I must begin with an expression of deep appreciation to the Fagunwa Foundation, Fagunwa Studies Group, the very fore-sighted Centre for Black African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC) and the dynamic Government of Ondo State, as well as their other collaborators in making this International Conference commemorating the Golden Jubilee of the demise of D.O. Fagunwa possible. The Foundation itself and its annual activities, including this Confab, removes, quite delightfully, the late Fagunwa from the miserable, lengthy list of Nigeria’s unsung heroes of the nation’s literati who have joined their ancestors. It also affords us the opportunity to contribute to the on-going erection of monuments without walls for the foremost Yoruba novelist and one of Africa’s most prominent writers in any indigenous language.
I have expressed, unabashedly, In the Preface to The Mysteries of God: A Translation of D.O. Fagunwa’s Adiitu Olodumare, that my effort was a mere attempt by a non-initiate, an amateur without any ‘training (n)or practice in the art of translation, either of transferring material through a metaphase (giving a word-for-word literal rendering) or a paraphrase (offering in one’s own word). The experience that I share here is the travail, or self-imposed ordeal, of a one-eyed man in one of Fagunwa’s numerous forests of words and ideas woven through dream-visions, adventure tales of men and spirits, real and ethereal elements, beings and gnomes, human and animal worlds, and so on. It is a journey of the untutored in a discipline with ‘all its nuances and complex matters of context, behaviours of the grammars of two languages’; their departing and meshing roads and cross-roads in the rules and conventions of their writing, their idioms, tropes, images and figurative.
I am mindful of Eugene Nida’s (1991:19) warning about translators’ covert pride in claiming ignorance of theories in translation, or inter-lingual communication (quoting Bell). She asserts that ‘all persons engaged in the complex task of translating possess some type of underlying or covert theory, even though it may be still very embryonic and described as just being ‘faithful to what the author was trying to say.’ If her assertions persuade you, there is no way my claim can move you. It makes the matter more intriguing. But one finds solace in her further revelation of the age-old complexities in the art of translation or, again, ‘the paradoxes of inter-lingual communication’ and its naturalness. She advances the authorities of I.A. Richards (1953), Harris and Sherwood (1978) on the great variety of translation theories and sub-theories as reason;
the fact that the processes of translating can be viewed from so many different perspectives; stylistics, author’s intent, diversity of languages, differences of corresponding cultures, changes in literary fashion, distinct kinds of content’, etc.
In my experience with this work, all of these and more waged violent wars inside me.
I shall attempt to tell you what I found and what I did not find, in a rather unstructured manner, the least of which, again as averred in the Preface, is that try as you may, in the translation of the last full-length novel of the patriarch of Yoruba literature, with its deployment of his boundless creative imagination and power of complex narration, is a cross-bridge between a ‘product of an inexact science’ without precise ‘encoding and decoding equivalents from the Yoruba to English and the product of a bi-cultural being ‘ struggling for a balance between fidelity’ to Original Text (OT) in Yoruba and a credible rendering of Translated Text (TT) in the target language of English. This is a summary of my original confession of finding already available in the work. What compounds the matter is the awesome comments of respected scholars of the work of our subject—from Bamgbose to Soyinka, and from Lindfors to Irele, anyone who wishes to translate Fagunwa’s work must have the courage of a lion. Irele’s defines Fagunwa’s works in one of such profound and intimidating ways as I describe above and recently quoted by Ahmed Yerima (2013) thus;
the most obvious characteristic of Fagunwa’s world is its fusion into a comprehensive theatre of human drama of the natural and supernatural realms. His characters exist and move within an imaginative framework whose frontiers are wider and more extensive than that of the conventional, realistic novel, a universe in which the ‘normal barriers between the physical and the spiritual would have been dissolved
First, I discovered that for any meaningful translation of Adiitu Olodumare, (which unquestionably, is Fagunwa’s most palpably and consciously didactic and morally-burdened novel), the translator must catapult the level of his imagination to at least fifty percent of the creative imagination of the author of Original Text. He must render an imaginative translation; he must engage in meta-creation from the mega-creation of OT. Paradoxically, you must not over-indulge in the art of creative interpretation that produces an alternative text, instead of a translation. You therefore must be a creative non-creator. And this begins right from the beginning—choosing a title. The Original text carries an eponymous character. Adiitu Olodumare is the protagonist (if that personage can be invoked without over-generalizing in a text like this) of the novel that carries his name as its title. You will find that I took a creative license to depart from the eponymous to the near –descriptive –translating the name, Adiitu Oldumare as The Mysteries of God, and making that translated from the title rather the personae’/subject. I notice that I am not alone in that creative liberty of providing a new name for the book title. Whole Soyinka did same for the title of Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale, which he freely translates as The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, completely editing out the brave hunter from the title. So did Osofisan in his adaptation—and by the way creative interpretation is more conventional in theatrical adaptation than in translation. In it, the ‘new author’ has a greater creative license, ownership right and liberty than the translator. Osofisan took a liberty of difference, far-flung from the original title, except in maintaining the meaning of Ireke, Sugarcane. This was not even allowed to stand on its own, without carrying a human personality, Sugarcane man. Hence, we get a title that is as ambitious as Soyinka’s—The Fabulous Adventure of the Sugarcane Man. The comparison cannot be carried beyond this general level, since, as I have averred earlier, Adiitu Olodumanre is the only Fagunwa title that is eponymous.
