Introduction

1Recent developments in the study of literature have shown, as Ria Vanderauwera tells us, that

the reception and appreciation of literary works is not primarily a matter of their inherent qualitative inferiority or superiority, but hinges on a series of interrelated factors ranging from poetics to economics, from prestige to profit.1

2This is particularly true of literature in translation (or translated literature, as one would prefer), a case in point being Nigerian literature in French translation.

3The existence of Nigerian writing in French translation is not a recent phenomenon since it dates as far back as 1953. That was the year Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town became available to the French reading public in an adapted form. That was followed thirteen years later (in 1966) by Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart which had been translated by Michel Ligny. But it was in the 1970s that literary works from Nigeria started becoming available in French translation in relatively large numbers.

41971 saw the publication of the French translation of three works by Wole Soyinka, namely: The Trials of Brother Jew, A Dance of the Forests, and The Swamp Dwellers. His The Lion and the Jewel came out two years later, published by the Yaoundé-based Editions CLE. In 1974, it was the turn of Achebe’s No Longer at Ease to appear in French translation. Then came Achebe’s A Man of the People in 1977, Achebe’s Arrow of God and Cyprian Ekwensi’s Burning Grass in 1978, and Soyinka’s The Interpreters in 1979.

5Since the beginning of the 1980s, the following works have become available to the French reading public: Achebe’s Girls at War and Other Stories (1981), Nkem Nwanko’s My Mercedes is Bigger than Yours and Soyinka’s Idanre (1982), Soyinka’s Ake, The Years of Childhood (1984), Gabriel Okara’s The Voice (1985), Soyinka’s The Man Died and Death and the King’s Horsemen (1986), Soyinka’s A Season of Anomy (1987), Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana, and Soyinka’s The Road (1988).

6There can be no doubt that these works on the whole represent just a small proportion of the literary production from Nigeria. One cannot but acknowledge, however, that the list of works by Nigerian writers available in French translation is quite impressive, at least when compared to the number of works of fiction from the other English-speaking countries of Africa which are available to the French reading public.

7However, a somewhat self-evident point is that, no matter how numerous they may be, the mere existence of these works cannot really give us a conclusive idea of the place Nigerian literature occupies in France and the level of success it has enjoyed. The fact that they exist in French translation is one thing, while whether they are sold and/or read is another thing alltogether. We can get a good idea of the state of Nigerian writing in France only when we take a close look at the available evidence concerning the reasons for, and the way and manner in which the translations now available came to be published, the amount of effort that has gone into making them known to the French reading public, the response they have received from the different sections of the public, and so on. In this short study, therefore, we intend to consider the state of Nigerian writing in France by examining the factors which can be said to determine its success or failure of being the most prominent of such factors is undoubtedly the attitude of the French publishing houses.

The attitude of French publishers to Nigerian writing

8In this connection, a number of events have take place in the recent past which are very instructive. We take just a few examples, the first of which will bear on the publication, early in 1988 and almost simultaneously, of the French translations of the works by Nwapa, Tutuola and Ekwensi noted above. Starting with Efuru, Nwapa’s first novel, the reader will remember that it was originally published in 1966. It thus took twenty-two years for the French translation to become available and, even then, only after a lot of hesitation on the part of the publishers. Indeed, a well-informed source in Paris told this writer that the translation itself had been completed some years earlier but that the publishing house it was handed to was in no hurry to bring it out.

9Coming to the works by Tutuola and Ekwensi, it has been reported that the translations were made with financial support from the French Cultural Centre in Lagos.2 This may very well be an indication of the readiness of the French authorities to actively encourage contacts and promote exchanges at the cultural level between Nigeria and France. It may, however, also be a recognition of the fact that each of the writers in question merited having a second work of his appear in French translation. As we saw earlier, Ekwensi’s Burning Grass came out in French translation in 1978. Even more noteworthy, though, is the fact that, after having had the singular honour of being the first Nigerian writer whose work appeared in French translation, albeit in adapted form, and this as early as 1953, Tutuola just did not seem to interest the French publishers any longer since it took thirty-five years for his second work to appear in French.

