Decolonizing Translation

Francophone African Novels in English Translation

Kathryn Batchelor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317641131
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The linguistically innovative aspect of Francophone African literature has been recognized and studied from a variety of angles over recent decades, yet little attention has been paid to what happens to such literature when it is translated into another language. Taking as its corpus all sub-Saharan Francophone African texts that have ever been published in English, this book explores the ways in which translators approach innovative features such as African-language borrowings, neologisms and other deliberate manipulations of French, depictions of sociolinguistic variation, and a variety of types of wordplay. The implications of their translation decisions are drawn out with reference to the broader significances that are often accorded to postcolonial literature, and earlier critics' calls for a decolonized translation practice are explored from both a practical and theoretical angle. These findings are used to push towards a detailed investigation of the postcolonial turn in translation studies, drawing on the work of key postcolonial theorists such has Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak.

This is a timely and incisive critical assessment of contemporary discourses on the ethics and politics of translation.

1. Francophone African Novels and Their Translation into English

The earliest Francophone novels by sub-Saharan African authors appeared in the 1920s, but it was not until the 1950s that novel writing began to take off. Early works identified by Michelman (1976:33–34) include short novels or fragments of novels by Senegalese authors such as Ahmadou Mapaté Diagne (Les Trois Volontés de Malic, 1920); Massyla Diop (Le Réprouvé – roman d’une Sénégalaise, 1925); and Bakary Diallo (Force-Bonté, 1926). Felix Couchoro, a prolific Togolese writer who was to write a further twenty novels between 1941–1970, produced his first novel, L’Esclave (1929) during this early period. Other pre-World War II novels include Karim (1935) and Mirages de Paris (1937) by the Senegalese writer Ousmane Socé, and Doguicimi (1938) by the Dahomean writer Paul Hazoumé.¹ During the 1950s, in the context of rising resistance to colonialism, improved education in the colonies and the opening up of universities in France to African students, as well as an increasing interest in Africa in the West, a much greater number of novels by African authors began to be published in France. While the early novels identified above have generally fallen into obscurity, the novels of the 1950s are still widely read today. They include Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir (1953); Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy (1956), and the first novels by Mongo Beti, soon to become the most prolific and one of the most well-known Cameroonian authors. Another well-known author, Ousmane Sembène, also wrote his first novels during this decade, producing Le Docker noir (1956); O pays mon beau peuple (1957) and Les Bouts de bois de Dieu (1960). In the years immediately following independence, the number of publications of African novels dropped, before picking up again towards the end of the decade.² Today there are some 1500 novels written in French by sub-Saharan Francophone African authors.

Although there are a significant number of anthologies of African literature, the majority cover only a limited period, making an accurate estimate of total novelistic output difficult.³ The most comprehensive and up-to-date database of Francophone African literature is the LITAF, a project set up by a group led by Alain Ricard, director of research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, and affiliated to the Centre d’Etude d’Afrique Noire de Bordeaux. Country-by-country searches of the database indicate that the total number of novels by writers from former French and Belgian sub-Saharan colonies range from 7 (Rwanda) to 242 (Cameroon), with the largest outputs after Cameroon coming from Senegal (236), Côte d’Ivoire (220), Democratic Republic of Congo (147) and Congo Brazzaville (124). ⁴ Full details are given in Table 1 on page 17 below.

Corpus Boundaries

Before going on to present an overview and analysis of the translation rates for the corpus of literature identified, a few comments on the criteria for inclusion in the category of ‘sub-Saharan Francophone African novels’ are called for. While the linguistic specification ‘Francophone’ is a relatively easily identifiable and closed category, encompassing any texts originally written in French,⁵ the categories of ‘African’ and ‘novel’ are more open to blurring at the borders. In the paragraphs that follow I shall outline the criteria for inclusion and identify potentially controversial inclusion/exclusion decisions.

African

The issue of what should be considered ‘African’ literature has long been a contentious one. As Adele King (2004) observes in her introduction to a recently published collection of Francophone short stories, From Africa, early studies such as Lilyan Kesteloot’s La Littérature négro-africaine viewed all writers of African descent (including Caribbean writers and Black Americans) as African authors and, while this grouping is no longer considered appropriate, disputes about just what constitutes ‘African’ literature remain. As Bandia (2008:13) observes, “questions have been raised as to whether African literature means literature written by Africans, or, more generally, literature about Africa or the African experience”. While Bandia opts for the second of these possibilities in defining African literature as “that literature which conveys African thought both traditional and modern, and deals with the African experience, both ancient and contemporary”, I have opted for the more straightforward – and statistically easier to identify – classification of African literature as that written by authors from African countries. More specifically, limiting my study to sub-Saharan literature as opposed to North African literature, I have viewed as ‘Francophone African novels’ any novels written by authors from any of the countries south of the Sahara in which French was, at some point, an official language. While some of these authors would themselves reject the label of ‘African’ for their work – the Chadian author Nimrod, for example, is cited by King (2004:x) as rejecting the label “African literature” as being a “result of colonization” – I nevertheless retain the term as a useful way of circumscribing a corpus of literature, and of drawing together literature from a variety of countries, the borders of which are just as much a result of colonization as the term ‘African literature’. If speaking of ‘African literature’ risks grouping together authors who are extremely varied in their writing styles and approaches, assuming a continuity between them that is nothing more than a colonially constructed myth, attempting to define literature by nationality (Senegalese literature, Cameroonian literature, and so on) would risk imposing artificial divisions between authors, assuming distinctions between them that are based on arbitrary national border lines drawn up by the colonial powers.

