Starting with the premise that aesthetic choices reveal the ideological stances of translators, the author of this research monograph examines works of fiction by postcolonial African authors writing in English or French, the genesis and reception of their works, and the translation of each one into French or English. Texts include those by Nuruddin Farah from Somalia, Abdourahman Ali Waberi from Djibouti, Jean-Marie Adiaffi from Côte dIvoire, Ayi Kwei Armah from Ghana, Chenjerai Hove from Zimbabwe, and Assia Djebar from Algeria, and their translations by Jacqueline Bardolph, Jeanne Garane, Brigitte Katiyo, Jean-Pierre Richard, Josette and Robert Mane, and Dorothy Blair.
The author highlights the aural poetics of these works, explores the sound motifs underlying their literary power, and shows how each is articulated with the writers literary heritage. She then embarks on a close examination of each translators background, followed by a rich analysis of their treatments of sound. The translators strategies for addressing sound motifs are contextualized in the larger framework of postcolonial literatures and changing reading materialities.
Author(s): Laurence Jay-Rayon Ibrahim Aibo
Series: Benjamins Translation Library
Edition: 1
Publisher: John Benjamins
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 170
Tags: African Fiction, Sound Studies, Translation Studies
The Politics of Translating Sound Motifs in African Fiction
Editorial page
Title page
Copyright page
Table of contents
Acknowledgements and bionote
Introduction
Chapter 1. Premise and contexts
1. The divided landscape in the criticism of African literatures
2. The relevance and limitations of postcolonial theory
3. Hybridity: A hackneyed yet unavoidable concept
4. African literatures as translation and in translation
5. Matters of genre
6. The poetics of African fiction and the creative license of prose translators
7. Defining sound motifs as aural aesthetics
8. A theoretical prelude to sound translation
9. African literatures: Which ones?
10. Corpus presentation
Chapter 2. Making sense of an alliterative practice in translssation: From resistance to restitution
1. Background matters
2. Digest of Somali oral literature
3. From membranes of maternity to Lauralité-Sur-Lécry
4. Methodology: A cross-corpus analysis
5. Farah’s alliterative project and its reconstruction in French
6. Sound motifs in the Lands of Waberi and Garane
7. Examining retranslations: A rare occasion with contemporary writers
8. The concept of critical threshold of perception as delineation of sound motif
Chapter 3. The aesthetics of repetition and their meanings
1. Understanding Adiaffi’s transgeneric position through the lens of translation
1.1 N’zassa literature
1.2 Toward transpoetics: An aural and surrealist reading
1.3 Adiaffi’s carte
1.4 Akan poetics
1.5 Translating repetition as a poetics of identity
1.6 Another poetics of repetition and its translation: Queneau in English
2. Hove’s politics of repetition
2.1 Socially committed writer and translator
2.2 Formal structures of Shona poetry
2.3 Ancestors, or the art of embedding repetitions
2.4 The workings of iterative poetics: From Ancestors to Ancêtres
Chapter 4. Sound motifs and their motivations
1. When polemics overcast poetics: The case of Ayi Kwei Armah
1.1 Understanding Armah
1.2 Articulating oral literatures in Armah’s works
1.3 Armah’s translators
1.4 A cacophony of senses: Splendor and decline in The Beautyful Ones
1.5 Motifs and motivations
1.6 The efficacy of aural devices in The Beautyful ones
1.7 Pathways to poetic re-creation in L’Age d’or
1.8 The measure of creativity in translation
2. The matrix of Assia Djebar’s poetic language
2.1 A complex linguistic and literary heritage
2.2 Situating L’Amour, la fantasia in Djebar’s work
2.3 Dorothy Blair: A made-to-measure translator
2.4 Overview of stylistic codes in Arabic literature
2.5 From L’Amour to Algerian cavalcade: Turning up the volume
3. Overexposures
Chapter 5. Modalities and intermedialities
1. Of interpretation
2. Weighting factors
3. Intermedial translation as a paradigm
4. Listening to literature throughout history
5. Audiobooks: From rebirth to explosion
6. African literatures and audiobooks: An unavoidable combination?
7. Translating in a digital era
Conclusion
Works cited
Primary corpus
Other literary works by authors of the corpus
References
Index
