Translating African Oral Literature in Global Contexts

Abstract

African nations strive in their various ways to preserve artistic traditions, such as oral literature (folklore). Preservation is an ethical-political act, as is translation of African folklore into world languages such as English and French. Two disciplines, folklore and translation studies, can now make common cause in the translating of folkloric systems. The example of a Malagasy folktale, grandly inflated by its narrator into epic scale, shows the utility of typographical devices in celebrating, if not overcoming, the abiding sense of difference between western poetic tastes and a nonwestern literary system. Translation takes a necessary place in the global context of cultural creolization. “Techno-capitalism” persists in its embrace of the world. The collecting and analysis of intangible cultural heritage, folklore, or oral literature cannot avoid reckoning with it. So anyone interested in Africa’s traditions might have doubts about the success of the program announced by UNESCO in 2003, when it adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. First, UNESCO had committed itself to honoring material culture, identifying the properties, 878 so far, that form part of the world’s cultural and natural heritage. Then it called for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage, a phrase replacing the disdained word “folklore.” That de mand put the global cultural organization into the position of having to supply how-to-do-it manuals to the 129 States Parties signatory to the Convention. The Intangible Cultural Heritage section of UNESCO engaged me to take up and complete a Manual on Safeguarding Oral Traditions and Expressions, then in draft form. Among the sharply drawn examples already in hand, Africa was bound to loom large, because African nations continually demonstrate how successful people are at preserving their own traditions. Upholding that ethical-political act, actually a part of most African societies, the disciplines