Even drawing on this pragmatic definition of ‘African’ literature, however, the phenomena of emigration and mixed parentage mean that certain authors hover on the borderlines of ‘African writer’ as a broad category. Where this is the case, I have drawn on the parameter privileged by Bandia (2008:13) (“literature which conveys African thought … and deals with the African experience”) in order to decide whether or not to include translated work by such authors in the corpus. Marie N’Diaye’s novel Rosie Carpe, for example, translated into English in 2005, has not been included in the corpus even though N’Diaye’s novels are listed on the LITAF database for Senegal. N’Diaye is half French and half Senegalese, and grew up in France, and, as Marco Roman observes, considers herself only ‘superficially African’:

The French writer Marie N’Diaye occupies a unique position as a “francophone” author, for, despite her name, which reveals her father’s origins as Senegalese, this prolific young novelist was born and raised in France by a French mother. As she has highlighted in several interviews, N’Diaye considers herself only “superficiellement africaine” and free from the suffering that a double cultural background often imposes. (2002:174)

Rosie Carpe tells the story of its eponymous protagonist, a French woman who travels to Guadeloupe in search of her brother, hoping that being reunited with him will help bring order to her own life. With no African characters and set outside Africa, the novel has little in common with the other novels that form part of the corpus. The publication of the translation as part of the University of Nebraska’s ‘European women writers’ series confirms that N’Diaye is probably to be viewed as a European, rather than African writer. Similarly, the novel Cercueil et Cie by Simon Njami, published in English as Coffin & Co in 1987, is set outside Africa (in New York City and Paris) and follows the adventures of two Harlem detectives. Although Njami was born to Cameroonian parents and although his novels are listed on the LITAF database for Cameroon, the translation of Cercueil et Cie has not been included in the corpus. The description of Njami as a “young black French writer” in the blurb to the English version of the novel, and his comment, in a foreword to Bennetta Jules Rosette’s Black Paris, that he has “always kept [his] distance from that literature called African” (Njami 2000:ix) suggest that it would be more inappropriate to include Njami’s novel in the corpus than to leave it out.

Part of Njami’s (ibid.) motivation in distancing himself from the “literary circuits” of “African literature”, which, he argues, “function at best as ghettos”, is his dismissal of academics, whom he describes as “often the bearers of received ideas than of truly new ideas”, suggesting that their general concern is to develop “hermetic” theses, drawing on writers as illustrations for those theses rather than exploring the achievements of writers in their own right. A similar concern seems to lie behind the Djiboutian author Abdouraham Waberi’s emphasis on seeing himself “as a writer first and only secondarily African” (King 2004:x). These concerns stress the importance of resisting tidy analyses that establish overarching characteristics or motivations behind ‘African writing’ and that interpret the work of individual authors according to those overarching patterns. The dangers associated with this type of interpretation can be clearly illustrated by the now notorious cases of plagiarism and disputed authorship associated with a number of the corpus writers, calling into question the true ability of critics to identify ‘Africanness’ in a literary text.

The most notable controversies relating to plagiarism and disputed authorship of the novels in the corpus relate to Le Devoir de violence by Yambo Ouologuem and L’Enfant noir and Le Regard du roi by Camara Laye. When Le Devoir de violence was first published in France in 1968, it met with significant acclaim, winning the prestigious Prix Renaudot in the same year. One of the meritorious qualities highlighted by reviewers was its purported Africanness; Philippe Decraene, for example, writing for Le Monde, stated:

Six years living in France, long months of teaching at the Charenton lyceé and at the little seminary at Conflans, the preparation of a Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures in English – successfully completed – followed by preparation for the Agrégation de Lettres, have in no way altered the authentically African view of things which he has retained. (quoted in English in Sellin 1999:69–70)

Ouologuem himself pointed to the links between his style of writing and African traditions when he stated in an interview originally given in French in 1969:

On the level of form, I wanted to make the epic speak, the tales of the griots, the Arab chroniclers, the oral African tradition. I had to reconstitute a form of speech filtered through a vision arising authentically from black roots. (1971:134–5)

Eric Sellin (1999:70) notes that “the only reservations came from some Africans who felt that the novel didn’t ring true, but did not state why”. Over the next couple of years, rumours that much of Le Devoir de violence was not Ouologuem’s work at all but was plagiarised from other sources began to circulate and take hold. In a paper given in 1971, Eric Sellin demonstrated strong similarities between Le Devoir de violence and Le Dernier des justes by André Schwarz-Bart, and in 1972 the TLS published an extract of Le Devoir de violence side-by-side with a section of Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield. In his account of the controversy, Sellin (ibid:81) cites Ouologuem’s essay ‘Lettre aux pisse-copie’ to argue that it might be seen as a sort of confessional by Ouologuem concerning his mode of composing Le Devoir de Violence. In this letter, Ouologuem prescribes a simple method for writing books:

