Christine Pagnoulle

Brathwaite's DreamHaiti: Translating Ethnicity

Born in Barbados in 1930, poet, historian and critic Kamau Brathwaite has produced an impressive number of epoch-making works, from his first trilogy, The Arrivants, published in 1973 (with the first part, Rights of Passage, in 1967), to his latest, so far unpublished, orikis, or praise poems. His works have developed in several stages determined by changes in his life, the most dramatic of which he called the first Time of Salt, when his beloved wife died of cancer, his archives were destroyed by hurricane Gilbert and he was mugged in his flat in Jamaica, all in the late 1980s; from then on he would no longer distinguish between ‘poetry’ and ‘criticism’ (as is most impressively illustrated in his Barabajan Poems, 1994), and he would only use what he calls his ‘Sycorax video style’, a waylaying of ‘Prospero’s’ (i.e. Western corporations’) hold on digital products and thus of using fonts and sizes to shape his words on his small computer. DreamHaiti, published separately by Savacou North in 1995, is part of a series of DreamStories, published by Longman in 1994. He is the recipient of several major awards such as the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Gold Musgrave Medal. Even before they are translated into some other language, literary texts are translations, albeit in a looser sense of the word. Kamau Brathwaite’s work conveys what he calls the Caribbean NationVoice in English. However, he would definitely object to the suggestion that this is a form of ‘ethnicity’, considering the possible distancing, if not condescending, connotations of the word. Indeed, ethnicity is all too easily associated with some sort of exoticism while the notion of nation voice calls upon some necessary sense of pride in one’s heritage and identity. Brathwaite’s language does not only combine specific features of Caribbean English-based Creole (disregarding differences between various islands), it also includes his own idiosyncratic codes, which, since the 1980s, have been fashioned in his unique use of computer resources. Somehow when translating into French conveying the author’s linguistic quirks often turns out to be easier than capturing the Caribbean voice. Indeed, the spectrum between standard French and French Creole is much less of a continuum than between ‘standard English’ (and the quotation marks tell a lot) and English vernacular Caribbean speech with its African inflections and different syntactic patterns. An Anglophone reader with hardly any notion of, say, Jamaican English-based Creole will be able to make sense, or at least guess the meaning, of passages written in Jamaican vernacular, whereas a Francophone reader will be completely lost

Creativity in Non-Literary Translation.

Abstract Non‐literary texts submitted for translation are often so inaccurate and muddled in their formulation that they call for exegesis and in‐depth rewriting. This sometimes demands a high degree of creative imagination in the translators. The article considers three instances in different areas: an advertisement for a paying guest agency, a popularizing book in Neuro‐Linguistic Programming, and the abstract of a film script. In each case meaning had to be retrieved behind the words as used in the texts and rephrased so as to be immediately understandable. The context has to be taken into account: who wants what? and will they pay for it? I conclude with some general considerations on the skills required.