Translating Narnia, an essay.

Throughout its history, Haiti has had the unusual distinction of combining a sophisticated and sustained literary culture with staggeringly low literacy rates. Haitian elites, nourished on the language and literature of their former metropole, have produced an impressive corpus of poetry and prose. In 1956 Edmund Wilson wrote that Haiti had “produced a greater number of books in proportion to the population than any other American country, with the exception of the United States.”¹ Yet the literacy rate in the 1950s was no higher than 10 percent, and it has since only risen to about 60 percent—still much lower than any other nation in the Americas.² The disconnect has to do with the structure of Haitian society. Economic and political power have long been concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority.³ The linguistic dichotomy has served to reinforce this exclusivity. Every Haitian speaks Creole as his or her mother tongue; those with an education also speak French. The prestige language has effectively excluded the monolingual masses from the political process, the legal system and education. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, there has been a growing push for the legitimation of the popular language.⁴ Writers, politicians and activists have called for the use of Creole in formal contexts and in writing in order to foster democracy and development.

Producers of Creole-language literature have been at the forefront of this movement, striving both to demonstrate the expressive capacity of the language, and to furnish Haitian educators with teaching materials. Yet despite the strong link between education and the emergent Creole literary corpus, there has been relatively little children’s literature produced in the language. As George Lang notes, the maturation of Creole-language literatures is hampered by “low levels of literacy, the lack of standard orthographies, the overwhelming prestige, both economic and cultural, of the metropolitan languages with which they compete,” and this has long been the case in Haiti.⁵ To be sure, there is a growing number of books for children in Creole, but the vast majority of these are intended for narrowly educational purposes. As yet, there is no critical mass of imaginative and captivating fiction in Creole. For children around the globe, one of the main incentives for learning to read is the promise of access to a boundless world of adventure and knowledge, but at present Creole literacy offers no such promise. Acquisition remains limited, and consequently the market for books in the language remains small. To break this cycle, concerted effort is required on the part of Haitian authors and publishers.

Translators, too, can offer valuable contributions to the corpus of children’s literature in Creole. Itamar Even-Zohar has explained that translations can play a central role in the development of a nation’s literary polysystem if the polysystem is “young,” “peripheral,” or “weak.”⁶ In such a situation, translation “fulfils the need […] to put into use its newly founded (or renovated) tongue for as many literary types as possible in order to make it serviceable as a literary language and useful for its emerging public.”⁷ Gideon Toury has described how translators respond to the “observation that something is ‘missing’ in the target culture which should have been there and which, luckily, already exists elsewhere and can be taken advantage of.”⁸ It therefore seems appropriate to call for an increased flow of translated children’s literature into Creole. There have been some works of world literature translated into Creole. Two of the earliest formal works in the language were adaptations of European classics: Cric? Crac! (1901), George Sylvain’s celebrated collection of fables adapted from La Fontaine, and Antigòn (1953), Félix Morisseau-Leroy’s adaption of Sophocles’s Antigone.⁹ But apart from Maude Heurtelou’s adaptations of half a dozen European fairy tales and two recent translations of Le Petit prince, there have been hardly any Creole translations of the so-called ‘classics’ of world children’s literature.¹⁰

It is in this context that Hans Michel Fortunat and I produced a Creole translation of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.¹¹ Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia are among the best-selling children’s books of all time.¹² The seven novels of the series have been adapted into stage and radio plays, video games, television cartoons and Hollywood films. Within ten years of its publication in 1950, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had been translated into Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German and Swedish; in another two decades it was available in Chinese, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Welsh; by 2008 it was in forty-seven languages including Afrikaans, Arabic, Georgian and Tibetan.¹³ While the Chronicles have not seen the same degree of international success as, say, the Harry Potter series (with translations in seventy-nine languages including Ancient Greek, Latin and Esperanto), they remain among the most translated works of literature in history.¹⁴ In 2003, Devin Brown assessed the ongoing appeal of the Chronicles, concluding that the works embody the ‘classic hero myth,’ and they “continue to be vital to readers today because they guide and encourage those facing this hero journey in their own lives.”¹⁵ The popularity of the works in places as disparate as Russia and Taiwan suggests that the Chronicles would be a valuable addition to the body of children’s literature in Creole.¹⁶

According to Hans Vermeer, “every translation presupposes a commission, even though it may be set by the translator to himself.”¹⁷ This paper, then, is conceived as an auto-commission for Neve Majisyen an, a Creole translation of Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, a follow-up to Konpè Lyon. Vermeer insists every commission include a well-defined skopos—a statement of the purpose or intended function of the translation.¹⁸ As outlined above, the purpose of the proposed translation is to contribute to the embryonic body of works of imaginative and engaging children’s literature in Creole in order to foster literacy, and thereby enrich individuals and extend the capacity for democratic processes and public discourse in Haiti. This skopos will serve as a frame of reference as we face the challenges of mediating between the vastly different cultures of the Source and Target Texts. But there remain a number of important points to address before this commission and skopos can be deemed complete.