Dear niggertrash, what is waiting for you here is a vast work of reading, a gigantic compilation. But such labour is not in vain. In fact, here is the magic potion of your formula. Your work as a hack, famous Black writers, will permit you – just as it permitted the surrealists – to play, as dadaists, to build your own “cadavres exquis” [exquisite corpses].⁶ … For your books (such as I advise you to fabricate them henceforth) must allow you to invent, in the corridors of your imagination, A BILLION NOVELS PAINLESSLY! (Ouologuem 1969:166–8, quoted in English in Sellin 1999:82)

This pastiche approach would certainly account for the extreme variations in writing style in Le Devoir de violence, which swings between historical narrative, sentimentalized romance and coarse descriptions of sexual violence.

What is particularly interesting about the Ouologuem case – and of particular relevance to the theme of this book – is that many of the devices in which critics recognized Africanicity, such as the strategy of summarizing a tale before telling it, or the insertion of interjections such as “a prayer for him” or “a sob for him”, were actually modelled on the writing of a Frenchman from a Polish-Jewish family, André Schwarz-Bart.⁷ Whilst critics might easily – and, indeed, did – draw connections between such stylistic devices and African oral story-telling traditions, the reality of Ouologuem’s plagiarism acts as a cautionary reminder that such connections are by no means intrinsic, but are subject to being read within a certain contextual framework (in this case, the ‘knowledge’ that the author is African). It is unclear whether another of the stylistic features of Le Devoir de violence usually associated with Africanness, namely the frequent inclusion of African-language and Arabic borrowings in the narrative, is original to Ouologuem or borrowed from another author, yet the reality of Ouologuem’s plagiarism of other stylistic features places an intriguing question mark over one of the assumptions made in this book – and explored in Chapter 3 in particular – that African-language borrowings can be viewed as palimpsetic traces of the African language or languages underlying the French narrative. Once again, the Ouologuem case reminds us that such an interpretation arises out of the broader framework that governs the reading and interpretation of the corpus novels, rather than being intrinsically linked to the stylistic device itself.

Another author in the corpus who has been accused of plagiarism is Calixthe Beyala, the best-selling Cameroonian female author. The charges of plagiarism relate to Le Petit Prince de Belleville and Les Honneurs perdus, the first of which has been translated into English and forms part of this corpus. As Hitchcott (2006:103) observes in her account of the plagiarism scandals surrounding Beyala, in May 1996 Beyala “was convicted in the High Court of Paris of having partially plagiarized Howard Buten’s novel Burt in her novel Le Petit Prince de Belleville”. As with Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence, then, identifying Le Petit Prince de Belleville as African fiction becomes problematic, given that it has been proven to have drawn very considerably on work by a non-African author (in this case, an American author living in France). Despite these difficulties, I have retained both Le Devoir de violence and Le Petit Prince de Belleville as part of the corpus, taking the view that, even if they are in large part derived from works by non-African authors, they have nevertheless been crafted to some degree by the African authors who claim ownership of them, and deliberately situate themselves within the framework of African literature.

If the type of plagiarism of which Ouologuem and Beyala were accused concerns African authors taking material from non-African authors, the controversy surrounding Laye’s novels concerns non-African author(s) purporting to be an African author. Unlike the Ouologuem controversy, which emerged fairly swiftly after the publication of the disputed text, the authorship issues surrounding Laye’s work were not accorded any significant attention until after Laye’s death in 1980, some twenty-five years after the publication of the novels, and were not treated in any depth by Western critics until the publication of Adele King’s Rereading Camara Laye in 2002. In this book, King – who originally set out to disprove the rumours concerning the disputed authorship of L’Enfant noir and Le Regard du roi – states:

After nine years, many letters and interviews, and research in available files, I now feel confident that Laye was helped in the composition and writing of L’Enfant noir and was given a manuscript of Le Regard du roi to which he contributed little. (ibid.:4)

Although, as King herself acknowledges, some of the information on which she bases her assertions cannot be proved, owing in particular to the disappearance of the manuscripts and to the extreme reluctance of those in whom Laye confided to consent to being interviewed, King’s detailed account puts forward compelling evidence to the effect that L’Enfant noir was in fact “a product of collaboration of several Europeans with the backing of the French government” (ibid.:6), and that Le Regard du roi was “primarily the work of [Francis] Soulié, a Belgian with a passion for Africa and an unsuccessful literary career” (ibid.:5). As with the Ouologuem case, the Laye controversy highlights the dangers of interpretation surrounding literature, indicating – to put it simply –...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Francophone African Novels and Their Translation into English
• 2. Linguistic Diversity and Polyglossia
• 3. Visible Traces and Traces within Traces
• 4. Basilectal and Mesolectal French
• 5. Relexification
• 6. Onomastics and Wordplay
• 7. Towards a Decolonized Translation Practice
• 8. Exploring the Postcolonial Turn in Translation Theory
• Bibliography
• Index