Walcott Translating Derek Walcott in America Today,

Walcott

Translating Derek Walcott

In America today, the 1992 Nobel Prize winner for literature Derek Walcott is perhaps best known for his poetry. His collective work explores themes regarding the Caribbean experience from colonial slavery to independence, and the nature of the Caribbean's post-colonial identity a mixture of different cultures. Walcott's writings reflect own ethnic and racial heritage and cultural background, both African and European. Walcott writes his works in English but with Creole vocabulary and calypso rhythm to evoke an image of his homeland in his poems and verse plays. Walcott was first known as a playwright when he was a young West Indian intellectual living in St. Lucia. Then, Walcott thought that theatre was the most relevant and culturally valid artistic form was the theater, as it had the unique ability to communicate poetry and stridently political themes through the wider audience of heard as well as written speech, yet with the dense and rhythmic language of literature. Although Walcott's beliefs have softened, his political concerns and the political and linguistic negotiations of his work remain constant.

Two critical elements to understanding this particular author's work, thus, are Walcott's often polymorphous use of language, his blend of French, Creole, and English, and his desire the lager dialogue between the language of the colonized peoples of the world, and the colonizers -- an additional reason that re-exploring his use of language in Spanish, another language similarly used by the oppressed and the oppressing peoples of the world in history is so crucial. Walcott's early 1956 play "Ti-Jean and his Brothers" is an often unrecognized work in the rest of the world, despite the acknowledged and awarded excellence of the author's verse, yet it explores many of the author's most cherished themes of colonialism. It is both a universal play in its depiction of family relations, yet typical of the concerns of this great author -- and particularly suited to its re-expression and recognition in the 21st century, though the expression of Spanish. It features particularly Caribbean elements, such as a bolom or the angry ghost of an murdered, unborn, abandoned or aborted child and more universal mythological elements such as Papa Bois is connected to the spirit Gran Bois, or Maitre Bois, the master of the nature of the forest. Mythology, family, and dominance all are part of the narrative play in "Ti-Jean and his Brothers."

The purpose of translation is to make the themes and language of one author, one part of history, and/pr one region of the world comprehensible and relevant to other areas of the world, who do not share the common language or who wish to make that language part of their own contemporary argot. Thus, the psychologically dense plays of the 19th century Russian author Chekhov have been translated into the sparse yet tense and pitched punctuated vocabulary of words of the American translator David Mamet in works such as "Three Sisters." The transcendent themes of class conflict were not simply pertinent to John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera" in English -- they were also rendered into German words and songs in "Threepenny Opera" in the 20th century by the German Author Bertold Brecht. And one of the British poet Ted Hugh's last works was to translate the French dramatist Racine's "Phaedra" and "Britannicus" into English. Racine was a poet and so was Hughes, and the obsessions of the 20th century British author Hughes with mythology and dense language were well suited to the words of Racine, even though Racine lived many years before Hughes was born.