J. Tsitsi Mutiti about the translation of Mapenzi to The Mad

 J. Tsitsi Mutiti's speech at the Harare launch of Ignatius Mabasa's The Mad

My sincere thanks to all who are gathered here to help us celebrate the completion and publishing of this English translation of Mapenzi to The Mad. I very much appreciate it.

I will begin by answering a question that I’ve been asked many times: why translation and why Mapenzi? The simple answer is that I fell in love with Hamundigone’s personality described by Memory Chirere as uncensored and sometimes utterly warm and likeable. I loved Bunny’s and Magi’s introspection. I loved all the characters because they are so relatable. These are not people to be pitied but strong people living their lives the best they can. They are people making the most of whatever resources are available to them to live their lives. 

The second reason is that I wanted to improve my halting Shona literacy. I could read Shona but not comfortably because I only had a few years of formal Shona education. What better way to improve on my Shona language than reading books in Shona? When I finished reading Mapenzi for the first time it stayed in my head. I think we need a word for books that stay with you for a long time. The way we have the word earworm in reference to songs that, when you hear them, continue playing in your head. While this book earworm was playing in my head I started wondering how Hamundigone would sound in English. Or Mai Jazz - how would her degree in popotology sound in English? 

Years ago, while at the University of Zimbabwe, I met Nhamo Mhiripiri and he introduced me to Russian literature. I became an enthusiastic fan of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy and others. Every week would find me haunting the library in search of my next Russian novel. At some point Nhamo and I had a conversation about the beauty of translation and how all these great books would have remained inaccessible to most of the world if they had remained in Russian. I asked, why our great novels, like Mungoshi’s Kunyarara Hakuzi Kutaura, haven’t been translated into English and he responded 'You could translate your favourite books'. I laughed and forgot about it because I thought he was teasing me – but here we are. The seed planted so long ago germinated when I started asking myself whether I could really do it? Could I really translate a book in Shona into English and produce something reasonably resembling the original?  And just like that I decided to try it. This translation basically started life as a private exercise aimed at improving my Shona and to see if I could do it – and here we are; so many years later the exercise has borne fruit.

What a journey it was! It has been a learning experience all the way. The very first paragraph in the first line “ndinoparadza zvisina mutsindo sehwai”, which I translated as “I am a lethal and silent destroyer, like a ram”. When I first read hwai I was thinking of sheep. The word sheep is not normally associated with anything menacing. I had a conversation with my colleagues who set me right by explaining how dangerous the male of the species could be. Hence the choice of ram in the translation.

The other thing I learned is how much we take our mother language for granted. Its words are so deeply imbedded in our minds that we usually don’t really think about the concepts these words represent. When translating this analysis becomes necessary so that a fitting word or phrase can be found. Sometimes this is a simple process, other times it’s a wrestling match.

Language is a patchwork made with words, culture and other beliefs peculiar to the speakers of language. Patchwork was my grandmother’s favourite pastime. She was one of those people who could never be idle, and patchwork was what she did when there was no work for her to do. She was able to do so much patchwork because my mother’s side hustle of sewing and selling clothes produced a lot of fabric scraps for Gogo’s work. It was my job to sort through the scraps left over from sewing and pack all the suitable pieces into “Box raGogo”. Gogo made her patchwork into pillows, quilts and sometimes tote-bags for us her grandchildren. Sometimes one of her grandchildren would say I want a quilt just like the one you made for Mukoma Hope. She tried but it was not always possible to replicate Mukoma Hope’s quilt because the contents of Box raGogo depended on what my mother was sewing at the time. I would dig into Box raGogo under her instructions looking for the bits she wanted. Sometimes we’d find fabrics in the right colours but with wrong textures. Or the right fabric but the wrong colours. Ultimately the second quilt would be its own thing but with a greater or lesser resemblance to Mukoma Hope’s quilt depending on the time that had passed.

In some ways translation is very much like Gogo trying to use scraps from box B to replicate a quilt made with scraps from box A. Take a simple concept like walking. Box A will have words like famba, fora, kanyaira, pesvaira, bhidhaira, dhanaira, digaira, chakwaira. Maybe even pesu-pesu or tutya-tutya.  Box B will have walk, march, stroll, tread, waddle, toddle, prance, sashay, power walk and so on. Sometimes the correspondence is immediately obvious but other times the choice from Box B takes a bit of thought and improvising. Sometimes Box B might not have a corresponding word at all and one has to make do with a phrase or even a sentence. Take the word Munhu. That’s simple enough to translate into English. But what of chimunhu? Or Zimunhu? Or a concept like ngozi that is intrinsic to Shona beliefs. Would karma be good enough to convey the idea? Avenging spirit? Or does it need a paragraph to convey the full meaning of what ngozi is? 

This means that the final product bears some resemblance to the original (hopefully a lot) but is in a way its own thing. Ultimately translation is an approximation and, as a translator, one has to accept that some things will be lost in translation: nuances, some emotional content, cultural aspects. The idea is to minimise these losses as much as possible. And also to avoid new things creeping into the story because of cultural differences or differences in beliefs and values between the original audience the book was written for and the target audience of the translation.

Dealing with cultural differences between original audience and target audience

Language and culture are so closely intertwined that any work in a particular language is also a reflection of that culture.  A culture likely to be foreign to the targeted reader. This presents a problem of how to handle these cultural differences. I think writers of sci-fi and fantasy who create worlds that have their peculiar cultures and rules also experience the same problems of how to convey these worlds to their readers in a way that the readers will understand. Writers like Frank Herbert in his Dune series or Isaac Asimov in his Foundation series do this by using quotations from various documents and commentaries said to exist in those worlds. The quotations bring the reader to the author by explaining and educating the reader about the world they enter when they read these books. Likewise the translators can do a similar thing through footnotes and glossaries. Other authors like Anne Leckie in her Ancillary Series and Ursula Le Guin in her EarthSea series simply get on with their story assuming the reader will be able to infer what kind of world it is and how things work in that world from the story. There is little detouring to explain the culture and values of these worlds. This is similar to how translators can bring the author to the reader in the same way. This second approach puts greater emphasis on entertaining the reader, while the first approach looks to educate the reader. The Mad underwent a transition from the first approach to the second approach at the suggestion of the editors. I think they made a good call. As I say this has been a learning experience for me. My original purpose in doing this translation for myself was superseded by a new purpose to translate for an actual audience. 

Finally our cultures determine our values and this is an area where a translator has to make decisions about whether to take the values of the target audience into consideration. I did not do this but translated everything as is because sexist attitudes, homophobia and violence are intrinsic to who we are. Happily, the editors remembered to put a disclaimer at the beginning of the book concerning these issues.

 I’d like to thank Ignatius Mabasa for trusting me with the work of translating his creation and I hope I have not mutilated it too badly. I would like to thank Jane Morris and Samantha Vhazure for the superb work they did in polishing my rough work. And thanks to amaBooks and Carnelian Heart Publishing for believing in this translation enough to publish it.