Abstract
The West African Mande oral epic, Sunjata, has been translated into scores of languages, often multiple times. English translations of the epic target a range of types of audience, including young children, school children, a popular general adult readership, and academic specialists. In this case study, Batchelor compares the three English Sunjata translations which target an academic audience, contrasting the levels of prominence given to the Malian djeli (oral historian, or story-teller) with that given to the translator or book-producer of the English version, and exploring questions around authorship and ownership of ethnographic literary texts. Drawing together Graham Huggan’s notion of the ‘postcolonial exotic’ with Lawrence Venuti’s emphasis on translator visibility, the chapter interrogates the political and ethical implications of the case study findings.
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of dissemination through audio products, see Newton (1999).
- 2.
- 3.
It should be noted that this is different from Genette’s own conceptualisation of the paratext, in which function takes precedence over the spatial. See, for example, Genette 1997: 407: ‘The most essential of the paratext’s properties […] is functionality. Whatever aesthetic intention may come into play as well, the main issue for the paratext is not to “look nice” around the text but rather to ensure for the text a destiny consistent with the author’s purpose.’ See Batchelor (in press) for a detailed discussion of Genette’s paratext and its relevance to translation studies .
- 4.
Interestingly, Hackett Publishing’s webpage about the book inserts a heading “About the Author” (as opposed to ‘About the Translator’) above this autobiographical information on Conrad. See Hackett Publishing (n.d.).
- 5.
It is worth noting that the earlier editions of the book, published in 1986 and 1992, both feature Sisòkò’s and Johnson’s names on the front cover, like the 2003 version, but only Johnson’s on the spine.
- 6.
For further details on UNESCO’s intangible heritage programme, see UNESCO (n.d.). For a discussion of UNESCO’s programme in light of a different African epic, see Haring (2012).
- 7.
It is interesting to note that, in the 2006 Penguin Epics version, the inside front cover identifies the work as having been “translated by Gordon Innes and Bakari Sidibe.” Apart from the copyright attribution to Innes, these are the only mentions of the translators in the Penguin paratexts: the visibility of Innes is thus much reduced in comparison with the 1974 translation, while Sidibe’s is slightly increased.
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Batchelor, K. (2018). Sunjata in English: Paratexts, Authorship, and the Postcolonial Exotic. In: Boase-Beier, J., Fisher, L., Furukawa, H. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Translation. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75753-7_20
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