Weighing words 
T is hardly thinkable to translate a literary 
text without some commitment of the 
sensibility. Language here is not reduced 
to intellectual significations as it should 
ideally be in a scientific text. It emerges 
into our world of appearance and manifestations 
loaded with the energies and 
potencies that have urged the author to 
create it; it is suffused with emotional 
messages. In various grades and contents 
according to whether it approaches speculation 
or borders on poetry, a text radiates 
feeling to which the reader is invited to react. 
And the translator, who very often is the reader 
of a language that is not her or his own, has to 
make herself or himself sensitive to these messages. 
Beyond the meanings conveyed through the sequences of 
sentences, a translator should perceive in the lexical choice, 
banal or mannered, loaded with sensuous images or dry 
concepts, in the syntactic complexity or simplicity, monotony or 
variety, in the stylistic endless games and the multitude of 
unnamed nuances, the total significance of the fluid thought of 
the author never fully conscious himself of the expression he 
mediates and creates. The translator should feel as well as 
understand, work as a technician and as an artist. And this, 
clearly, in addition to an extensive and precise knowledge and 
mastery of the languages whose correspondence she/he ensures, 
with the pitfalls their linguistic proximity can hide, such as 
the deceptive cognates to the anglophone translator of French. 
And translating implies style and choice. A technique and 
an art, a profession or a passion, translating has its theoreticians 
and its historians, its trends and schools. A translator should keep 
informed of these in order to understand the wide range of 
possibilities offered, rigid or flexible, shy or daring, overdoing 
or underdoing. When Jacques Derrida says that 'good translation 
should indulge in excess' he may not find unanimous support 
but he does not fail to find quite a few followers. 
A French specialist of translation, Valery Larbaud, says 
that'all the work of translation is a weighing of words', an option 
l African Qn/irtci/y 
n the Arts 
for differential sensibility that means with some propriety to 
obtain the seal of scientific value. But Valery Larbaud knows well 
that we must think of the author's words rather than the dictionary's, 
that is words which, while retaining their cores of conventional 
values, have been coloured by what has preceded them in the 
text where they appear and even in previous texts, and also in the 
linguistic environment of the writer since his childhood, whether 
his mother tongue or others, with their own structures and cultural 
bases, or again the ever growing and expanding field of his 
literary and social associations. 
Wole Soyinka spoke Yoruba before he started learning 
English, even though at a very early age, and still speaks it; but, 
voracious reader that he is, he has been continuously nourished 
by an indefinite wealth of new verbal entities Behind the hidden
or manifest allusions to Shakespeare or 
Yeats, or the Bible often humorously, 
twisted, loom the innumerable presences 
of literary worlds superimposed or associated 
to the Yoruba language and 
thought in his 'selective eclecticism'. A 
translator should become acquainted with 
all these data and feed his cerebral 
computer whose unconscious work produces 
and proposes a text that the mental 
checker sifts through, deletes, corrects or 
retains. 
Cultural Distance 
A literary text is never read in pure 
objectivity. The farther it is in time and 
space, the more the reader projects his 
own preoccupations on it. If the reader is 
a translator, he tends to emphasize whatever 
is relevant to his own desires in the 
text he is attempting to capture and tone 
down whatever has little appeal to him. 
And he also knows that his translation 
should receive the approval of his publisher, 
which may sometimes be something 
of a feat when he wants to remain 
faithful to the values of the writer. And this 
means that a translation will age. Like any 
other literary text it will develop a coat of 
patina or rust. It runs the risk of becoming 
trite. A new translation then scrubs the 
first and attempts to recreate the original 
Etienne at home with wife, Zeinabou (France, May, 1996) 
text with the most honourable intentions 
and... illusions. 
