent Euro-area crisis—to the impoverishment and erosion of the middle classes in countries such as Greece and Spain, a trend historically associated with Latin America (e.g. Argentina in the 1980s and 1990s). In fact, the exclusion of enormous parts of a nation’s population from social participation is a phenomenon that has, since then, been experienced by many in the countries of the Global South. We traditionally expect to find tribal structures in the—politically incorrect—“primitive” cultures of remote parts of the world, for example, among indigenous ethnic groups in the Amazon Basin, the Congo Basin, the Kalahari Desert, north-eastern Siberia or northern Canada while we tend to associate clan structures as pre-modernist residuals with Mediterranean or Muslim societies. Today, however, we can also observe these types of structures among non-European groups of migrants in the cities of Europe. Immigrants do not cast off their culture when they arrive at the border. They take it with them to their new homeland regardless of the continent or its current social state (pre-, post-, hypermodernity). Phenomena previously separated in terms of location and time can now be identified simultaneously in the same locations. The first public mention of no-go-areas in German political discourse was during the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The Duisburg police force recently admitted that they were too afraid to patrol certain neighbourhoods controlled by Lebanese clans with less than 100 police officers as opposed to the traditional two-officer patrol. Every police commissioner and interior minister will deny it. But of course we know where we can go with the police car … [O]ur colleagues can no longer feel safe there in twos, and have to fear becoming the victim of a crime themselves. We know that these areas exist. Even worse: in these areas, crimes no longer result in charges. They are left to themselves. Only in the worst cases do we in the police learn anything about it. The power of the state is completely out of the picture. (Bernhard Witthaut, Chief Police Commissioner of Germany, in Kern 2015).

Fractalisation is both a spatial and a temporal condition. In hypermodernity, increasingly flexible time arrangements in the various

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functional systems, which have been set to non-stop operation, have taken the place of rigid hourly, daily, annual and life schedules (see Rosa 2005, 307). Therefore, it is possible to speak of a fractalisation of the hypermodern approach to time. We used to think that the transition from modernity to postmodernity was highly advanced in the mainstream societies of Europe, North America and Japan, including those enclaves excluded from specific functional systems, whereas a plainly visible and wide-spread combination of pre-modern, modern and postmodern structures dominated in other regions of the world, particularly in the Global South. This is particularly apparent in countries such as China, India or Brazil. Due to globalisation, deterritorialisation, temporalisation and migration, however, we find more and more of the same combinations of pre-modern, modern and postmodern structures in the “Global West”. It is feasible that asynchronous phenomena will continue to increase in Western societies as well and that they will be interpreted as brake pads—or even as a regression—for the future development of societies. We shall presumably need to adjust to the fact that the future of European societies will not comprise directed development (moving from worse conditions to better conditions). On the contrary, we are dealing with an osmotic process in which existing global structures spatially and temporally pursue one another and become interwoven. This interrelatedness presents as fractalisation.

4. Translational conditions If, in our world-system, we are confronted with an osmotic process in which the proximity of the distant and the synchronicity of the asynchronous become more and more prevalent, the question arises in which way such different structures, conditions, situations, states, et cetera can still be integrated into one and the same society. Joachim Renn attempts to provide an answer with the help of his translational-conditions approach. Translational conditions emerge in various situations in society. In the past, we used to think of nations—at least in Europe—as monolithic units of homogeneous peoples: One country, one culture. Nowadays, however, the situation is completely different: one country, many cultures. European countries (mainly the UK, France and Germany) have mutated from emigration countries to immigration countries. In Germany, for example, some 16 million individuals (or 20% of the whole population) have a migration background. In France, this number is 14 million individuals (or

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23%). The need to communicate with the help of foreign languages and/or via translation or interpretation has increased greatly over the last three decades, not only due to the globalisation of business but also due to increased migration. However, the main difference is that translation activities, nowadays, determine day-to-day life in Europe whereas, in the past, translation occurred mainly when crossing borders. To correlate translation with interlingual translation exclusively, namely, translation between two or more national languages, would be insufficient. The motto “one country, many cultures” does not only apply to the share of migrants and migrant cultures within a society but more fundamentally to the diversification of the entire population in various life-worlds that have each developed an individual sub-culture. Germany or France must be considered as multicultural societies, not because of their share of immigrants but because of the existence of multiple subcultural life-worlds. In hypermodern societies, there is a need to translate between the existing subcultural life-worlds, on the one hand, and between immigrants and non-immigrants, on the other hand. Therefore, hypermodern societies can only function if they ensure that translation is intralingual and interlingual as well as intracultural and intercultural. Renn (2006, 183) adopted a “pragmatistic action theory” in which he firmly distances himself from popular subjectivist, teleological and rationalist action theories, which he considers neither complex nor expedient enough due to their underestimation of the differentiation issue. His concept of “pragmatic translation” (Renn 2006, 181) forms the fundamental pillar of his “theory on the integration of integrations” (Renn 2006, 181). Renn (2006, 165) focuses on the “problem of social translation between integration units”, resulting in his concept of translation becoming a basic sociological concept. Linguistic translation turns into a “model of the relationship between integration units” (Renn 2006, 157). Renn (2006, 134) assumes four integration forms (person, milieu, organisation, system), which he defines as “action context which constitutes meaning” and understands as “various types of language games” in the sense of Wittgenstein (Renn 2006, 200). A novelty here is, firstly, that Renn recognises four types of integration from which society has developed and, secondly, that individuals must be described as integration units from the perspective of differentiation theory (Renn 2006, 192). More precisely, a person’s identity is “the name for the integration of that person into a unit of integration of actions in the medium of intentionality” (Renn 2006, 193; translation: SOS) Renn does not begin with the simple question about the (pre-social) integration of individuals into society. This question is relevant to pre-

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modernist societies that have not been differentiated into functional systems and is considered a first-order integration problem by Renn. The question of social structure in “second order integration problems” (Renn 2006, 183) or integration of integration forms, however, arises in late, post or hypermodern societies. Second-order integration occurs through translation. The concept of translation enables Renn (2006, 157) to move away from the principle of representation as well as the principle of construction. Renn clearly highlights that the impossibility of equivalent transfer of meaning beyond linguistic borders does not testify to the impossibility of translation, but instead to the inappropriateness of the standards for equivalent transfer. Renn (2006, 157; translation: SOS)

Incidentally, Renn is obviously acting on Whitehead’s advice that we need to alter our concepts once we realise that we are doing something that, according to our concepts and abstractions, we cannot actually do (see Whitehead 1925). With this approach, Renn naturally opposes the extreme views proffered by linguistic translation theories and held by scholars such as Benjamin or Derrida. While the opponents, who promote representation or construction as the key principle of cross-border relationships, consider a tertium comparationis to be either unproblematic or impossible, a pragmatic theory of second order integration must search for forms, types and possibilities of practical constitution of possible translations. These types of constitution can be found in actions. (Renn 2006, 156; translation: SOS) Renn (2006, 202) treats every social action as a linguistic action since every action, once understood and identified as an action, requires a linguistic frame of reference in order to secure its identity as this specific action and in order to ensure social compatibility in a semantic, pragmatic and intentional sense: Translation between two integration units on the basis of a tertium comparationis is possible even if the tertium cannot be explicitly formulated in either of the units. (Renn 2006, 154; translation: SOS)

If we agree with Renn’s ideas, then effectively, there are “in this sense, no non-linguistic actions, in so far as every socially compatible event defined as an ‘action’ can only be determined linguistically” (Renn 2006, 202; italics in German original; translation: SOS). With his approach, Renn (2006, 184; translation: SOS) deliberately uncouples “the concept of

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action from the supposed unit of the acting individual”. From this perspective, actions do not achieve their meaning with the help of “subjective meaning-positing” (Renn 2006, 194). Instead, Renn bases his assumptions on the constitutive ambiguity of actions: In this respect, an individual’s actions are always ambiguous as, depending on reference, they can be understood or even judged either according to the identity index, or according to social meaning, which pertains to various relevant, supra-individual contexts. (Renn 2006, 195; translation: SOS)

