Source: Bruce-Humes.com (12/19/18)
2018 Round-up: AfroLit in Chinese Translation
By Bruce Humes
What a difference a year makes.
In 2017, readers in mainland China keen to experiment and read newly translated novels from Africa could choose from just 8 titles, all translated from English or French, and weighted in favor of high-profile “diaspora” authors writing from abroad, such as Chimamanda Adichie and Alain Mabanckou. And 3 of those books were written by Nigerians.
Mia Couto’s “Terra Sonâmbula”: One of several Lusophone novels to be rendered in Chinese within 2018.
As 2018 comes to an end, according to the bilingual database African Writing in Chinese Translation, there are 143 titles dating from the sixties through today — mainly novels, but including short story and poetry collections — from which to choose.
The 2018 batch of new titles — 13 in all — looks rather more varied. To wit:
- The majority were penned in Portuguese or Arabic
- Four of the authors hail from Lusophone countries (Angola, Mozambique), three from countries bordering on the Mediterranean, and the others are natives of sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa)
- Novels, short stories and drama are all represented
Variety aside, another good sign is that by and large, the newer titles have been translated from their original language, in this case, mainly Portuguese and Arabic. I have not confirmed this with the publishers, but my online research indicates that several of the translators hold advanced degrees in these tongues, and have translated several books from them.
China-based publishers are notorious for a misleading practice: the nationality of the author — not necessarily the language of the source text — is often noted on the spine or copyright page. Thus the reader may well believe she is reading a novel translated direct from the Swahili, when the source text is actually the English rendition of a Swahili original. The reason: a dearth of translators from certain languages, and often, the desire to cut costs and shorten time-to-market by translating from the English.
Tawfiq al-Hakim’s “People of the Cave”: Arguably Egypt’s first script destined for production on a stage.
As detailed recently in Can Literary Exports Change Chinese Perceptions of Africa?, there have been “three waves of African literary imports”:
The first, which emerged in the 1980s, was ideologically driven. Empowered by Beijing’s policy of promoting solidarity with the Third World and newly independent nations, state-run imprints like the Foreign Literature Publishing House translated and published a substantial number of African works such as those by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Senegalese poet (and former president) Léopold Sédar Senghor, and the Algerian writer Mouloud Mammeri. Anthologies of translated African folktales for children even appeared.
During the ’90s and 2000s, imported African literature was top-heavy with winners of globally recognized awards such as the Nobel Prize in Literature. Imports slowed and tended to focus less on the works of socialist-inspired thinkers in favor of high-profile Nobel laureates such as J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, both with South African roots, and Egypt’s Naguib Mahfouz.
By comparison, the 2018 crop appears refreshingly distinct. Admittedly, there are two authors on the list, Chimamanda Adichie (a recidivist) and Mia Couto, who can be counted on to sell well because of their notoriety. But they have proven themselves mainly in the global marketplace; they are not Nobel
Laureates or Booker Prize Winners as were a few of the first African authors — such as Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka — who were subsequently widely published in Chinese (Still Stuck on “Things Fall Apart?“).
The latest from “African diaspora” writer Chimamanda Adichie
Several of the 13 new titles are translations of works that were actually published decades ago, and thus were obviously not chosen for their current popularity. They include People of the Cave, a play by Egypt’s Tawfiq al-Hakim, first published in 1933; Secret Lives and Other Stories by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, known for his insistence on writing in his mother tongue Kikuyu, published in 1975; and a short story collection featuring 14 South African authors writing in the years leading up to the beginning of black-majority rule in 1994.