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T is hardly thinkable to translate a liter-ary text without some commitment of thesensibility. Language here is not reducedto intellectual significations as it shouldideally be in a scientific text. It emergesinto our world of appearance and mani-festations loaded with the energies andpotencies that have urged the author tocreate it; it is suffused with emotionalmessages. In various grades and con-

tents according to whether it approaches specu-lation or borders on poetry, a text radiatesfeeling to which the reader is invited to react.And the translator, who very often is the readerof a language that is not her or his own, has tomake herself or himself sensitive to these mes-sages.

Weighing wordsBeyond the meanings conveyed through the sequences of

sentences, a translator should perceive in the lexical choice,banal or mannered, loaded with sensuous images or dryconcepts, in the syntactic complexity or simplicity, monotony orvariety, in the stylistic endless games and the multitude ofunnamed nuances, the total significance of the fluid thought ofthe author never fully conscious himself of the expression hemediates and creates. The translator should feel as well asunderstand, work as a technician and as an artist. And this,clearly, in addition to an extensive and precise knowledge andmastery of the languages whose correspondence she/he en-sures, with the pitfalls their linguistic proximity can hide, such asthe deceptive cognates to the anglophone translator of French.

And translating implies style and choice. A technique andan art, a profession or a passion, translating has its theoreticiansand its historians, its trends and schools. A translator should keepinformed of these in order to understand the wide range ofpossibilities offered, rigid or flexible, shy or daring, overdoingor underdoing. When Jacques Derrida says that 'good transla-tion should indulge in excess' he may not find unanimous supportbut he does not fail to find quite a few followers.

A French specialist of translation, Valery Larbaud, saysthat'all the work of translation is a weighing of words', an option

for differential sensibility that means with some propriety toobtain the seal of scientific value. But Valery Larbaud knows wellthat we must think of the author's words rather than the dictionary's,that is words which, while retaining their cores of conventionalvalues, have been coloured by what has preceded them in thetext where they appear and even in previous texts, and also in thelinguistic environment of the writer since his childhood, whetherhis mother tongue or others, with their own structures and culturalbases, or again the ever growing and expanding field of hisliterary and social associations.

Wole Soyinka spoke Yoruba before he started learningEnglish, even though at a very early age, and still speaks it; but,voracious reader that he is, he has been continuously nourishedby an indefinite wealth of new verbal entities Behind the hidden

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or manifest allusions to Shakespeare orYeats, or the Bible often humorously,twisted, loom the innumerable presencesof literary worlds superimposed or asso-ciated to the Yoruba language andthought in his 'selective eclecticism'. Atranslator should become acquainted withall these data and feed his cerebralcomputer whose unconscious work pro-duces and proposes a text that the mentalchecker sifts through, deletes, corrects orretains.

Cultural DistanceA literary text is never read in pure

objectivity. The farther it is in time andspace, the more the reader projects hisown preoccupations on it. If the reader isa translator, he tends to emphasize what-ever is relevant to his own desires in thetext he is attempting to capture and tonedown whatever has little appeal to him.And he also knows that his translationshould receive the approval of his pub-lisher, which may sometimes be some-thing of a feat when he wants to remainfaithful to the values of the writer. And thismeans that a translation will age. Like anyother literary text it will develop a coat ofpatina or rust. It runs the risk of becomingtrite. A new translation then scrubs thefirst and attempts to recreate the original

text with the most honourable intentionsand... illusions.

Obviously the problem of time dis-tance does not exist with Wole Soyinka,but that of spatial, or rather, culturaldistancedoes. Wole Soyinka isa Yoruba,Nigerian, African, Planetary writer. Hequestions the pretensions to universality ofWestern culture. He has particularly criti-cized its 'periodic dialectics', examiningthe effects on the evolution of literaturesand the accompanying movements ofcriticism of this 'compartmentalising habitof thought which periodically selects as-pects of human emotion, phenomenalobservations, metaphysical intuitions andeven scientific deductions and turns theminto separatist myths (or "truths") sus-tained by a proliferating superstructure ofpresentation idioms, analogies and ana-lytical modes. I have evolved a ratherelaborate metaphor to describe it; appro-priately it is not only mechanistic butrepresents a period technology whichmarked yet another phase of Westernman's comprehensive world-view.

'You must picture a steam-enginewhich shunts itself between rather closely-spaced suburban stations. At the firststation it picks up a ballast of allegory,puffs into the next emitting a smokescreen

Etienne at home with wife, Zeinabou (France, May, 1996)

on the eternal landscape of nature truths.At the next it loads up with a differentspecies of logs which we shall call najural-isttimber, puffs into a half-way stop whereit fills up with the synthetic fuel of surreal-ism, from which point yet another holisticworld-view is glimpsed and assertedthrough psychedelic smoke. A new con-signment of absurdist coke lures it into thenext station from which it departs givingoff no smoke at all, and no fire, until itderails briefly along constructivist tracksand is towed back to the starting-point bya neo-classic engine.' (Myth, Literatureand the African World, pp. 37f).