Obviously the problem of time distance 
does not exist with Wole Soyinka, 
but that of spatial, or rather, cultural 
distancedoes. Wole Soyinka isa Yoruba, 
Nigerian, African, Planetary writer. He 
questions the pretensions to universality of 
Western culture. He has particularly criticized 
its 'periodic dialectics', examining 
the effects on the evolution of literatures 
and the accompanying movements of 
criticism of this 'compartmentalising habit 
of thought which periodically selects aspects 
of human emotion, phenomenal 
observations, metaphysical intuitions and 
even scientific deductions and turns them 
into separatist myths (or "truths") sustained 
by a proliferating superstructure of 
presentation idioms, analogies and analytical 
modes. I have evolved a rather 
elaborate metaphor to describe it; appropriately 
it is not only mechanistic but 
represents a period technology which 
marked yet another phase of Western 
man's comprehensive world-view. 
'You must picture a steam-engine 
which shunts itself between rather closelyspaced 
suburban stations. At the first 
station it picks up a ballast of allegory, 
puffs into the next emitting a smokescreen 
on the eternal landscape of nature truths. 
At the next it loads up with a different 
species of logs which we shall call najuralisttimber, 
puffs into a half-way stop where 
it fills up with the synthetic fuel of surrealism, 
from which point yet another holistic 
world-view is glimpsed and asserted 
through psychedelic smoke. A new consignment 
of absurdist coke lures it into the 
next station from which it departs giving 
off no smoke at all, and no fire, until it 
derails briefly along constructivist tracks 
and is towed back to the starting-point by 
a neo-classic engine.' (Myth, Literature 
and the African World, pp. 37f). 
This 'series of intellectual spasms' 
(ibid.) has been confirmed and analysed 
by French academic Gilbert Durand who 
has shown the pendular movement of 
cultural generations impelled by recurrent 
myths.+
Western and westernized translators, 
just like their fellow writers and 
critics, cannot easily escape these fluctuations. 
But Soyinka challenges the dialectical 
agitation and contrary excesses in 
perpetual unbalance and rebalance. To 
the compartmentalization of European 
thought resulting in the extremes advocated 
by Derrida he opposes 'culture as 
defined within man's knowledge of funt 
damental, unchanging relationships 
between himself 
and society and within 
the larger context of the 
observable universe.' 
(ibid.) 
+Figures mythiques et visages 
de I'oeuvre, Paris, 
Berg International, 1979. 
Sound,sense, 
harmony 
It seems quite natural 
that a translator of 
Soyinka's works should 
endeavour to share his 
cultural vision. What about 
a reader of Wole Soyinka 
who came to translate him 
because he felt in himself a 
deep agreement with this 
vision? There is little danger 
for him to be tempted 
any longer by ebb and 
flow of Western schools 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. II NO 4
and cultural generations. And yet he has 
to admit that he does not fully know all that 
went into his formation and is unaware of 
the laws of the cerebral computer that 
presents him translations he can only 
check, reject or accept. Let us only say that 
the Cerberus that keeps watch at the 
portals of the nether regions of the psyche 
out of which emerge the French words that 
had entered in English garb has its three 
heads: sense, sound and harmony. It 
unemotionally tears to pieces the unfaithful 
beauties, grunts in front of make-up 
and drives back all that is out of tune with 
the song started long before. 
To translate Soyinka therefore 
means to be in harmony with the deep 
thoughts that inspire him. It also means to 
remember that Soyinka has himself practised 
translation and expressed his sentiment 
about it, however briefly, in his 
prefatory note to The Forest of a Thousand 
Daemons, a translation from D. O. 
Fagunwa's Yoruba saga Ogboju Ode 
Ninu Igbo Irunmale. Soyinka explains 
that his translational options are based on 
the art of the storyteller whose text he 
wants to capture and render: 
'Fagunwa's concern is to convey 
the vivid sense of event, and a translator 
must select equivalents for mere auxiliaries 
where these serve the essential purpose 
better than the precise original. In 
what I mentally refer to as the 'enthusiastic' 
passages of his writing, the essence of 
Fagunwa is the fusion of sound and action. 
To preserve the movement and fluidity 
of this association seems to be the best 
approach for keeping faith with the 
author's style and sensibility.' (op. cit., 
P-3). 
