Migrating Mia Couto’s voice[s]: strategies of translation across the borders of genre and nation

Abstract

Over more than a decade from the year 2000, I engaged in a project to translate the short stories of the Mozambican writer Mia Couto to the stage. This work resulted in the production Voices Made Night different versions of which were performed in Cape Town, Grahamstown, Maputo and Edinburgh between 2000 and 2013. Mia Couto has developed a new and deeply creative literary language based in the African oral tradition and on African transformations of Portuguese. The stories have been translated into English by David Brookshaw and these are the versions from which the stage production departed. Part of the ongoing project has been to discover ways in which to make the stories align with the particular context of their original creation, and to migrate this context and the particularities of the linguistic register employed in the original versions to audiences in other countries, initially in Africa but also in other parts of the world. The article recounts the experience of the director trying to engage Mia Couto directly regarding the work of translation as an indication of the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of ever being able to reach back to the original author in the process. It explores the specific translation strategies employed in the performance project and argues for a focus on voice as a marker of singularity. It argues that paying attention to prosodic effect leads to an idiomatic affect that, in turn, gives rise to a strangeness in the theatrical encounter between stage and audience. It suggests that such a strangeness must be dwelt in rather than overcome, as a way to refuse an easy crossing of borders between nations and genres in translation and to counter ideas of transparency.