10From these examples, we see that Nigerian literature in general has not been mobilising publishing houses In France, the evidence for this being not only the lateness with which the translations are brought out but also the very limited number of writers who seem to interest the publishers. Indeed, on looking again at the list of works of fiction from Nigeria which are available in French translation, one cannot but be struck by the fact that the publishers have concentrated their efforts mainly on Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. Could this have been accidental or a simple question of coincidence? That, in our opinion, is very unlikely.

Reasons for the choice of authors

11Indeed, a more plausible explanation would be that the publishers have simply decided to concentrate on the two Nigerian writers who are probably the best known the world over, and this to the detriment of the others, many of whom have not had even one work of theirs translated into French. It may be no exaggeration, therefore, to say that the choice of works by Nigerian writers which appear in French translation has not been based on purely literary criteria.

12That, of course, is not to say or even to suggest that the other Nigerian writers have produced works of higher literary value than Soyinka and Achebe have done. But one cannot resist the temptation to ask why, for instance, it was considered more important and urgent to publish Soyinka’s Stockholm speech (pronounced when he received the Nobel Prize in 1986) in French translation than a work by, say, Aluko who is yet to have a novel by him in French translation, not to talk of the younger writers.

13It would also appear that the choice is not made on the basis of any particular taste one may want to attribute to the French public for which the works translated are presumably intended. After all, what is the need for the translations to start with if not to make Nigerian literature known to the French public which would not have been able to discover it otherwise? That would mean that more Nigerian writers could have been brought to the notice of the reading public in France if the people responsible for doing that had been thinking only of making as much of Nigerian literature as possible known in France.

14To be fair, though, one has to acknowledge that the publishers concerned, like most other publishing houses, are not philanthropists but people in business mainly, if not solely, in order to make money. They can therefore not really be blamed for favouring two of the better known Nigerian writers whose works may not necessarily achieve bestseller status once they are translated into French but at least stand a good chance of selling. Commercial considerations thus seem to have had the upper hand. Surprisingly, however, the publishing houses concerned do not seem to see the need to make serious attempts to get the works they choose to publish known to the public.

Commercial strategies and results

15In this connection, the impression one gets is actually that the publishers somehow assume that the very names of the writers whose works get translated into French suffice to make the works sell well. One gets this impression because, to take just one example, the announcements which usually precede and follow the publication of literary works in order to make the public know of their existence are conspicuous by their total absence when it comes to Nigerian writing in French translation. Strange strategy indeed on the part of people handling works which need all the publicity they can get in order to gain access to a literary environment where the majority of the potential readers, as we shall see later, know practically nothing about the existence of such works. This attitude is all the more surprising since it comes from publishing houses at least a number of which cannot really be said to lack the resources or means needed to embark on massive promotion of the works they bring out.

16Little wonder then that, when Efuru, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Jagua Nana came out early in 1988, the exposure they got was dependent mainly on the goodwill, so to say, of people and institutions which had nothing to do with their publication. An example would be the fact that, in its weekly supplement on books, Liberation, the widely read and extremely popular French newspaper, published long articles on both Amos Tutuola and Cyprian Ekwensi and also announced the publication of Efuru in French translation. Interestingly enough, within the period it published the articles just mentioned. Liberation brought out only two other articles on African writers, one on Blaise N’Djehoya, a Camerounian living in France and who writes in French, and another on Andre Brink, a white South African.

17Can we see in those publications a sign that Nigerian literature will henceforth get serious treatment in French reviews? Probably not. However, Libération’s effort is worth mentioning because it is not often that one reads about Nigerian literature in the printed press in France, the notable exeption having been the day after Wole Soyinka was proclaimed the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986.