This 'series of intellectual spasms'(ibid.) has been confirmed and analysedby French academic Gilbert Durand whohas shown the pendular movement ofcultural generations impelled by recurrentmyths.+

Western and westernized transla-tors, just like their fellow writers andcritics, cannot easily escape these fluctua-tions. But Soyinka challenges the dialecti-cal agitation and contrary excesses inperpetual unbalance and rebalance. Tothe compartmentalization of Europeanthought resulting in the extremes advo-cated by Derrida he opposes 'culture asdefined within man's knowledge of fun-

t damental, unchanging re-lationships between him-self and society and withinthe larger context of theobservable universe.'(ibid.)+Figures mythiques et vis-ages de I'oeuvre, Paris,Berg International, 1979.

Sound,sense,harmony

It seems quite natu-ral that a translator ofSoyinka's works shouldendeavour to share hiscultural vision. What abouta reader of Wole Soyinkawho came to translate himbecause he felt in himself adeep agreement with thisvision? There is little dan-ger for him to be temptedany longer by ebb andflow of Western schools

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and cultural generations. And yet he hasto admit that he does not fully know all thatwent into his formation and is unaware ofthe laws of the cerebral computer thatpresents him translations he can onlycheck, reject or accept. Let us only say thatthe Cerberus that keeps watch at theportals of the nether regions of the psycheout of which emerge the French words thathad entered in English garb has its threeheads: sense, sound and harmony. Itunemotionally tears to pieces the unfaith-ful beauties, grunts in front of make-upand drives back all that is out of tune withthe song started long before.

To translate Soyinka thereforemeans to be in harmony with the deepthoughts that inspire him. It also means toremember that Soyinka has himself prac-tised translation and expressed his senti-ment about it, however briefly, in hisprefatory note to The Forest of a ThousandDaemons, a translation from D. O.Fagunwa's Yoruba saga Ogboju OdeNinu Igbo Irunmale. Soyinka explainsthat his translational options are based onthe art of the storyteller whose text hewants to capture and render:

'Fagunwa's concern is to conveythe vivid sense of event, and a translatormust select equivalents for mere auxilia-ries where these serve the essential pur-pose better than the precise original. Inwhat I mentally refer to as the 'enthusias-tic' passages of his writing, the essence ofFagunwa is the fusion of sound and ac-tion. To preserve the movement and fluid-ity of this association seems to be the bestapproach for keeping faith with theauthor's style and sensibility.' (op. cit.,P-3).

Soyinka as translator just likeSoyinko as poet, novelist and dramatistheeds rhythms and harmonies as much assense, and may even sacrifice the latter tothe former:

'In one of the extracts for themagazine Black Orpheus, this phrasemo nmi ho bi agiliti' which became 'my

breath came in rapid bloats like the haw-ing of a toad' aroused some protest froma critic. Indeed agiliti is far from being thetoad, it is more a member of the lizardspecies. But then neither toad nor lizard is

the object of action or interest to the heroAkara-Ogun or his creator Fagunwa atthis point of narration' (ibid.).

This free attitude towards the letterfor a better faithfulness to the spirit andits musical expression connects with whatSoyinka says about the relationship be-tween the dramatist and his producers:he lets those who stage his plays takeliberties with his text in order to adapt tothe public and their cultural environmentbut remains uncompromising about theessential message to deliver.

Soyinka's translator should not bemisled by their freedom; it expresses ademand for a sensibility to modes ofexpression that cannot be easily defined.In Soyipka's works elliptical, allusive andobscure turns may perplex a reader whois after total intellectual lucidity. Shouldthe translator then come to his help?What about a phrase like 'the rocksaltpsyche' in The Interpreters which looksand sounds both hermetic and poetic?When | found an opportunity to ask thewriter he was surprised at my embarrass-ment and kindly explained that salt dis-solves when it absorbs too much waterand therefore the rocksalt psyche is thatwhich risks dissolution when it absorbstoo much knowledge. Then, out of pity forthe francophone readers, the translatorwrites: 'cette pshyche de sel gemme quedissout I'eau qu'il absorb' (the rocksaltpsyche dissolved by the water it ab-sorbs), regretting that his explanationbreaks the rhythm, turns the phrase offkey, in fact ruins the text.

