Publishing Francophone African Literature in Translation: Towards a Relational Account of Postcolonial Book History

Abstract

In his preface to the English translation of Bernard Dadie's Climbie , Es'kia Mphahlele (1971: x) writes: ‘A progressively greater measure of exposure to one another's literatures in translation must in the long run advance the pan-African cause’. The perceived political benefits of translation set out by Mphahlele in 1971 signal one aspect of the muted call for literary translation in early post-independence sub-Saharan Africa. In the 1960s and 1970s, an uneven relationship between anglophone and francophone pan-African thought and literary activity was partly shaped by the commercial, aesthetic, and political interests of publishers and other literary mediators, including translators. As will be shown, the process of publishing English translations of francophone African writing is bound up with the instrumental, and sometimes vexed, work of the translator of postcolonial texts. Charting the trajectories of francophone African books in translation extends existing postcolonial publishing histories by developing a comparative and relational understanding of this work against broader structural evolutions in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary marketplace. Recent attempts to describe the production and reception of African literature have referred to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the literary field and to world systems theory to describe the ‘world republic of letters’ and a ‘global literary marketplace’ that function through unequal relationships between centre and periphery. In his discussion of the Heinemann African Writers Series (AWS), which published many translations from French, Clive Barnett (2005: 76) critiques what he terms the ‘dependency’ model, whereby ‘a particular model of how cultural power is exercised and reproduced […] turns on a fairly simple understanding of the differential economic and ideological power between a “core” region of Western Europe and North America and the “periphery”, the rest of the literary world’. He seeks instead to trace the ‘distinctive geographies’ of the African Writers Series and to show how its processes at times bypass the colonial centre, in a transcultural model that disputes the ‘ideological’ analysis of cultural circulation (94). Such circuits of literary production depend on criteria of aesthetic, political, or commercial value that are necessarily relational, determined by the legitimating roles of publishers and other literary mediators that structure, and are structured by, the differential stakes of the literary field.