It’s no fun translating pidgin English to French
By Henry Akubuiro (ifeanyi_mcdaniels@yahoo.com)
Sunday, October 22, 2006

Christiane Fioupou, translator Photo: Sun News Publishing

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Christianne Fiopou strikes you as a meticulous academic at first impression. And so she is as you get to know her. Her eyes betoken some misgivings the moment I approach her for a chat. But, in a matter of moments, her curiousity springs up, after she has sought Prof. Niyi Osundare’s confirmation about me.

Don’t blame her. Sometime ago she had a nasty experience with a journalist, who presented her in a bad light. “The journalist wrote what I didn’t say,” she begins in a cautious voice, “but Niyi told me you are good.”

Born and bred in the south of France, she lived abroad for quite a while. First, she taught French at the University of East Anglia, in Britain, then spent twelve years in Upper Volta (later Burkina Faso), where she taught English and African Literature at the University of Ouagadougou, and where she specialized in Nigerian and Ghanaian literature. She is currently a professor of English at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail in France, a place where, she tells Sunday Sun, “I try to teach as much WS (William Shakespeare and Wole Soyinka) as I can.”

Deconstructing Wole Soyinka’s works is no mean feat, needless to say translating him. Then you must appreciate the French woman’s “bravery” and ingenuity. “I have translated two plays by Wole Soyinka: The Road, which came out in French in 1988, and King Baabu, published in 2005,” she announces to me in Accra, Ghana, where we meet. Translating The Road was a challenge that she took up with her Burkinabe colleague and friend, Samuel Millogo. At that time, one of the problems was: how can one translate pidgin English into French?
“For sure, we wanted to do away with easy colonial stereotypes (such as the use of what is called "petit nègre" in French), and to find an equivalent variety of colloquial French that also existed linguistically in Francophone West Africa. Samuel who had spent a year at the University of Ibadan, was familiar with pidgin English, and had worked as a schoolteacher in Abidjan. So we used a rough equivalent known as ‘Français Populaire d'Abidjan’, a lingua franca used in Abidjan, and which was also transcribed in newspapers or used in comic strips, similar to the way pidgin English is used in Nigeria,” she says.

A few years ago, Samuel Millogo and Amadou Bissiri, a former student of hers, translated Sozaboy, Ken Saro-Wiwa's novel in “rotten” English into a very inventive brand of "rotten” French. “I must say I am impressed by their achievement, which is a literary and linguistic ‘tour de force’,” she enthuses.

What actually led her to the translation of Soyinka's play? “She tells me that she was puzzled and fascinated the first time she read The Road. “I lived in France at the time. I had read only a few plays by Soyinka and I did not know much about Nigerian roads, but I fell in love with the play. I couldn't tell why, yet I knew there was something in that play that really spurred me on and I decided to write my French doctoral thesis on the topic ‘The Road: Reality and Representation in the Works of Wole Soyinka’.

“I read anything I could get hold of on Nigerian literature or politics, and on Yoruba traditions so as to be steeped in the culture of the play. I first went to Nigeria in 1984, especially to meet Soyinka about the translation and experience the roads, then went back to Ouagadougou, laden with books and articles, and later, with interviews and recordings or transcriptions of Ifa divination verse. I decided to translate The Road because I wanted to share it with my friends who did not speak English.

“Also I liked the challenge of translating a play, as I have always been interested in drama, the challenge of being as close to the original as possible, that is, being faithful to the different language registers used by Soyinka. For example, the sophisticated, biblical and puzzling language of Professor, the American speech mannerism of Say Tokyo Kid or the pidgin English, Nigerianized English or standard English of Samson and Salubi. So, with Samuel, we tried to recapture Soyinka's language variations and translate them into French ‘rough equivalents’ that had some socio-linguistic reality and could work theatrically,” she explains.

Given her French background, Sunday Sun wonders how she was able to translate effectively a writer many find difficult to grasp his writing. She thinks “many of the people who say that Soyinka is difficult are those who haven't read him or seen his plays performed.” Some asked her, "How can you translate a play that even critics can't understand?"
Laughing, smugly, she admits, “I think I was obsessed with the theme of The Road and, as you can see, I keep going back to it. I taught The Road to my students in Toulouse, and they were very enthusiastic about it. Of course, having worked and written on it for so many years, I was able to give them some background to the Yoruba pantheon, Ogun, egungun masquerades, etc. to make things easier for them. In the end, the students admitted that the play grows on you: even though you cannot be explicit about what it means, the whole point is that it means something, whatever culture you come from.”

At Toulouse, she managed to put Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman in the second year English syllabus. For two years, all the students of English of the University (about 150 a year) studied the play. “Believe it or not, though it is said to be difficult, the students loved it,” she reveals. Nowadays when she meets some of them (now postgraduates or teachers), they tell her that Death and the King's Horseman is one of the best, if not the best work, they have studied throughout their university career. She says further, “That year, in 1999, we organized a Conference on African Literature, when Niyi Osundare was awarded an honorary doctorate (he was on the MA syllabus too!) and Soyinka came to celebrate with us and talked to the students; he told me that they had indeed asked him some very interesting and insightful questions about the play.”