Take the example of Soyinka's ad-dress to the Lagos Symposium in May1988. He says: 'On this continent wehave had far too many martyrs amongwriters, artists and scientists who havemet with hideous ends at the hands ofpurely reflexive rulers.' The translatorsuspects that 'reflexion' here hides some-thing derogatory and wonders howreflection can be noxious. Chancing onthe man he puts it to him and receives amischievous glance and reply: 'What?You don't know what reflexes are?', andsuiting the action to the words WS dem-onstrates the knee-jerk. How should wetranslate then? Is it not treasonable toexplain: 'des dirigeants qui n'agissent

que par reflexe'(rulers that act only throughreflex)? Should we not rather leave thereader the chance and pleasure to guess,relish the hidden meaning, the strange-ness of the phrase at the end of the longperiod? Attachment to immediate lucidityis fanatical intellectualism declining feel-ing and refusing imagination and deny-ing the poet his art and right to choose hiswords with the unexpected slant that fresh-ens them up.

In his poem 'New York, USA'Soyinka mentions his 'long liquid vigils' inthe feverish wait for Western and Easterncosmonauts' departures for space. 'Liq-uid'? I learn from the horse's mouth that itrefers to the beers and other ogunianbeverages that help him to kill time. But'liquide' hardly applies. Shall I use 'arrose'(wetted, washed)? It is clearer in French.Yet I keep l iquide', and who can tell mewhy? Just a feeling. Of course an explana-tion is deplorable in a poem and a foot-note disgraceful.

'Music before anything''de la musique avant toutechose' (Verlaine)

Soyinka is an artist even when heuses words as essayist, orator or profes-sor. His texts are often musical works, as

•when he theorizes on Yoruba drama inhis major essay, The Fourth Stage: 'Thismasonic union of sign and melody, thetrue tragic music, unearths cosmic uncer-tainties which pervade human existence,reveals the magnitude and power of cre-ation, but above all creates a harrowingsense of omni-directional vastness wherethe creative Intelligence resides andprompts the soul to futile exploration'(Myth, Literature and the African World,p. 148).

A translator should enter into thisrelational spirit in which 'the sound mustseem an echo to the sense' as Pope says.Because of this duality of sound and senseand their delicate tension and balance,his choices partly rely on intuition andcannot be easily justified. Is it the impres-sion of the moment, unerring instinct orsimply necessity that decides? What is heto do, among other things, when facedwith rhymes? In 'Psalm' (Idanre and OtherPoems) Soyinka threads couplets like a

African Quarterlyon Ihe ArtsIof. / / SO •*

-f ~-Lnd translating implies style andchoice, A technique and an art, aprofession or a passion, translating hasits theoreticians and its historians, itsWends and schools, A translator shouldkeep informed of these in order tounderstand the wide range ofpossibilities offered, rigid or flexible, shyor daring, overdoing or underdoing.

string of pearls. Some of the Englishrhymes use latinate words, inviting loan-translation: 'gratitude/plenitude', 'sanc-tuary/mystery', 'exegesis/genesis'.Should not the francophone reader beshown that Soyinka does not disdainrhymes when he feels them expressive ofthe mood of a poem? With 'Roots' (AShuttle in the Crypt) I simply gave up,fearing that I would have to cut down toomuch in the wealth of images. But withThe Apotheosis of Master-Sergeant Doe'(Mandela's Earth and Other Poems) I feltI could not escape. The heroic couplethere seems essential, conveying the satirein a pastiche of occasional verse, but myFrench alexandrins (twelve-syllable lines)have certainly lost a number of allusionsand nods, and some of the original caus-tic wit.

Translating without betrayingMost of the problems the translator

addresses in Soyinka's poetry, whetherrhymed or not, are similar to those foundin all texts where .form carries a majorload of expressivity. Then come problemsspecific to African literature, rarelyinsolvable but quite worthy of attention.To avoid certain blunders, it is desirableto have some knowledge of African geog-raphy, history and some acquaintancewith African life and people. Nothinghere can better help than to have lived inAfrica and become sentimentally attachedto Africa.

With such a background the trans-lator will not translate 'corn' in Idanre byBle (wheat) but by Mais (maize). Theharvest in Kongi's Harvest is not moisson,which only applies to corn, but recolte,the only word that can be used for yam.

The kite in Death and the King's Horsemanis not a toy but a hawk, a milan orepervier, probably the Yoruba asha.Should we translate 'void' in the sameplay by neant (nothingness)? The Void isa primal concept in the Yoruba worldview.It is the first basis in Ogun's mythologyand Soyinka's vision. Ogun is the pioneerand ferryman of the Void. Rather thannothingness and Void is a whirling worldof creative and destructive energies as thereader comes to feel through this passagein Myth, Literature and the African World:'The void had become impenetrable. Along isolation from the world of men hadcreated an impassable barrier which theytried, but failed, to demolish. Ogun finallytook over. Armed with the first technicalinstrument which he had forged from themountain-wombs, he cleared the primor-dial jungle, plunged through the abyssand called on the others to follow' (pp.28f).

