The Portuguese Translation of Oyono'sUne vie de boy:José Saramago's Invisible Postcolonial Intervention

Abstract

Translators are Typically invisible, noticed only when they blunder. how might one interpret, then, a book translated by a now very visible Nobel laureate, especially when the underlying text confronts controversial subjects that the laureate's own works avoid? Such is the case of the Portuguese writer José Saramago (1922-2010), who in 1981 translated Ferdinand Oyono's 1956Une vie de boy.In its press release announcing the 1998 Nobel for literature, the Swedish Academy called him a writer “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality” (“Nobel Prize”). It is this ability to communicate what refuses fixed meaning that Walter Benjamin famously restored to the art of translation, endowing it with a philosophical and artistic distinction: “Even when all the surface content can be extracted and transmitted, the primary concern of the genuine translator remains elusive” (19). “Escrever é traduzir” (“To write is to translate”), Saramago would state years after he gained world visibility thanks to the translations of his works. In both cases, he argues, the objective is to pursue what lies beyond language, but the translator strives to communicate what may have been beyond not only the language of the original but also that of the translation (“Traduzir”). Saramago's translation of Oyono'sUne vie de boy, a text that readers of Saramago's oeuvre generally overlook along with his other translations, invites a consideration of how the elusive as an artistic value with broad appeal may relate to the local cultural contingencies informing the translator's language choices.