Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So, they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.

Coming from a middle-class background and growing up in Nigeria’s lousy economy of the 90s, I relate with much of what he said with regards to the habit of working. The disingenuity of the argument he makes, however, is in the way it casually omits the truth in a similar argument for the other side. Read below:

“Really rich children in really affluent neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So, they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s for partying.”

Did you see what I did there? I substituted the words “poor” for “rich” and other “negative” equivalents for “positive” ones. Does that little trick change the truth in the assertion of Mr. Gingrich? No. The problem however is that he did not make this balanced claim. By focusing only one side and demonizing poor children, he pits himself on one side of the argument, and thus muddles the issue he was supposed to be solving. If the focus of his comment was to breed a culture of working, is there a particular reason why it should focus only on poor children?

Let me make a second example, also from Mr. Gingrich’s attempt at political commentary. While speaking with a Jewish television last week, Mr. Gingrich said that Palestinians are, after all, “an invented people” who didn’t exist as a nation until after the exit of the Ottoman empire. Of course, he was right. The people now referred to as the Palestinian people, now craving for a state of their own, are just Arab people living in the middle east. However, so are the Jewish people as well! The Jewish State of Israel (at least as we know it today) was just as well “invented” in self-determination after the Second World War. So why did Newt Gingrich not state the second equivalent truth of his assertion? Because it is not politically expedient, and – like other Republican candidates – all he wanted to do was to sound Pro-Israel than the incumbent president whose job he seeks.

Now, to my final two examples on this matter, this time on race. I found out to my chagrin that the most popular post on my earlier wordpress blog (before moving to this domain) has remained this one where I wondered if oyinbo - a Yoruba word for “white person” was a racist word. I knew it wasn’t, but I was interested in reader perspectives on the way a word conditions the way we look at the world and other people. I got feisty, energetic responses. But what struck me earlier this morning however is a fact that I had overlooked for too long: that more than half of what is considered racist – even here in the United States – were anything but. Here are two quotes, the first by Donald Trump: “I have a great relationship with the blacks,” said a few months ago to public outrage, and Ann Coulter’s “Our blacks are so much better than their blacks” – a reference to African-Americans in the Republican party as opposed to those in the Democratic party.

It is easy for me as an African to take umbrage at each of these statements (as I undoubtedly did for a few days without being able to lay my hands on why the statements seemed so jarring). A few months removed from the uttering of those words however, I finally got it. It took a short memory trip back to the sociopolitical environment of my home country. “I have a great relationship with the whites” would not have elicited such a public umbrage in Nigeria but it would have raised eyebrows of social awkwardness. There is a consensus that there is something awkward with a citizen who felt the need to associate himself with a particular race for political advantage. “Our whites are so much better than their whites” would have elicited a similar response of awkwardness, albeit with a heavy dose of scorn and derision. It definitely would take some self-loathing and inferiority complex to make such a public proclamation. Implicit in these statements however is the acceptance of the “otherness”, and thus the problem. In Nigeria, this “otherness” is accepted, considering our colonial history The “whites” are not one of us. In America, it is not, because of the country’s history of slavery and civil rights. The “blacks” are also Americans, and undeserving of such “otherization,” thus the outrage. If Mr. Trump had said “I have a great relationship with the Nigerians”, or Ann Coulter, “our Nigerians are better than their Nigerians,” no one would have taken notice.

There is something to be said for double equivalents. Some things don’t make much sense until we put them in front of a mirror of polar equivalents. Some don’t make sense at all, eventually, of course, but it sometimes helps to pare them off all their political overtones. Mister Trump and Miss Coulter get a pass from racism but not from bigotry, and Speaker Gingrich gets all the blame he very well deserves.

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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.

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If the only person(s) you know write only novels and not short fiction, please send me their contact as well, as long as they write in Yoruba. Thank you.

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Follow their blogs and share in their experience as they move through Nigeria:

http://www.northoflagos.wordpress.com by Cara “Titilayo” Harshman.

http://irinajoyinbo.wordpress.com by Kevin “Kayode” Barry.

http://wellesleyh.wordpress.com by Lauren Halloran

Here are some of the videos from the blogs. Note that much of the Yoruba language capability of the person in this video was acquired long before she even set foot on Nigerian soil. This is a testament to the progress of Yoruba language studies in the Wisconsin University at Madison, and a victory for globalization.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SlgnGAGFsU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsltcnHxzfI. And in this amazing one, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLzWfxBRa8Q), where Titi takes a walk around the University of Ibadan.

Enjoy, and leave them some encouraging comments too.

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I like what I’ve seen so far.

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This semester was different. The class project this time was that they had to pick particular songs in Yoruba and learn to sing it within three weeks. To do this, they had to work with a student tutor who is also a from Nigeria who came to train them every Wednesday. He also found them costumes. I had told them the meaning of the songs in class before handing them over to the tutor, so all I had to do next was just to wait for the final presentation which was set for the final day of class. I invited the head of department and a journalist from the Alestle to come on that day to share in the surprise. I had only heard of their progress and how much fun they had rehearsing for the day. I had not seen them sing before, and I had a feeling that some of them were nervous. At the end of the day, this happened: I was very impressed. From the following video made of their presentation, you will see why the class presentation was the best final class I could ever have hoped for, as a goodbye to a great teaching year.

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It started this way:

“The world was exactly as it should be. No more and, definitely, no less. She had the love of a good man. A house. And her own money – still new and fresh and the healthiest shade of green – the thought of it buoyed her and gave her a rush that made her hum.”

In Yoruba, that should be:
“Ilé ayé rí gẹgẹ bó se ye kó rí. Kò sí àseju bẹẹni kò sí àìtó. Ifẹ rẹ n jẹun lokan ọdọmọkùnrin ọmọlúàbí kan. Ilé kan. Àti owó tirẹ – tó tuntun yanranyanran pẹlú àwò ewé té rẹwa tó sì jọlọ – rírònú nípa rẹ lásán mú inú re dùn dé ibi wípé ó bẹrẹ sí n kọrin laìlanu.”

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I wrote my reply in red, and left the sheets on the door so that he can see it whenever he comes back. When I see him, I intend to inform him of how impressed I am at his resourcefulness since, as I know for a fact, I wasn’t the one who taught him pele (the Yoruba word for “I’m sorry/forgive me” ) and there is no other Yoruba person living in this building, or within a mile of our residence.

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