Mawuli Adjei
Kofi Anyidoho’s poetry, spanning half a century, covers a large body of works in Ewe and English. The poet has performed his Ewe and English poems extensively on various platforms and commemorative occasions and also on radio, television and audio recordings. As the appreciation and appetite for Anyidoho’s poetry grows, so is there a growing need to make his Ewe poems accessible to a wider audience outside the Ewe linguistic circle – in English and other languages. As someone currently engaged in co-translating selections of Anyidoho’s Ewe poems from Ghananya into English (with Professor Patron Henekou of University of Lome, Togo), in this paper, I explore, from theoretical and practical perspectives, the burden of translating poetry across linguistic zones, with particular reference to Anyidoho’s Ewe poems. I will critically discuss my engagements with the selected Ewe poems, drawing attention to Ewe as a tonal language steeped in deep-layered idiomatic texture; how poetic diction and imagery adapted from Ewe folklore, mythology and philosophy are captured in Anyidoho’s Ewe poems with a touch of artistic complexity and aesthetic sublimity, and the intricate balancing act of conveying the nuances of such poetic language into English – employing various translation techniques, including semantic equivalence/reformulation, modulation, approximation, etc., without much injury to the original texts.
There are several translation theories, methodologies and techniques, as well as a groundswell of studies that explore and discuss the subject from varying angles (Newmark, 1988, 1989, 1991), Fawcett (1997), Munday (2001), Palupi (2002), Glynn (2021), Inggs & Wehrmeyer (2021), among others. According to Newmark, ‘translation is rendering the meaning of a text into another language’ (1988, p.5). However, translating from one culture to another needs the experience in one’s language, in determining its uniqueness from among other languages and skills in multicultural mediation. Therefore, translation or any form of transference cross-linguistically is more than simply translating the words, it is also translating the concepts; concepts belonging to a specific civilization, concepts that belong to a people with their own way of thinking, with equal focus on the source text as a work of literature.
The translator, resources and methodology
With regard to translating Ewe poems into English, Nayo’s translation of celebrated Anlo-Ewe poet-cantor Henoga Akpalu Vinoko’s dirges into English (1964), Kofi Awoonor’s translation of selected poems of some of the greatest Anlo-Ewe poets/singers in Guardians of the Sacred Word (1974), as well as Anyidoho’s own attempts at translating some of his original Ewe poems into English, and the other way round, constitute a working template, to some extent, which can be adapted to the present project.
Translating Kofi Anyidoho’s Ewe poems into English presents a daunting set of challenges due to the Ewe language’s rich literary and cultural heritage. Without overstating it, Anyidoho’s works are deeply rooted in Ewe oral poetry, folklore, history and worldview. Therefore, translating his poems requires not only linguistic skills but also a deep understanding of Ewe culture and literature. The translator of Anyidoho’s poems must, therefore, take on board a good knowledge and understanding of Ewe culture, which, like any other culture, has its unique symbols, values and norms that influence its literature. The translator should be able to critically navigate the cultural significance and intricacies of the sociolinguistic implications of metaphors and convey them effectively in English. The translator must also bear in mind that Ewe and English are two different languages with their unique idiomatic expressions, colloquialisms, collocations, semiotics and cultural references. There is also the poet’s use of innovative style and use of the Ewe language, including coinage of new words and expressions. The overall objective, therefore, is to establish a level of sensitivity to the poems’ metaphors, rhythm, music and cultural context in order to produce a high-quality translation that captures the beauty and meaning of the original poems.
Lost and gained in translation: Kofi Anyidoho’s poems in translation
In the following paragraphs, I shall discuss some samples of my translations of Anyidoho’s poems from Ewe into English, based on the preliminary propositions above.