Recently, the professor translated Soyinka's latest play, King Baabu, into French, and it was another fascinating experience for her. “His [Soyinka] model is Ubu Roi [King Ubu] by French writer Alfred Jarry, and this is made explicit in the subtitle of King Baabu: ‘in the manner-roughly-of Alfred Jarry’. Jarry's play had provoked a scandal when it had its premiere in Paris in 1896 because it subverted the conventions of the well-made play. Ubu is a puppet-like bourgeois, stupid and cowardly, who, spurred on by his wife, a kind of Lady Macbeth, kills the king of Poland and takes his place. In French, when we mean that something is grotesque or ridiculous, we say it is "ubuesque".

“What made the translation of King Baabu interesting is that it is modelled on Jarry's play and also, more topically, that Basha Bash, soon to become King Baabu, is modelled, of course, on Abacha. So, I went back to the French original, because of its structure and its use of language, and tried to see how far I could translate King Baabu ‘back’ into French, as it were. But Baabu, as Soyinka put it somewhere when he referred to Abacha, is a ‘murderous moron’.

How does one capture the language of a ‘murderous moron’? King Baabu speaks a strange mixture of bombastic language, vulgar words and broken and ungrammatical English. And I was aware that, unlike Samson's pidgin English in The Road, Baabu's English is not meant to be representative of any colloquial variety but to satirize and deflate a vicious, stupid and arrogant character. I therefore had to find other ways of rendering that strange mixture.”

The French woman has also translated Prof. Niyi Osundare. What attracted her to his poetry? First, she was fascinated by her work on Soyinka and the Yoruba background she had acquainted herself with in the course of her research. “I don't think I would have dared to translate Niyi Osundare had I not worked on Soyinka before. I met Niyi in Lagos in 1988, at the Writers' Conference organized after Soyinka's Nobel Prize. I had read some of his poetry in West Africa Magazine when I was in Ouagadougou. I first translated one of his poems from Moonsongs for an anthology, then some other poems for poetry magazines and journals in French. I also translated a whole volume of his poems, Waiting Laughters, which was published in Paris by Présence Africaine as a bilingual edition, just over a year ago.

“What I like about Niyi's poetry is its energy, its humour, its satirical bend and its commitment to both sense and sound, his use of rhythm, alliteration, assonance, the whole musicality of it, which of course makes the translation a difficult but highly gratifying task. When I translate his poetry, I am interested in the challenge of having to render the polysemy of words into another language. And I have always been interested in the translation of puns and other plays on words, in Shakespeare or Alice in Wonderland for instance.

“Also, I have always kept in mind that when Soyinka and Osundare write in English, in the background, there is also Yoruba. I don't speak Yoruba, but I have a smattering of how it works and I know that Yoruba, like most African languages, is a tonal language. So, I know that when Soyinka and Osundare play on words, I can feel they are also adding Yoruba tones to their English, as it were.

As a French person translating into a language which is neither stressed, like English, nor tonal, like Yoruba, there is a problem when it comes to recapturing the musicality of the original as well as its meaning. Steven Arnold, the Canadian scholar, said that Niyi Osundare is not an anglophone poet, he is a Yoruba poet who writes in English. So, when I translate, I also try to capture that difference between say, British English and Yoruba English, and to render that edge of strangeness that clings to it.”

When I ask her how she arrived at corresponding French rhymes for Niyi's English rhymes, she explains, “A few months ago, I translated one of his Katrina poems, ‘The Weeping Book’, which is a rhymed poem. I spent days finding the appropriate rhymes because, as you know, when one translates rhymes, one runs the risk of ending up writing doggerel! So, I used a dictionary of synonyms and spent hours working on it. It's a challenge, it's a game, it often becomes obsessive (and translation is obsessive!). I always say that I spend much more time writing the translation than the poets writing their own,” she laughs afterwards.

She has read all the classics of Nigerian literature, Achebe, Ekwensi, Tutuola, Okigbo, etc. and have taught some of them. She is trying to catch up with younger Nigerian writers and read them as much as she can. “But I must say Soyinka is, to me, not just a monument in Nigerian literature but in world literature,” she admits. Does she have time for creative writing herself? She doesn’t. “I never write for myself. It never occurs to me, though I enjoy playing with the words of others. I suppose translators are said to be bridges, and I am quite happy to be a bridge,” she concedes.

Anymore translations from her? “When I find a poem or play I like, I have a go at it. I do it because I feel like it, because I enjoy translating what I like. It's my only way of being creative. I'd like to translate more, but my university work does not leave me much spare time for it. I'll soon translate some more poems by Soyinka (I translated some of the songs from Opera Wonyosi for a publication on Brecht and I have started a few poems from Samarkand) and by Osundare (I am finishing some "Katrina Poems" and I am thinking of some less recent ones). I promised Odia Ofeimun I would translate some of his.”