Translation Tuesday: “She Sits Beneath Her Father’s Olive Tree” by Audefroi Le Bastart

August 22, 2023 | in Translations | by Timothy Perry

Whoever has love’s grief and pain / Should also have love’s joy.

This Translation Tuesday, a melodic love story for the ages floats in the air, transporting us to a time of dueling knights and castle towers. Hear from Timothy Perry, translator of “She Sits Beneath Her Father’s Olive Tree” by Audefroi Le Bastart, on appropriation in the layered histories of France’s medieval weaving songs: an oral tradition of working women recorded in writing by men:

“The weaving songs of medieval France do not survive. Which is to say, the traditional songs of women engaged in textile work—a largely oral tradition—do not survive. In their place, we have approximations to this genre written by men in a purely literary context. These literary weaving songs, with their themes of courtly love, (artfully) simple language, and repetitive rhythms, attempt to preserve the ‘feel’ of the oral tradition, but their appropriation of it results in a problematic shift in perspective—narratives involving the objectification and abuse of women take on an entirely different tenor when taken from a context of women’s work and transformed into a male literary exercise. The resulting poems have been considered among the finest lyrical creations of medieval French literature, but their casual misogyny raises timely (and timeless) questions about how we should read aesthetically accomplished but morally tarnished works, and how we should translate them.

The ‘weaving song’ translated here tells the story of Idoine and the obstacles to her love. The poem upends the conventions of courtly love by presenting everything—even martial pursuits—though Idoine’s eyes, resulting in a complex layering of gender: a male poet writing in a female genre presents male activities through the eyes of a female character. Despite this complexity, the misogyny outlined above remains very much present and I have tried both to draw attention to and undercut it. For example, the French text mentions the aesthetic qualities of Idoine’s hair even as she is being dragged by it, but in an unemphatic way: ‘[the queen] takes her by the hair, which she has blonde like wool’. I have heightened this aestheticization of Idoine’s suffering by overtranslating the prosaic ‘takes’ as ‘grasps’ and by expanding the description of the hair from half a line to a whole line and setting it off between dashes. Elsewhere, however, I employ vocabulary not found in the French to undercut the poem’s ‘happy’ ending. Twice my translation describes Idoine as the ‘captive’ of her love Garsiles. On the first occasion, the French simply says that her love for him ‘preoccupies’ her; on the second, which occurs at a point in the poem when her father is literally holding her captive in a tower, the French simply says that she is still ‘taken with’ Garsiles. And when Garsiles fights to rescue Idoine, after which they will marry, I describe him as ‘an iron tower of strength’, though the French says merely that he has ‘prowess and strength’. By presenting Garsiles as a tower and Idoine as his captive, I try to suggest that Idoine’s plight as a wife may not be so different from what it was as a daughter. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Timothy Perry

Language:

French

Place:

France

Writer:

Audefroi Le Bastart

Tags:

In Review: Doomi Golo by Boubacar Boris Diop

June 12, 2017 | in Essays, Reviews, Translations | by Jessie Stoolman

Jessie Stoolman on the first book ever to be translated to English from Wolof, an indigenous language of Senegal.

Doomi Golo is the first book to be translated into English from Wolof, an indigenous language widely spoken in Senegal. In its interesting linguistic journey, the Francophone author Boubacar Boris Diop has also personally translated the novel from Wolof to French.

The protagonist Nguirane Faye’s six notebooks written for his grandson compose the heft of the novel. One of the many iconic passages in the book tackles a central question facing the decolonizing world:

I am perfectly aware, Badou, that turning one’s back on the outside world is tantamount to the kiss of death. It’s bound to be a good thing if a nation lets the winds that are blowing from all corners of the globe expand its chest, but not unless we do what we can to preserve the crucible destined to receive its breath when they are blowing. Life, after all, is not born out of the void.

Every aspect of Diop’s masterpiece, from its content to choice of language to its translation, addresses this struggle to preserve marginalized identities in a globalized context. It is unsurprising that this pioneering novel was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award 2017, founded by Three Percent.