To begin with, a major issue to contend with has to do with Ewe titles, names, phrases, terms, maxims, metaphors, etc. that are used in Anyidoho’s poems. Ewe names, in particular, have meaning and context, and most derive from Ewe philosophy, worldview, history, social organization and spirituality (Gbolonyo, 2009; Aziaku, 2016). They, therefore, carry a huge baggage of cultural implications that are virtually lost in translation if one loosely adopts word-for-word, semantic equivalence or any kind of substitution in translation. The names must, therefore, be subsumed in the general fabric of layers of meaning and aesthetic appeal of the poems.
Each poem in the collection has a Ewe title, including Ghananya itself, the collection from which the selections for translation were drawn. The immediate dilemma for the translator is: whether to retain the Ewe titles, or to render them in translation for the benefit of the English reader. Take ‘Ghananya’, for instance: Translating it as ‘Ghana Palaver’, ‘Ghana Affair’ or ‘Ghana Matter’ would convey the intended meaning due to the implied sense of unpredictability, confusion or danger that characterizes Ghana’s socio-political discourse, if one does not tread cautiously. ‘Palaver’, in my view as translator, just about captures the connotations of the word in Ghanaian usage across linguistic hierarchies – from educated Ghanaian English to pidgin. However, in a literary sense, ‘Ghanaya’, which is repeated ten (10) times in the poem, each time with incremental allusive and sarcastic tenor, transcends the limited import of ‘palaver’ or ‘affair’ or ‘matter’. What this implies is that the reader comes to terms with the original Ewe titles and names and makes meaning of them in the context of the entire poem.
Let us take, for instance, an excerpt from the poem ‘Agbesinyale’, which opens as follows:
There go Agbesinyale and Agbelengɔ
Waving flaming torches rehearsing war games
Threatening hellfire spewing venom
Towards Zadokelikɔƒe
They say all the affairs of the world have become Thunder-god’s sacred axe
Stuck between the teeth of the Deity
The two names ‘Agbesinyale’ (the title) and ‘Agbelengɔ’ present no contextual problem for Ewe readers who know and understand the loaded meanings of those two names and can easily relate them to the ravages of life which the names, derived from Ewe worldview and spirituality, convey, and which pervade the entire poem. ‘Agbesinyale’, or, literally, ‘It is in the hands of life that matters are’, idiomatically translates as, ‘If one lives long, he’ll succeed in life’. ‘Agbelengɔ’, on the other hand, translates literally as, ‘There’s life ahead’. The thrust of the message in the poem is thus borne by these two names, and which become clearer by the end of the poem. ‘Zadokelikɔƒe’ makes very little sense if translated as ‘Eclipse of the Sun Village’ (quite a mouthful for the name of a village) in the metaphoric sense in which it is used in the poem. Similarly, in ‘They say all the affairs of the world have become Thunder-god’s sacred axe/Stuck between the teeth of the Deity’, the Ewe idiom ‘Sofia’, which has been rendered literally as ‘Thunder god’s sacred axe’ (from ‘So’ – ‘Thunder-god’ – and ‘fia’ – ‘axe’), with its qualification as ‘sacred’ by the translator (which is not in the original text), does great disservice to the poem in terms of the religio-spiritual sense in which ‘Sofia’ is used, with reference to the Ewe Thunder-god and the myths, rituals and folk knowledge associated with it.
‘Agbosege’ in ‘Agbe Ƒe Avi’ (literally ‘Life’s Cry’), translated as ‘Life’s Lamentations’, a recurrent mention in the above poem (and a couple of others), is much more than ‘sea turtle’ in both connotation and denotation. There is a sense in which the name is meant to carry what it represents in terms of size and weight, captured forcefully in its tri-syllabic composition: ‘Agbo/Se/Ge’. ‘Agbo’ stands for ‘ram’, but it also denotes ‘big size’ (same in the Ga language); ‘Se/ge’ (tonally with a grave accent on both syllables and where tone is a unit of semantics), on the other hand, has to do with heavy weight, particularly weight that hangs heavily and ominously in the air and which, when borne on the head by someone, is impossible to carry. And this is exactly what the poet-personal laments in the entire poem. See excerpt below:
All my life’s story has become okro soup unable to stand firm in the ladle’s hold
The travails of the world have become the Agbosege
I carry on my bare head
In terms of poetic diction, therefore, ‘sea turtle’ does not carry any such semantic import, hence Anyidoho’s persistent use of ‘Agbosege’, with all its implications in the contexts in which it is used – as an enormous existential burden. The poem also features a number of other interesting constructions which, for constraint of space, are not captured in this discussion. However, what is not lost, in totality, is the resonance of orality, rooted in the speaking voice of the persona in his engagement with the audience.