Vermeer explains that the skopos of an original work is by no means identical to that of a translation of the same work, saying “source and target texts may diverge from each other quite considerably, not only in the formulation and distribution of the content but also as regards the goals which are set for each.”¹⁹ He permits, however, that the skopos of the Source Text can and should be taken into consideration: “one must know what one is doing […] e.g. what the effect of a text created in this way will be in the target culture and how much the effect will differ from that of the source text in the source culture.”²⁰ Lewis wrote extensively on writing, so his skopos for the Narnia books can be elucidated with some certainty. The didactic purpose of the works is evident, but the author insists he did not approach his fiction from a moralizing position. The year after Nephew was published, Lewis wrote: “Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; […] then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’ to embody them. This is all pure moonshine.”²¹ He explains that his writing “inevitably begins with mental pictures” which become “a thing inside him pawing to get out […]. This nags him all day long and gets in the way of his work and his sleep and his meals. It’s like being in love”²² Elsewhere, he wrote that his chief interest as a reader was the “pleasure of Story” for its own sake, which is “something other than a process and much more like a state or quality.”²³ Elsewhere still, he conceded that “a simple sense of wonder, extraordinary things going on, were the motive forces behind the creation.”²⁴ The story, in a sense, is the skopos. This seems compatible with our goal of stimulating the imagination and the love of reading in Haitian children. To honour Lewis’s intentions we will strive to maintain the aesthetic and the sense of wonder present in the original work.

Lewis’s opinion of children, moreover, can serve as a useful model. He had a profound respect for his young readers. He criticized authors who “take too superior an attitude” when writing for children, and said that “the child as reader is neither to be patronized nor idolized: we talk to him as man to man.”²⁵ We must, however, consider the particularities of children’s literature as such. In his analysis of Taiwanese translations of the Harry Potter books, Wen-chun Liang found that strategies of preservation, addition and localization were employed somewhat unsystematically when dealing with British cultural items like food and goods. After surveying a group of fifteen-year-olds, he found that young readers preferred localization—the substitution of foreign with familiar items. He explains that translators of children’s literature “need to take into account children’s interests, demands, responses, knowledge and reading ability,” as well as their “imperfect understanding of other cultures.”²⁶ If young readers do not feel they understand the text, they will get frustrated and give up.

Lawrence Venuti’s concept of ‘implicature’ is instructive here. He defines implicature as “a feature of the foreign text that reveals a difference between the foreign [SL] and domestic [TL] cultures, usually a gap in the domestic reader's knowledge for which the translator must somehow compensate.”²⁷ This is doubly the case when translating for young readers, triply so when writing for young readers in a place like Haiti, with its widespread illiteracy and partial incorporation into global cultural matrices. Excessive explanation, however, can also be a deterrent. Emer O’Sullivan describes a German translation of Alice in Wonderland in which the translator went to great lengths to explain the pun inherent in the name of the Mock Turtle; in so doing, he utterly nullified the humour of the original, along with the attraction the book holds for adult readers.²⁸ In order to appeal to our intended readership, then, we must be sensitive to the needs of young Haitian readers but not condescending.

Finally, we must take a moment to reflect on specific sociolinguistic factors governing the use of Creole. André Lefevere states that translations are subject to the various ‘poetics’ and ‘patronages’ of the Target Culture.²⁹ A poetics is an informal code of behaviour that governs the inventory and function of a work, while a patronage is an ideological, economic or social pressure that influences artistic production. Literature in Creole is shaped and enriched by the inventory of the country’s deep-rooted oral storytelling tradition. There are particular turns of phrase, syntactic shifts, comedic elements and narrative styles that can be employed to attune the translation to a Haitian reader’s literary sensibilities. This traditional poetics, for instance, is what led us to title our first translation Konpè Lyon, Konmè Lougawou (‘Brother Lion, Sister Witch’). On the functional side, it is quite typical for oral storytellers in Haiti to “both entertain and deliver a message to their audience.”³⁰ The didacticism underlying the text will not, therefore, seem out of place. Of course, our genre requires considerable divergence from the norms of Haitian storytelling, but the conscientious application of local poetics will help readers cope with the sometimes uncomfortable foreignness of the work.

The most important patronage governing the production of Creole texts emanates from the Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen (Haitian Creole Academy). Like its counterpart in France, the Akademi serves as the governing body for the Creole language, overseeing its use and development. It is not an authoritarian institution, but we must take its preferred practices and ideological notions regarding Creole into account if we are to contribute to an internally coherent body of literature. We will, for example, need to consult with the latest resolutions on orthography, the most recent of which was issued in June 2017.³¹ Furthermore, the members of the Akademi wish to dispel the myth that Creole is merely a vulgar dialect of French, and to show that it is a self-sufficient language. While much of the Creole lexicon is derived from French, the Akademi discourages the creation of neologisms based on French words. Academician Michel Degraff, for instance, states that Haitian Creole “manifests a robust set of productive affixes that allow lexical expansion from HC’s internal morphological resources.”³² Accordingly, we must be careful not to simply fill lexical gaps by creolizing a French equivalent.