Interpretation is not exclusively or ultimately a concern of the subject. “It is primarily actions that interpret other actions” (Renn 2006, 207; translation: SOS). This resembles Peirce’s belief that actions, which include speech acts and communication, are the interpretants of other (speech) actions (see Peirce 1960). Renn wonders how these four integration forms can be integrated into society. Renn describes social integration as the integration of integration forms in which integration occurs on the basis of constant acts of translation. “The issue concerning integration of integration forms” is a “permanent translation issue” (Renn 2006, 200). Renn’s belief that translations occur, and must occur, at the perimeters of integration forms (person, milieu, organisation, system) corresponds with Lotman’s discovery, provided that integration forms are understood as semiotic systems. Lotman puts forward that translation should not be understood as a comprehensive predictable rewording of meaning and that acts of translation always occur at the perimeters of two differing semiotic systems (see Lotman 1990). Once sub-units (such as person, milieu, organisation, and system) have been differentiated within a society, borders inevitably develop between these units while cross-border relationships develop beyond the units. The relationship between two or more people, which is accomplished with the help of actions and/or communication, does not constitute a problem of intersubjectivity for Renn. Instead, he considers it a translation relationship. In this sense, his proposal is to reconstruct all cross-border relationships as types of translation (Renn 2006, 183). At the same time, this means that, in terms of systems theory, translation leads to structural coupling between the integration units (Renn 2006, 178). Interestingly enough, Rosa also uses the concept of translation in the same area in which he discusses interaction between the individual and society. Rosa pinpoints not only an interface but, more explicitly, a “point of translation” between the systemic-structural time patterns and the cultural perceptions of time (Rosa 2005, 348). Time patterns and

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perceptions of time must be translated into one another so that the resulting translation can contribute to the individual formation of identity. It is crucial to our discussion that translations do not only guarantee social integration but are just as important for the individual formation of identity. In accordance with the four integration forms, there is, on the one hand, a necessity for intra-integrational translation from person to person (interpersonal translation), from milieu to milieu (intercultural translation), from organisation to organisation (inter-organisational translation) and from system to system (inter-systemic translation). On the other hand, there is a necessity for inter-integrational translation from person to milieu, from person to organisation, from person to system, et cetera, resulting in a matrix of 16 translational conditions: Table 1: Matrix of translational conditions Translational conditions Person Milieu Organisation

Person

Milieu

Organisation

System

Interpersonal MPT OPT

PMT2 Intercultural OMT

PST MST OST

System

SPT

SMT

POT MOT Interorganisational SOT

Intersystemic

In the meantime, it should have become clear that Renn’s concept of translation is not synonymous with the definition of translation in equivalence theory. His interest in translation-studies literature includes, apart from Benjamin, advocates of skopos theory and functionalism such as Vermeer, Snell-Hornby, Hönig, Kussmaul, Holz-Mänttäri, Risku and Göpferich, as well as postcolonial scholars such as Wolf. For Renn, translation always occurs beyond the perimeters of integration units. Therefore, translation does not primarily cross (national) language barriers but instead crosses integration units in the sense of the semiotic spaces. In Renn’s opinion, linguistic barriers are not the decisive factor for the existence of translation. When an action in an integration unit is translated for a different integration unit then translation here does not mean a transfer of meaning (which would be the case for interlingual translation according to 2

Read: Person-Milieu-Translation; this applies mutatis mutandis to all other initialisms in this table.

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equivalence theory) but instead stands for a transfer of this specific action (Renn 2006, 179). The focus is: not primarily on the representation of an action and its meaning beyond the perimeters of integration units, but instead on the practical compatibility of an action ascribed to another integration unit, for which the description of the meaning is merely a reflexive (self-selective) expression. (Renn 2006, 178; translation: SOS)

As measured by the paragon of identity of meaning, translations are always “suboptimal approximations” (Renn 2006, 172). Above all, however, Renn (2006, 163) considers translation a “referential selftransformation”. The main reason why the concept of translation is so appealing to Renn is that it enables the simultaneous encompassing of identity and difference. According to Christiane Nord’s terminology, one could, with a grain of salt, say that Renn favours instrumental translation and discards documentary translation as the translation product must function according to its autonomy in the target integration unit (see Nord 1997). “… [T]ranslation defines and establishes ... the synchronicity of identity and difference” (Renn 2006, 179; translation: SOS), which Siever (2010) also postulates. The focus is on the operational compatibility of the translation with another action context that often (but not always) accompanies the “difference in meaning” (Renn 2006, 179). It should be clear that a translation between a milieu and an organisation cannot occur as a linear transfer of meaning (Renn 2006, 178). Neither integration unit can comprehend or control what its individual actions mean, trigger, entail etc. in the other unit so that exchange (the provision of services and the corresponding articulation of “needs” and information on the effect), caused by permanent translation, has sufficient surprises at the ready for both sides. (Renn 2006, 178; translation: SOS)

In inter-integrational translations, the focus is always on the method with which a meaning that is ascribed to an action in one integration unit can be referred to and processed by another integration unit. An action, such as killing someone, can be construed as a necessary and honourable action in some conservative Turkish migrant environments. At the same time, the German legal system considers this very same action noncontingent and a criminal offence.

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While unification always occurs in the paradigms of representation (modernity) and construction (postmodernity), which only ever focus on either identity or difference, the instances of identity and difference, according to Renn, exist side-by-side in the paradigm of translation. Only the synchronicity of identity and difference created by translation enables an action to become compatible within the scope of disparate integration units. The performative way of integrating differentiated integration forms remains “society’s implicit unit”. As a complex translation ratio between differentiated parts of society, it cannot be bindingly and compatibly represented, consciously recovered or controlled for all contexts. However, at a pragmatic (implicit) level, it provides opportunities to decentrally balance preservation of heterogeneous borders and continuation of (productive) exchange relationships. (Renn 2006, 25; translation: SOS)

5. Conclusion Globalisation and temporalisation have led to a gradual transformation of the societal space-time regime in the sense of multi-layered fractalisation, which, at the same time, has caused a transformation of the objective, the subjective and the social world (see Rosa 2005, 342). These processes continue while the result is an already altered relationship between the subjects and, ultimately, an altered relationship of the subjects to themselves. The notion of postmodernity is based on the idea of a linear and directed development over a certain period of time and stresses discontinuity or rupture between pre-modernity and modernity, on the one hand, and modernity and postmodernity, on the other. As previously stated, I prefer the term hypermodernity to emphasise that there is no such thing as directed development (or even “progress”, as it was considered in the 19th century) that leads from “pre” to “post”. Instead, there is an osmotic process that leads to the same fractal patterns all over the world. Thus, hypermodernity reflects the increase of complexity due to the osmotic process of fractalisation. Under the terms of hypermodernity, a simple, linear, one-dimensional and static way of thinking is no longer acceptable. Instead, we should try to apply a more complex, spiralling, multidimensional and dynamic way of thinking and theorising. One component of this kind of thinking is to conceive the world as constituted by fractal forms. The different fractals of a society (e.g. Renn’s integration forms) are held together or integrated via translation processes.

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Thus, it is translation that creates unity within a society by mediating between the integration forms, namely person, milieu, organisation and system, while the temporal structures ensure structural coupling in the relationship between society and the individuals (Rosa 2005, 25, 236). In this respect, it is possible to say that translational structures, on the one hand, and temporal structures, on the other, have become the essential factors of the individual, cultural or societal formation of identity in hypermodernity (see Rosa 2005, 237). The fact that interlingual and inter-integrational translations have become a commonplace and ubiquitous factor for each and every individual in hypermodern society, and not just for specialised experts or specific stakeholders such as customers or users of translation, has impacted our self-image. At a psychological level, some of the negative effects of these transformations, at least in Europe, can be seen in the increase in xenophobia or a strengthening of right-wing parties. These deliberations constitute a sociological analysis in which the concept of translation plays a key role. The sociological definitions of hypermodern societies, as advocated by Renn and Rosa, invite translation studies to address the concept of translation in a more comprehensive and profound manner. So far, translation studies has dealt exclusively with the linguistic phenomenon of translation and more or less only in linguisticsemiotic scenarios. A systematic approach to translation as a societal structure, as postulated by Renn, is still lacking in translation studies. The developments in translation studies of roughly the last 60 years have resulted in various concepts of translation. The most well-known are probably the equivalence-theory concept of translation in linguistic translation theories, the meaning-oriented concept of translation in hermeneutics and the purpose-oriented concept of translation in skopos theory. It is striking that all three concepts of translation, including Derrida’s concept, are one-dimensional and opt for either identity (equivalence, meaning) or difference (purpose, skopos). The multidimensionality of translation (i.e. as a phenomenon, as a structure, as a process, as a result) cannot be achieved with the onedimensional concepts of translation thus far proposed in translation studies. These concepts of translation that target equivalence, invariance, meaning or purpose need to be replaced with a multidimensional concept of translation.3 Such a concept of translation (that focuses on identity and 3

I will present a multidimensional concept of translation, in the scope of a complex, interpretationist theory of translation that does not include only language but also other semiotic spaces, at the Leuven conference on complexity Thinking in Translation Studies (June 2017) in Leuven, Belgium.

