Chaka. Thomas Mofolo
is. Is it for the purpose of revealing the style of the original? Is it in order to convey the idiom of the original through a distortion of the receiving language, if that be necessary? Is it to find the closest equivalent idiom in the receiving language? If one’s translation is trying to reveal the style which the writer makes manifest through his intimate knowledge of the structure and idiomatic versatility of his language, then the receiving language almost invariably suffers. So too if the translation seeks to jolt the reader into an awareness of the idiom of the original, which gives an exotic flavour to the translation. I suppose that one could say that the best translation is one which blends all these together according to the translator’s poetic sensitivity.
Specific translation problems encountered
1. No dictionary equivalent in English
This involves culture-bound words, and has been handled in different ways. First, and perhaps most common, is that the original Sesotho word is retained, immediately preceded or followed by a defining statement, which is woven into the narrative in as unobtrusive a manner as possible. Here are some examples:
a.Mofolo tells how, during the festivities in the feast called by Senzangakhona in order to find a girl he could take as an additional wife, the young men went to the young women and asked them to “kana”. There being no one-to-one equivalent between “kana” and any English word I know, I made the young men ask the girls “to play the choose-a-lover game called ho kana”.
b.Mofolo says that ho kana is like the sedia-dia of the Basotho. I have said that it is like “the sedia-dia girls’ dance among the Basotho”.
c.Mofolo continues his comparison of the Zulu lovers’ game with Sesotho equivalents by stating that it is closer to ho iketa than to the sedia-dia. I have handled this like the others by saying “ho iketa whereby a girl offers herself to a young man for marriage without waiting to be asked”.
But even such definitions are not always adequate. For example, the girl who engages in ho iketa does not propose love to the young man as one has heard that women in Europe do during a leap year. The Mosotho girl engages in totally non-verbal behaviour in which symbolic acts are performed, the most important of which consists in her going to the young man’s home and sitting outside the courtyards in a certain attitude, thus demanding that her presence be recognised and certain rituals performed by her hoped-for in-laws.
2. No equivalent idiom
Sometimes I felt the original imagery had to be retained since it was so striking. But since a close (or “literal”) translation would make no sense in English, I often had to resort to a kind of paraphrase of the original. Here are two examples:
a.Mofolo describes the pain Senzangakhona felt when he had to expel his wife and son from home under the pressure of the senior wives by saying that Senzangakhona “swallowed a stone” and expelled them, in other words he performed a most painful act. I translated this as follows: “The pain was like swallowing a stone.”
b.When the woman doctor “works” on Chaka to strengthen him, her aim is that the young man should “have a liver”, and that explains why the major ingredients in the medicines she uses are the livers of brave and ferocious animals, and the liver of a brave warrior. The liver is the seat of bravery and courage, and to reflect this I translated this as: “he would also have bravery in his liver”.
But again one does not always feel that such paraphrases and/or amplifications are either necessary or useful. So I am afraid some inconsistency is inevitable.
3. The irrepressible stylistic feature
I have also sometimes felt that the style of the original needed to be reflected in the translation. Where I have succumbed to this, the result has been to introduce an element of exoticism (not deliberate nor for its own sake), at the same time stretching the idiom of the receiving language. In these situations a “free” translation would have smothered the freshness of the original. Here are some examples:
a.One of the hallmarks of Mofolo’s style is the use of various forms of repetition, resulting in a whole variety of parallelistic structures. In the following example, the effect of the repetition is to convey Mofolo’s admiration of his character, Chaka. It is Chaka’s first battle since he was enlisted in Dingiswayo’s armies, and he fights with adeptness, with courage, and with much grace, and he literally carves a path through the enemy’s ranks. Mofolo says:
a a b c
A sa kena,/ a sa kena/ ntweng,/ mora wa Senzangakhona
and I attempted to retain the a, b, c rhythmic pattern by translating:
a a b c
No sooner had he entered,/ no sooner entered/battle,/ the son of Senzangakhona
The rest of the sentence is: “than he felled men with his short spear, and he opened up gaps in the enemy ranks”.
b.Another repetition pattern, perhaps even more difficult to translate, is one where Mofolo uses synonymy whose effect is to lend greater emphasis to the statement. In many cases I have refrained from attempting to carry this structure over into my translation. One of the few cases where I could not resist the temptation is where Mofolo describes how the tree Isanusi needed for one of Chaka’s medicines, which bled when chopped, could only be cut by someone completely naked. The relevant sentence is translated: “The person chopping it had to be naked, totally nude.”
4. Second-language “interference”
Writing in Sesotho about a Zulu king, Mofolo could not help breaking into Zulu at certain appropriate moments. Where he has then gone on to provide a Sesotho translation, I have followed the practice of giving the original Zulu and then translating Mofolo’s Sesotho into English. It has sometimes been necessary to correct Mofolo’s translation of the Zulu. In that case I have translated direct from Zulu into English, placing my translation in parentheses; I have then translated Mofolo’s Sesotho translation of the Zulu as it is in the open text. In many cases, however, including the long praise poem for Chaka at the end of Chapter 17, Mofolo has not translated the Zulu into Sesotho. In those cases I have given my English translation in parentheses.
In this context, I should mention that Mofolo’s definition of the royal salutation “Bayede” is highly impressionistic and emotionally coloured. It reflects the sentiment that the greeting was god-inspired, having been revealed to Chaka in a dream, and thus confirming the growing myth that Chaka was chosen by the gods to come and teach the Zulu people the art of war. He is cast almost in the role of a Christ. It is this sentiment which Mofolo conveys when he says, “Bayede means he who stands between God and man, it means the junior god through whom the great God rules the kings of the earth and their nations.”
I must not leave the reader with the impression that the translation was nothing but problems. There were numerous passages, comprising the bulk of the book, where the translation flowed with amazing ease and grace, making one marvel at the close parallels in human thought in different cultures, and its conversion into the intricate system of sounds called language.
Daniel P. Kunene
1Albert Gérard, Four African Literatures: Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu, Amharic, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, p. 131.
2Thomas Mofolo, Moeti oa Bochabela, Morija, 1907.
3Thomas Mofolo, Pitseng, Morija, 1910.
4The full title is Leselinyana la Lesotho, first published in 1863, and still being published today.
5Paris, 1912.
6Livre d’Or, p. 509. The original French reads: “Un quatrième manuscrit, consacré par la même auteur à