The void feared by the praise-singerin Death and the King's Horseman is thegreat Void on whose boulders the worldwill smash if it leaves its course (p.l 1). Nodoubt the word neant, in its associationswith Pascal and Sartre for the Frenchpublic, is more pregnant, in a sense, thanVide (emptiness). We certainly can imag-ine that Soyinka in his broadmindednesswill lend a favourable ear to this argu-ment. And yet, should we not attempt toinvite the western or westernized public tocome out of their cultural world, payattention to the 'other', escape from theformidable ethnocentricism which main-tains most of these people in their closeduniverse and invincibly makes them relateeverything to themselves and their systemof values in a naively patronizing atti-

tude?

As regards the Yoruba words andphrases Soyinka drops here and there inhis writings, occasionally without expla-nations, the translator can use a dictio-nary or ask a friendly informant to helphim write footnotes or a glossary, eventhough some readers prefer to keep theexotic touch intact and ignore the mean-ing. On the other hand the surprisingsyntactic or stylistic turns sometimes usedby Soyinka should not be interpreted asmarks of the Yoruba: Professor AkinwumiIsola told me at the time he was translatingAke, the Years of Childhood into Yorubathat his job was definitely tougher thanmine. Soyinka's English contains nothingthat compares with Gabriel Okara's inThe Voice or Amos Tutuola's in The Palm-Wine Drinkard.

Rendering popular languageYet another issue to meet in translat-

ing WS is that of pidgin English. This isone of the most widely used languages inNigeria, by semi-literates primarily, butalso by educated people and even aca-demics when they want to relax or befacetious or again humorously veil theirgravest thoughts. It is simplified Englishstructured in African syntax, pepperedwith twisted words of, sometimes, un-known origin, often very pithy and evoca-tive. It appears prominently in The Road,and the translators Christiane Fioupouand Samuel Milogo chose Abidjan Popu-lar French (FPI) to render it. The result isvery satisfactory. The few passages thatare not readily understandable for theaverage Francophone are explained infootnotes. The comical effect is faithful tothe original. And yet the use of FPI re-quires fairly long passages to acquirecoherence, unless the reader or listener isacquainted with it. It would not be soeffective in the shorter passages To ren-der Ambrose's and Polyphemus's pidginin The Man Died I used Niamey popularFrench, a little toned down to be easilygrasped by all types of readers. But theFrench publisher changed it for popularFrance French. Why not after all? Any-way I do not think there is any one solutionto the translation of pidgin. Quite often Iwould use simplified French with contrac-tions. But for plays the producer shouldadapt to the local popular French, wher-

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ever he is.

Translation and publicationWhen a translator has finalized his

text he is not yet out of the wood: publish-ers are his masters as they are the reader's.Their choices can be ideological, artistic,political... most often simply commercial,which is, after all, understandable. Frenchpublisher Belfond took interest in Soyinkaonly when he heard that he was a poten-tial Nobel prize winner in 1984. Mytranslation of Season of Anomy, com-pleted in 1979, waited in a few publish-ers' drawers after being turned down bythe'great'GallimardandLeSeuil. Belfondfinally published it in 1 987. The mosttouching refusal was from Le Seuil, whichregretted that the novel should be 'ambi-tious sometimes, rich, sometimes too rich'.Well, how many readers find a novelgood and beautiful only when a critic has

told them. Andre Gide himself turned hisnose when he first read Marcel Proust.

The last enemy to confront is theprinter, if you are given a chance to readthe galley proofs. You have to make himagree that what he took for mistakes arenot always mistakes. And when the bookis finally out, you are in for a few shocks.I remember 'Hurlez, hurlez votre comptant'(Howl, howl your cash) instead of 'harlez,hurlez votre content' (Howl, howl, yourfill') in 'To the madmen over the wall' (Ashuttle in the Crypt) which froze my bloodin my veins, and 'avilissant' (degrading)instead of 'aveulissant' (enervating) whichmade it boil because I had corrected it onthe proof but the printer, evidently smarterthan me, had de-corrected it. It is a realdisaster in the passage: 'Suspect all con-scious search for the self's authentic be-ing: this is the favourite fodder for the

enervating tragic Muse' (The Man Died,p.87). This is a basic idea in Soyinka'sphilosophy of life, as it appears also inMyth, Literature and the African World:'the insidious enervation of social will bythe tragic afflatus' (p.47).

Translating Wole Soyinka is an ab-sorbing and fascinating activity carryingthe reader-translator further into his/herfeeling of the work, leading her/him deeperand deeper into the universe expressed init. Translating gives the satisfaction to helpother readers share in it, but it is worth*doing for its own sake. Any reader ap-proaching a poem, a novel or a play in aforeign language should feel invrted totranslate a passage every now and thenand respond and reach a finer, strongerand more genuine experience in the lan-guage that belongs to his blood andguts.GR

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