[en] Oral literature in Cameroon and especially the « mbooku » poems from Diamare is endangered because it is no longer performed. In fact, most of the poets have passed away and the new generation has not taken over because of the lack of interest in the African traditional culture. Besides, only few materials do exist in the form of transcription and translation on one hand, and less good quality audio recordings in the other hand. To the best of my knowledge, only three researchers transcribed and published the « mbooku » poems in English, French and German. These are respectively the Japanese Paul K. Eguchi (1978; 1980; 1992), the German Viet Erlmann (1979) and the Cameroonian Abdoulaye Oumarou Dalil (1988). All these three authors translated the poems for different purposes, other than literary. All of them are also from different backgrounds of studies. This paper aims at describing challenges in (re)translating Cameroon Fulani poems, namely «mbooku» poems from existing transcribed and translated texts, as well as other untranslated materials in the form of audio, from a literary perspective. In other words, the author explores ways to make the poems ‘more poetic’ in the target language and underlines the various challenges the translator may face in dealing with such texts.
Disciplines :
Arts & humanities: Multidisciplinary, general & others