Soyinka as translator just like 
Soyinko as poet, novelist and dramatist 
heeds rhythms and harmonies as much as 
sense, and may even sacrifice the latter to 
the former: 
'In one of the extracts for the 
magazine Black Orpheus, this phrase 
mo nmi ho bi agiliti' which became 'my 
breath came in rapid bloats like the hawing 
of a toad' aroused some protest from 
a critic. Indeed agiliti is far from being the 
toad, it is more a member of the lizard 
species. But then neither toad nor lizard is 
African Quarterly 
on Ihe Arts 
Iof. / / SO •* 
the object of action or interest to the hero 
Akara-Ogun or his creator Fagunwa at 
this point of narration' (ibid.). 
This free attitude towards the letter 
for a better faithfulness to the spirit and 
its musical expression connects with what 
Soyinka says about the relationship between 
the dramatist and his producers: 
he lets those who stage his plays take 
liberties with his text in order to adapt to 
the public and their cultural environment 
but remains uncompromising about the 
essential message to deliver. 
Soyinka's translator should not be 
misled by their freedom; it expresses a 
demand for a sensibility to modes of 
expression that cannot be easily defined. 
In Soyipka's works elliptical, allusive and 
obscure turns may perplex a reader who 
is after total intellectual lucidity. Should 
the translator then come to his help? 
What about a phrase like 'the rocksalt 
psyche' in The Interpreters which looks 
and sounds both hermetic and poetic? 
When | found an opportunity to ask the 
writer he was surprised at my embarrassment 
and kindly explained that salt dissolves 
when it absorbs too much water 
and therefore the rocksalt psyche is that 
which risks dissolution when it absorbs 
too much knowledge. Then, out of pity for 
the francophone readers, the translator 
writes: 'cette pshyche de sel gemme que 
dissout I'eau qu'il absorb' (the rocksalt 
psyche dissolved by the water it absorbs), 
regretting that his explanation 
breaks the rhythm, turns the phrase off 
key, in fact ruins the text. 
Take the example of Soyinka's address 
to the Lagos Symposium in May 
1988. He says: 'On this continent we 
have had far too many martyrs among 
writers, artists and scientists who have 
met with hideous ends at the hands of 
purely reflexive rulers.' The translator 
suspects that 'reflexion' here hides something 
derogatory and wonders how 
reflection can be noxious. Chancing on 
the man he puts it to him and receives a 
mischievous glance and reply: 'What? 
You don't know what reflexes are?', and 
suiting the action to the words WS demonstrates 
the knee-jerk. How should we 
translate then? Is it not treasonable to 
explain: 'des dirigeants qui n'agissent 
que par reflexe'(rulers that act only through 
reflex)? Should we not rather leave the 
reader the chance and pleasure to guess, 
relish the hidden meaning, the strangeness 
of the phrase at the end of the long 
period? Attachment to immediate lucidity 
is fanatical intellectualism declining feeling 
and refusing imagination and denying 
the poet his art and right to choose his 
words with the unexpected slant that freshens 
them up. 
In his poem 'New York, USA' 
Soyinka mentions his 'long liquid vigils' in 
the feverish wait for Western and Eastern 
cosmonauts' departures for space. 'Liquid'? 
I learn from the horse's mouth that it 
refers to the beers and other ogunian 
beverages that help him to kill time. But 
'liquide' hardly applies. Shall I use 'arrose' 
(wetted, washed)? It is clearer in French. 
Yet I keep liquide', and who can tell me 
why? Just a feeling. Of course an explanation 
is deplorable in a poem and a footnote 
disgraceful. 
'Music before anything' 
'de la musique avant toute 
chose' (Verlaine) 
Soyinka is an artist even when he 
uses words as essayist, orator or professor. 
His texts are often musical works, as 
•when he theorizes on Yoruba drama in 
his major essay, The Fourth Stage: 'This 
masonic union of sign and melody, the 
true tragic music, unearths cosmic uncertainties 
which pervade human existence, 
reveals the magnitude and power of creation, 
but above all creates a harrowing 
sense of omni-directional vastness where 
the creative Intelligence resides and 
prompts the soul to futile exploration' 
(Myth, Literature and the African World, 
p. 148). 