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difference) has so far only been proposed by Siever (2010). Furthermore, his concept aims to include the specific sociological application of the concept of translation in the scope of a genuine theory of translation. In Joachim Renn’s opinion, with which I agree, hypermodern societies can no longer function without translation. However, the individual is also no longer socially acceptable without basic skills in dealing with various types of translation. Joseph Beuys once said that every human being is an artist. In regard to our topic, one could reformulate his statement and say that, under the terms of hypermodernity, every human being needs to be a translator. How do translation studies as well as the corresponding universities and departments react to the despecialisation of the phenomenon of translation?

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Mumford, L. 1934. Technics and civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co. Nord, C. 1997. Translating as a purposeful activity. Manchester: St. Jerome. Peirce, C. S. 1960. Collected papers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Renn, J. 2006. Übersetzungsverhältnisse. Weilerswist: Velbrück. Rosa, H. 2005. Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Siever, H. 2010. Übersetzen und Interpretation. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Spencer Brown, G. 1969. Laws of form. London: Allen and Unwin. Wallerstein, I. 1974. The modern world-system. New York and London: Academic Press. Whitehead, A. N. 1925. Science and the modern world. Repr., New York: Free Press, 2008.

PART THREE: THE GLOBAL NORTH RESPONDENT: REINE MEYLAERTS

Chloé Signes argues for a similar but less far-reaching move away from binary oppositions and away from colonial and postcolonial frameworks. Her historical overview of what is understood by (mainly francophone) African literature is not necessarily new in itself but interestingly stresses that contemporary African writers do not identify with the traditional oppositions anymore (the West vs. Africa, colonial vs. postcolonial, francophone vs. African etc.). Instead they feel at home in the former colonial language, which they transform and hybridize at their guise, and they want to inscribe themselves in “the wider framework of the littérature-monde”. Of course, translation is key in a cultural context marked by hybridity and Signes rightfully stresses the need for a “more critical, more dialogical and also more unstable” redefinition of translation. What this means exactly and how it relates to (francophone) African literature in translation is not made clear by the author. Sure, we can easily imagine that much of the hybrid nature of African literature is lost in translation, but examples from actual translations remain too scarce to provide real evidence. So again, if in principle the “need to initiate a cosmopolitan turn of translation which allows us to overcome the dichotomies and the simplistic views based on traditional Western stereotypes” and the plea for “a truly ethical and dialogical translation practice” is most convincing, there is no clear evidence in the article how to do so. I therefore sympathize with the author’s appeal to “keep on researching and spreading concrete results”. In “Fractalisation: The human condition as a translational condition”, Holger Siever makes an appealing plea for “a more complex, spiraling, multidimensional and dynamic way of thinking and theorizing” as the best way to understand and analyze today’s world. Instead of describing this world as postmodern, i.e. the logical, chronological and linear successor to premodernity and modernity, Siever prefers the term hypermodernity as it was already coined by Baudrillard (1990). Hypermodernity stands for the

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synchronic combination of premodern, modern and postmodern features and is thus characterized by “the increased complexity of the synchronicity of the asynchronous”. More in particular, hypermodernity is both continuity and increased complexity of the three key characteristics of modernity: globalization, temporalization and the differentiation of functional systems. More than on globalization (defined as time-spacecompression) and temporalization (referring amongst other to innovation, divergence between world-time and life-time, acceleration of the pace of life), Siever mainly focuses on differentiation. The differentiation of functional systems is a well-known feature in contemporary sociology: It refers to the fact that societal systems such as politics, science, economics, art, et cetera have become auto-poietic (Luhmann 1996). This differentiation is also responsible for growing societal complexity and the subsequent problem of inclusion and exclusion: Whereas in premodern societies individuals were recognized and integrated (or not) in society as a whole, in hypermodern, differentiated societies, “each individual must now actively strive for inclusion in selected functional systems”. In hypermodernity, individuals are “partially included at the same time as being multiply excluded”. In order to understand this hypermodern complex world in which people are included and excluded at once, we need a more complex, spiraling and multidimensional way of thinking and theorizing. For Siever, the concept of fractalisation is particularly relevant to understand the current period of hypermodernity. Fractals are repeating or self-similar patterns which occur in various areas, at various levels, in differing magnitudes and at differing times. Fractalisation takes place both in space and time. If we take, for example, a typical fractal like ‘centre-periphery’, this opposition can be found simultaneously at the global, national, regional and local level. Moreover, a specific centre at the regional level can be simultaneously a periphery at the national level; also, a former centre can become periphery and vice versa. In their capacity to transgress the non-essentialist, relativistic but still binary oppositions of system’s theory (see e.g. Even-Zohar 2005), fractals are a significant step towards a much-needed complex way of thinking and theorizing. It is in this context that Siever also maintains that the “notion of the post-colony should be understood and used as a fractal pattern to describe (a) the dichotomy of being politically independent but at the same time economically dependent and/or (b) the dichotomy of being included in the political system whilst being excluded from other functional systems (economy, education, etc.).” As a consequence, Siever interestingly concludes that “the post-colony not only applies to specific nation states in Africa, Asia or Latin America but

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also to specific peripheral regions within African, Asian or LatinAmerican countries, and even to peripheral regions within Western countries”: various areas, various levels, differing magnitudes and differing times. In terms of this volume’s thinking about the postcolonial condition as more than a result of the empire only, Siever’s views are refreshing and thought-provoking as they open the way for a more complex, multidimensional and dynamic implementation of the concept, beyond its mere temporal and political definition. It is regrettable, therefore, that the author does not elaborate further on these ideas. Instead, he turns to several other examples of fractal patterns which I find not entirely convincing. Why would it be only in hypermodernity that the “ascription of dichotomous formulas (friend-foe, good-bad) depends on the observer’s perspective as well as its embeddedness in political, societal, religious and other contexts”? Why would it not have been reductionist to think in ontological dichotomies (good vs. bad) during the Cold War but only thereafter? According to Siever, outbreaks of violence occur more and more frequently in civil society: violent-peaceful coexistence (another fractal form) can occur at different levels. Still, considering, for example, the many acts of violence against Jews in Europe at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, why limit the erosion of solidarity and violence against foreigners in Europe to the end of the Cold War and the beginning of globalization? These and other examples point to a sometimes implicit sometimes explicit – but for that matter questionable – linear and temporal bias in a paper that otherwise convincingly pleas for “a more complex, spiraling, multidimensional and dynamic way of thinking and theorizing”. The same bias occurs when references are made to the role of translation over time. According to Siever, the “need to communicate with the help of foreign languages and/or via translation or interpretation has increased greatly over the last three decades. The main difference is that translation activities, nowadays, determine day-to-day life in Europe whereas, in the past, translation occurred mainly when crossing borders.” Such a statement is unsustained for its lack of evidence and questionable for its linear and reductive view on societies as evolving from monolingual nation-states into multilingual sub-state and supra-state entities. Do we really believe that, in the past, translation was limited to relationships between monolingual states? What about translation in the Middle Ages, or in the 16th century when the city of Antwerp, for example, functioned as an international hub of printing and translating (see e.g. François 2010)? What about translation in the multilingual Habsburg Empire (see e.g. Wolf 2015), to name just a few? It is in my view a missed opportunity that Siever limits the idea of

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fractalisation to hypermodernity rather than working out its full implications. Moreover, since Siever refers to Morin, one of the fathers of complexity theory, it would have been fruitful to address the links between such an expanded view on fractalisation and the insights of complexity thinking. The latter holds a view of reality as precisely hierarchical, nonlinear, self-organizing, paradoxical, indistinctively of time and space. Complexity theory refuses to choose between local and global, between one and many, between inclusion and exclusion: All these hold simultaneously and should not be resolved. This is exactly what is implied by Siever’s observations on fractalisation. Complexity theory furthermore challenges the notions of disjunction, abstraction and reduction which together constitute the “paradigm of simplification” (Morin 2008, 3). Reductionism has been the dominant approach to science since the 16th century (Mitchell 2009, ix) and has been wrongly associated with the only way to do ‘good science’. In the words of Edgar Morin, reduction means “the search for elementary, simple units, the decomposition of a system into its elements, the origination of the complex to the simple” (Morin 2008, 33). Complexity theory therefore criticizes imposing simple (binary) conceptualizations on a complex reality (see e.g. Marais 2015, 19). We should indeed be aware of the danger of conceptual blindness. If our concepts do not fit reality, we should not adapt reality but rather adapts our reductionist concepts according to the complexity of reality. This is exactly what Siever states when saying that we “need to alter our concepts once we realise that we are doing something that, according to our concepts and abstractions, we cannot actually do”. For all these reasons, I see great potential in a further exploration of the relationships between the concept of fractalisation and complexity thinking. “If, in our world-system, we are confronted with an osmotic process in which the proximity of the distant and the synchronicity of the asynchronous become more and more prevalent, the question arises in which way such different structures, conditions situations, states et cetera can still be integrated into one and the same society.” For complexity theory, such a question would be partly irrelevant. Complexity theory sees society as an emergent phenomenon which means that societies and societal processes (like translation) do not have fixed boundaries and that boundaries should therefore be explained, not assumed (Marais 2015, 50). In other words, the boundaries between societies, between translation and non-translation, between translation and other transfer processes are complex, fuzzy and unstable, unpredictable. For Siever, in a differentiated society, borders develop between the units of person, milieu, organization and system, and cross-border relationships develop beyond the units.

