Problèmes de l'adaptation et de la traduction française de Lanke Omu (Omuti) de Kola Ogunmola

Omuti is a theatrical adaptation of Amos Tutuola's work titled: The Palmwine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-wine Tapster in the Dead's Town, published in London by Faber and Faber in 1952. A year after, in 1953, a French translator, Raymond Queneau translated it into French with the title LTvrogne dans la brousse. Many long essays, theses and articles in learned journals have been devoted to this work. In addition to all this literary fortune, Kola Ogunmola, adapted it for the stage in 1962. During the 1969 Pan-African Festival of Arts in Algiers, in Algeria, the adapted play won a Silver medal for theatre. This was one of the major reasons why we translated this work into French in 1982. We encountered many problems during the translation of Omuti, the least of which are, how to render the "Longish" title into a short one, the difficulty in establishing grammatical and semantic equivalents between the Yoruba original and the French translation. Certain linguistic habits that belong to the Oral tradition of the Yoruba people, such as the use of riddles, proverbs, talking drum register etc. made the French version difficult to work on. But there is communication in spite of all the above linguistic and cultural problems.