A poem like ‘Eʋe ho aʋa’ (by far the longest poem in the selection), which takes a panoramic sweep of the entire Ewe landscape, from community to community, and their geographical, historical and cultural traits, presents its own problems of translation in respect of the names of towns and their traditional appellations, which are better left untouched. The closest one comes to translating ‘Eʋe ho aʋa’ into English is: ‘Eʋe on the warpath’. It is the note on which the poem opens, in a two-line incremental repetition. In my estimation, ‘ho aʋa’ conveys a much more dramatic scenario of activities than merely being ‘on the warpath’. The two words taken together evoke a sense of tumultuous eruption captured especially in the word ‘ho’, which literally means ‘uproot’, with implications of a forceful mass action of movement of people. Compounded with ‘aʋa’ (‘war’), the martial picture is more engaging than what the simplicity of ‘on the warpath’ captures in English. However, as an example of semantic equivalence, it comes in handy, as in other cases of similar renditions in English. In terms of generic form, like Wole Soyinka’s ‘Idanre’ (which uses Yoruba myths and symbols to construct a Yoruba creation myth), the entire poem comes across as an Ewe creation myth, and a fast-paced free verse narrative that graphically mimics people on the warpath. Take note of the opening lines of the poem:
Ewe on the warpath
The Ewe have waged a war
Ewe enclaves are embedded in gunpowder
All the way from Betsi to Bedo
Ferocious beasts and wild animals
Are engaged in a scuffle on the forehead of the Adaklu Mountain
The main focus in this discussion is on the title poem ‘Ghananya’, which will be analysed in detail; a redacted presentation of the Halo poem ‘Awoyo’, as well as ‘Agbe Ƒe Avi’ (in full).
GHANANYA | |
| |
Hmmm Ghananya! | |
Ghananya is a marshland | |
Also clayey morass | |
It’s as slippery as okro soup poured on mirror | |
Ghananya is so slippery | 5 |
Deer, reindeer, antelopes, leopards | |
And other four-footed animals | |
Survey the sky with keen eyes scan the ground | |
Probe deeper still into the crust of earth | |
Before they leap onto Ghananya | 10 |
| |
Ghananya is so slippery | |
Even mudfish have to tug at each other’s tails to move ahead | |
I say Ghananya is a marshland | |
So slippery the tongue that speaks it | |
A creative tongue it must be | 15 |
| |
Therefore any child that for want of care | |
Pokes his long pointed mouth | |
Into Ghananya with reckless glee | |
If all his affairs do not turn into drib-drab mish-mash slime | |
Some surely would | 20 |
| |
Ghananya is just like wetland | |
Baptized by dawn, noon and sundown drizzle | |
Mesmerizing swathes of lush glistening gleaming dreamy greenery | |
| |
But woe betide the infant who knows not the mysteries of the hunters’ world | |
Who tiptoes gingerly gingerly gingerly | 25 |
Chest held high, balancing on one leg | |
Then plunges with a thunderous splash in Ghananya | |
He would tumble roll somersault till he lands in Underworld | |
| |
I say, it was Crab that said | |
He’s endowed with eight feet | 30 |
And two mighty claws for good measure | |
But when he encounters Ghananya | |
Roller-coasting like a boulder downhill | |
The distant untrodden footpaths…the lonely orphaned trails | |
The coastline margins…the far-flung fringes | 35 |
Would he tread cautiously warily guardedly | |
Ei! GHANANYA. | |