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These cross-border relationships are seen as types of translation. That is to say, the different fractals of a society are held together or integrated via translation processes: Translation, used here in a metaphorical sense, creates unity within a hypermodern differentiated society by mediating between the so-called units or integration forms. Moreover, hypermodern differentiated societies can only function if they ensure that translation is intralingual and interlingual as well as intracultural and intercultural. This opening up of the concept of translation makes it a “basic sociological concept”: Interlingual translation thus becomes a “model of the relationship between integration units” for Siever. As much as this broad, metaphorical definition of translation is challenging and thoughtprovoking, two critical observations need to be made. First, translation is associated with linear causality claims, which contradict Siever’s ideas on fractalisation. For Siever, the “fact that interlingual and interintegrational translations have become a commonplace and ubiquitous factor for each and every individual in hypermodern society … has impacted our selfimage” and has led to an “increase in xenophobia or a strengthening of right-wing parties”. Such easy lines of causality are very problematic, also in the light of complexity thinking. Complexity theory considers that human dynamics are nonlinear and exist in a “multilayered social field that contains various factors that affect how conflict originates, how conflict is addressed, and how conflict is resolved. … Human dynamics, especially in conflictual areas, are unpredictable and difficult to impossible to control” (Brack 2011, 4). Secondly, and more generally, the question remains how this broad, metaphorical definition of translation can be related to existing definitions and discussions within Translation Studies. Except for some quick and vague references to skopos theory and functionalism, the author does not deal with these issues. Once again, and especially in the light of Siever’s urge for “translation studies to address the concept of translation in a more comprehensive and profound manner” and for translator training to “react to the despecialisation of the phenomenon of translation”, this is a missed chance. Nonetheless, I wholeheartedly subscribe to the author’s plea for a multidimensional concept of translation: to be continued.

References Brack, G., P. S. Lassiter, M. B. Hill, and S. A. Moore. 2011. Ecosystemic complexity theory of conflict: Understanding the fog of conflict. Journal of Humanistic Counseling 50 (1): 3–15. Even-Zohar, I. 2005. Polysystem theory (revised). Papers in culture research.

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http://www.tau.ac.il/~itamarez/works/papers/papers/ps-revised.pdf. François, W. 2010. The Antwerp printers Christoffel and Hans (i) van Ruremund, their Dutch and English Bibles, and the intervention of the authorities in the 1520s and 1530s. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 101 (1): 7–28. doi: 10.14315/arg-2010-101-1-7. Marais, K. 2014. Translation theory and development studies: A complexity theory approach. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, M. 2009. Complexity: A guided tour. New York: Oxford University Press. Morin, E. 2008. On complexity. Trans. R. Postel. Cresskill: Hampton Press. Wolf, M. 2015. The Habsburg monarchy's many-languaged soul: Translating and interpreting, 1848–1918. Trans. K. Sturge. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Amarílis Anchieta is a graduate student in the Postgraduate Translation Studies Program at the University of Santa Catarina. Her research is mainly focused on the areas of literary translation, African literature and ethnography. She is co-author of the chapter “Nigerian Writers in Brazil: Translating a Literary System in Formation” (2015). Paul F. Bandia is professor of French and Translation Studies in the Department of French at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He is an Associate Fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is currently a member of the Executive Council of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) and a member of the Editorial Board of numerous international journals. His interests lie in translation theory and history, postcolonial studies and cultural theory. He is considered a leading scholar in postcolonial translation theory and history with particular interest in Africa and its diaspora as well as encounters between the Global South and the Global North. He has given numerous lectures and keynote addresses at conferences and universities in North and South America, Europe and Africa. Professor Bandia has published widely in the fields of translation studies and postcolonial literature and culture. He is the author of Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa (2008), editor of Orality and Translation, special issue, Translation Studies (2015), Writing and Translating Francophone Discourses: Africa, the Caribbean, Diaspora. (2014); co-editor of Charting the Future of Translation History (2006), Agents of Translation (2009), and Rencontres Est-Ouest/East-West Encounters, TTR (2010). Ilse Feinauer is Vice Dean: Languages and Research of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Stellenbosch. She is also Professor in Afrikaans linguistics and translation studies in the Deptartment of Afrikaans and Dutch. In 2014, she was appointed as Honorary Professor at the Taiyuan University for Technology in China. She completed her PhD (Stellenbosch) on Afrikaans syntax in 1987. Nowadays, she coordinates and teaches translation studies as part of the postgraduate programmes in translation, but she also teaches Afrikaans

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linguistics. She is co-author of a learner’s dictionary of Afrikaans Basiswoordeboek vir Afrikaans as well as co-editor of a volume on Afrikaans syntax Sintaksis op die voorgrond. She has published in the field of syntax as well as lexicography, but her research has shifted towards translation studies. She has a special interest in reader-centred translation and media translation, and she runs research projects in both. In 2009, she acted as co-founder for a Summer School in Translation in Africa in collaboration with Kobus Marais of the University of the Free State. She is on the editorial board of Translation Studies Bibliography as well as Lexikos, an international journal for Lexicography. Adrián Fuentes-Luque is associate professor in Translation at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain). His main fields of interest include audiovisual translation, the history of translation, translation of tourist and advertising texts, translation of humour and institutional translation. He is the author of “Institutional Audiovisual Translation: A (Shop)Window to the World”, “La historia de la traducción audiovisual en Latinoamérica: aproximación a su investigación”, “A collaborative multimodal working environment for the development of the instrumental and professional competences by trainee translators: An innovative teaching experience” and “An Empirical Approach to the Reception of AV Translated Humour”, amongst other publications. Tania Hernández is a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Linguistic and Literary Studies at El Colegio de México. She teaches translation theory and is the author of “Translating and Writing in the first edition of Le Monde diplomatique en español (1979-1987): Agents, Capitals and Influences” (2015). Tshokolo J. Makutoane is a senior lecturer in the Department of Hebrew at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. He studies orality as a feature of Bible translations into African languages and has published on orality in Sesotho Bible translations. He teaches Biblical Hebrew and is developing materials for special use with Sesotho students. He is a church leader and is actively involved in developing performance translations for local congregations. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal for Semitics. Caroline Mangerel is a research fellow in the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice at the University of the Free State (Bloemfontein), South Africa. She holds a Ph.D. in Semiology from Université du Québec

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à Montréal (Canada). Her research focuses mostly on semiotics, translation theory, hybridity and scientific discourse. She recently authored several papers on the subjects of intersemiotic translation (NBU Press, 2016; CASAS, 2016 [forthcoming]) and literary semiotics (Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2014; Dictionnaire Le Clézio, 2015; Tabuleiro de Letras, 2016). Kobus Marais is associate professor in translation studies at the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice of University of the Free State, South Africa. In 2014, he published a book titled Translation Theory and Development studies: A Complexity Theory Approach, which was awarded the UFS book prize for Distinguished Scholarship. In this book, he examines, amongst other topics, the relevance of complexity thinking for translation studies, the links between translation and development and the role of the informal economy for translation studies. Alamin Mazrui is professor of Sociolinguistics, Literature, and Cultural Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He holds a PhD in linguistics from Stanford University with specialization in the political sociology of language. Over the years, he has taught in universities in East Africa, West Africa and the United States. He has also served as a consultant to non-governmental organizations in Africa on subjects such as language and urbanization and language and the law. Once a member of the international advisory board of Human Rights Watch, the Committee on Academic Freedom in Africa and the Board of Directors of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and MUHURI, he has a special interest in human rights and civil liberties and has written policy reports on these subjects. Mazrui has authored and edited several books over the years and has written numerous articles in political sociology of language, education, literature, culture and linguistics, which have been published in leading journals and edited volumes. In addition to his scholarly works, Alamin Mazrui is a published Swahili poet and playwright. Reine Meylaerts is professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at KU Leuven (and research associate in the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein) where she teaches courses on European Literature, Comparative Literature and Translation and Plurilingualism in Literature. She was director of CETRA (Centre for Translation Studies; https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/cetra) from 2006-2014 and is now board

