To gloss, or not to gloss? To italicize, or not to italicize?
September 6, 2017 11:13 AM   Subscribe

"Whenever African writers get together on our own, we talk about glossaries." In "Glossing Africa," Namwali Serpell looks at the work glossing does at the sentence-level, story-level, and sociopolitical level in African fiction.
posted by mixedmetaphors (4 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
Makumbi showcases a range of other glosses in the novel, but I find these three interesting because they suggest that there is an inverse relationship between how important the word is to the text and how explicitly it is glossed. That is, the explicitly defined lukiko (parliament sessions) are not mentioned much more and the word is essentially jargon; the bambowa (warriors) are important to the story but are generally referred to as “Kintu’s men,” while other warriors are simply “warriors”; the kabaka (king), the most loosely defined word, appears most frequently as a character and as a concept. This makes some sense—the more a term is used, the more familiar to us it becomes—but it also implies that the least translatable Luganda concepts need to be set in motion within the story to be grasped. They can’t simply be defined, as Noah would have it, or vividly described, as Obioma would have it.

This is adept analysis and seems to me (from the outside) to be a good approach. Assuming (an assumption oddly not dissected in the article) that you desire a primary audience of Westerners, any word you use with regularity or importance is going to be effectively glossed by most readers from the text one way or another. Under most circumstances, a writer would probably prefer that kind of control to surrendering the meaning to the online dictionary a very diligent reader might consult.

I myself would be strongly tempted to ditch the italics for most such uses, depending on the novel's POV. If I'm writing from the POV of a person for whom "lukiko" is an ordinary part of his tongue, it seems wrong to use a convention that suggests that it's a foreign word to him, not part of his idiom. On the other hand, the narrator might actually mark off some such words as consciously different and special and distinct from English, as an educated late medieval person might use Latin.
posted by praemunire at 12:22 PM on September 6, 2017


Great article, thanks for posting.

I've read other articles addressing this question when translating Chinese literature to English. But the difference between Chinese and African literature is that Chinese books are published in Chinese for a Chinese audience, and then maybe translated into other languages. Whereas apparently this article is saying that African authors mostly write in foreign languages? I can't imagine how that must affect the corpus.

Can anyone explain how this situation happened? Like, are there too many languages in Africa for any one language to be a viable market? Are literacy rates too low? I'm just baffled by the idea that African authors don't write their stories in their own languages.
posted by d. z. wang at 7:28 PM on September 6, 2017


I myself would be strongly tempted to ditch the italics for most such uses, depending on the novel's POV. If I'm writing from the POV of a person for whom "lukiko" is an ordinary part of his tongue, it seems wrong to use a convention that suggests that it's a foreign word to him, not part of his idiom.

More and more, I notice this to be the case for Malaysian/Singaporean writers in English, and probably for the Philippines too, and it's coming from a similar sense of ownership of our own Englishes and creole. Certainly more current works set in the area have a consciously prideful (?) attitude about it, and less time feeling embarrassed about supposed grammatically wrong language.

(curating/propagating a nascent national identity via language against the background of a colonial heritage and hegemony can be a fraught thing. in Malaysia anyway, the above practice - if you're getting published -- has to also coexist with the established regulation that only grammatically correct Malay is normal-weighted. Slang/idiomatic/dialect ie 'wrong' Malay must be set in bold even in dialogue. Especially in dialogue as this was seen most often in the local comics. does this stylistic choice interrupt your comprehension? sure.)

Can anyone explain how this situation happened? Like, are there too many languages in Africa for any one language to be a viable market? Are literacy rates too low?


It's like that in Southeast Asia too. Market viability because of the variety of languages is one reason, but also because several other historical reasons: regional lingua franca that was dethroned by English (or Dutch) during colonialism; unification via language being its own domestic colonialism (much like China with Mandarin) but happening more recently so still unstable; language itself being a trait of various ethnicities who are themselves trying to assert their respective empowerment etc etc etc. And other reason besides, but the consequence being that English is the regional lingua franca still, and one that is very much 'the mother tongue' or at least primary language for many. Within the Malay archipelago states there was a concerted effort to maintain a regional standard in the 'Malay language', but seriously these days I'm better off speaking English with an Indonesian and vice versa.
posted by cendawanita at 12:04 AM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


NPR's Code Switch had a good episode kinda on this topic called "Hold Up! Time For An Explanatory Comma" about people of color explaining words and references to white audiences.
posted by retrograde at 8:28 PM on September 7, 2017


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