18With so little promotion and given the almost total absence of reviews in newspapers and other publications, therefore, it is not surprising to note that Nigerian literature is still unknown to the greater part of the French public (more on that later). Indeed, it would appear that the knowledge of Nigerian creative writing is limited mainly to people in the universities.

Nigerian writing in French universities

19As could be expected, French universities have for long actually known of the existence, and accorded due recognition to the qualities, of works by Nigerian creative writers. This has been the case in particular of Departments of English which, as Versinger tells us,3 have over the years had African writers on their programmes of literature from the ’’British Commonwealth". Special mention must be made in this connection of Chinua Achebe who has had the most singular honour of having his Arrow of God selected as the first ever novel by an African writer to be included on the list of eight books to be studied for the Aggregation examination in English. That was in 1980.

20But the interest generated by Nigerian writing has not been limited to those university students and teachers who are capable of reading the works directly in English. Other sections of the French university community, especially people in Departments of Literature, have up-to-date knowledge of Nigerian literature which is an object of very serious study. An example would be the University of Montpellier III which organised a colloquium in 1984 to discuss the topic "Wole Soyinka et le théâtre africain anglophone" (Wole Soyinka and African Theatre in English). The proceedings of this colloquium have since been published.4 The reader may be interested to learn that, on the occasion of that colloquium, the University of Montpellier awarded Soyinka an honorary doctorate degree.

21It may not be out of place to also make mention here of some scholarly works devoted to Nigerian literature which were published and are therefore readily available in France. These include: Amos Tutuola: tradition orale et écriture du conte by M. Dussoutour-Hammer (published by Présence Africaine), Chinua Achebe et la tragédie de l’histoire by the Camerounian critic Thomas Melone (also published by Présence Africaine), and a special issue of the monthly journal Europe which came out in October 1980 and which was edited by Daniel Vignal, then of the Department of French, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. Among more general works, we can retain the relatively recent Anthologie critique de la littérature africaine anglophone (published in 1983) which was put together by a group of French university lecturers and which includes many works by Nigerian writers.

22It would be no exaggeration, therefore, to say that Nigerian literature has not only been relatively well known in universities and other institutions of higher learning in France but has also been given the place of honour it so obviously deserves. But, when we come to the French public at large, we cannot but note that the story has been totally different.

Nigerian literature and the French general public

23Commenting on the situation of Nigerian writing as far as the French public at large is concerned, Denise Coussy (who lectures at the Iniversity of Mans and also writes on African literature in English for the reputable Le Monde newspaper), for example, has actually acknowledged that, if literature from English-speaking Africa in general has been acclaimed the world over for its qualities, the French public knew (and continues to know) little about it.5 That, in our view, is putting it very mildly. It may be nearer the truth to say that African literature in English in general and Nigerian literature in particular has been something of which the greater part of the French public remains profoundly ignorant. An example will illustrate and bring this point out very well.

24In the October 1980 issue of Europe which was entirely devoted to Nigerian literature, Daniel Vignal, himself of French origin, betrayed the level of ignorance of the public when he saw the need to write in his introductory remarks: "but, you may be asking, from where did we fish out these writers whose works we are now bringing out in French translation?" A little earlier, he had written: "but, you may want to ask, what is Nigeria?" Nigeria, Vignal explained, is a country that is known in France mainly to businessmen and "Africanists". He then went on to inform the French public that Nigeria is the country where Biafra once existed (the French certainly did hear of Biafra, given the level of support they accorded it), which produces a lot of petrol, etc. Vignal thus confirmed the impression Nigerians living in France have always had, that is to say, that the knowledge the majority of the French people have of Nigeria is limited to Biafra (and this writer was quite surprised on several occasions to hear people in Paris still talking about "Biafrans" as if the country still existed). coups-d’état (of course!), the expulsion of immigrants in large numbers from the country, and other such things as do get reported once in a while (on rare occasions would be a better way to put it) in the French mass media.