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member. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters (https:// lirias.kuleuven.be/items-by-author?author=Meylaerts%2C+ Reinhilde%3B +U0031976). She is also review editor of Target: International Journal of Translation Studies. She is former Secretary General (2004-2007) of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and Chair of the Doctoral Studies Committee of EST. Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé is a senior professor in the Department of Hebrew at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. She has published extensively on Biblical Hebrew linguistics, especially in the areas of syntax and pragmatics. With Jacobus A. Naudé, she edits the series on Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic published by Eisenbrauns. She has been a consultant for Bible translators in Africa since 1992. She has published on the translation of biblical proverbs in African languages, religious translation in Africa, ideology and translation strategy in Bible translation and on alterity, orality and performance in Bible translation. She serves on the editorial boards of The Bible Translator, Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages and Journal for Semitics. With Jacobus A. Naudé and Tshokolo J. Makutoane, she is engaged in developing methods for teaching Biblical Hebrew to African students. Jacobus A. Naudé is a senior professor in the Department of Hebrew at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. He is a programme unit chair of the Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, member of the three editorial committees of Afrikaans Bible translation project for the South African Bible Society and serves on the advisory board of the Handbook of Translation Studies and the editorial board of Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages and Folia Orientalia. In addition to his publications on Biblical Hebrew linguistics, he edited various volumes on the interaction of translation studies and religious translation. His recent publications are inter alia on alterity, censorship and the role of metatexts in religious translation. Fernanda Alencar Pereira is associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation at the University of Brasíla. She conducts research in the following areas: African literature, comparative literature, cultural multilingualism and literary translation. She is the author of the following chapters: “Language contact in novels by Chinua

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Achebe and Pepetela” (2015) and “Nigerian writers in Brazil: Translating a literary system in formation” (2015). Holger Siever is senior lecturer with habilitation in the Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germersheim. He teaches translation studies and is author of Übersetzen und Interpretation (2010) and Übersetzungswissenschaft: eine Einführung (2015). Chloé Signès is a researcher and assistant lecturer in the Department of Translation and Interpreting of the University of Salamanca. She is currently finishing her doctoral thesis on the translation challenges found in hybrid literature and particularly in contemporary Sub-Saharan narratives written in French. Serena Talento has been wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin of the Professorship of Literatures in African Languages at the Department of African Linguistics and Literatures (University of Bayreuth) since October 2015. She is pursuing her PhD in Swahili literature and sociology of translation at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS). Talento completed a master’s degree in the languages and cultures of Africa from the University of Naples “L’Orientale” (Italy) where she specialised in Swahili language and literature. In addition, she furthered her academic training in Belgium and Zambia. Her research interests include Swahili literary translation, sociology of translation, translation histor(iograph)y, translation and discourse analysis. She also has a special interest in cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. Chris Thurman is associate professor in the English Department at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is the editor of South African essays on ‘universal’ Shakespeare (2014) and Sport versus art: A South African contest (2010). His other books are the monograph Guy Butler: Reassessing a South African literary life (2010); Text bites, a literary anthology for high schools (2009) and At large: Reviewing the arts in South Africa, a collection of his arts journalism (2012). He also edits the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa and writes for Business Day on art and politics.

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Maria Tymoczko is Professor of Comparative Literature, specializing in translation studies, medieval studies and Irish literature. Her books The Irish “Ulysses” (University of California Press 1994) and Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (St. Jerome 1999) have both won prizes from the American Conference for Irish Studies. Other full-length studies include Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators (St. Jerome 2007) and Neuroscience and Translation (forthcoming). She is editor of several volumes, including Born into a World at War (with Nancy Blackmun, 2000), Translation and Power (with Edwin Gentzler, 2002), Language and Tradition in Ireland (with Colin Ireland, 2003) and Translation, Resistance, Activism (2010). Professor Tymoczko has held grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council for Learned Societies, and she is a Conti Fellow at the University of Massachusetts. She has served as president of the Celtic Studies Association of North America and as a member of the Executive Committee of the American Conference for Irish Studies. She holds three degrees from Harvard University.

AUTHOR INDEX

Aamodt, A., 238 Abdulaziz, M. H., 34 Abdulsalam, A., 143 Achebe, C., 242–7, 249, 252-60 Adebe, A., 143 Adesanya, A., 133 Adesokan, A., 140 Adeyemo, T., 176 Agualusa, J. E., 248 Aguiar, D., 10 Ahuvia, A., 163 Aichele, G., 161 Akeeshoo, A., 231 Allen, J. W. T., 55, 64 Amselle, J.-L., 323–4 Angelelli, C. V., 38 Appiah, A. K., 74, 131 Arndt, W. F., 182 Ashcroft, W., 277 Ashcroft, B., 319, 322 Austen, R. A., 138 Baer, B. C., 37 Bandia, P. F., 37, 131, 137, 155, 167, 169, 319, 322, 329 Barbieri, M., 9 Barrett, D. B., 165 Barrot, P., 134, 140–41, 147 Barth, C., 170 Barthes, R., 15 Bassey, A., 146 Bassnett, S., 37, 51, 250–51, 262 Bastin, G., 293–97, 310 Battiste, M., 236 Baudrillard, J., 337, 351 Bauman, Z., 315, 324 Baumgartner, W., 171 Beck, U., 317, 324, 328, 330 Becker, U., 174–5

Benson, R., 264–6 Bergman, J., 170 Bertoncini Zúbková, E., 47, 59 Bertram, G., 174 Bhabha, H. K., 137, 322–3 Bialystok, E., 282 Bielsa, E., 38, 328 Bierstecker, A., 40 Billington, M., 102 Blumenberg, H., 338–9 Bonnell, A. G., 98 Boomershine, T. E., 168 Bopda, A., 317 Borrows, J., 229 Boschetti, A., 38 Bosman, H., 155 Bourdieu, P., 35–38, 40–41, 43-44, 55–57, 60–61, 262–65, 342 Brandt, A., 95 Brenner, Y., 109 Brett, E. A., 14, 19, 23 Briggs, C. A., 171 Bringhurst, R., 231 Brown, F., 171 Brown, J. R., 123-24 Brown, M. E., 171 Browne, A. J., 228, 234, 236-37, Brownhill, L. S., 89 Brumfit, A., 34 Burke, C., 157 Bursov, B., 85 Buzelin, H., 37, 262 Cairns, A. C., 222, 226, 228, 235, 237 Campo, A., 293–97, 310 Candido, A., 238 Cardinal, P., 230 Carr, D., 166

Translation Studies beyond the Postcolony Casanova, P., 33, 35–41, 43, 56, 58, 60, 63, 252, 321 Castro-Ramírez, N., 277 Cazelles, H., 172 Chase, S., 226 Cheesman, T., 96, 101-3, 106 Chevrier, J., 319–20 Cheyfitz, E., 62 Chung, Y.-L., 38 Clark, K., 83–84 Cobley, P., 16, 21 Coetzee, J. K., 14, 19 Collier, A.-C., 323 Colón-Rodríguez, R., 230 Connolly, K., 109 Coote, R. B., 166 Corkin, L., 157 Craik, F. I. M., 282 Cronin, M., 324 Crossing, P. F., 165 Curry, B., 233 Cutler, H. C., 161, 163 Dahms, T., 238 Dalai Lama XIV [Bstan-’dzin-rgyamtsho], 163 Damjanovic, L., 161 Danesi, M., 16 Davies, M., 157 De Sousa, G., 244 De Vries, L. J., 166 De Waal, C., 12, 14, 16 Deacon, T. W., 8–10, 14, 17 Deane, S., 302, 308 DeBlois, R., 172 Deely, J., 9, 11, 16-7, 21–23 Delabastita, D., 144 Delanty, G., 131, 328 Deleuze, G., 315 Delisle, J., 229-30 Deutschmann, C., 340 Díaz Narbona, I., 318 Dickson, A., 113 Dinis, N., 244 Diome, F., 325-26 Distiller, N., 97, 106

Dodds, P. S., 162 Dowling, G., 18, 20, 23 Drábek, P., 114 Driver, S. R., 171 Dryden, J., 61 Durkheim, E., 165 Durrani, N., 88 Dye, T. W., 155, 194 Eagleton, T., 305 Echeverri, A., 293–97, 310 Eco, U., 12, 160 El-Buhry, H. A., 64 Elgindy, A., 38 Emmeche, C., 9 Endepols, J., 179 Engle, R., 112 Esan, O., 137 Even-Zohar, I., 223, 359 Ezeogu, E. M., 168 Fanon, F., 324 Farisani, E. B., 168 Fasano, F., 270 Favareau, D., 9, 15-6 Finnegan, R., 168–69 Florentino, L., 122-124 Foster, J. W., 308 Fourie-Basson, W., 161 Fowler, R. M., 167 Foz, C., 277 Friedman, T., 156, 153–60, 170 Fukari, A., 328 Galloway, G., 233 Galtung, J., 266 Gans, H., 266 Gardner, L., 124 Geider, T., 49 Gendron. F., 238 Genette, G., 41–42, 255 Gentzler, E., 275, 324 Giddens, A., 338 Gikandi, S., 243 Gikambi, H., 78–79 Gil-Bardaji, A., 42

