Three translations from Hausa with a note

You are a wonder Dije, As wonderful as Mary and Queen Sheba The great charm of Joseph Is a child’s play compared to your beauty He took only a fraction of your grace You let him have just a little of your prettiness His popularly known charming face Cannot match the beauty of your ankles […]

You are a wonder Dije,

As wonderful as Mary and Queen Sheba

The great charm of Joseph

Is a child’s play compared to your beauty

He took only a fraction of your grace

You let him have just a little of your prettiness

His popularly known charming face

Cannot match the beauty of your ankles

In days gone by

The sun, moon, and stars were all utterly dark

They got their light on the day of your emergence

From the heavens just for a stroll

In their confusion, they thought it was the Divine Deity

Glory to the King chanted all that were present

The sun in her jumble bowed in deference

Only to realise it was you she was addressing

The moon only bowed halfway then he realised

That it was you, for he beheld your hand

The entire stars in the heavens refused to bow

Except Venus and Mercury who did

This explains the brightness of the sun and moon

As well as “Zara” the brightest of all stars

This explains the variation in brightness

Among the heavenly stars; some bright, some dull

Such was the division by the Almighty

Based on each star’s compliance.

Harun al-Rashid–  The Well-Watered Pastures of Love

What could I possibly tell you that you haven’t heard before?

Are you startled by a bashful love?

Even God the Almighty knows I belong to you,

I don’t have any thought save yours.

When I’m in the midst of my friends

All my thoughts go to you.

It’s only my hollow body that’s there with them,

My mind’s with you.

Your gaiety steps, o my God! I can’t even describe them,

I get jealous when you’re the subject of discussion.

Your face is brighter than the moon,

The moon couldn’t manage a smile like yours.

Your hair is more alluring than gold,

You’ve graceful eyes like those of an antelope.

They said you’re created just for me,

And the Almighty sustains my life just for you as well.

Salisu Sa’adu–  Zainabu

Love Tambai you did Zainabu Abu

Loved him like a ferocious winter blaze

You ditched Haliru (for his sake)

Despite thousands of your suitors

Such as Kabiru who loved you madly

But whom you’ve also forsaken (for Tambai)

Zainabu a true friend

So faithful you’ve been to Tambai

The one who initiated you into the art of love

The one full of feelings for you

He took you for what you are

Took you away from Razak

Great wonder it is, Zainabu

That after you’ve fallen for Tambai

After he has found you

Got hold of you

After you’ve given in to him

He then turned his back on you

What a world full of irony!

After you’ve suffered and resisted forced marriage

(Now) see how your husband let you down

Your emotional turmoil is inestimable

Behold your teary eyes

In an estranged land

Now what Zainabu?

In your present state of sorrow

With your many kids and matrimonial responsibility

Tambai is turning a new leaf

Taking a new wife

A girl named Laure

Zainabu what a sad event!

(Tambai has) done you a blow

By being a friend of Barau

He has gone into evil ways

Gone into womanising

Tambai has abandoned the truth.

A note on translation

What, by now, must have become a stereotypical image of translation (one that is beloved of most literary translators) is that of the transfer of water from one container to another. Certainly this transfer leads to spilling of water. With poetry (as it is with some writers much more than with others) spillage occurs; and it is, most of the time, a huge problem for the translator. And the sooner a translator, more especially a poetry translator, accepts that leakiness and spillage is endemic to the process of translation the better for her. This is very important, since this realisation avails the translator some uncluttered space and some kind of freedom to carry out her translation and best serves the original poet.

Often literary translations are inherently designed to flow rather “smoothly” or “fluently”, i.e. to as much as possible be read as if they had been written in the target language in the first place. This may not be unconnected with the language of translation studies (translatology) which often asserts rather tendentiously that appropriate translation norms should be, or are necessarily, assimilationist and are also strongly based on, or geared towards, naturalisation.

Vladimir Nabokov is known to have taken a contrary stand and expressed utter scorn for what he cheekily called “paraphrases [which] possess the charm of stylistic diction and idiomatic conciseness”. As such nothing, Nabokov claims, annoys him more than to read a review of a translated work, praising a translator for having produced a smooth and fluent version of a foreign work: “In other words, a hack who has never read the original, and does not know its language, praises an imitation as readable because easy platitudes have replaced in it the intricacies of which he is unaware”. Nabokov’s attack on stylishness in translation is really a defence of his own pedantic practice of translation. For Nabokov’s decision to settle for an extremely literal rendering, with footnotes to explain background and alternative readings, is justifiable; but it is not generalisable to a new work that has yet to acquire its first readers, let alone cultural legitimacy in the receiving language.

