Items

• Unfettered, Unfree

  [Gerald Moore reviews 'Song of Lawino']: "Out of the grasslands of Northern Uganda comes a new voice in African poetry. It is a voice whose innate sophistication is controlled by compassion and understanding, so that the poet can quite simply lend it to an illiterate woman whose circle might otherwise be confined to the village well and the dancing arena... Mr. Okot's poem was originally composed in Lwo, the language of the Acoli people. Much of its imagery is rooted in their traditional songs of love, war, victory, and death. In rewriting his poem in English he has chosen a strong, simple idiom which preserves the sharpness and frankness of this imagery, a structure of short, free verses which flow swiftly and easily, and an uncondescending offer of all that is local and specific in the original... Inevitably lost is the pattern of rhyme, assonance and tonal variation offered by the vernacular. In the poet's own words, he has 'clipped a bit of the eagle's wings'. But what survives is enough to offer one of the most varied and exciting contributions yet made to English poetry in Africa."
• A South African Poet

  Ulli Beier critiques the collection of Swahili poetry. He suggests that we should be grateful for the collection, in that "very little is known about African poetry anywhere on our continent," but he also argues that this collection suffers from translation and the fact that the Swahili poetry is meant to be sung or recited to music. He concludes that the poetry in the volume is worth more to "students of East African ethnolography and above all to Islamic scholars," but not to literary critics.
• The music of Milan

  [A review of Italian poet Vittorio Sereni's collections]...The first part of Sereni's masterpiece, "Un posto di vacanza" contains two snatches of quotation in italics. While his few notes for Stella variabile (1981) had indicated that the second is from his translation of "Ton Oeuvre" by the Malagasay poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, he had seen no need to point out that the first was of lines from an epigram by Fortini, "Sereni esile mito" (Sereni slender myth), which had cited his own war poem "Italiano in Grecia" to criticize its "perplessa musica" and attack his belief in youth: "Non sempre giovinezza e verita", Fortini writes (Youth is not always truth).
• Reclaiming the mother tongue

  [Chinweizu reviews "Decolonizing the Mind," a book by Ngugi wa Thiong'o.] "...Even in colonial days, Africans wrote literary works in African langauges. But such works have always remained outside the maistream of official culture. Among Africa's post-independence writers, several others preceded Ngugi in writing in their mother tongues. The best known of these was the late Okot p'Bitek whose works, including his famous Song of Lawino, were composed in Acholi, and then translated by him into English."
• London Diary

  President Senghor of Senegal, who left London yesterday after a conspicuously successful five-day official visit, had a lively discussion on English and French literature with the Queen at a luncheon party in his honour. Both agreed that State duties made it difficult to devote as much time to reading as they would wish. The President said he insisted on spending from 9 to 11 each morning at his books. M. Senghor, an outstanding French poet, is an admirer of Stephen Spender and Dylan Thomas and has translated both into French. He would like to do the same with T. S. Eliot but finds him "too difficult for translation." He hopes the British Council will send poets and writers on lecture tours of Senegal. President Senghor was captured while fighting with the French Resistance. A brilliant linguist, he became the prison camp's interpreter.
• In Brief

  The Song Atlas is an ambitiously compiled anthology, painstakingly edited by John Gallas. The book sets out to embrace alphabetically samples of verse from countries as far ranging as Afghanistan and Zimbabwe (the editor has been unable to find a nation beginning with X). In these days of superfluous poetic gallimaufries, this is a gatherum which at least seems to have some purpose. It consists of piece which Gallas acknowledges to have been found and translated by a multitude of hands. The quality (and, indeed, the comprehensibility) of these poems is variable, but that is to be expected, given the cultural divergence involved... And from Uganda, Gallas proffers a similarly minimalist thought-provoking oddity by Okot p'Bitek (1931-82): "Where's / the Eyeshop? / When will I ever see Ms Right? / I ogle her with anger." ...
• Black Orpheus

  Thorpe reviews Ulli Beier's anthology of African Poetry, which includes fifty-four poems translated from twenty-six languages. The collection purports to be for students in Africa to study English poetry, but Thorpe is critical of the anthology's lack of inclusion of poems in the African version, as well. He writes, "Offering them only an English text half concedes - with unintentional irony - the defeat of the languages many are being educated away from."
• Akamba, Yoruba, Swahili

  [Ulli Beier reviews two books, Thet Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala by S. A. Babalola and Poems from Kenya by Ahmad Nassir bin Juma Bhalo.] "The editors of the Oxford Library of African Literature hope that 'compositions in local languages will make their impact on world literature as those of India and China have done for many years.' It is not likely that this series--nine volumes have so far appeared--will make much impact ont he literary world.... To make African literature come alive in English is a formidable task. But it can be done, as was proved by Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek, whose brilliant translation of his own original Acholi poem Song of Lawino was reviewed in the TLS of February 16."
• A golden age of translators

  "Not since the renaissance has the art and craft of translation--especially from the classics of Greece and Rome--such a level of quality and quantity."
• In their own write

  "Mr. George Steiner is an American, a Cambridge don, and an acute, finely cosmopolitan critic."
• From Poet to Poet

  "For as long as poetry has been spoken or written, it has also been translated."
• Foreign Fields

  "Leopold Sedar Senghor is the president of Senegal and his Selected Poems (Rex Collins Limited £2.95; hardback £4.50 pp 135) have been translated by Craig Williamson."
• Fiction in translation

  Sir,-- J.C. observes a reluctance in the anglophone reading public in tackle works in translation(NB, October 17).
• NB: Vidal revised