The Linguist

FEATURES WORLD RENOWN Haruki Murakami (top); and his First Person Singular in English (above) 20 The Linguist Vol/61 No/4 2022 thelinguist.uberflip.com Translating one of the world's best-known authors is a challenge, so why do it on spec, in relay, into Yorùbá? Kọ́ lá Túbọ̀ sún explains I discovered Murakami at an airport. I was passing through Turkey on the way to Korea when I found his work in the bookshop aisles. Turkish Airline layovers are notoriously long, and I had nothing to do but watch the bustle of passengers, eat, rest, and read. I finished What I Think About When I Think About Running in less than two hours. It was either the tedium of waiting for the flight or the writing style. Certainly it wasn't the subject matter, which was the mundane topic of marathon running. Haruki Murakami's works have all come to me through translation – he writes in Japanese – so even the ease of getting through this book of specialist interest is thanks to both the translator and the style of the original text. I would often wonder, when I read more of him later on (as I do with other works in translation), who gets to claim the credit for the reader's pleasure. I wouldn't have been able to access the author's brilliant mind without a translator. And yet a translator has nothing to work with without an original text, from an original mind. When I found myself back in Turkey in 2021, this time on the way to Spain, I was looking for Murakami's books. Living in Nigeria meant I couldn't always find them. One title caught my interest because of my involvement in the language question: First Person Singular. I may have mistaken it for another collection of essays, but it turned out to be a book of short stories. Easy to read, the language was clear, free of clutter. Each story was crisp and weird. But it was when I got to the story 'Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey' that I was hooked. I had planned to spend a few weeks translating short fiction by Nigerian writers but instead dedicated weeks to translating Murakami's story about a pilfering, talking monkey into Yorùbá. It had all the elements common to classical Yorùbá fiction, pioneered by Daniel Fágúnwà, without a moralising overlay: there was a talking animal with a mysterious skill, there was suspense, and there was magical realism giving the story its most delightful sheen. I loved it, and I wanted to see it in Yorùbá, first for myself and later for the reading audience. Why Yorùbá? Yorùbá-language literature started to dwindle in production and consumption in the mid 1970s and early 1980s. 1 This was due to a bad economic situation in Nigeria and a change of attitude by publishers, who had switched from their efforts to support literature in Nigerian languages to publishing only works written in English by Nigerian writers. New work published in any of Nigeria's many languages reduced, becoming scarce and eventually non-existent. With no publishers willing to bet on them, writers chose to self-publish or not publish at all. With government dropping its policy of teaching Nigerian languages in schools, the need to recommend local- language literature disappeared, and so did the audience. By the time I decided to translate the work of a Japanese writer into my language, I was working on the assumption that only a small audience would be willing to read it, and would choose to do so in a language other than English. So what is the point? There is the external motive of creating a growing literary corpora of Yorùbá texts, and the many positive possibilities this presents for language documentation. 2 But there is also a joy derived from the translation process. I reached out to Murakami's agents to see if they would grant me the rights to publish my translation and received an enthusiastic 'yes': he hasn't been translated into Yorùbá yet, so let's do it! And so, for a short period, my translation of 'Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey' will be published at OlongoAfrica.com, 3 a publication I founded and where I work as an editor. Falling for Murakami

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