To sum up, the intention behind our translation of The Magician’s Nephew is to contribute to the growing corpus of imaginative and engaging children’s literature in Creole in order to foster a reading culture among Haiti’s young people, thereby establishing a viable readership to sustain the ongoing evolution of the corpus of Creole literature, and, not incidentally, cultivating the necessary level of literacy to enable a stronger democracy and greater grassroots development. To realize this objective we must navigate the specific requirements and tastes of young Haitian readers, as well as the broader poetics and patronages that govern the use of the language. Now that we have delineated the objectives and parameters for out translation, we will examine the implications of this skopos for one specific challenge presented by the Source Text: the names of characters.

Lincoln Fernandes writes that characters’ names in children’s fantasy fiction play “a fundamental role in […] portraying characters’ personality traits, which will often guide the reader throughout the plot of the story.”³³ The Chronicles are no exception. The names in the series cannot be treated as mere placeholders that can be transplanted unproblematically from Source to Target Text. Nephew contains two categories of names: those belonging to the ‘real’ world (Digory, Polly, Uncle Andrew), and those of ‘other’ worlds (Jadis and Aslan). In our previous translation, we decided to emphasize the familiar/foreign divide by localizing the names of the English characters, while preserving the names of Narnians. Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter’s names were Haitianized to Lwiz, Edmond, Pyè and Sizàn, whereas the names of Tumnus, Aslan and Jadis were preserved. This, we hoped, would strengthen our readers’ connection to the children, while maintaining the sense of enchantment conjured up by whimsical names. The same strategy will suit our translation of Nephew. Polly will be Polèt and Uncle Andrew will be Tonton Andre; the names of Aslan, Jadis and Narnia itself will remain intact.

There are, however, two small complications regarding names in Nephew. The eponymous nephew is called Digory, a name that prompts Polly to remark: “what a funny name!”³⁴ Unlike most of the human characters in the Chronicles, Digory’s name is marked as idiosyncratic. This is significant, as later in the series he appears as an eccentric professor. His name, furthermore, is doubly removed from the standard familiarity, because the events of Nephew take place decades before the other six novels—“when your grandfather was a child.”³⁵ It is both antiquated and unusual. The distinctiveness of Digory’s name presents a challenge for the translator, as Haitians are famous for the inventive and unique names they give to their children. Our solution is to draw from a formerly widespread but now less common trend in Haitian naming: the use of Greek and Roman names. Reading about early twentieth-century Haiti, one constantly encounters names like Damoclès Vieux, Cincinnatus Leconte and Themistocles Epaminondas Labasterre, but the use of names from antiquity is now less common. In Haiti, a name like Diagoras will strike the proper chord of eccentricity and datedness.

The character who best exemplifies the onomastic composition of the novel is the horse. Introduced as a humble London cab horse called Strawberry, the animal is renamed Fledge when he comes to Narnia and is granted the power of flight. Clearly, both of Strawberry/Fledge’s names contain meaning besides mere designation. Strawberry is sweet, commonplace and somewhat comic, while ‘Fledge’ alludes to his nascent wings and conjures up visions of action and heroics. One could argue for preserving ‘Strawberry’ or localizing ‘Fledge,’ (e.g. ‘Zèl,’ wing, or ‘Alavòl,’ in flight), but it seems most appropriate and consistent to localize the creature’s ‘real world’ name (‘Strawberry’ becomes ‘Frèz’) and preserve Fledge. The semantic meaning of Fledge will evade Haitian readers, but one may assume that many readers of the original are unaware that ‘to fledge’ is ‘to acquire feathers.’ Moreover, the sonic similarity of Frèz/Fledge can be considered an improvement on the original text. Likewise, the Greek flavour of ‘Diagoras’ will seem all the more poignant when, in later volumes, Digory is revealed to be something of a philosopher, even momentarily musing on Platonic forms in The Last Battle.³⁶ As Gideon Toury notes in a study based on his own translation of the Narnia books, translations sometimes engender “shifts which appear to be textual gains and improvements.”³⁷ The names in Nephew allow for such felicitous gains.

Hence, by emphasizing the familiar/fantastic division in the novel we will draw readers in with the ordinary and then captivate them with the extraordinary, thereby adhering to our intention of producing engaging literature in order to foster literacy. There are several other features of the text that must be analyzed along these lines: British cultural items, dialects and speech registers, and magical/mythical elements, to name a few. Then again, early twentieth-century London, with its cisterns and domestic servants, its school uniforms and codes of conduct, is not as different from modern Port-au-Prince as one might suppose. If nothing else, precocious and spirited children like Polly and Digory are universal. But if such children are to have a voice in their societies they must learn to read and write, to imagine, to analyze and explore. Translations of engaging and creative literary works like The Magician’s Nephew can play a vital role in the process.

Notes and Bibliography