371

372 Gilroy, P., 317 Gingrich, F. W., 182 Glissant, E., 315 González, P., 274 Gorlee, D. L., 9–10, 13–15 Green, J., 228 Griffiths, G., 319, 322 Gromova, N. V., 83 Grutman, R., 138, 144 Guattari, F., 315 Gunkel, H. H., 166 Guntner, J. L., 96, 112 Haddadian-Moghaddam, E., 38 Hadjivayanis, I., 78 Hanna, S. F., 38 Hardoon, D., 346 Haresnape, G., 105 Harries, L., 34, 58 Harvey, D., 338 Harvey, K., 42 Harvey, N., 266, 274, 276 Hauck, F., 174 Havelock, E. A., 166 Haynes, J., 14, 131–32, 134, 139 Heaney, S., 299, 301-9 Heilbron, J., 36–38, 55-6, 262 Hekkanen, R., 38 Hellier, A. B., 57 Helliwell, J. F., 162 Henning, B. G., 9, 28 Hermans, T., 57, 296, 299 Hernández, T., 269, 272, 274 Herrington, O. A., 78 Hichens, W., 55 Hill, H., 155, 194 Hill, M., 155 Hoad, P., 148 Hoenselaars, T., 94 Hoffmeyer, J., 9, 13, 16 Holladay, W. L., 171 Holloway A., 160 Horsley, R., 167 Hortmann, W., 96, 116 Horton, M., 40, 53 Howard, A., 236 Hughes, S., 269

Author Index Ibbi, A. A., 143-46 Ibrahim, A. A., 157 Igboanusi, H., 137 Iliffe, J., 34 Inggs, J., 315 Ingle, S., 79 Inglehart, R., 165 Irion, H., 117, 119, 121 Jacquemond, R., 37 Jakobson, R., 12–13, 224 Jameson, F., 305 Jedlowski, A., 142–43 Jettmarová, Z., 38 Johnson, D., 97 Johnson, F., 50, 52–53, 57 Johnson, T. M., 165 Jousse, M., 166, 168 Joyce, J., 309 Julien, C., 266–68, 270–71 Katz, C. E., 200 Kauffman, S., 9–10, 16 Keller, C. A., 172, 177 Kelley, N., 224, 227 Kennedy, D., 112 Kern, S., 347 Kesteloot, L., 318 Khalifa, A. W., 38 Khayyam, O., 44, 59–61 Kiberd, D., 301 Kingsnorth, G. W., 34 Kinsella, T., 299, 302 Knappert, J., 34, 39 Knott, D. F., 155, 194 Koenen, M. J., 179 Köhler, L., 171 Koosed, J. L., 161 Kopetzki, M., 106 Korning-Zethsen, K. K., 9, 12 Korten, D. C., 19 Kovala, U., 42, 48 Kress, G., 9, 13 Kresse, K., 40, 53 Krings, M., 149 Krohn, M., 107

Translation Studies beyond the Postcolony Kujamäki, P., 52 Kull, K., 9–10, 12, 14, 16 LaCapra, D., 131 Laferrière, D., 316–17 Lambert, H., 55 Lanier, D., 103 Larkin, B. D., 83 Latour, B., 10–11, 15, 21 Laviosa-Braithwaite, S., 52 Lawrance, B. N., 64 Layard, R., 162 Le Bris, M., 314 Lee, M. E., 183 Lefevere, A., 58, 285-86, 299 Levinas, E., 163–64 Levy, L. W., 285–86, 288–91 Lewis, B., 162 Lewis, D., 18 Littau, K., 167 Lloyd, G., 287, 291 Longfellow, H. W., 50 López Ponz, M., 328 Lotman, J., 20, 24, 222–25, 351 Lotman, Y. M. (see Lotman, J.) Loubser, J. A., 168 Louviot, M., 317, 321 Louw, J. E., 175 Lovejoy, G., 167, 194 Luhmann, N., 223, 335, 341, 359 Luk, G., 282 Lutz, D. S., 285 Maalouf, A., 316 Mabanckou, A., 314, 319–21, 327– 28 Makutoane, T. J., 155–56, 164, 166–67, 170, 178, 182, 185, 194 Mandelbaum, M., 156, 158–60 Mandelbrot, B., 335 Mangerel, C., 223–24 Marais, J., 9–10, 12, 14, 165, 291, 361 Marais, K. (see Marais, J.) Marsh, Z., 34 Martín, R., 328

373

Marx, P. W., 96 Mathews, J., 194 Mauranen, A., 52 Maxey, J. A., 155, 168 Mazrui, A. M., 34, 39, 48–49, 80 Mbaabu, I., 47 Mbatiah, M., 74 Mbembe, A., 100, 154 Mbilinyi, M. J., 35, 54 McLean, A. M., 96 Meintjes, L., 315 Merrell, F., 9–10, 12, 14–15, 17, 23 Meylaerts, R., 46, 137 Miampika, L.-W., 315 Middleton, J., 40, 53 Miller, R. D., 166 Miller-Naudé, C. L., 156, 164–67, 194 Milton, J., 155 Mngomezulu, B. R., 47 Mojola, A. O., 155 Molière, J.-B. P., 44 Mongia, P., 250 Mongo-Mboussa, B., 316 Morin, E., 10, 342, 361 Morris-Hale, W., 54 Morrison, A., 51 Mosse, D., 18 Motsapi, M. J., 182 Mouralis, B., 328 Mugi-Ndua, E., 89 Mulokozi, M., 47 Mumford, L., 339 Munday, J., 131 Munslow, A., 131 Munyoro, W. W., 82 Muraoka, T., 174 Mwaniki, M., 165 Nässelqvist, D., 194 Naudé, J. A., 155–56, 164–62, 164– 67, 169, 170, 178–79 Neveu, E., 265 Ngamgne, L. A., 317 Nida, E. A., 175 Niditch, S., 166

374

Author Index

Niranjana, T., 62, 248–51 Noble, T., 165 Nord, C., 353 Norris, P., 165 Noy, F., 136 Nurse, D., 34, 53 Nussbaum, M., 20, 162 Odinga, O., 80 Ogbaa, K., 242 Okome, O., 135, 140, 149 Okpewho, I., 169 Okri, B., 316 Olivier de Sardan, J. P., 10–11, 14– 15, 19 Ong, W., 167–69 Onstad, K., 238 Opubor, A. E., 132 Orero, P., 42 Orkin, M., 97 Osborn, E. L., 64 Page, E. M., 34–35 Pansare, M. A., 87, 90 Patel, Z., 87 Peirce, C. S., 10, 12–14, 16, 351 Pellatt, V., 42–43 Perrott, D. V., 61 Petrilli, S., 9 Pett, S., 103 Pinker, S., 160 Pratt, M. L., 75, 275 Prescott, P., 121 Presley, C. A., 89 Prunþ, E., 50 Pym, A., 38 Queiros, J., 10 Quince, R., 97 Rabbani, M. J., 14 Rafael, V., 62 Ralston Saul, J., 237–38 Ramonet, I., 266–67 Reis, E. L. M., 244 Renn, J., 336, 349–56

Rhoads, D., 168 Ribeiro, M. F. M., 245 Ringgren, H., 170 Rist, G., 19 Ritzer, G., 158 Robert, S., 60 Roberts, R. L., 64, 125 Robinson, D., 14, 50 Rodríguez Murphy, E., 327, 329 Rollins, J., 47 Rosa, H., 335, 337–42, 348, 351, 354–55 Rossiter, C., 286, 288 Rovira-Esteva, S., 42 Rubin, A. N., 75–76, 78 Rutter, C. C., 102 Sachs, J., 162 Sæbø, M., 175 Said, E., 249, 259, 322 Sales Salvador, A., 323 Sammons, S., 231 Sandy, B., 166 Sanneh, L. O., 155 Sapiro, G., 36–38, 55–56, 262 ùaul, M., 138 Saunders, D., 109 Sawyer, R. K., 10, 21 Scarfe, A. C., 9, 28 Schalkwyk, D., 96, 116 Scharbert, J., 172 Schlesinger, M., 38 Schneider, E. W., 137 Schröter, M., 232 Schwanke, O., 157 Schwarz, H., 9 Searle, J. R., 10 Sebeok, T. A., 15–16 Selasi, T., 143 Seligman, M. E. P., 162 Sen, A., 20 Senghor, L., 318 Sengupta, M., 62 ùerban, A., 137 Shamma, T., 37 Shariff, I. N., 34

