‘Au plus profond de l’inconnu
Les poètes et les océans
Se rencontrent
Pour rejoindre
Hawaiki.’[1]
Thus writes Marie Tamole Keletaona, describing the ocean as the language of the peoples of the Pacific, and dreaming of being back on her home island of Futuna. Like many inhabitants of ‘Uvea (Wallis) and Futuna, she currently lives in Kanaky / New Caledonia, the ‘other’ French archipelago in the Pacific. Here the land of Hawaiki, the mythical origin of all Polynesians and the place to which their spirits return after death, represents unity and reunification with the source: it is also a reminder of ancestral voyaging and Pacific diaspora.
Both connection and disconnection, Hawaiki is thus an iconic representation of Oceania as a whole, constituted as it is of multitudes of archipelagic clusters, both separated and joined by the waters of the planet’s largest body of water. It is a space in which every arrival is a departure and every departure, an arrival; where tradition persists, challenging and being challenged by modernity; where a number of Indigenous languages increasingly flourish from their shared Proto-Polynesian sources in the face of the colonizers’ ‘world’ languages (French, English, and to a lesser degree, Spanish…).
As a translator based in a Pacific country (Aotearoa / New Zealand), I am a firm believer in the usefulness and even the necessity of a good awareness of the source text’s context. My recent experimental (and uncomfortable) translation of a Cameroonian poem for Georgina Collins’ Nineteen Ways of Looking at Awono (Bakwa Books 2024) brought this home to me very clearly. While I have never (yet) visited Futuna, I have spent time in New Caledonia and have visited so-called French Polynesia on several occasions. I have also co-translated into French and translated into English several books by Indigenous Pacific writers. While still very aware of multiple gaps in my knowledge, I have at least a degree of familiarity with a range of writing from the region. Having stumbled across Marie Tamole Keletaona’s poetry during a stay in Noumea, I was struck by both thematic and linguistic similarities with other Indigenous Pacific writers’ work. For example, the role of kava or the word tagi (tangi in Aotearoan Māori language).
Of interest in this context is the question of how translators might deal with cultural practices and allusions. In the poems featured here, Tamole Keletaona has provided a few basic notes to her texts, either simple translations of Fakafutuna terms or fuller explanatory comments. In the interests of a potentially even wider, non-Pacific readership, these have been kept in the English translations, although I have avoided adding to them because I also hold a stubborn belief in letting the texts speak for themselves, particularly in the case of poetry.
Other allusions are more discreet. While it could be argued that in these cases it is up to the readers to inform themselves, and that translators are responsible merely for providing equivalent words, there is some risk of loss of understanding. Take the example of the reference in ‘Tagi’ to the white city in a black land,’cette ville blanche en terre noire’: this is Noumea, nicknamed ‘Nouméa la blanche’ because of the concentration of European and Metropolitan French residents there. Outside the city itself are tribal areas and countryside, referred to as ‘en tribu’ and ‘en brousse’ where the population is preponderantly Kanak (black). Does it matter that this very specific reference may remain a touch obscure, or is the probably accessible inference clear enough?
More broadly, the poems refer several times to crossing the ocean, to the outstanding navigational skills of the early Polynesians who migrated in their canoes – va’a, waka, wa’a, the very words underline the commonality of their culture. It is only recently that the tremendous achievements of these early navigators have been increasingly recognized, with their profound knowledge of the sea and the skies that made it possible to travel immense distances across the sea.
A specific example can be found in the poem ‘Lingua Pasifika’, which speaks of ‘invincibles regards de pierre / figés sur l’horizon’: in this context, it is Rapa nui, Easter Island, with its famous carved stone statues, that is being evoked. Rapa nui is the most easterly corner of the Polynesian triangle, and marks one of the limits of Polynesian migration: connected by culture and tradition, but disconnected by distance.
Given the obvious subjectivity that readers bring to a text – Joyce’s description of Bloom’s delight in eating mutton kidneys likely stands in a very different emotional space for most readers from Proust’s madeleines, for example, but this is something outside an author’s control – should translators in fact concern themselves with potential understandings and interpretations? Or is there a fall-back point at which he or she can do no more than replace words in one language with words in another? Even within the unavoidable limitations noted here, the unavoidable distances between us, perhaps we may take comfort from the evidence that poetry, and more widely, literature, in particular literature in translation, provides precisely the possibility of connection within (and in spite of) our disconnection.
Born and raised in Aotearoa / New Zealand, not a country known for its interest in publishing translations, Jean Anderson has been working on and with Indigenous Pacific writers since 2006 (Chantal Spitz’s Island of Shattered Dreams, numerous short texts). She has a particular interest in assisting francophone and anglophone Indigenous peoples to access one another’s literatures across the colonial language barrier. In this regard, she has been fortunate enough to work with Tahiti-based publisher Au Vent des îles in co-translating into French eight of the books of leading Māori author Patricia Grace (eg. Chappy, 2018; Cousines, 2024). She also led and translated for the recent Words Without Borders special issue on Oceanian writing.
[1] In the deepest unknown, / Poets and oceans / Come together / To return to / Hawaiki.