A translator should enter into this 
relational spirit in which 'the sound must 
seem an echo to the sense' as Pope says. 
Because of this duality of sound and sense 
and their delicate tension and balance, 
his choices partly rely on intuition and 
cannot be easily justified. Is it the impression 
of the moment, unerring instinct or 
simply necessity that decides? What is he 
to do, among other things, when faced 
with rhymes? In 'Psalm' (Idanre and Other 
Poems) Soyinka threads couplets like a
-f ~-Lnd translating implies style and 
choice, A technique and an art, a 
profession or a passion, translating has 
its theoreticians and its historians, its 
Wends and schools, A translator should 
keep informed of these in order to 
understand the wide range of 
possibilities offered, rigid or flexible, shy 
or daring, overdoing or underdoing. 
string of pearls. Some of the English 
rhymes use latinate words, inviting loantranslation: 
'gratitude/plenitude', 'sanctuary/
mystery', 'exegesis/genesis'. 
Should not the francophone reader be 
shown that Soyinka does not disdain 
rhymes when he feels them expressive of 
the mood of a poem? With 'Roots' (A 
Shuttle in the Crypt) I simply gave up, 
fearing that I would have to cut down too 
much in the wealth of images. But with 
The Apotheosis of Master-Sergeant Doe' 
(Mandela's Earth and Other Poems) I felt 
I could not escape. The heroic couplet 
here seems essential, conveying the satire 
in a pastiche of occasional verse, but my 
French alexandrins (twelve-syllable lines) 
have certainly lost a number of allusions 
and nods, and some of the original caustic 
wit. 
Translating without betraying 
Most of the problems the translator 
addresses in Soyinka's poetry, whether 
rhymed or not, are similar to those found 
in all texts where .form carries a major 
load of expressivity. Then come problems 
specific to African literature, rarely 
insolvable but quite worthy of attention. 
To avoid certain blunders, it is desirable 
to have some knowledge of African geography, 
history and some acquaintance 
with African life and people. Nothing 
here can better help than to have lived in 
Africa and become sentimentally attached 
to Africa. 
With such a background the translator 
will not translate 'corn' in Idanre by 
Ble (wheat) but by Mais (maize). The 
harvest 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 Horseman 
is not a toy but a hawk, a milan or 
epervier, probably the Yoruba asha. 
Should we translate 'void' in the same 
play by neant (nothingness)? The Void is 
a primal concept in the Yoruba worldview. 
It is the first basis in Ogun's mythology 
and Soyinka's vision. Ogun is the pioneer 
and ferryman of the Void. Rather than 
nothingness and Void is a whirling world 
of creative and destructive energies as the 
reader comes to feel through this passage 
in Myth, Literature and the African World: 
'The void had become impenetrable. A 
long isolation from the world of men had 
created an impassable barrier which they 
tried, but failed, to demolish. Ogun finally 
took over. Armed with the first technical 
instrument which he had forged from the 
mountain-wombs, he cleared the primordial 
jungle, plunged through the abyss 
and called on the others to follow' (pp. 
28f). 
The void feared by the praise-singer 
in Death and the King's Horseman is the 
great Void on whose boulders the world 
will smash if it leaves its course (p.l 1). No 
doubt the word neant, in its associations 
with Pascal and Sartre for the French 
public, is more pregnant, in a sense, than 
Vide (emptiness). We certainly can imagine 
that Soyinka in his broadmindedness 
will lend a favourable ear to this argument. 
And yet, should we not attempt to 
invite the western or westernized public to 
come out of their cultural world, pay 
attention to the 'other', escape from the 
formidable ethnocentricism which maintains 
most of these people in their closed 
universe and invincibly makes them relate 
everything to themselves and their system 
of values in a naively patronizing attitude? 
As regards the Yoruba words and 
phrases Soyinka drops here and there in 
his writings, occasionally without explanations, 
the translator can use a dictionary 
or ask a friendly informant to help 
him write footnotes or a glossary, even 
though some readers prefer to keep the 
exotic touch intact and ignore the meaning. 