‘Ghananya’ opens with a muted invocation: ‘Hmmm Ghananya!’ This invocation is at the centre of the entire narrative. As with other poems in the collection, it is contemplative, reflective/reflexive, and conversational: ‘I say Ghananya is a marshland’; ‘I say, it was the Crab that said/He’s endowed with eight feet/And two mighty claws for good measure…’ It features a plethora of descriptive Ewe words and phrases are almost impossible to render in English translation. The translator can only scramble approximations in English. For instance, how exactly does one translate Ewe figures of speech and imagery that invoke the five (or even sixth or seventh) human senses: the visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory? Often, in Anyidoho’s poetry, one encounters sophisticated imagery that seem to defy easy translation, particularly polysyllabic words, structures of compounding and reduplication as well as neologisms (the poet’s own coinages), because there are hardly cross-linguistic forms of mediation between Ewe and English in that regard. ‘Ghananya’ features a number of expressions such as ‘drigbadrigba’/’drigbedrigbe’ (diminutive form of the former), ‘mlɔmlɔmlɔ’, minyaminyaminya’, ‘goŋu goŋu goŋu goŋu’, ‘fuuu’, ‘gboyaa’, ‘ tsyɔƒui’, etc. These expressions have their renditions in English, arrived at in translation by adopting a dynamic semantic approach without recourse to the words in the original Ewe text. Ideally, they are better assessed when the source text (ST) and target text (TT) are placed side by side in full. However, below are how the expressions in reference have been translated into English:
•minyaminyaminya (visual/auditory imagery)
This polysyllabic expression is self-revelatory of an action undertaken stealthily, warily, quietly, gingerly. In translation, I opted for a single word ‘gingerly’, which, in my view, can replicate the action repetitively:
But woe betide the infant who knows not the mysteries of the hunters’ world
Who tiptoes gingerly gingerly gingerly (lines 24–25)
•fuuu (auditory/onomatopoeic imagery)
The expression is used to describe the sound made when an object is immersed in water. The lines have been translated as:
Therefore any child that for want of care
Pokes his long pointed mouth
Into Ghananya with reckless glee (lines 16–18)
The emphasis here has shifted from the auditory/onomatopoeic to something to do with recklessness, an unguarded moment when a careless person, literally, plunges into something, especially a matter he/she better steer of. The sound, which cannot be adequately captured in English translation, is here implied.
•gboyaa (auditory/onomatopoeic imagery)
As in ‘fuuu’ above, and in the same context, the expression is reduced to a dynamic equivalence in the English translation where ‘gboyaa’ becomes ‘a thunderous splash’ – in which case the onomatopoeic resonance is lost – as seen below:
But woe betide the infant who knows not the mysteries of the hunters’ world
Who tiptoes gingerly gingerly gingerly
Chest held high, balancing on one leg
Then plunges with a thunderous splash in Ghananya (lines 24–27)
•drigbadrigba/drigbedrigbe (auditory/visual/tactile imagery)
Quite a sophisticated description of a slippery state of being in the Ewe language, to limit its equivalence in English to ‘slippery’ would lose the poetic intricacy of ‘drigbadrigba’/ ‘drigbedrigbe’ as well as the phonemic/phonological and reduplicative verbal composition of the expression – especially the poet’s play on tonal contrast where the first word is repeated but with a different tone. It is translated as follows, with emphasis on getting as close to articulating the phonic word-play as possible:
If all his affairs do not turn into drib-drab mish-mash slime
Some surely would (lines 19–20)
The word ‘drib-drab’ (my own coinage) is a crude attempt at replicating ‘drigbadrigba’/‘drigbedrigbe’ while mish-mash together with ‘slime’ compensates for the state of being slippery.
