Tutuola and the Haunted Translation, or Zazie in the Ghost Train

Amos Tutuola’s novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, My life in the Bush of Ghosts and The Witch-herbalist of the remote town are all haunted by ghosts. While spirit-characters intervene in the narration, a metaphorical ghost subverts the English syntax and lexicon. A brief linguistic survey will allow us to describe the traces left by Tutuola’s mother tongue, Yoruba, between the lines of the written English. Although many critics assert that translation is the most appropriate model to account for the postcolonial stereophonic writing, it will appear that both the production and the reception of the haunted text require a more complex procedure than the mere transfer from a source to a target language. Freud’s psychic model of translation and Riffatterre’s conception of intertextuality may help to explain why translation appears to be such a vivid metaphor in the critical literature about postcolonial writing. We shall finally observe an effective translation, namely Queneau’s French version of The Palm-Wine Drinkard. At once domesticating and creative, Queneau’s translation appears to have exorcised the Yoruba ghost that haunted Tutuola’s English. But has the ghost vanished or will it come back within another text? Zazie might finally take her turn in the ghost train...