On the other hand the surprising 
syntactic or stylistic turns sometimes used 
by Soyinka should not be interpreted as 
marks of the Yoruba: Professor Akinwumi 
Isola told me at the time he was translating 
Ake, the Years of Childhood into Yoruba 
that his job was definitely tougher than 
mine. Soyinka's English contains nothing 
that compares with Gabriel Okara's in 
The Voice or Amos Tutuola's in The Palm- 
Wine Drinkard. 
Rendering popular language 
Yet another issue to meet in translating 
WS is that of pidgin English. This is 
one of the most widely used languages in 
Nigeria, by semi-literates primarily, but 
also by educated people and even academics 
when they want to relax or be 
facetious or again humorously veil their 
gravest thoughts. It is simplified English 
structured in African syntax, peppered 
with twisted words of, sometimes, unknown 
origin, often very pithy and evocative. 
It appears prominently in The Road, 
and the translators Christiane Fioupou 
and Samuel Milogo chose Abidjan Popular 
French (FPI) to render it. The result is 
very satisfactory. The few passages that 
are not readily understandable for the 
average Francophone are explained in 
footnotes. The comical effect is faithful to 
the original. And yet the use of FPI requires 
fairly long passages to acquire 
coherence, unless the reader or listener is 
acquainted with it. It would not be so 
effective in the shorter passages To render 
Ambrose's and Polyphemus's pidgin 
in The Man Died I used Niamey popular 
French, a little toned down to be easily 
grasped by all types of readers. But the 
French publisher changed it for popular 
France French. Why not after all? Anyway 
I do not think there is any one solution 
to the translation of pidgin. Quite often I 
would use simplified French with contractions. 
But for plays the producer should 
adapt to the local popular French, wher- 
Afi lam Quarterly 
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Vol.1/ NO 4
ever he is. 
Translation and publication 
When a translator has finalized his 
text he is not yet out of the wood: publishers 
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. French 
publisher Belfond took interest in Soyinka 
only when he heard that he was a potential 
Nobel prize winner in 1984. My 
translation of Season of Anomy, completed 
in 1979, waited in a few publishers' 
drawers after being turned down by 
the'great'GallimardandLeSeuil. Belfond 
finally published it in 1 987. The most 
touching refusal was from Le Seuil, which 
regretted that the novel should be 'ambitious 
sometimes, rich, sometimes too rich'. 
Well, how many readers find a novel 
good and beautiful only when a critic has 
framevi|tfif a)nt|raporary art is shifting. 
told them. Andre Gide himself turned his 
nose when he first read Marcel Proust. 
The last enemy to confront is the 
printer, if you are given a chance to read 
the galley proofs. You have to make him 
agree that what he took for mistakes are 
not always mistakes. And when the book 
is 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, your 
fill') in 'To the madmen over the wall' (A 
shuttle in the Crypt) which froze my blood 
in my veins, and 'avilissant' (degrading) 
instead of 'aveulissant' (enervating) which 
made it boil because I had corrected it on 
the proof but the printer, evidently smarter 
than me, had de-corrected it. It is a real 
disaster in the passage: 'Suspect all conscious 
search for the self's authentic being: 
this is the favourite fodder for the 
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enervating tragic Muse' (The Man Died, 
p.87). This is a basic idea in Soyinka's 
philosophy of life, as it appears also in 
Myth, Literature and the African World: 
'the insidious enervation of social will by 
the tragic afflatus' (p.47). 
Translating Wole Soyinka is an absorbing 
and fascinating activity carrying 
the reader-translator further into his/her 
feeling of the work, leading her/him deeper 
and deeper into the universe expressed in 
it. Translating gives the satisfaction to help 
other readers share in it, but it is worth* 
doing for its own sake. Any reader approaching 
a poem, a novel or a play in a 
foreign language should feel invrted to 
translate a passage every now and then 
and respond and reach a finer, stronger 
and more genuine experience in the language 
that belongs to his blood and 
guts.GR 
call a, 718. 935. 
0907