•mlɔmlɔmlɔ (visual imagery)
Although just a reduplication of the root ‘mlɔ’, the visual image it conveys, which is, a wide swathe of luxurious/verdant vegetation that is alluring and thus appeals to one’s sense of visual impression as far as the eye can see, requires such emphasis and word jugglery as would depict its proper context of usage. Note how it is descriptively translated below, employing a succession of cognate adjectives:
Ghananya is just like wetland
Baptized by dawn, noon and sundown drizzle
Mesmerizing swathes of lush glistening gleaming dreamy greenery (20–23)
•tsyɔƒui (visual imagery)
The word ‘tsyɔƒui’ translates loosely as long and pointed. In its description of a mouth, it has been translated simply as:
Therefore any child that for want of care
Pokes his long pointed mouth
Into Ghananya with reckless glee (lines 16–18)
However, as in our earlier discussions, something is lost in translation, contextually and linguistically; in terms of insult, for instance, ‘long pointed mouth’ does not compare in depth of impact with ‘nu tsyɔƒui’ in Ewe. Note that, as a spoken word poet, Anyidoho crafts his poems for performance. Thus, in a performance situation with regard to this poem, the facial muscles, in concert with labio-palato-dental features that are harnessed in articulating the word, particularly the way the performer would depict such a mouth pictorially, are lost in the English translation ‘pointed mouth’.
•goŋu goŋu goŋu goŋu (visual/auditory imagery)
The expression ‘goŋu goŋu goŊu goŋu’ is no simple mimicry of an ideophonic depiction of the crab’s slow and methodical gait, but embedded in that rhythmic construction is a whole philosophical statement bordering on loneliness, ennui and extreme caution, disposition and virtues/values, which, in totality, drives the crab to walk on the margins and fringes rather than the communal thoroughfares with the dangers such a choice would entail. In the context of the poem ‘Ghananya’, that constitutes the final thrust of the poet-persona’s exhortation to the audience. Again, the option here for the translator is two-fold: a choice between maintaining what pertains in the source text (‘goŋu goŋu goŋu goŋu’), with footnotes, or other forms of explanatory glosses, and an attempt at semantic or dynamic equivalence translation. I opted for both: it does not quite capture, practically, the musicality and other poetic cadences of ‘goŋu goŋu’, but then what is lost in translation in that wise is perhaps gained in the extended metaphorical sense through semantic translation in English for the benefit of non-Ewe speakers. The translation of ‘goŋu goŋu goŋu goŋu’ is captured in the final segment of the poem below (lines 34–36):
I say, it was Crab that said
He’s endowed with eight feet [30]
And two mighty claws for good measure
But when he encounters Ghananya
Roller-coasting like a boulder downhill
The distant untrodden footpaths…the lonely orphaned trails
The coastline margins…the far-flung fringes [35]
Would he tread cautiously warily guardedly
Ei! GHANANYA.
It must be emphasized that the reader/audience would be captivated solely by the repetitive rhythmic thump-thumping and sing-song modulation of ‘goŋu goŋu’ and not its philosophical or socio-cultural import. This, again, raises a number of technical issues: how can the gulf between a poem composed basically for performance in Ewe be mediated in translation on the printed page; in effect, from the stage to the page; how can voice modulation, tone, pitch and the entire baggage of pyrotechnics involved in the performative delivery before an audience (particularly an active one) be transferred to the page in translation? The reader/audience can only bridge that gap based on their reception and appreciation of the poem in translation, not necessarily its fidelity to the source text.
