African Europhone
Literature and Writing
as Translation
Paul Bandia
Page 1
È giusto che un uomo debba
abbandonare la propria
lingua madre per quella di
qualcun altro? Sembra un
tradimento orrendo, che ti fa
sentire in colpa. Ma per me
non c’è altra scelta. La
lingua mi è stata data e io
intendo usarla. [...] Sento
che la lingua inglese sarà in
grado di sostenere il peso
della mia esperienza
africana. Ma dovrà essere un
inglese nuovo, ancora in
piena comunione con il
proprio antico lignaggio,
seppur alterato per adattarsi
al nuovo ambiente africano.
(1975: 59)
Is it right that a man should
abandon his mother tongue
for someone else’s? It looks
like a dreadful betrayal and
produces a guilty feeling.
But for me there is no other
choice. I have been given
the language and I intend to
use it. […] I feel that the
English language will be
able to carry the weight of
my African experience. But
it will have to be a new
English, still in full
communion with its
ancestral home but altered
to suit new African
surroundings.
Page 2
Il fatto che gli scrittori
africani rivendichino il diritto
di usare una lingua estranea
per la propria espressione
artistica non è, di per sé,
sorprendente alla luce della
storia coloniale dell’Africa,
considerando anche l’effetto
che oggi hanno le spinte
verso la globalizzazione. Ciò
che appare particolarmente
significativo, però, è la loro
determinazione a
impossessarsi delle lingue
coloniali, dando a queste un
sapore decisamente
africano.
That African writers assert
their right to use an alien
language for their artistic
expression is not in itself
surprising given Africa’s
colonial history, coupled
with the impact of today’s
globalization movement.
What seems to be of
particular import is their
determination to appropriate
the colonial languages,
giving them a distinctly
African flavour.
Page 3
Il tentativo di presentare il
prodotto della loro
immaginazione in qualità di
autori di scrittura creativa,
l’ispirazione derivante dalle
narrazioni orali e la
necessità di scrivere in un
codice estraneo formano la
base delle pratiche
linguistiche innovative, con
degli esempi di inventiva
che contraddistinguono la
lingua della letteratura euroafricana.
The attempt at combining
the product of their
imagination as creative
writers, the inspiration
derived from oral narratives,
and the need to write in an
alien code is at the basis of
the linguistic innovative
practices, or ‘inventiveness’,
characteristic of the
language of Euro-African
literatures.
Page 4
La pratica propria di chi
scrive è a sua volta soggetta
alle contingenze del retaggio
coloniale dell’individuo. Per
esempio, è stato osservato
che nella scrittura africana,
la lingua inglese ha subito
un processo molto più
incisivo di acculturazione
rispetto a quella francese.
Albert Gérard (1986)
attribuisce questo fenomeno
ad alcune differenze fra la
politica coloniale britannica
e quella francese […].
The writer’s individual
practice is in turn
determined by the
exigencies of his or her
colonial heritage. For
instance, it has been pointed
out that the English
language has undergone a
great deal more
acculturation than the
French language in African
writing. Albert Gérard (1986)
attributes this to some
differences between British
and French colonial policies
[…].
Page 5
Jacques Chévrier (1978) sums up the
attitude of African Francophone writers
towards writing in French by separating
them
into
three
categories:
les
inconditionnels,
les
réticents,
les
réalistes.
1) […] unconditional acceptance of the
French language in Africa as a medium
of cultural expression.
Page 6
2) The second category includes those
authors who use French as an artistic
medium in spite of themselves. For
these authors, the French language is
an intrusion (Like the presence of a
gendarme); it is an instrument of
colonization with its own ambiguities
and travesties. They strongly encourage
vernacular
language
writing,
but
generally acknowledge its limitations in
reaching a wider readership.
Page 7
3) The third category includes those
authors who are said to have a realistic
and pragmatic view on the subject. For
the « realists », French becomes a sort
of Troyan Horse, so to speak, through
which they can encounter, resist and
demystify the imperialist subtexts of
neocolonialism.
Page 8
La difficoltà che grava sulla
scelta di ogni scrittore
africano di continuare a
scrivere in una lingua
estranea, che non è parlata
o compresa dalla
maggioranza delle persone,
può essere spiegata
utilizzando la nozione di
letteratura “minore/di
minoranza”, dovuta a
Deleuze e Guattari.
The predicament of the
African writer’s choice to
continue to write in an alien
language which is not
spoken or understood by a
majority of the people can
be elucidated through an
understanding of Deleuze
and Guattari’s notion of
“minority/minor” literature.
Page 9
Many
post-independence
writers,
Francophones and Anglophones alike,
have
continued
this
practice
of
deterritorializing the European language
by consciously « bending » the
language, violating its metropolitan
norms, in an innovative process that
ranges
from
pidginization
to
creolization,
thus
creating
a
recognizable African variety of the
European language.
Page 10
In questa sede intendo
considerare la ‘traduzione
come metafora della
scrittura’ e il discorso che
ne deriva, il cui carattere
necessariamente ibrido dà
luogo a una lingua che
chiamerò ‘terzo codice’, in
analogia con la nozione di
“terzo spazio” proposta da
Homi Bhabha.
In altre parole, la traduzione
viene qui vista come una
metafora di trasferimento e
spostamento, un
‘trasportare oltre’ i confini
fisici, culturali e linguistici
che avviene da una cultura
di lingua minore verso una
egemonica.
Here, I am interested in the
view of translation as a
metaphor for writing and the
resulting discourse which is
necessarily hybrid, a
language which I refer to as
a third code, by analogy with
Homi Bhabha’s notion of a
“third space”. In other
words, translation is viewed
here as a metaphor of
transportation and
relocation, a “carrying
across” physical, cultural or
linguistic boundaries from a
minority language culture
into a hegemonic one.
Page 11
A differenza dei traduttori,
gli scrittori postcoloniali non
traspongono un testo”, ma
al contrario “in quanto
questa fa da sfondo alle loro
opere letterarie,
traspongono un’intera
cultura”. Mentre questo vale
generalmente per molti
scrittori africani, è anche
vero che molti altri
traducono non solo le
culture, ma anche le lingue,
[…]
Unlike translators
postcolonial writers are not
transposing a text, but
rather as background to
their literary work, they are
transposing a culture.
While this is generally true
of many African writers, it is
also true that many others
are translating not only
cultures but also languages.
[…]
Page 12
The more a language acquires the
characteristics of a major language, the
more it tends to be affected by internal
variations that transpose it into a
« minor » language. English, because of
its very hegemony, is constantly being
worked on from within by the minorities
of the world […].
The acquisition of power by a language
and the becoming minor of that
language, in other words, are coexistent
movements that are constantly passing
and converging into each other in both
directions.
Page 13
Given its decolonizing strategy of
resistance and preservation through
language
experimentation,
African
European-language translating is best
informed by an ethics of difference
(Venuti, 1998), whose main objective is
to safeguard the linguistic and cultural
specificity of Euro-African discourse.
[…] The Euro-African text is in itself a
translated
text,
the
result
of
a
foreignizing as well as a domesticating
strategy, blending African traditional
discourse
with
European
language
discourse.
The
resulting
hybrid
texts
are
themselves often multi-lingual and
multi-cultural, steeped in intertextuality
[…]
Page 14