The Transatlantic Culture Trade
Caribbean Creole Proverbs from Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Part One Introduction
- Beyond and Besides Reparations
- The Caribbean to the World
- One Caribbean or The Caribbeans: A Translator’s Musing
- On Caribbean Languages
- The Transatlantic Culture Trade
- Proverbs, Proverbiality, and Proverb Studies
- On Caribbean Creole Proverbs
- Translating Proverbs
- Writing in Creole
- Translating Creole and Creolization
- On Creole Intracultural Translation
- Pan-Creole Worldview and Creole Intracultural Translation
- Conclusion
- References
- Part Two 222 Creole Proverbs from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, with IPA
- Typology of Data Presentation in Proverb Collections
- The Corpus
- About the Creole Orthographies in this Collection
- Before and Beyond The Transatlantic Culture Trade: Caribbean Creole Proverbs from Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean
- References
- Index
- Series index
Illustrations
Figure 1. Small hax fall big chree
Figure 2. Two captain cannot steer one ship
Figure 3. Shut mou’ no ketch fly
Figure 4. If you follow wha’ owl nyam, you nebber nyam fowl meat
Figure 5. Every moldy bread has its cheese
Figure 6. No put yu hat higher dan yu can reach i
Figure 8. Cow no business inna horse gallop
Preface
This book, The Transatlantic Culture Trade: Caribbean Creole Proverbs from Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, celebrates indigenous Caribbean Creole languages and one of their associated cultural vectors, Creole proverbs. It is particularly timely as 2019 has been designated by the United Nations as the Year of Indigenous Languages, and falls within the United Nations Decade for People of African Descent which began in 2015 and will end in 2024.
This collection of 222 French-lexified and English-lexified Creole proverbs from the Caribbean is the result of over ten years of research which began as a result of my graduate work, undertaken at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris, France, a critique of two literary works, one of which was the 1997 English translation, Down Among the Dead Men, by David Homel, of the 1996 French autobiographical work of non-fiction, Pays sans chapeau by renowned Haitian-Canadian author Dany Laferrière. In Pays sans chapeau, the 24 bona fide Haitian Creole proverbs, which are immediately followed by Standard French renderings of them, appear as epigraphs for each chapter in the novel. These Haitian Creole proverbs were translated into Standard English by the ←xi | xii→translator, David Homel. My time-bound graduate research revealed that there are in fact 15 Caribbean English-lexified Creole equivalent proverbs, of the 24 in the novel, with similar syntactic structures and lexical elements with the same meaning from my native homeland of Jamaica.
That initially geographically restricted graduate work of equivalent Haitian and Jamaican Creole proverbs piqued my interest and so, my research mushroomed into a transdisciplinary doctoral thesis which focused on the translation of Creole proverbs from the entire Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean regions, whilst examining issues such as creolization, Creole culture, Creole orthography, and the use of Creole in Caribbean literature. This expanded my cultural awareness of the linguistically diverse Dutch, English, French, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean regions and confirmed my hypothesis that beyond their shared history of European colonization and their diverse languages, they share culturally similar realities which are expressed in their folkways such as their proverbs. Some of my findings have been published in French in various articles such as Bogle (2016), “Traduire la créolisation: traduction intraculturelle, proverbialité et littérature anillaise” Translating Creolization, Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts, special issue, vol. 2, no. 2, December 2016, John Benjamins Publishing Company; “La traduction intraculturelle: défense et illustration”, Minor Translating Major/Major Translating Minor/Minor Translating Minor (MTM Journal); and “Traduire la culture créole”, Atelier de traduction, no. 21, 2014, Universitatea Stefan cel Mare din Suceava.
The title of this collection, The Transatlantic Culture Trade: Caribbean Creole Proverbs from Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, was chosen over four equally compelling titles, namely (1) Over the Mountains, Across the Sea, (2) Our Caribbean Neighbours, (3) Trading Cultures: When West meets West, and simply (4) Trading Culture.
Details
- Pages
- XX, 86
- Year
- 2020
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781433157240
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781433157257
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781433157264
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433157233
- DOI
- 10.3726/b14121
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2020 (November)
- Published
- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2020. XX, 86 pp., 10. b/w ill.