The Anlo-Ewe poetry of abuse/insult known as ‘Halo’ (see Anyidoho, 1982; Avorgbedor, 1983, 1994; Campbell, 2002), which has fascinated both Awoonor and Anyidoho as Ewe poets who draw extensively on the Anlo-Ewe oral tradition, does not lend itself easily to translation into English. Halo texts are extremely descriptive, allusive and highly metaphoric, employing language of abuse at a level only accomplished poets in the tradition can deliver. Awoonor describes it as ‘verbal overkill’ on account of its exquisite and aggressive use of poetic diction and language. To achieve the maximum effect by way of inflicting verbal violence – insult that really hurts the referent to the marrow, breaking all the rules of decency in public discourse – and to induce humour at the same time, halo poets often overreach themselves in terms of their mastery of the Ewe language and technicalities of oral poetry. Both Awoonor and Anyidoho have experimented with this traditional poetic form, Awoonor mainly in English, Anyidoho in Ewe and English. This can pose great difficulty for the translator. Anyidoho’s poem ‘Awoyo’ is one example. In translating ‘Awoyo’, which is a fairly long poem (because halo poems often dwell on padding, association, allusion, storytelling, address, etc.), I have had to settle for equivalences of descriptive transferences that do not capture the full weight of the source language. On the whole, the narrative segments of the poem (to do with morality, family history, mother’s public image, etc.) are better captured in translation than the purely descriptive sections that dwell on the person of Awoyo (physique, personal hygiene, gait, etc.) Below is a redacted version of my (full) translation of ‘Awoyo’:
AWOYO | |
Awoyo Sagada Koklovie | |
Plodded her way clumsily and crossed my path | |
Spat straight into my face | |
Like a duck delivering its smelly shit. | |
I didn’t as much as stir. | 5 |
She again hobbled and landed those spindly legs | |
In a brush of cactus. | |
She turned back nonchalantly | |
Bathed my face with early morning hot spittle. | |
I didn’t even move an inch | 10 |
Much less fart in her direction. | |
She dawdled, gathered herself | |
Convinced in her mind that she was laughing | |
Unbeknownst to her it was an ugly cry | |
Evil cry she was laughing | 15 |
I have sworn to myself to uphold my composure | |
In my corner somewhere | |
Juggling thoughts in my head hoping | |
Perchance she’d dare provoke me again | |
Then I’d use my sickle-sharp knife | 20 |
To carve a Hausa tribal mark on her face | |
Slash her knotted cheek | |
Administer pepper in the fresh wound | |
Daughter of a witch | |
Her hollowed-out face like the Owl’s | 25 |
| |
Awoyo come back for your rant | |
Do come back here | |
Do you recall that day? | |
You breached the dawn, night sleep’s rheum still in your eyes | |
Seeking audience with stick | 30 |
Seeking audience with rope | |
Pleading that they stand and hear your loaded tales. | |
You invoked all the earthly deities | |
And invoked the celestial ones ensemble | |
You said you saw Agbenɔxevi | 35 |
On top of me | |
Doing what exactly behind your stinking mother’s broken fence? | |
Daughter of a witch, perpetual night stalker | |
If you slept at night | |
Then we might say you dreamt a bad dream | 40 |
Awoyo come back | |
Do come back again | |
So I unleash your baggage of shame in your ears | |
Come let me jolt your mind back to a very serious matter | |
The unspeakable matter Agbenɔxevi told you in public | 45 |
Agbenɔxevi said | |
Even if they multiply you Awoyo | |
By Awoyo ten times, multiplied by ten | |
He would not accept you | |
Not even as a dash | 50 |
Agbenɔxevi further said | |
When at Christmas time | |
Your mother holds you down | |
Bathes you in a whole barrel of lavender | |
And pampers your body with exotic spices | 55 |
With gold, diamond, emerald and lazuli chains | |
Around your emaciated neck | |
And you glitter | |
You glitter | |
Like a comet | 60 |
And a mother turkey with eggs | |
In addition to your person dumped on him | |
