ktravula - a travelogue! » Literature

Book, Blook, Bloog, Blog…

Kola — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:46:00 +0000

Ikhide Ikheloa has joined the blogging community. This next sentence, otherwise supposed to describe him in a few words and put him in the context of Nigerian and African literature, will however be used to tell you something else: that blogging is the future, or at least the way to it. With electronic data content and text being gradually becoming the most viable medium of communication, it takes no prophet to see that what literature is will also eventually take on a more pro-electronic bias. I have said this before, and let me repeat it here (as if it needs repeating, duh) that the future of literature depends in some form (if not entirely) on the internet. A future Nobelist from blogging, anyone?

You should also follow @SalmanRushdie and @TejuCole on twitter while we’re still talking about the internet as a literary resource.

On Migrations, and Age

Kola — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 10:21:13 +0000

This recent post on my colleague Clarissa’s blog on migrations and the kind of immigrants/grad students that we find in the US raises interesting perspectives. The post she wrote and the one she referenced both talk about the two extremes of being migrant students/travellers in the US: they either completely or extremely assimilate (sometimes even more fervently than already settled natives), or refuse to assimilate at all, living in the host country only in the flesh, and keeping their minds fixated only with things from home. Both extremes are unsustainable but we have all at one point or the other met people who leaned more to either side of the continuum.

Does it have to do with age, education, gender or religion? I can’t tell, but one very endearing characteristics of Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay to me was the very removed but well situated (beautifully written) reflections on life in Poland as observed from California where the author had chosen to settle after a career lasting very many years. It was in the interaction of his fossilized Polish cultural personality with the new and dynamic of the American West Coast that the beautiful book of reflections emerged, and one is grateful for it. I suspect that the extent (and more importantly, progression) of the immigrant’s insularity on the continuum of eventual assimilation will determine the extent of creative conflict that might turn out to delight in form of essays and literary reflections. And surely, age does add a very interesting dynamic.

By the end of our teenage years, we are all usually well situated in our cultural surroundings to be able to thrive with it in a foreign country. The result of the melange of attitudes and interactions from then on determines much of how one’s adult life in a foreign country eventually plays out, and much of it is also fuelled by attitude. For a second here, I return to the short moments at the end of Wole Soyinka’s Ake and V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street where the young impressionable men leave their home surroundings for the very first time. Insularity ends, and the real world lessons begin. There might be something to be learnt in comparing the thought progression, attitudes and output of the three writers through the prism of their travel experiences, and more importantly, exposure. And time.

Discoursing Translations

Kola — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 07:26:45 +0000

I spent a few hours last week in the house of an American colleague who teaches Chinese here. He had invited me and a few other friends for an evening of Chinese food and conversations in his St. Louis home. His partner is a Chinese woman who works as a writer as well as a translator from Chinese into English.

The conversation soon turned to the matter of writing, and the challenge of translating from one language to the other. What is lost in translation? What remains? How authentic is that product of translation in representing the original thought of the writer? Who makes the call of how translations should turn out? How much is taking too much liberties with original ideas? Where does translation end and improvisation/adaptation begin? They were interesting questions for me not only because I’d considered them many times myself before, but also because I discovered, a few years ago, that the translation of George Orwell’s classic book Animal Farm into German was not uniform because the translators belonged to different ideological camps during the cold war. I have spent countless moments pondering the literary tricks that would be needed to render something so clearly anti-socialism (or at least anti-leninism) as anti-capitalism. But then, that is the power of translation – which thrives on running an original idea through the conduit of the mind of a removed second reader-writer.

I’ve read a few Chinese literature in English. We discussed the ideas behind Soul Mountain, the famous novel by Gao Xingjian, translated by Mabel Lee into English. It is a travelogue of some sort incorporating elements of soul-searching autobiographical non-fiction, fiction, vignettes, ethnographic writings, musings, jottings, poetry, and story fragments. One of the challenge of translating from Chinese must also include rendering an idea of communality into an English-speaking culture of individualism. But therein lies the pleasures of translation – a special brand of serving that is not totally belonging to one culture, and not totally transformed into the other. In language learning, that would be a sort of “interlanguage” – a language that is neither the first nor the second language. What we read when we read something translated into English from Greek or Latin, or Arabic, is neither those languages, nor is it English. The ideas are most times successfully conveyed in the target language, but not enough to prevent literary/language purists from a snobbery that insists on the original as the most authentic standard bearer. And they are sometimes right. Yet, the “interlanguage” of translation carries in itself an original and yes authentic voice.

