ktravula – a travelogue!

Corrigedum

When we were in the first year of university, there was this course in the Communications Department in which students had to read Nigerian national dailies and spot grammatical errors. For many of my friends taking the course for the first time, it was a great surprise to them to learn that Nigerian newspapers make grave grammatical errors everyday in their editorials, opinion and even education pages. Yesterday I had another one of those crazy moments of panic when I found out one of my own errors. My heart flew into my mouth and I feel almost like disappearing into the ground. I had been reading through one of the last posts on this page, when I spotted a sentence. The process was always the same: I’ll be reading through a line I’d read through very many times before without having seen anything, then something would strike me, I’ll look at it again, and see the error. And my heart would begin to race.

What I had written while composing the post at the time was “I greeted you…” then I remember going back to change it to “I used to greet you…”. But as it turned out, I had forgotten to remove the “–ed” at the back of the “greet” so the sentence read “I used to greeted you…”* Oh my!

I hate it when that happens, and it does a lot because writing a blogpost is always and trial and error thing. One would write something, publish it and then discover an error. One would correct it, publish, and see another. Sometimes I never see it until very many days later. Some I never see at all, and I have sometimes wondered how many new visitors had spotted it and gone with the first impression: “Oh, what an idiot.”

It’s not always funny when I think about it though. I spot errors easily in other people’s writings, even without looking for them, but not in mine. How does that happen? Is it a writer’s disease? (And has it had gotten worse since I took on Wole Soyinka’s play? Haha!) According to George Carlin, the reason why a writer would never commit suicide is that s/he would most likely spend the whole day, and following weeks, trying to write a perfect suicide note, and would never be satisfied with the wordings. Maybe Carlin was right, or not, but I know that he surely didn’t have a blog in mind.

Oh, how I miss the good old days when my dedicated editors Tayo, Yemi and Zainab used to read the posts before anyone else did. The point of this post is to apologise in advance for all past and future errors :). Maybe I should now throw my editor position available. Anyone wants to apply? Perfect candidate: an insomniac. Remuneration: US gold quarters 😉

Corrigedum was published on June 19th, 2010, with the tags , , under the Academic, Observations category. There are currently 4 comments on this article so far.

On The Strong Breed

There are several things to do when one is a “retired” foreign language teacher with time on his hands. One could begin to translate a book of English fiction into Yoruba just for the sake of it – never mind that many of our “modern” people don’t read in the language anymore. At least one can convince oneself that it is an effort in the furtherance of literature.

One could also begin to read old books, some of which one had bought over a year ago but had not got a chance to open due to the busy nature of one’s teaching and learning commitments. As much as catching up on old books is concerned, my bed at the moment is littered with open copies of “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, “Slow Man” by J.M. Coetzee and Chika Unigwe’s “On Black Sister’s Street”.

But yesterday, I stumbled on a copy of Wole Soyinka’s “Collected Plays 1” which I had bought from Amazon two months ago. It had in it A Dance of the Forests, The Swamp Dwellers, The Strong Breed, The Road, and The Baccae of Euripides. I’ve read all of them at one point or the other before, but it struck me that there was a part of The Strong Breed that once seemed very strange to me in grammatical accuracy. Today I began to look for it, and it didn’t take me too long for me to to spot. I’ve found it. Wole Soyinka, or his editor at the time, seemed to have missed an almost negligible grammatical rule for one of the lines in the play. Almost negligible, but not quite forgivable for an author that has now gone ahead to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here:

SUNMA: You don’t even want me here?

EMAN: But you have to go home haven’t you? *

SUNMA: I had hoped we would watch the new year together – in some other place.

pg 120.

The first time I spotted this in 2001, I was sure that it had missed the editor’s eye especially since a random internet search did not produce any result of anyone having spotted it before. But seeing it still in another edition of the book convinced me either of the author’s insistence, or on the forgivableness of the slip on some level. Or not. The character of Emma is neither a teacher known for grandiose language nor an illiterate known for the same. In fact, his ability to speak well was never in question throughout the short play so it couldn’t have been part of character. It could only have been an error. What surprised me was how it was repeated in all the editions I have read. So I’ve brought it here for debate. What special reason could be given for this sentence written like this?

Of course after this, I shall be expecting a cheque from the publishers for my eagle-eyed spotting of a faulty line in a book more than four decades old.

On The Strong Breed was published on June 13th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , under the Academic, Observations category. There are currently 24 comments on this article so far.