He said he Agbenɔxevi | |
Would with the swiftest dispatch | |
Return you to Amedzɔfe | 65 |
Back to Dada Bomenɔ | |
| |
…. | |
| |
Awoyo, come…come with cocked ears | |
Let me explain a few matters to you | 90 |
I am not the daughter of a mother-harlot | |
Like you Awoyo | |
Come and let me tell you a few things from yesteryear | |
Come and let me remind you of some old secrets | |
That mother of yours with the battered underside | 95 |
Your notoriously gossipy mother, | |
Your mother, promiscuous slut, queen-mother whore | |
One with the withered underside. | |
She would offer herself to any object, | |
To stick, to rope | 100 |
Dangle her lean backside in the air | |
Haul it down to the ground | |
People say she’s a mother-hen | |
She said pleasure is not confined to one location | |
So she became communal wife | 105 |
Gifted that thing of pleasure to children. | |
First of all, | |
Did she have the presence of mind | |
To whisper some guarded secret in your ear? | |
Whether you belong to Atsu! | 110 |
Whether you belong to Etse! | |
Or are you Edo’s child? | |
Would you remember that | |
They said the day your mother died | |
All the Elders heaved a heavy sigh of relief | 115 |
Poured libation on her grave | |
With incantations and | |
Rebuke of her soul warning that | |
If she ever dreamt of coming back to life | |
She should endeavour to mend her conduct a little | 120 |
Awoyo, child of a witch | |
Hollow face | |
Like an Owl’s | |
I dare you to ever cross my path again | |
I will spread your shame on the ground | 125 |
For you to roll on in public | |
As a form of entertainment for all the children | |
To see. | |
Anyidoho’s closeness to the ‘halo’ genre of poetry comes into play in ‘Awoyo’. As a literary piece, it adheres to the main technicalities required of a halo poem, most notably the typical opening of the halo poem where the poet-persona lays down the gauntlet for combat, as an artist provoked and, therefore, with a license to insult. In ‘Awoyo’, this is captured in lines 1–11 (highlighted in bold). The poet-persona then proceeds to roll out a litany of insults, laced with vulgarities and invectives. As indicated earlier, most of these insults have lost their finer details and artistic sophistry in translation.
Moving on to other poems, we concede that there are also poems where the density of Anyidoho’s craft yields to pure lyricism bordering on romanticism. Such poems lend themselves to a much easier translation once the translator can match the English translation with the poetic diction and language of the source text without diminishing the poet’s emotive cadences, or attachment to the poem and its subject matter. An example of one such poem is ‘Agbe Ƒe Avi’. Below is the full translation of the poem:
AGBE ƑE AVI | |
| |
Life’s lamentations | |
If only I could glean some meager respite | |
From life’s infirmities | |
If only I could unshackle myself from these fixations of morbid fear | |
I’d walk the gallant walk of warriors | 5 |
Through the wilderness of life | |
Yeah, I’d travel with night | |
Knock on Dada Segbo’s door | |
I’d plead with her for a little tete-a-tete | |
All my life’s story has become okro soup unable to stand firm in the ladle’s hold | |
The travails of the world have become the Agbosege | |
I carry on my bare head | |
| |
So long have I bottled grudges in my stomach | |
Farted b-o-o-m in public | |
Now I shriek and ululate to the high heavens | 15 |
For all my life’s story has become okro soup defiant of the ladle’s scoop | |
And the travails of the world have become the Agbosege | |
I carry on my bare head | |
There are people chuckling and sucking their teeth in contempt | |
There are others hissing-hissing whining-whining | 20 |
Persistently asking – | |
I an infant born only yesterday dawn | |
What have I been ear-witness to? | |
What exactly have I heard with my eyes? | |
Such that I mount the rooftops trumpeting my self-adulation | 25 |
Desecrating the minds of great thinkers | |
Those with sparkling teeth | |