Garcia Marquez is famous in English speaking Africa even though we don’t speak Spanish. Vargas Llosa will be too soon enough, for good reason. How much did we lose if we did at all reading in English? Does it ever matter? Does my friend from Morocco have a better and richer literary experience than me because he speaks Tamazight (his local language), Arabic (his national language), and French (his country’s official language) and English and is thus able to read many more literature in original languages? If I read Naipaul in English and he reads it in French, what have I gained that he hasn’t? Does an Indian reading Naipaul or Rushdie (in English) gain something more? After all, they are co-sharers in the cultural conditioning that produced the texts? If I read Onitsha by JMG Le Clezio in French, do I gain any more or less than those who do it in English? After all, the writer is French. But then, after all, I am Nigerian, and the story in the book are based on the writer’s adventures in the Nigeria of the 60s. For those who have read George Orwell’s 1984 in German, or in Japanese, how does the writer translate words like “newspeak” and “thoughtcrime”. Does it make the same compact sense as it does it in English?

I first read Plato On the Trial and Death of Socrates in the early 2000s and what struck me the most was how beautifully it was written. It was a translation. Plato did not write in English. A few of the other plays we read as undergrads The Frogs by Aristophanes, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, and Wole Soyinka’s notable translation of D.O. Fagunwa’s classic novel into The Forest of a Thousand Daemons all struck me as bearing very distinct literary styles that stand in their own stead as authentic study of thoughts in translation. The last time I read Plato On the Trial and Death of Socrates was late last year in Edwardsville, and I was greatly surprised at how insipid it read compared to the one I read back in Ibadan. The conversation on the dinner table went back and forth within these many areas of literary translation and I learnt as much as I grubbed. By the time the evening was over, all I wanted was a financial grant to go live in a small house by river and complete all the pending translations I have been working on for many years.

The last time we conversed, I sent them a long Yoruba to English translation of some of my father’s poetry. Half insecure in my experimentations (I’d completed the translation in 2005 and haven’t worked on it since then), and half wondering if any of the beauty of oral literature is lost when they become text, I was pleasantly surprised to read as a response to it, an email from my colleague: “That is a lovely, rich and absorbing poem,” it read “I have read it twice and found myself drawn in so many directions, wishing I could climb its hills, listen to its music more closely and roll around in its musky earth – love is a vast world, mysterious and ordinary and always full of pungent flavors and astonishing depths and heights. I would like to read more.” See? Maybe all that is lost to translation should be the expectations we bring to it from our knowledge of the depths of the original. A few hours later, he sent me a work-in-progress Chinese to English novel translation excerpt that he and his partner (the writer) had been working on. I found it a delightfully splendid read. And I don’t speak Chinese.

Good literature will always speak out, in whatever tongues it finds.

Why Nwaubani Was Wrong

Kola — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 21:39:39 +0000

Many commentators have already responded fittingly to a recently published op-ed in the New York Times by Nigerian writer Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani. (One of them was Carmen McCain in this blogpost). In “The Laureate Cause” which you can read on NY Times or on 234NEXT, Ms. Nwaubani argues a faulty logic that implies that having new authors write in local languages is detrimental to national unity and cohesiveness and thus bad for literature. To momentarily ignore the fallacy in assuming that writers write so as to further nationalistic goals rather than to justify their creative potential by creating using whatever means they have, the argument she makes insults intelligence. Language diversity is one of literature’s best assets as well as one of its most assaulted elements. It doesn’t need anymore drawbacks.