25This would mean that, if so little was known and continues to be known about Nigerian literature in France, it has been, at least in part, because the majority of the French people did not even know and still do not know much about the country called Nigeria to start with. The closer political ties that have been developing between Nigeria and France in recent times and the massive French investments in Nigeria have apparently not done much to change that. Little wonder, then, that when Soyinka was proclaimed the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986, Françoise Huguier, writing in Liberation (of 17th October 1986), could talk of him (Soyinka, that is) as a writer who was almost totally unknown and who was teaching Theatre Arts at the University or Ife, located in the "north-west" of Nigeria!

26One has to acknowledge, though, that such crass ignorance when it comes to Africa and, worse, the impression created that the effort required in order to get the facts right is too great to make, only goes to confirm what many refer to as the "imperial" nature of the relationship Europe and the other countries of the industrialised "North" maintain with Africa in general. The French may thus be no worse offenders than the other Europeans in this regard.

27However, as we all know, the French, probably more than all the other erstwhile colonial masters, have continued to maintain such close contacts with the African continent and have remained so attached to their former colonies – which, as Anyadike has pointed out, are important because they "provide France with an international role crucial to its national prestige"6 – that one may not be asking for too much to expect them to be relatively more knowledgeable than most other Europeans when it comes to Africa.

28Even with regard to literature, one would normally expect the French to be more familiar with writings from Africa than, say, the Germans or the Dutch. We can expect that much from the French given the fact, for example, that they are extremely proud to note that Africans continue to use the French language so well and to such an extent that they actually produce literary works in it, this being something that is encouraged all the more these days with the emphasis being placed on "Francophonie" (a sort of Commonwealth à la française which brings together all users of the French language who are expected, among other things, to join forces in order to check the advance of the all-conquering English language). But has that resulted in the French public at large knowing African literature in French reasonably well? That is very doubtful, even though most of the works produced by French-speaking Africans are published in France and in spite of the fact that writers like Sony Labou Tansi of the Congo live and get a lot of publicity in France.

29One can arrive at that sad conclusion by looking at the issue this way. If the French people have tried to have a reasonably good knowledge of African literature that has been produced in French over the years, it should follow that, somewhere along the way, they would have discovered at least some of the works by the English-speaking writers which have been translated into French. Or are we to understand that they actually did come across such translated works but found the differences between them and those written originally in French so great that they preferred the second set of works to the first? That would be strange indeed because if we take post-independence novels, for instance, the African writers have all, irrespective of the languages they use, expressed their disappointment over the failure of political independence to usher in the much-hoped-for improvement to the lot of most Africans. Why then would one want to read only Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les soleils des indépendances or Sembène Ousmane’s Xala and not Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People or Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not yet born, for example, especially if these works are all available in French, albeit in translated form as far as the last two are concerned? Of course, it can be argued that the translations may not succeed in reproducing all the qualities contained in the original works, thereby rendering them less worthy of interest. But such an argument cannot be taken seriously because the translations cannot be so bad as to kill one’s interest completely. We contend, therefore, that if the majority of the French people have remained ignorant of Nigerian literature, it is because they have shown very little interest, if at all, in African literature as a whole, that is, including literature coming from countries which they know relatively well.

30The problem most probably has to do with prestige. This is because, as Vandereuwera has said in connection with Dutch literature in English translation,

literature which comes from an area which is at present of little socio-political or even cultural interest does not elicit great excitement in a target pole.7

31Indeed, we see that, as far as the cultural side of it is concerned, the French people, and especially the youth, have come to learn to enjoy music by Fela, Sunny Ade, Sunny Okosun and others. But that seems to be about the only thing that really interests them for now. When it comes to literature, the only authors who seem to generate sufficient interest among the French public are those who come from Europe, the United States of America and other parts of the developed world, some notable exceptions being "dissidents" and other writers who defend fashionable causes or come from some of the "hot spots" of the world.