Those with coolness of chest | |
You around whose necks the fortunes of the world have wrapped their arms | |
Strut your majestic gait along the streets of life | 30 |
Laugh. Drink. Feast. | |
But do not foul-mouth my person with idle prattle and jabber | |
Because the forces that pushed Swallow by the occiput | |
To Underworld with a big bang | |
The forces that killed Dumega Dumenyo’s heart in his stomach | 35 |
Dragged him roughshod all the way to Great Beyond | |
If we dispatched Kɔsivi Afi | |
To probe the mystic vaults of the greatest Afa diviners | |
They would search and search for him to no avail | |
Therefore, do permit me the luxury to hum a little song | 40 |
For the troubles of life | |
Have become the Agbosege I carry on my bare head | |
I grumbled ceaselessly in my innards | |
Bombed a fart in public | |
My life story has become okro soup dribbling in the ladle’s groove. | |
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Translating ‘avi’ (‘cry’) as ‘lamentations’ alludes to Anyidoho’s grounding in the Anlo-Ewe dirge tradition. The poem bears many features of the Anlo-Ewe dirge in terms of the poet-persona’s laments about how unfairly life has treated him which is captured in the varying renditions of the refrains: ‘All my life’s story has become okro soup unable to stand firm in the ladle’s hold’ and ‘…all my life’s story has become the Agbosege/I carry on my head.’
As work in progress, a lot of tweaking and fine-tuning is on-going. The final product, in collaboration with my co-translator and the poet himself, will reflect the convergence of ideas and harmonization of approaches for a credible translation of Anyidoho’s Ewe poems into English for the benefit of a wider audience. As translators, our approach is framed by a multiplicity of renditions that are filtered through a maze of cross-cultural, cross-linguistic and translation methodologies, including turning parts of the source text into ‘new originals’ within acceptable limits. As we indicate in the Translators’ Note:
(T)here is something enthralling in Ghananya whose power dwells in qualities such as the poet’s mastery of Ewe… the modulated paces that come with varied feelings, the crispy mystery of its emotional cadences, among others. To capture these features in their natural Ewe habitat, and transfer them into English, was for us more a question of creation than a matter of translation.
Works Cited
Anyidoho, Kofi.2022. Ghanaya. Accra: Bureau of Ghana Languages.
——— ‘Kofi Awoonor and the Ewe Tradition of Songs of Abuse (Halo)’. Towards Defining the African Aesthetic, ed. Lemuel Johnson et al., Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1982.
——— 2022. SeedTime. Accra: DAkpabli and Associates.
Avorgbedor, Daniel. ‘Freedom to Sing: License to Insult: The Influence of Halo Performance on Social Violence Among the Anlo Ewe’. Oral Tradition 9/1 (1994), pp.83–112.
——— ‘It’s a Great Song!: Halo Performance as Literary Production’. Research in African Literatures, Vol.32, No.2, pp. 17–43.
Awoonor, Kofi. 1974. Guardians of the Sacred Word: Ewe Poetry. NOK Publishers.
Aziaku, Vincent. 2016. A Linguistic Analysis of Ewe Animal Names among the Ewe of Ghana. Koln: Rudiger Koppe Verlag.
Campbell, Corrina. ‘A War of Words: Halo Songs of Abuse of the Anlo Ewe’. SIT, Legon, 2002 & African Diaspora, ISPs 44, 2008.
Fawcett, P. 1997. Translation and Language. Manchester: Jerome Publishing.
Gbolonyo, Stephen. ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Values in Ewe Musical Practice: Their Traditional Roles and Place in Modern Society’. University of Pittsburg, 2009.
Glynn, Dominic. ‘Qualitative Research Methods in Translation Theory’. Sage Journals, 18 August, 2021.
Munday, J. 2001. Introducing Translation Studies. London: Routledge.
Nayo, Y. Z. ‘Akpalu and His Songs’. Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, 1964.
Palupi, Muji Endah. ‘The Techniques of Translation and Methods Using the V Diagram Methods’. Journal of English Language and Literature, Vol.6, Issue 1, March 2021.