Author Archives: Nathan H Dize
A Review of “AfroTrans: Perspectives. Entretiens. Poésie. Fiction”
As the title indicates, this rich volume is entirely devoted to Afrodiasporic transgender experiences, but editor and contributor Michaëla Danjé specifies that it does not seek to construct a new, normative, monolithic, inalienable identity category. In fact, the Trans in AfroTrans is capacious and fluid enough to welcome transformation, transmigration, transoceanicity, and, germane to this special issue, translation. Conceived as an open space for trans artists, activists, and intellectuals from all corners of the African diaspora to constitute, bear witness to, and preserve their own archive, the volume organically stretches out like an archipelagic community with submarine ties connecting the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
Coral Relation: Reading translated excerpts from Denis Pourawa’s “Our Coral Soul”
Denis Pourawa is a Kanak (Indigenous) writer born in 1974 in Nouméa, the capital city of Kanaky/New Caledonia, a French-speaking archipelago situated close to Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia in the Pacific Ocean. In 2003, he wrote his first children’s book; since, he has published (and performed) in a variety of literary genres, including poetry, theatre, short essays, and slam poetry. A member of the Mérénémé tribe, Pourawa’s work is influenced by his childhood memories, Kanak tradition, and his first encounter with “occidental thinking” through literature, which encouraged him to dedicate his life to the arts.
‘Archipelagic Francospheres: Transoceanic Dialogues Through Translation’ an Interview with Ananda Devi
My first experience in literary translation was when I was asked by Dapper publications to translate The Counting House, a novel by the Guyanese writer, David Dabydeen, into French. It is a very powerful novel about a country with a colonial history very similar to that of Mauritius, despite the discrepancy in size between the two countries. I therefore understood it at a very deep level and was fascinated by the choices David made in telling that story. But when I came to the final part of the novel, written entirely in Guyanese English, I realized that this represented an almost incommensurable challenge: Guyanese English, despite having its own specificity, was understandable to anglophone readers, perhaps in the same way that Salman Rushdie’s Hinglish passages were.