Table Of Content

B EN J A M I N S ■ T The Politics R of Translating A Sound Motifs N in African Fiction S L Laurence Jay-Rayon Ibrahim Aibo A T I O L I B R A R Y N ■ The Politics of Translating Sound Motifs in African Fiction Benjamins Translation Library (BTL) issn 0929-7316 The Benjamins Translation Library (BTL) aims to stimulate research and training in Translation & Interpreting Studies – taken very broadly to encompass the many different forms and manifestations of translational phenomena, among them cultural translation, localization, adaptation, literary translation, specialized translation, audiovisual translation, audio-description, transcreation, transediting, conference interpreting, and interpreting in community settings in the spoken and signed modalities. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see benjamins.com/catalog/btl General Editor Honorary Editors Roberto A. Valdeón Yves Gambier University of Oviedo University of Turku & Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University Associate Editor Gideon Toury† Franz Pöchhacker Tel Aviv University University of Vienna Advisory Board Cecilia Alvstad Kobus Marais Stockholm University University of the Free State Georges L. Bastin Christopher D. Mellinger University of Montreal University of North Carolina at Charlotte Dirk Delabastita Jan Pedersen University of Namur Stockholm University Daniel Gile Nike K. Pokorn Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle University of Ljubljana Arnt Lykke Jakobsen Luc van Doorslaer Copenhagen Business School University of Tartu & KU Leuven Krisztina Károly Meifang Zhang Eötvös Lorand University University of Macau Volume 150 The Politics of Translating Sound Motifs in African Fiction by Laurence Jay-Rayon Ibrahim Aibo The Politics of Translating Sound Motifs in African Fiction Laurence Jay-Rayon Ibrahim Aibo University of Massachusetts Amherst John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. doi 10.1075/btl.150 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2019049075 (print) / 2019049076 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 0487 5 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6162 5 (e-book) © 2020 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company ∙ https://benjamins.com Table of contents Acknowledgements and bionote ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Premise and contexts 5 1. The divided landscape in the criticism of African literatures 5 2. The relevance and limitations of postcolonial theory 6 3. Hybridity: A hackneyed yet unavoidable concept 8 4. African literatures as translation and in translation 10 5. Matters of genre 13 6. The poetics of African fiction and the creative license of prose translators 17 7. Defining sound motifs as aural aesthetics 19 8. A theoretical prelude to sound translation 21 9. African literatures: Which ones? 27 10. Corpus presentation 29 Chapter 2 Making sense of an alliterative practice in translation: From resistance to restitution 33 1. Background matters 33 2. Digest of Somali oral literature 40 3. From Membranes of Maternity to Lauralité-Sur-Lécry 42 4. Methodology: A cross-corpus analysis 45 5. Farah’s alliterative project and its reconstruction in French 48 6. Sound motifs in the Lands of Waberi and Garane 53 7. Examining retranslations: A rare occasion with contemporary writers 57 8. The concept of critical threshold of perception as delineation of sound motif 62 vi The Politics of Translating Sound Motifs in African Fiction Chapter 3 The aesthetics of repetition and their meanings 67 1. Understanding Adiaffi’s transgeneric position through the lens of translation 67 1.1 N’zassa literature 67 1.2 Toward transpoetics: An aural and surrealist reading 69 1.3 Adiaffi’s carte 70 1.4 Akan poetics 71 1.5 Translating repetition as a poetics of identity 73 1.6 Another poetics of repetition and its translation: Queneau in English 81 2. Hove’s politics of repetition 86 2.1 Socially committed writer and translator 86 2.2 Formal structures of Shona poetry 90 2.3 Ancestors, or the art of embedding repetitions 92 2.4 The workings of iterative poetics: From Ancestors to Ancêtres 93 Chapter 4 Sound motifs and their motivations 99 1. When polemics overcast poetics: The case of Ayi Kwei Armah 100 1.1 Understanding Armah 100 1.2 Articulating oral literatures in Armah’s works 102 1.3 Armah’s translators 102 1.4 A cacophony of senses: Splendor and decline in The Beautyful Ones 104 1.5 Motifs and motivations 106 1.6 The efficacy of aural devices in The Beautyful Ones 107 1.7 Pathways to poetic re-creation in L’Age d’or 110 1.8 The measure of creativity in translation 115 2. The matrix of Assia Djebar’s poetic language 116 2.1 A complex linguistic and literary heritage 116 2.2 Situating L’Amour, la fantasia in Djebar’s work 118 2.3 Dorothy Blair: A made-to-measure translator 121 2.4 Overview of stylistic codes in Arabic literature 123 2.5 From L’Amour to Algerian Cavalcade: Turning up the volume 125 3. Overexposures 130 Table of contents vii Chapter 5 Modalities and intermedialities 133 1. Of interpretation 133 2. Weighting factors 135 3. Intermedial translation as a paradigm 140 4. Listening to literature throughout history 143 5. Audiobooks: From rebirth to explosion 144 6. African literatures and audiobooks: An unavoidable combination? 146 7. Translating in a digital era 148 Conclusion 149 Works cited 153 Index 167 Acknowledgements and bionote I would like to thank Daher Ibrahim Aibo and Hélène Buzelin without whose genu- ine support and unfailing encouragements this book would not have been possible. Laurence Jay-Rayon Ibrahim Aibo holds an M.A. in Translation and a Ph.D. in Trans lation Studies from Université de Montréal and currently teaches translation and interpreting online at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a reviewer for international translation studies journals and is the Director of the Colony in Crisis in Haitian Creole Translation Project funded by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. She has been translating, teaching, and interpreting in the Americas, Europe, and Africa for the past 30 years. This book is the result of an independent project as a translation studies scholar.