Day Translation in French and Francophone Literature and Film

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roes will leave us unsatisfied (4)]. Elle sera de jaspe et de corail is
focused on the building of a New Race one made of jasper and
coral materials that suggest a spectrum of color that stands in
direct contrast to the historically hegemonic and prejudice-laden
Western classification that sorts the human race into White and non-
White. Liking writes:
Il na�tra une Nouvelle Race d hommes
[...] Et la misovire que je suis rencontrera un misogyne
Et nous vivrons heureux (9)
There shall be born a New Race of men
[...] And the misovire I am now shall encounter a misogynist
And we shall live happily ever after (5)
If we take this New Race to be rooted in African feminist
ideals, and if we consider that Africa s present condition worsened
because of patriarchal systems, it is interesting to analyze why the
misovire and the misogynist would meet. If we consider the misovire
as a product of an African matriarchal world, then the misovire would
112 FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009
still expect that man is potentially her complement as opposed to the
hierarchized patriarchal world in which woman is of a status inferior
to man. Thus, the misovire is analogous to the misogynist in their
respective matriarchal and patriarchal realms. Since the misovire is
analyzing patriarchal Africa through the representative village of Lu-
na�, a land where men and women have allowed themselves to become
tsetse flies (11), there can be no suitable complement for the miso-
vire; just as in the patriarchal world of the misogynist, the belief is that
no woman can be at a man s level. With the creation of the New Race
one that will free Africa from its current misery and oppression
the social conditions that create the misovire and the misogynist would
simply disappear into a world apart.
By constructing the word misovire, Liking has essentially done
in French what Chinua Achebe deemed in his own texts as examples
of new English. Achebe explained in his celebrated essay, The Af-
rican Writer and the English Language, that what he considered to be
new English was a language still in full communion with its ances-
tral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings (446). With
her numerous demonstrations of language inadequacies and their sub-
sequent reconstructions, along with her call for the building of a New
Race, Liking most definitely heeds Achebe s call for the African
writer to dominate the colonial language as he or she deems appropri-
ate.
Jeanne Dingome tells us in the introduction to her English trans-
lation that Liking revels in verbal artistry (19), which explains why
this author is so difficult to translate. However, Liking s self-transla-
tions of her culture into a Bassa-infused French is in many ways a
completely different exercise in translation, since Dingome considers
that Liking generally lets her imagination meander, culling the im-
ages and the words from a rich web of free associations (18). Thus,
the task of translators of English, such as Jeanne Dingome and Marjo-
lijn de Jager, is to conceive of the translation of Liking s texts as what
Gyasi calls a strategy of literary decolonization, whereby the Euro-
pean language is pushed and forced to the position of minor lan-
guage and in that sense ceases to be an instrument of domination
( The African Writer 156). Even as a self-translator, Liking, in her
quest for ownership of the French language, essentially shares with
Dingome and de Jager some of these same goals.
Toman 113
Works cited
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_____. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African
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Gyasi, Kwaku. The African Writer as Translator: Writing African Lan-
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_____. Ahmadou Kourouma: Translation and Interpretation as Narrative [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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