With an array of opinions and ideologies as many as the tools of translation available to linguists, it is already difficult to prevent one work from misinterpretation. (Orwell’s Animal Farm was translated into two different ideological interpretations in East and West Germany respectively during the cold war.) However, the pleasure of being able to read works written in the native thought and tongue of the writer has aways been unquantifiable, as can be seen from the feting of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Naguib Mafouz, Gunter Grass, Mario Le Clezio and very many others including recent Mario Vargas Llosa who have all written in their local languages. If Ngugi Wa Thiong’o had won the Nobel this year, he would have been deserving of it, not just for the depth of his creativity, but for his contribution to the development of Gikuyu by choosing to write in it. We can only hope for more of those kind, and not less.

Many of the books I read as a child were in Yoruba and I can’t say it enough how much it helped my appreciation of English and all the other languages I have learnt to use. If tomorrow I choose to write in Yoruba – which I have certainly considered, I would represent an important a voice in literature as someone who decides to do it in Igbo or Swahili without care for English as an international language as long as I stay committed to the craft and say something new (or even something old, in a new voice and style) and say it well. We’ll have literary translators to do the rest. To make the case for English as the only medium of creative process is easily the biggest one of the many flaws of her essay, and a disingenuous take on the African literary present and future.

Cross posted at Nigerianstalk.org.

In Africa, the Laureate’s Curse

I Went to Hannibal

Kola — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:52:51 +0000

And so I went to Hannibal, a little town two and a half hours away (131 miles north) from my present location. More than anything, it is famous for being the birthplace of Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens) and the site of his boyhood home with the famous whitewashed fence. There’s so much to say about the journey, from the open land of the highway which reminded me of the trip between Kaduna and Zaria to the coolness of the fresh morning air on the way and back. Then there were the sculptures, the quietness of the town, the beauty of the museum building, and the amazing detail of the house as compared to the descriptions that Twain wrote about them in his books The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The famous white-washed fence was there all right, now marked with names of visitors from all over the world.

For those not familiar with the story, the young boy Tom had successfully conned his bullying friends into doing his own chore of white-washing his house fence for him. Samuel Clemens grew up in this house in Hannibal, a son of a judge of a father living on a low income. He moved out of it in 1853 to seek his fortune. Twenty years would pass before he started writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and he drew most of his materials from the events of his own childhood on the streets of Hannibal in a house overlooking the Mississippi river. This makes a lot of sense: living through a very hard but colourful childhood and amassing in the process a very large stash of memories, and waiting at least twenty years to set them down to paper, sometimes after returning to visit the place and reliving the memories. Now that’s an idea.

The museum had many fun sights: a marble sculpture of the man reading stories to kids, a boat deck to simulate the view of ship captains, a gallery of famous quotes of the man, and a cave built to the type described in his books about his childhood days. It also has a gift shop filled with postcards, t-shirts, and countless books (including his autobiography. He had written it – The Autobiography - by himself and had instructed that it be published a hundred years after his death. It has now been published, and is the current #1 bestseller on Amazon and the #2 on NY Times bestseller list. One of the famous quotes on the t-shirts being sold there reads: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” Another one read: “Action speak louder than words but not nearly as often.” And there were many more.

I may not successfully exhaust my report of the visit to a place that holds much significance to me as a consumer of literature and the works of the man as a writer and a chronicler of a certain epoch in American history. His views on slavery, politics, and life in general have been highly documented in many of his books, including this final autobiography. But I can tell you this: that it was a worthwhile visit that I would gladly make again, if only to be able to spend more time in the town and see what else they have besides the very many resources of the Clemens. One more thing before we left was to sign our names on the white-washed fence. The traveller was here. No, that wasn’t what I wrote. You have to go there to find out for yourself.

Oh, and one more quote now going to remain on my office computer: “To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” Oh well!

Pictures by Temie Giwa

Ernest Who?

Kola — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 02:49:28 +0000

I had a mojito today, for the very first time, like many other things I report on this blog. Thanks to the prodding and generous encouragement by a colleague in the department, I am discovering not just a new palatal delight, but a new lesson in (literary) history. Olga says it’s invented by Ernest Hemingway. Wikiepdia says it’s only Hemingway’s favourite drink. The indisputable fact however is that the man Ernest Hemingway liked his mojito very well that he went to a bar called La Bodeguita del medio and wrote “My mojito in La Bodeguita, My daiquiri in El Floridita” on the wall there. It can still be seen today in his own handwriting.