Interestingly, Diop decided to translate Doomi Golo from Wolof after being “inundated with requests,” according to Vera Wülfing-Leckie, one of the two translators of the English version. Adding intrigue to the situation, Wülfing-Leckie notes in her captivating introduction that some scholars argue that the French version, entitled Les petits de la guenon, “was a new novel that merely bore close similarities to the original.“ As for the English translation, Wülfing-Leckie mainly worked with the French version. However, El Hadji Moustapha Diop, Boubacar Boris Diop’s son and the second person in the translating duo, consulted the Wolof version as well.

Teach This—Banned Countries Special Feature

May 13, 2017 | in Asymptote for Educators | by Cristina Serverius

Simon Fraser University’s Cristina Serverius on Understanding Identity in Oral Storytelling Traditions

Welcome to Teach This, Asymptote for Educators’ answer to the current issue’s Banned Countries Special Feature. We believe that the classroom is the perfect setting for young people to be exposed to diverse, contemporary voices, both allowing them to challenge their assumptions and to engage them with living literature… a conversation in which their own voices matter. To that end, Asymptote for Educators has launched this weekly blog series in which global educators share how and why they would teach the feature’s articles. We hope you and your students enjoy!

Are you an educator with your own lesson plan ideas? Teach This – Banned Countries Special Feature is currently open for submissions. Email education@asymptotejournal.com for more information.

While the work of Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is always situated between two cultures—Somali and Italian—it provides a point of access for students to learn about oral traditions, because despite the author’s long residencies outside of Somalia, these traditions remain present in her writing. Their ubiquity is testament to the very nature of oral stories, which creep into our lives unannounced and perhaps unnoticed, and travel with us. This is how they survive; this is how we survive.

The activities below focus on Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s use of the Somali oral tradition and the question of personal identity in the context of stories that are passed down and retold, and which have become part of the socio-cultural fabric of our being. Besides offering an introduction to these topics, the lesson provides practice for analysis of a literary text and use of a secondary source to enrich our understanding of literature.

Translator Sean Sell on Contemporary Indigenous Literature in Mexico

April 20, 2017 | in Interviews | by Kelsey Woodburn and Paul Worley

Political concerns are in the back of my mind, and when translating I try to keep them back there. I hope the works can speak for themselves.

During the past thirty years indigenous literatures in Spanish and indigenous languages have slowly emerged onto the literary scenes of many Latin American countries. Despite what many refer to as a literary renaissance, these literatures garner scant attention beyond the region, and many masterworks of contemporary indigenous letters remain unavailable in English translation. A graduate student at the University of California-Davis, Sean Sell recently published an excellent translation of Maya literature from the Mexican state of Chiapas with the University of Oklahoma Press. We caught up with Sell to discuss his work, that of the authors he translates, and his role as a conduit of indigenous writing in English.

Paul Worley & Kelsey Woodburn (W&W): What led you to an interest in Mayan languages and literatures?

Sean Sell (SS): Credit the Zapatistas, I suppose. Their uprising captured my attention as it did with so many others, so in 2000 when I was looking to visit Mexico and work on my Spanish, I got involved with the organization Escuelas para Chiapas or Schools for Chiapas. I figured I could improve my Spanish and support this intriguing project at the same time. Schools for Chiapas is based, at least on this side of the border, in San Diego, where I’ve lived most of my life. They regularly organize trips to Zapatista territory. Our group helped prepare a site for school construction in one of the communities. But the trips are as much about cultural exchange as they are about any particular project.

It was on this trip that I first learned of indigenous languages like Tsotsil and Tseltal. Organizers told us that many of the Zapatistas we would meet did not speak Spanish, and for those who did it was probably their second language.

Years later I was getting a master’s at San Diego State University, and I took a class called Mexican Sociolinguistics. I thought it would be about Mexican variations and regionalisms in Spanish, but it was all about indigenous languages—their history, their variety, their different levels of health today. Estimates of how many indigenous languages remain in Mexico range from 68 (the number with government recognition) to almost 300, with some disagreement as to when languages are distinct rather than different dialects of the same one. It was fascinating to learn about this, as each language represents a particular cultural world. I drew from my experience in Chiapas for the class.