NOUVELLES DE JÉRUSALEM - Automne 2017

Bible
Translating the Book of Isaiah into Mauritian
Creole: Opportunities and Emerging Questions
Fr. Laurent Rivet is a priest, native
from the Island of Mauritius. He was
student at the École biblique during
the last academic year, ending his
studies at the Università Gregoriana.
The Biblical Society of Mauritius
asked me to participate in the Old
Testament translation project by
working on the Book of Isaiah. In
my creolophone parish in Mauritius,
I had sometimes experienced
the joyful astonishment of my parishioners
hearing, during Mass,
the liturgical readings in Creole.
I knew that I was embarking on a
demanding intellectual task. From
my working desk in Jerusalem I
remembered St Jerome, the patron
saint of translators who lived only
a few kilometres away and spent
thirty difficult years working on the
Vulgate! Somehow I would be able
to help my people to have a better
understanding of God who was
now talking their mother tongue!
The syntatic difficulty
Mauritian Creole is probably
amongst the newest languages
in the world. It was created some
300 years ago by Afro-Malagasy
slaves who, listening to their masters’
French, simultaneously tried
to speak it and to resist it. Today,
Mauritian Creole is the mother
tongue of 85% of the population.
However, it has long remained an
oral language. For ideological and
political reasons, its orthography
was fixed and it has been taught at
school only since 2007. The New
Testament was translated only five
years ago. Thus, Creole linguistic
studies are quite new and only a
few publications and translations
have been made in Creole, with
written poetry slowly emerging.
One can easily suppose that the first
difficulty of translating Hebrew
poetry to Creole would be a syntactic
one. Hebrew verses, generally
composed of two repeated affirmations,
usually use elliptic forms of
expression such that the verb in the
second part of the verse is most of
the time omitted. For example, in
Is 60:19b, the verb היה – to be – is
used only once for both “YHWH
being your everlasting light” and
“God being your splendour”. The
use of such elliptic forms is not very
common in Creole and can obscure
the meaning of a verse. The verse
repetition phenomenon opens us
to another challenge often met by
translators: the lexico-semantic
field. The two parts of the verse are
rarely linked by a mere repetition
but rather by a rhetoric of intensification.
If רוא – light can be translated
in Creole, its intensive partner
הראפת – splendour can be only
be rendered by leaving the “light”
spectrum to give “beauty” or “glory”.
Such examples can be multiplied
all through the book. Talking
of a field in biblical language is
not really a metaphor. The prophet
would often use agricultural and
biological references to deliver his
message: in their semi-desert area,
the fauna and flora are not at all
the same as on a tropical island!
Therefore, Mauritian Creole’s lexicon
does not correspond to the Hebrew
one in this particular aspect.
Another challenge of translating
from Hebrew is the rendering of
theological anthropomorphism.
When in Is 60:13b, Isaiah speaks
of the “place of the feet [of God]”
to indicate the place where he
stands; or in Is 9:11, when he talks
of the “nose [of God] which is not
turned” for “the anger which is not
spent”, can we afford such leaps
without impoverishing the metaphorical
specificity of Hebraic
theological expression? The same
issue is encountered for idiomatic
expressions: shall the covenant still
be תרכ – cut or simply “made”?
Are dynamic translations more
appropriate though they be a bit
anachronistic: in Is 65:3 the brick
in the garden on which incense is
burned is strangely similar to what
we call in Creole “Garden guardian
– gardyn lakour”. In this case, can
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Lettre aux amis de l’ÉBAF - N° 94 - Automne 2017