Towards a Responsible Translation of Pidgin English in Postcolonial LiteratureThe Case of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy

Resumo

The overall aim of this dissertation is to explore strategies for the translation of postcolonial texts into a “third” language, that is, a language other than the colonized vernacular and the European language of the colonizer, and to do so from a responsible position as a translator. The dissertation begins by establishing a dialogue with the existing literature on translation and postcolonialism, trying to ascertain what constitutes translator responsibility when working with postcolonial contexts, and how can translation be mobilized for counter-hegemonic purposes today, exploring the notion of translation as a means to enact a new universalism based on difference (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000; Santos 2004; Balibar 2004, 1995; Ngugi 1987, 2009). However, any discussion of cultural translation willing to avoid uniformization and assimilation should be grounded on a specific project, which in our case is the eventual translation into Spanish of Sozaboy, a novel written by the late Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995). The most salient feature of this book is that it is written in what the author himself defined as “‘rotten English’, a mixture of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and occasional flashes of good, even idiomatic English.” After the initial theoretical considerations, the dissertation performs a thorough stylistic analysis of the source-text taking as a general framework the structure put forward by Discourse Analysis (Munday and Zhang 2015; Baumgarten and Schröter 2018), but combining it freely with insights from other scholars. For the context of culture, the dissertation draws from Maria Tymoczko’s holistic approach to cultural translation (2010) to deal with questions of genre, intertextuality and discourse, and culturally-marked signature concepts. Next, the study takes up the context of situation of the novel, both internal and external. For the latter, it considers the immediate circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of the book, including Saro-Wiwa’s militant politics and his experiences during the Nigerian Civil War, the setting of Sozaboy. Consulting primary and secondary sources, we try to elucidate the intention behind Saro-Wiwa’s linguistic choice and the pioneering function rotten English has served for later authors. Taking a closer look at the language itself, we consider its strong oral component, which is a staple of African narrative, but also a way to deal with traumatic experiences. Rotten English is a hybrid construct, and we break it down to determine its specific Nigerian Pidgin features, which constitute the core African substrate that any translator should strive to preserve. How to do that exactly is the crux of the dissertation and the main concern of the last block, where the study leaves strict analysis aside to search for solutions. We first look at the German, French, and Italian translations, which interestingly followed quite different strategies. The study maintains that the best option for the Spanish translator is to follow López Guix’s (2015) advice and opt for a creative strategy which nevertheless observes the responsibility due to the disenfranchised Other by committing to the preservation of the unique African, postcolonial Pidgin feel (Bandia 2008). It is our contention that the best way to achieve this is by vindicating an often hidden legacy of Afro-Spanish language to draw inspiration for the syntactic and morphologic transformations the target text will have to deploy. Afro-Cuban bozal, in particular, offers an excellent source, because of the linguistic proximity of the African substrate and because its voice, now lost, can be heard not only in scholarly studies but in the literary work of writers who often were abolitionists and hence prioritized accuracy over parody when reproducing bozal speech (Lipski 2005).