Page 1 African Europhone Literature and Writing as Translation Paul Bandia

Page 2 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 3 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 4 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 euro- africana. 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 5 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 6 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 7 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 8 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 9 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 10 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 11 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 12 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 13 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 14 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 […]