Translation As meta-Creation: A Translator’s Experience (II)

I confronted this severally in this work and I had to pause, many times before deciding whether to give it as he said it or make a daring creative interrogation. The ones in dream sequences are easily handled as ‘realistic’—Adiitu’s dream to the ‘firmament’ or outskirts of heaven or Hades, or where? And his meeting […]

I confronted this severally in this work and I had to pause, many times before deciding whether to give it as he said it or make a daring creative interrogation. The ones in dream sequences are easily handled as ‘realistic’—Adiitu’s dream to the ‘firmament’ or outskirts of heaven or Hades, or where? And his meeting with his father and mother, Obiri-aye and Iponjudiran, as well as ‘those who had died before and those who knew him while on earth and embraced him’; the houses with more than a hundred rooms each’ and the town in heaven
whose beauty was difficult to describe adequately. The road was built with glass, the walls were in glass, and these glasses were in different colours…What was most marvelling was that the people of the town all looked like glasses so that if one approached from the front, one could see the person clearly from the rear’ (The Mysteries, p.67)
Faith in the fabulous, or sheer creative fidelity, based on the unmistakable reliance on and recourse to motifs ‘from oral traditional Yoruba folkore, folktales, knitted or indeed, structurally woven to attain  the proportion of epics, was required to proceed in the translation of Adiitu’s sojourn in the forest (p. 47-66) and his rags-to-riches story. Seven years with only his old school uniform! His encounters with animals in the forest; his fight with the python, the shark, his taming of the lion who became his friend and the colony of apes whom he held weekly meetings wit and feted; his pile of ivory, revealed to him by his lion friend which remained there for him to fetch and sell and make pots of money from…
What marvellous realism can surpass story of Adiitu and Iyun-ade in the shipwreck and their two month sojourn in the forest?  The capsized Ferry and the coincidence of the two-some holding to two ends of a broken piece of the Ferry intrigue.
 This broken part of the ferry was very long and Adiitu was unable to see what was going on at the other side. After sometime, when then this broken piece had been carrying Adiitu, it birthed on the beach finally and Adiitu held on to a tree, planted his foot firmly on the ground and stepped onto the shore. As he looked ahead of him, whom did he see? Iyun-ade! She had held unto the same split ferry on the other side. Of all the passengers on the ferry, it was only these two-some that escaped death. It was a strange shore, where they knew nobody and saw nobody
This appears as a plausible space/love nest for inevitable match-making. Two months of sojourn and all the strange accidents of survival—the meal prepared from home by Adiitu, the floating box full of plates, soup pots, candles and matches , female dresses, box of Gari, with salt and pepper, the rescue of Iyun-ade from the Human Eaters ( which I also translated as carnivores) at the nick of time just as ‘they were performing their ritual, dancing around Iyun-ade in accordance with their custom before roasting their human-catch to feast on. And, the best of this love-locale is the love missive—individual determination to propose marriage. Now, how does one choose the English diction, apt syntax, to capture the poetry of love expression by these two in the love-nest? Read the letters of marriage proposition by the two (Adiitu and Iyun-ade). A short piece from Adiitu’s letter will suffice:
A bird like Okin is rare among birds. The Okin is more beautiful than them all. The egret has a flourish of black like the sparrow, it had red spots like woodcock, and it has white quills like ologose. The dove cannot perch where okin perches and the oriri dare not chirrup in the presence of okin. Alapande and the parrot, Ibaaka and Ega, the cattle egret and the patridge, odere koko and Asere—all these birds will hurtle together wherever okin perches…It is more prosperous than they are and it is found with prosperous persons in prosperous homes. Iyunade, you are my okin. There is none to compare you with among women. You surpass them all.
 The task of capturing the figures and images of love requires meta-creation, without losing the tenor and phraseology of the Original Text. What about the difficulty of finding English equivalents of l the birds that provide the aval metaphor to give a lucidly apt exquisite beauty of Iyunade?
Now, talking about syntactic and figurative idiosyncrasy of the Fagunwa narrative style and the ordeal of the translator’s meta-narration, I will pick a single example, one which is fairly typical. This is the deployment of anti-similes (subversion of similes) to draw verisimilitude in describing human physique. One is the occasion of the description of the exquisite handsomeness of Adiitu Olodumare, match-able only by the most beautiful of women. ‘But the fact that he did not’ repeated severally to separate Adiitu, a non-pareil of beauty from being mistaken for a woman;
But for the fact that he did not plait his hair, did not knot wrapper like a woman, did not wear eye-lashes nor manicure his nails, but that he did not carry a handbag and did not cat-walk like a self-conscious modern day lady, we would have mistaken the man for a woman
This set of negatives strung in much longer descriptive narrative to depict the ‘beauty of Adiitu was preceded by a barrage of absences encoded in negatives—was nots-  his neck was not as long as the ostrich; his skin was not complicated as that of the masquerade; his back was not as rough as the back of the tortoise; his head was not to big (The Mysteries, p.3.)