A few more things about the bloody author. He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, he wrote Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, among many other books. He liked his alcohol, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was in Africa where he was injured and almost killed in a plane crash, and he committed suicide, the bloody guy, in 1961. He also “invented” the mojito.

The drink is made of : white rum, sugar (traditionally sugar cane juice), lime, sparkling water and mint. As opposed to KT Martini made only of Sherry wine and soda, the mojito is limy and less intoxicating. I guess that makes the mojito more family oriented, or so? Or maybe not. We need to find an independent assessor. In any case, I’m glad to find in Ernest a kindred spirit of the muse, the wine and the restless feet. Let’s take out the suicide and we may have something close to a match. Now I need to find someone to send me any of his books for free whether electronically or physically. \

Do you need my address?

Blog Recommendation

Kola — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:06:23 +0000

Kinna Reads http://kinnareads.wordpress.com/

A blog written from Ghana on issues relating to reading and literature. From the blog description: “On this blog, you will find a good mix of reviews and commentary on novels, short stories and poetry. I love poetry, can’t live without it Basically, this blog reflects my reading life.”

(Thanks Tayo for the link)

On Written English

Kola — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:43:42 +0000

Prompted by my sister’s observation on reading Larry King’s My Remarkable Journey. “The language is remarkably simple,” she said. The fact is that we have been so used to the literary culture that passes off grandiose English as the only true means of good literary communication that when we see one that pulls off a feat of enchanting us without pretending to be grand, we are pleasantly surprised and are forced to look at ourselves again.

How the literary culture in Nigeria (as borrowed from Britain) successfully evolved into the idea that it is better and more acceptable to write (and speak) as difficult possible when given the opportunity is really beyond me. And for all who bother about it, this is the singular most (de)pressing issue in Nigerian literature today. Not just the language of our writing – which will remain English for a long while – but the way we use it. The argument is long and tedious, and will – if not properly articulated – spill over into very many distracting directions, but what is clear is that we still haven’t mastered the ability to simply write, simply.

My favourite essay of all time is by George Orwell, titled Politics and the English Language(1946), and I’ve always recommended it for anyone wishing to be called a writer. In it, he highlights the very many wrong ways in which we use the English language a famous one being the rendering of a verse in Ecclesiastes in “modern” English. According to him, and I agree, this verse…

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

would most likely be written by today’s writers as follows:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

He admits in the end, as I do now, that he too may have occasionally fallen into the temptation to use more words than necessary in order to sound grand, or just for the drought of ideas. Yet, it is inexcusable. There is a reason why I was able to complete Larry King’s book in two days and I’m yet to complete one by a Nigerian writer since more than a year ago, and it doesn’t have to do with their personalties, a glossy cover or their countries of origin. And it is the same reason why V.S. Naipaul is now one of my favourite Nobel Prize winners. There is just something enchanting about a simply but brilliantly-written work.

African Roar on Amazon

Kola — Sun, 23 May 2010 07:05:40 +0000

The new anthology of short stories from Africa titled “African Roar” is now available to buy on Amazon and the Lion Press UK website (for those in the UK).

My short story “Behind the Door” is one of the eleven stories that made the cut of this maiden edition.

Recommendations

Kola — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:48:43 +0000

Here are a few blogs about literature, travelling and journalism that you should check out. I have also recently added them to my Favourite page.

Richard Ali on Nigerian Literature and the Arts.

Belinda Otas – Journalist, Writer, Blogger and theatre fanatic.

Naijablog – A British academic in Nigeria: views, observations and links.

Jude Dibia – Author of Unbridled and Walking With Shadows.

Novuyo Rosa – The Pen and I: Thoughts of a South-African writer.

Ruona Godwin-Agbroko - a Nigerian Journalist and 2010 Nial Fitzgerald Scholar in South Africa

Loomnie – thoughts of a Nigerian Anthropologist in Europe.

Ethan Zuckerman – My Heart’s in Accra.

Wordsbody – Nigerian Writer and Arts Journalist

ktravula - a travelogue! » Literature

Book, Blook, Bloog, Blog…

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