32In short, Nigerian literature has generated very little interest among the French reading public, in spite of the fact that, as we have seen, they have a relatively large number of works by Nigerian writers at their disposal. There are at least ten works by Soyinka alone, most of which were available in French translation even before he became a Nobel laureate. In comparison, the Dutch had only two8 while it would appear that the Hungarians had none at all – it was reported in 1987 that they were hard at work trying to produce translations of some of Soyinka’s works.9 But how many French people had read just one of his works or even knew the name Wole Soyinka? They must have been few indeed, despite the fact that, at the very moment the Stockholm jury was proclaiming Soyinka the winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature, one of his plays in French translation was being staged right on French soil, in the town of Limoges, during the annual "Festival des Francophonies".

33Little wonder then that the French were surprised to learn the name of the Nobel laureate for 1986. Indeed, they almost could not believe that Nigeria has produced writers some of whom have come up with works whose qualities entitle them to such distinctions at the international level. At best, they were ready to accept that Soyinka could have merited the award because of his struggle in the area of human rights protection (at least the press did hammer a lot on that point). That, of course, was by far a more positive reaction than the one reserved for Tutuola when his The Palm-Wine Drinkard came out in French adaptation in 1953. As Denise Coussy has reported, the French public was not even ready to believe that an African had written the work originally, believing instead that Raymond Queneau had written it himself and was only trying to deceive people into believing that it was a foreign product.10 It would appear, however, that the French still find it difficult to accept that works of quality and worthy of serious attention can come out of Black Africa.

Future prospects

34The Nobel Prize won by Soyinka in 1986 has, in the words of the Society of African Culture, put the African continent "on the same level as all the others" because, thanks to Soyinka, "black talent has made its triumphal entry into the club of the greatest celebrities of the mind and of human creativity".11 Unfortunately, not even that distinction has succeeded in making the French public want to discover or explore the rich literary production that has come out of Nigeria, despite the fact that much has been done of recent to make them aware of the existence of Nigerian literature in French translation. To take an example, a publishing house which has brought out some of Soyinka’s works in French is said to have tried to draw as much attention as possible to them by putting them on conspicuous display during the 1988 Paris Book Fair. However, the sales were said to have been so disappointing that the publishing house almost came to the conclusion that it just might be a hopeless case. It would appear, though, that not all the publishing houses are so pessimistic.

35Indeed, during discussions with well-informed people in Paris, this writer came to learn that some of the publishing houses are now ready to give more serious consideration to translations of Nigerian writing that may be presented to them for possible publication. A representative or one of such publishing houses is actually reported to have gone to the Lagos Symposium on African Literature, held in May 1988 in honour of Wole Soyinka and jointly organised by the Nigerian government, the French government and the UNESCO, in the hope of "discovering" new talents whose works could be commissioned for translation into French and published.

36Many more works by Nigerian writers (other than Soyinka and Achebe who have had practically all their works translated into French) may thus appear in French in the years to come, thereby giving the French public an even better opportunity to discover not only the beauty of Nigerian writing but also the realities of the Nigerian situation as described by the writers.

Conclusion

37The publication of still more works will surely be a welcome development. However, as we have tried to show in the preceding paragraphs, the mere existence of translated works does not suffice if they are to be read. The publishers need to do a lot more to promote the translations they bring out. They may also need to. prevail on newspapers, magazines, literary journals and other publications to do reviews which will expose Nigerian literature to the French public. Such reviews will need to be as comprehensive and broad-based as possible, taking into account not only the qualities of the works as such but also the level of ignorance of the public which needs information on Nigerian literature and on Nigeria itself.

38Until Nigerian literature in French translation begins to get such serious attention, until it gets all the exposure and promotion it so obviously merits, not even the arrival on the market of many works will bring it out of the ghetto to which it is confined at present in France. But how soon will that happen?