Translation Studies beyond the Postcolony Shimo, A., 236 Siever, H., 11, 353, 356 Silva, A. C., 255–56 Simeoni, D., 50 Simon, S., 277 Singh, M., 87–88 Sioui, G., 229 Smye, V. L., 228, 234, 236–37 Sommer, D., 256 Sonnenburg, P. M., 34–35 Soria, G., 286–288, 292 Souza, J. M. E., 245 Spear, T., 34, 53 Spencer Brown, G., 335 Spencer-Miller, A., 167 Spivak, G. C., 131 St Lo Malet Conan-Davies, E., 64 Steemers, V., 328 Steere, E., 46, 55 Stote, K., 235 St-Pierre, P., 277 Suleiman, K., 83 Sullivan, E., 121 Sundaram, J. K., 157 Swift, J., 48 Sydenham, M. J., 287–88 Symington, R., 96 Tahir-Gürçaglar, ù., 42 Talento, S., 33, 49, 53, 61 Tanner, T., 116 Tchak, S., 321 Tchindjang, M., 317 Thomas, D., 319 Thompson, B., 194 Thompson, J. M., 287–88 Thurman, C., 106, 123 Thurman, J., 282 Tiffin, H., 319, 322 Togarasei, L., 168 Torop, P., 9 Toury, G., 52 Traore, F. A., 77 Trebilcock, M., 224, 227 Trivedi, H., 51, 250, 262 Turner, T. E., 89

375

Tymoczko, M., 2, 4, 57, 252, 262, 283, 289, 299, 302, 305, 315 Ugochukwu, F., 137–38, 143, 145, 147 Usman, J., 143–44 Uzoatu, U. M., 139 Van Schalkwyk, S., 116 Varcoe, C., 228, 234, 236–37 Vendler, H., 306 Venuti, L., 75–76 Vidal Claramonte, A., 317, 323–24, 329, 323 Vidal, D., 267–68, 273–74 Vieira, E. R. P., 91, 251–52 Vierke, C., 40 Von Armin, R., 157 Von Bertalanffy, L., 224 Von Uexkull, J., 15 Waberi, A., 328–29 Wacquant, L., 263–64 Wafula, R. M., 47 Wallerstein, I., 335, 338 Walton, J. H., 166 Wanjala, C. L., 74 Watts, R., 42 Wehmeier, G., 172, 177 Weimann, R., 95, 98–99 Weissenrieder, A., 166 Wendland, E. R., 155, 194 Werner, A., 55 Westoby, P., 18, 20, 23 Wheeler, W., 9 White, H., 131 Whitehead, A. N., 350 Whiteley, W., 46 Widdowson, F., 236 Willan, B., 96 Williams, K., 266, 277 Wilson, A., 77 Wilson, P., 277 Wolf, M., 11, 56, 328, 360 Woolf, S. H., 225 Wright, L., 97

376 Yorke, G. L., 168 Yuste Frías, J., 42

Author Index Zabus, C., 319 Zhukov, A., 34

SUBJECT INDEX

Aboriginal peoples, 220–22, 228– 29, 231–33, 235–37 activism, 88–89, 250, 297 adaptation, 51, 76, 96, 117, 125, 132–33, 215 African languages, 96, 176, 216, 284 African literature, 73, 243, 245, 253, 255, 259, 315–17, 358 Afrikaans, 96, 125, 178–80 agency, 12, 18, 22–23, 211 alienation, 103, 111, 137, 155, 160, 170, 210, 217 alterity, 163–64, 217, 234, 277, 367 American Revolution, 284–85 Anglophones, 227, 230 Animal Farm (novel by George Orwell), 78–82, 90, 213 Mugunda wa Nyamu (Gikuyu translation), 82 Shamba la Wanyama (Swahili translation), 76–80, 82, 91 Antropofagia, 251–252 apartheid, 24, 97–99, 105, 113 Arabic, 34, 45, 49, 53, 55, 77 art, works of, 43, 56, 61 As You Like It (play by Shakespeare), 113–16 audiovisual translation (see also dubbing; subtitling), 131 autoconsecration (see also consecration; deconsecration), 60 Beatitudes, 175–76, 180, 183–85, 188–94 Bemba, 177, 184–86 178, 183, 189– 91 Beowulf (Old English epic), 305–9

Bible translation, 155–56, 165–68, 178, 182–83, 217 binaries, 9, 63, 100, 103, 116, 118, 166, 210, 239, 320, 323, 328– 29. 358–59 biosemiosis, 16–17, 21 biosemiotics, 9, 11, 16–18, 21, 211, 238 Black people, 24, 99, 102–3, 318, 321 blackface, 103–10 blackness, 105, 109–10, 118 Bollywood, 130, 133–36, 142 Brazilian Portuguese, 122–25, 244, 246–48 Britain, 34, 56, 112, 226, 289, 298– 301, 308 Buile Suibhne (Irish tale; English translation: Sweeney Astray), 305 Canada, 214, 220–22. 226–31, 233– 36, 238 capabilities approach, 18, 20, 162 capital (sociological concept), 33, 35–38, 40–41, 43, 47, 54–58, 62–64, 263–65, 270, 274, 342 capitalism, 74, 80, 90, 335, 343 Cartesian schism, 9–12, 16–18, 22, 29 Catholic Church, 297, 300, 309 censorship, 58, 232, 294, 301 Césaire, Aimé, 318, 327 China, 157, 268, 282, 343, 345, 348 circulation, 35–38, 41–45, 54, 56, 100 classics, European, 46, 48, 52, 55– 56

378

Subject Index

Cold War, 73, 75. 77, 83, 96, 100, 113, 334–35, 345–46, 360 colonies, 34–35, 39, 210–11, 214, 243, 249, 262, 280–81, 283–84, 293–95, 297–98, 343–44 communism, 75, 77, 90, 343, 345 complex adaptive systems, 18 complexity theory, 10, 165, 224, 239, 361–62 consecration (see also autoconsecration; deconsecration), 33, 37, 39–41, 43, 49, 56–57, 59–60, 63, 212, 275 cultural production, 135, 230, 262, 265–66 culture dominated/dominant, 214, 239, 264 oral/written, 155, 166–68, 217 curricula, 47, 56, 74, 96, 98, 248 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, 286–90, 292, 294–95 Declaration of Independence, 284– 86, 289–90, 294 decolonisation, 19, 24, 39, 132, 140, 211, 222, 224, 236–37, 253, 259, 276, 310, 314, 334, 343 deconsecration (see also autoconsecration; consecration), 41, 48, 54–55, 57–59, 61, 63–64 deterritorialisation, 315, 322, 335, 342, 348 developed countries, 157, 214, 216 developing countries, 149, 157, 167 development, 10–11, 14–24, 28, 162, 165, 211–12, 341, 348, 354 diaspora, 137–38, 142–43, 145, 148–49, 214, 216, 314 dichotomies, 36, 166, 328, 335, 342–45, 358–60

discourse, 33, 41–43, 49, 52, 54, 56, 58–64, 74, 82, 86, 106, 210–12, 217, 221–22, 225–26, 228, 230, 232–38, 242–43, 249, 251, 253, 289, 293, 304, 315, 322, 324, 329, 336, 344 distribution of capital, 264 of films and videos, 130–31, 131, 141–43, 147, 149 of resources, 35, 37 domestication, 77–78, 87–88, 122, 213, 296 domination, 37, 40, 56, 214, 227, 249, 263–64, 274, 276, 297 dubbing (see also audiovisual translation; subtitles), 143–44, 146–48, 216 economics, 19, 123, 341, 359 education, 44–48, 54, 56–59, 97, 99, 157, 161, 167, 228, 231, 233, 235–37, 300 emergence, 10–12, 17–18 empire, 1, 19, 39, 45, 157, 281, 283, 319, 329, 360 England, 77, 99, 112, 221, 226, 282–83, 288, 298, 302, 308 English, 214–16, 284 education, 54 as official language, 226–27, 229–31 films, 131, 135, 137 literature, 44, 47–48, 55–56, 301, 303, 308 ethics, 23, 114, 131, 164 ethnic diversity, 105, 221, 314, 317 Europe, 100, 118, 212, 381, 284, 318, 345–49, 360 exclusion (see also inclusion), 56, 170, 300, 335, 341, 344, 347, 359, 361 exportation (see also importation), 39, 55, 145, 294 extratext (see also paratext), 41–44, 62