Though not a translator himself, Robert Frost once famously remarked that “poetry” is “what gets left out in translation”; and this remark is not, in the field of translation, sadly uncommon or out of place. But many, both translators and others alike, who hold this view do not necessarily make clear what they mean by the omitted “poetry” and still less agree on it with others who share that view. For me, an over-arching concern in making this modest effort of translation has been to counter that criticism as much as I can. (Though as James Kirkup argues, it is not that poetry is untranslatable, but rather in “most translation of poetry, it is the poetry that vanishes, leaving only heaps of dead words”). And in order to do so, as many redoubtable translators have done before, it seems to me necessary to aim at preserving both the clarity the everyday nature of the poems’ diction, including their many varied moods, and also conveying something of what, nevertheless, remains their special quality. The possibility of the above might be what Goethe refers to in his poem “An Equation” when he says, upon hearing a translation of one of his poems, that “a marvel came to pass” as if the changed words “still stood in their mother earth. . . marvellously strange in an alien tongue”. With poetry, the form of a translated poem, ala Goethe “must be thought through”. It is that which has to do with making a poem something more than, and yet consistent with, the subject matter and its importance.

Translation is often assumed to be invisible and, so the assumption goes, should also be quietly unnoticeable. It should, like a good wife, be faithful too. I beg to disagree slightly.  While a good translation, all translation worth the name, would be in the appropriate sense, in the most appropriate target language, say English; yet I would not want it to “iron out” all the cultural idiosyncrasies of its original. I admire a translation that lets you see where it has come from. A good translation makes the reader rejoice in the difference of the culture being presented, as well as simultaneously making the reader feel at home in it. For translation is, in a way, magical: one poem gets changed into another. As Michelle Roberts argues, “metamorphosis and transformation happen because of translation”. As one book changes via translation into another, so the reader is also changed by absorbing it. For the root word for translation is the Latin for being “carried across”.

One major problem is that of finding a tone (less a pitch) for the translation which would reflect the deceptive simplicity of the original while avoiding a descent into the banal, a problem compounded by the richness of English vocabulary which  could make an over-literal rendering from Hausa sound too simplistic and repetitive. As Christopher Middleton argues, translation is a species of mime, and as the mime embodies another person, the translator inheres (or what Middleton calls “envoices”) other voices in her own tonal scale, as the translator goes into the text, she teases out of herself a faculty for hearing the nuances, she catches twisted rays of splendour and untwist them. Literal translation can be useful in providing us with black and white   snapshot of the original but a version, however subjective, seeks to restore a light and colour perspective.

All translation is impossible in certain ways, and all possible translation must be done. An anecdote that has achieved a status of classic in translation circle goes that a long time ago theologians believed that translation meant invariably the immediate removal to heaven of a body without intervening death, the intact and beautiful body. But anyone who ever translates knows that the body never comes across perfectly and purely. For a literal, word-by-word translation is hardly a shadow of the original, and an imitation, in which the poet converts a text from another language (which she may not know) to a mirror image of her own style, is a way of possessing a poem that her imagination did not create. The problem of translating from Hausa is of a far higher range of difficulty than the problem of translating from other languages into English. The whole visual effects in terms of the sheer number of words in Hausa are different, but above all the auditory effects cannot be in any way reproduced. All translations are a shadow cast by the live body of the original poem. The translator’s job is to pump blood into the shadow. She never wholly brings it back to life, but she can make it breathe.

As Ulli Beier perceptively argues, translating poetry from a different culture, the problem often is that the translated text is inundated with an entanglement of notes to explain either unusual phrases or words or problem of context and unfamiliar references. But the problem can sometime be overcome by a careful selection. According to Beier scholarly translation of, say, Hausa poems may tend to include everything (however untranslatable) while in literary translation whose purpose is to convey the feeling and mood of Hausa poetry to the English reader may have to leave out material that is of purely anthropological interest unless it is absolutely necessary, as it is hoped here with this translation; a small selection that strives to be transposed successfully into English.

Translators of poetry tend either towards the depressive or the manic. On one hand lies the anxious, the scrupulous, above all the literal word-for-word translation from their original language. On the other hand is a more relaxed, more creative approach, which leads to something that is not quite an original poem, not quite a translation either. In these versions (they are simultaneously “versions”, “translations” and “imitations”), I have attempted to make poetry in English from the Hausa texts, to make something that possessed its own integrity and life, something faithful but not something tame.

In a conversation with his Russian translator, Nazim Hikmet, the pre-eminent Turkish poet, is reported to have said: “I don’t believe that translating poetry is possible. But I wouldn’t really mind if a translator turned my verse into prose provided he didn’t attempt to alter what I originally put down”. In doing these poems into English, I have borne this remark in mind. Though I have remained faithful to the poems’ line arrangement, I would also like to believe that I have avoided altering the meaning of the poems.

I have decided to let the poems stand alone, without notes or explanation; but I have also tried to find ways of making them into poems in English, and which follow the spirit, mood and agenda of the original Hausa poem. Above all, I have tried to remain sensitive to what one might call the discrete quest for “subtle style” among most of the poems, a style that seeks to avoid affectation while repudiating, to certain extent, the colloquial.

Translation can be a more intimate and nitty-gritty experience than reading. One must somehow get inside the poem and inhabit it. A verbal transfusion should happen. The hard, dividing wall of language and “otherness” shatter, or melt or evanesce. The poem being translated becomes air, food, water, sun. Both the original poem and the translation find homes in the translator’s head. And if the translator is also a writer, the most fertile rain drenches her projects in embryonic stages. A translator, especially a poetry translator has to possess the “mind” and “imagination” of a poet, since a translated poem must not just be a mere translation (or rather translationese) but necessarily a living work of art in its own way.