@Linguist_CIOL
FEBRUARY/MARCH The Linguist 11
FEATURES
balances that with appropriate aspirations to
creative orality. I settled more comfortably into
the role of a translator and lexicographer,
leaving the poet with space to manoeuvre.
I enjoyed the process. I have read the
book out loud in a couple of public readings,
and I like how it comes out on my tongue
and through the contour of the silence into
the hearing of the audience. They are able to
see and hear, through the limits of this neo-
literary Yorùbá voice, the sublime aspirations
of Grosholz's real and invented characters.
The theme of childhood – of raising children
and watching them grow to discover the
world through their parents' eyes – is a
universal one. So, the walls between
Philadelphia and Papalántó break down to
reveal the relatable vagaries of childhood.
Breaking with convention
Then there was the matter of grammar,
which was always going to arise when writing
in a language whose orthography had not
been revised in about five decades. Part of
the limitation to writing in Yorùbá among my
generation is self-censorship – a disagreeable
gatekeeper that sits invisibly on our shoulders,
shaking his head at every expression that
doesn't read like the canonical texts of
Fágúnwà, Fálétí or Òkédìjí, or even the
Yorùbá Bible from the 1840s. I shook it off, as
I had done privately long before, convinced
that the language is creative and dynamic,
and so should be its modern orthography.
Where I found the need to break the rules,
I did so. Third person pronouns in Yorùbá, for
instance, are amorphous morphemes that take
the character of the verbs they are attached
to, as in fún-un ('give him'), gbé e ('carry it')
and jẹ ẹ́ ('eat it'). Only nasal examples, such
as fún-un, are hyphenated, which I've always
found inconvenient and less elegant than,
say, fúun. I took liberties like this deliberately,
in the hope of generating conversations in
the Yorùbá writing community about the
future of the orthography, and the
opportunities presented by new writing
mediums to help the language evolve.
This reinforces my intention to pursue
more creative translations with Yorùbá as the
destination language from English – a
language that already benefits from plenty of
global attention in translation, and which is
thus rewarded with an expanded vocabulary,
creative inventions and a larger growing
audience. There's no reason why Yorùbá
doesn't deserve this as well. The benefits are
many, including corpus building, which itself
has ripple effects for the future of the
language in technology.
GROWING UP
Kọ́ lá Túbọ̀ sún at the first reading of Ìgbà Éwe
in Lagos (top left); the audience reads along
(top right); and (above) the poems' themes are
common to children in Nigeria (r) and the US (l)
©
SHUTTERSTOCK
©
SHUTTERSTOCK