Translation Studies beyond the Postcolony field journalistic, 262–63, 265, 268, 270, 274, 277 literary, 33, 35–41, 45, 47, 49, 54, 57–58, 62–63, 262, 301 field theory, 35, 264 film industries, 130, 134–35, 138, 144, 148 First Nations, 220–21, 228, 232, 234, 238, 280–84 flow, 252, 274, 294 foreignness, 103, 108, 111, 122–24 fractalisation, 335–36, 341–48, 354 France, 221, 274, 283–87, 289–96, 323 Francophones, 227, 321 French, 220, 229–30, 284, 318–19 functional systems, 335, 338, 341– 44, 348, 350, 359 Germany, 34, 95–109, 112–14, 121, 125, 214, 346–49 Global North, 2–4, 94, 99–101, 114, 117, 121–22, 125, 210, 214, 217, 220, 239 Global South, 2–4, 19, 100, 125, 210, 220, 239, 347, 348 globalisation, 2, 154, 156–59, 211, 216–17, 314, 317, 319, 323–24, 328–29, 334, 338, 342–43, 347– 49, 354 Hamlet (play by Shakespeare), 95, 121–25 hierarchies, 36, 40, 51, 53, 55, 57, 105, 115, 211, 251–52, 262, 266, 296, 341, 361 Hispanic America, 293–97 Hollywood, 130, 133–35 human rights, 200, 227, 288, 290, 292, 366, humanness, 155–56, 160–61, 163, 200, 217, hybridity, 3, 27, 106, 131, 216, 220, 228, 238, 315–16, 319, 320–24, 326, 328–30, 358, 366, 368

379

hypermodernity (see also modernity; postmodernity), 330–33, 335–39, 341, 348–49, 351–53 336–39, 341–45, 347– 50, 354–56 identity, 53–54, 101–3, 113–14, 137, 139, 157, 163, 215–16, 228, 236, 250–51, 280, 296, 301, 309–10, 314, 316, 317, 321–22, 349–55 Igbo, 134–37, 242–243 immigrants, 101, 106, 108–9, 214, 227, 302, 319, 325–26, 347, 349 immigration, 2, 100–2, 108–9, 220– 21, 227, 348 imperialism, 73, 78, 90–91, 100, 113, 134, 211, 213, 217, 221, 226, 228, 321 importation (see also exportation), 38–41, 49, 54–55, 57–58, 63, 294 inclusion (see also exclusion), 43, 238, 335, 341, 344, 359, 361 independence, 76, 79, 100, 137, 226–27, 230, 280–82, 284–86, 293–99, 301, 303, 309–10, 314, 319–20 interpretation (profession), 231, 349, 360 interpretation (semiotics), 12–14, 224, 351 invisibility, 50, 228, 232, 295, 322, 324 Ireland, 280, 282, 298–309 Islam, 78, 345 journalism, 262–63, 265–66, 274 Kenya, 34–35, 47, 64, 78–82, 85–91 languages dominated/dominant, 36, 39, 55 indigenous, 144–45 official, 34, 144, 229, 243

380

Subject Index

Le Médecin malgré lui (play by Molière; Swahili translation: Tabibu asiyependa utabibu), 44, 50–51 Le Monde diplomatique, foreign editions of, 268–77 Le ventre de l’Atlantique (novel by Fatou Diome), 324 En un lugar del Atlántico (Spanish translation), 326 link languages, 282, 284, 293 marginalisation, 50, 75, 82, 157, 212, 236 Merchant of Venice, the (play by Shakespeare), 110–12 migrants, 101, 104, 109, 346–47, 349, 353 migration, 100, 348–49 mind, 9, 11, 17 modernisation, 300, 337, 340, 342 modernity (see also hypermodernity; postmodernity), 216, 334, 336– 42, 344, 346, 348, 354, 358–59 Mother (novel by Maxim Gorky), 75, 83–90 Bega kwa bega (dramatised Swahili version), 87–89, 91 Mama (Swahili translation), 83, 85–87, 90 multiculturalism, 226, 228–29, 235– 36, 243, 317, 349 multilingualism, 144, 147, 243, 252, 280–84, 290, 293, 298, 314, 317, 360 Native Americans, 280, 283 Nigeria, 130–49, 243–44, 246, 259 Nollywood, 215–16 themes, 135–37, 138–40 production, 135, 140–43 languages, 135–37, 144–48 non-translation (see also silence), 57, 226, 232, 361

oral translation, 168, 188–89 orality, 164, 166–68, 200, 255 Othello (play by Shakespeare), 101– 10 Other, 17, 21–23, 74, 149, 156, 164, 200, 211, 221, 226, 232, 236, 259, 321–22, 329 otherness, 110, 156, 164, 232 paratext (see also extratext; peritext), 41–44, 48, 50, 62, 243, 255, 258–59, 293, 296, 326 performance criticism, 155–56, 166, 168–69, 183 performance translation, 155, 169, 183–84, 194–96, 200 Bemba, 189–91 Lokaa, 191–94 Sesotho, 184–89 peritext (see also extratext; paratext), 42 poetry, 34, 39–40, 49, 53, 55–58, 212 postcolonial studies, 2, 249, 262–63, 322–23, 329 post-humanism, 156, 160–61, 164 postmodernism, 9, 11, 23, 236, 334, 336 postmodernity (see also hypermodernity; modernity), 336–39, 342, 348, 354 power relations, 36, 157, 226–28, 230, 249, 262, 264, 268, 273, 277, 322, 324 race (see also blackface), 95, 101–9, 114, 118, 215, 249, 280, 290– 92, 318 racism, 102–3, 106–7, 109–10, 113, 118, 215, 222, 237, 248–49 reductionism, 18, 22, 212, 316, 324, 327, 360–61 religion, 105, 165, 296 rewriting, translation as, 285–86, 290, 295–96, 321–22

Translation Studies beyond the Postcolony Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur (Swahili translation: Omar Khayyam kwa Kiswahili), 44, 59–61 semiosis (see also biosemiosis), 3, 10, 12–17, 20–21 semiosphere, 222–25, 232 semiotic systems, 24–25, 212, 224, 351 semiotics (see also biosemiotics), 4, 10–11, 15, 29, 212, 239 Sesotho, 182, 184–89 silence (see also non-translation), 54, 56–58, 62–63, 212, 221, 225, 228, 232–33, 238, 327 social reality, 10–11, 35, 44, 116 socialism, 77–80, 82–85, 90, 98, 213 sociology, 11, 18–19, 35–38, 43, 62, 212, 262–64, 328, 349, 355–56 South Africa, 24–26, 94–100, 105, 112–13, 125, 214 Soviet Union, 73, 75–76, 82–85, 90, 214, 334, 338, 345 Soyinka, Wole, 74, 246–47, 319 subaltern, 121, 131, 211, 214, 216, Sub-Saharan Africa, 38, 131, 133, 135, 141, 148–49, 315, 327 subtitling (see also audiovisual translation), 3, 124, 131, 134, 137–38, 142–49, 216 surtitles, 102, 122–24 Swahili, 34–35, 39–41, 44–46, 49, 52–64, 74–79, 82–88, 90–91, 147, 212–13, systems theory, 223–24, 351

Tempest, the (play by Shakespeare), 117–21 temporalisation, 335, 337–39, 342, 348, 354 Things Fall Apart (novel by Chinua Achebe), 242–43, 245–47, 253– 57, 260 O mundo se despedaça (Brazilian Portuguese translation), 245–47, 253, 255. 258–59 transculturality, 319, 322 transculturation, 75, 82, 91 translational research, 225 translation, types of, 3, 12–14, 28, 131, 215–17, 221–25, 230–31, 284, 290, 349, 351–52, 362 United States of America, 73, 75, 280–86, 288–97, 300, 302 values, 20, 40, 43, 155–56, 165, 227, 256, 274, 276, 281, 300, 303 Verre Cassé (novel by Alain Mabanckou), 327 voice, 131, 149, 242, 315 White people, 97, 99, 102–9, 118, 232, 256–57 whiteness, 103, 105, 107, 109, 118 women, 85, 87–89, 134, 136, 161, 234–35, 239 World War I, 34, 100, 282 World War II, 19, 99, 227, 282, 284, 300, 302, 334, 345 xenophobia, 109, 355, 362

Táin, the (trans. Kinsella, Thomas), 299, 302, 306 Tanzania (Tanganyika), 33–35, 41, 45–49, 51, 58–59, 62, 76–79, 82–85, 90

381

Yoruba, 132–39, 144–45