In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BODIES AND TONGUES: ALTERNATIVE MODES OF TRANSLATIO IN FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN LITERATURE TOBIAS WAR ER ce que vous appelleriez barbaric esl Ie mouvement iMpuis..1ble des scintillations de langues, qui ChilffOic scories et inventions, dominations ct accord , silences mortels el explosions irrepres ibles - ldouard Glissan( Translation is often seen as a key component of what is called world literature, which to many readers is a promising venue for cultural dialogue. But is translation a way of communicating across the frontiers of language, or is it Ihe very act of translation that delin ·swhere one language begins and another endsl While it is certainly a pow rful tool, in order to understand the nature and potential oftran lation, we mu t come to term with its role in the ideologies of lheempires that carved the current geo ultural globe and th nation stales that have followed. In this paper, I seek to establish Ihe genealogy of European theories of translation and demonstrate their complicity with imperialist ideologie . In contra t to this tainted legacy, I examine how two francophone African author d vel oped alternative modes of translation, using the borders of languag and literatures as ites of survival and resistance. UndelWriting my urrent tudy i Naoki Sakai's claim that.translation is not a bridge betw n language, but rather what divides them. This inversion stem from the deductiOn that only in translating can one actually claim to deal with two distincl languages. W hat we commonly conceive of as U translation,' then, i a strategy for defining and managing the differ nee between languages. This most common representation of translation is compliCi! with diverse strategies of domination and 5ubjeclification: because it territorializes linguisticcommunilies, T R Ae £ S : 295 Tobias Warner translation elides the fundamental discontinuity that preced S it, manufacturing manageable species difference out of the singularity and incommen urabilityof languages. in his Translation and Subjectivity, Sakai shows how"J apan R as a nation became thinkable only when a group of eighteenth-century scholars translated texts from Chine e into Japanese, a non-distinct language their work performed into exi tence. The impIications ofthis way of thinking about translation ar more than conceptual. Each territorialized, unitary language is paired off against another commensurable unity - a move that in turn enables the representation of larger unities, such as H lhe nation" or "the West." Translation's di cur ive power regulated linguistic and literary nOw through the bord r of merging cultural provin es of the European nation-states. In the imperiali t era, tran lation wa subsumed into a machine that proce ed othernes , driving the project of knowledge that accompanied and legitimated European colonization. Yet this is only one mode of translation. in this ludy, I propose that postcolonial African writers deployed alternalive mode of translation. Alternative modes of translation are form of linguistic relation and composition that resurrect the Babel whi h conventional translation elides. In 1968, two francophone African writers, Yambo Ouologuem and Ahmadou Kourouma, published their first novels - Le Devoir de violence (Bound to Violence) and Lc Sol if de independilnces (The Suns of Illdependence), r spectively. in these work, (liternativ modes of translation are a means of resistance within thc con training lingui tic and cultural porities of post-independence AfriC mouv m(!t'll synchroniques. le suffixe ka, en malinke, grace 11 ses alliances dans Ie mot, est charge d'un valeur bi n suPllrieure ~ celie de la preposition {ran<;aise sur, qui ne laisse transparaitre aucune notion d temps." Kourouma tries to convey the inevitability of i/-mourir- ur (he-die-for sure) by avo';r fin! C to have finished): he was SlIre to die, he has finally died. Clearly, ~tre fini (to be finishedl is insufficient; avoir has more of an implkation of process. R lbrahima Kone a fini· Ubrahima Kone ha finished-died)58 comes as close as one can to deploying (in the past tense) the certainty of il-mol/fir-sur, itself an approximation of ayebakii. }]]}----T RA CES: 4 Bodie s an d Tongues The hunt for avoir fini brings up more questions than it answers. The importance of Gassama's discus ion of abiina does not lie in establishin ' a source for Kourouma's poetics, but rather in his interrogation of the verb itself. What breach is there between finir and abana? How can on "end" in French and in Malink(i, and where do these languages "end"? The attempt to temporalize French in th manner of Malinke expression draws out a divergence in thc present tense. Ayebak,'i, the prescnt form of abana, is not a simple present, as we have n. Th particle ka imparts not only a sense of progressive, inevitable action, but also a sort of distance in time and space (because it retains its prepositional connotations - on top of, outside of). This produces estfangem nt in the heart of the present, a notion of no longer being where we were. The present, Gas ama writes, i a division arbitrairc du temps YO 00 fa~on absolue.. . nou avon vu que son expression, en mallnk~: ayeWka, ne pourrail eIre rendue en fran~ais par: i/ (inil, mais p r la p~riphra e : iI e f en Irain de {inir, notionellemenl plus juste puisque la forme: iI fini/, n'est rien de moins qu'un simpl convention." The present in Malinke i different from the present in French, Gassama says. It differs in its ending. The pre ent tense in French is mor rigid, though this is a convention, existing only through intention. The "fuuy contoursH of the present are mare ri hly colored in agglutinating languages. The present is always ending, but its endings in French and Malink~ are incommensurable.60 Then what happens to the "endings" of the e language w hen Kourouma writes in a langue lhat cal ls French verbs into metamorpho is, creating an assemblage that accommodates qualities of the Malink~ present tens ? I am suggesting that these languages defer, not differ, in their "endings." What Gassama presents as the difference of "ending" between two languages is really the quality of ending within language. What does it mean "to end" in a language? How does one language end differently from another? What docs it mean to say il-ends-farure in a language? To say thi of language? To say of language: ayebaka, il-finirsur , its-ends-for-sure. The present of a language i promised like ayebak1i: itsends -for-sure. language promises and thre<)tens its If, (I'nd this is its present. language never ends (is boundlessl, and language ends-for-sure, because this is the condition of its being. It must promise its ending. TRACE Tobias Warner Throughout Soleils, Kourouma finds solutions to West African social ills in neither tne secular, self-interested stale, nor in the withered epic past. The charge of unhelpful negativity continues to be leveled al Soleils, and il is indeed (like Devoir), a bitter, vituperative book. Yet both novelsoffer ways out; the mistake is to look for solutions in explicit social critique. It is best to (orget narrated content, and look to the becoming of language. Kourouma wrote in a new tongue, a metamorphiC langue. His langue is his answer - a collective assemblage Ihat gives voi e to Malinke people, not through a regime of tran lation but a rather tran formative engagement with N French.# In reconsidering Ouologuem's work, we must similarly brush aside the searing polemics he directed at all sides, and - as we have done with Kourouma look to his Ir 'alment of language. Ouologuem's allacks were aimed at destroying the bodily integrity of literatu res, and realizing Ihe mutually destructive and con titutive nature of cultural relations. But to what end?To answer, it mighl help to turn to Ouologuem's two other published books, which were mostly ignored. Th fir twas Lellr", J la (rance {legre, a book of sarcastic s ay . He also wrote a ollection of pornographic stories, Les milles ellme bible du sexe, which he publi hed under Ihe pSeudonym Utto RUdolph (though h gra ed the prefa e with his own name). In the most infamous essay in the Lettre, Ouologuemelaborates a plan for mass-producing the detective novel, which m

Share