Christopher Okigbo, the legendary poet of Nigeria finally translated into French

Christopher Okigbo, poet and activist for the Biafran cause Okigbo Foundation / Obiageli Ibrahimat Okigbo

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

Christopher Okigbo, the legendary poet of Nigeria finally translated into FrenchConsidered as the most gifted poet of his generation, the Nigerian Christopher Okigbo died during the civil war that tore his country apart in the late 1960s. His poetry inspired by aesthetics Western modernist of the twentieth century and the poetic riches of his Igbo culture, sometimes adorns himself with warlike accents, as evidenced by the brief volume of his poetic texts which has just appeared in bilingual English French version. The collection includes an introduction by the translator Christiane Fioupou and a preface by Chimamanda Adichie.

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More than fifty years after his tragic disappearance on the Biafran front, at the very beginning of the civil war, the memory of the poet Christopher Okigbo continues to haunt Nigerian literature. This is what the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recalls in her preface to Labyrinths , the only collection of poems with a hundred pages, which the disappeared poet left to posterity and which has just appeared in French these days in Gallimard editions. Today, this dazzling poet became a legendary figure of African literature continues to influence the younger generation  ," writes the author of The Other Half of the sun .

When she grew up in Nigeria in the 1970s and 80s, the young novelist had memorized, as many schoolchildren in Lagos and Ibadan still do today, the poems of Okigbo, in particular the verses of opening of his cult poem, "The Passage", staging the adoration of an aquatic goddess. I didn't understand it, at the time, (…) however it was the only one that gave me a strange feeling, a shiver of gratitude ...  ", adds the novelist.

Pioneer of Nigerian letters

If the Nigerian and African youth can still be recognized today in the poetry of Christopher Okigbo, his literary legend was born during his lifetime,  " explains the poet's translator, Christiane Fioupou. He was one of the most gifted writers of his generation.

Born in 1932, Okigbo with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka constitute the pillars of modern Nigerian literature. They were all three members of the famous Mbari Club which brought together artists, intellectuals and writers at the University of Ibadan who, in the years following independence, laid the foundations for a free and particularly fertile postcolonial Nigerian culture. It is within this university framework, bubbling with vitality and creativity, that the Nigerian novel and theater took off under the aegis of Achebe and Soyinka respectively, while their friend Okigbo opened the tracks of an African poetry original English speaker.

A man of many talents, the latter was a jazz musician, high-level sportsman, librarian and editor. Passionate about poetry since his early youth, he had absorbed poetic productions from around the world, before publishing his first poems in the late 1950s. His poetry, published in the pages of the most famous literary magazines of the time ( Transition , Black Orpheus , The Horn ), wanted to be resolutely modernist, halfway between avant-garde experiments of a TS Eliot and Ezra Pound and traditional songs of praise Igbo or Yoruba. His contemporaries were captivated by the beauty and the promise of this poetry. For Chinua Achebe, friend of the poet and one of the first readers of the scattered poems which today constitute Labyrinths, there is "  nothing in Nigerian poetry and not much in poetry in general that surpasses the haunting beauty, mystical resonance and clarity with which  the movements of his poems are imbued .

However, despite the almost universal recognition of Christopher Okigbo's exceptional talent, it took several years for all of his poetic production, which numbered a few hundred pages, to find a publisher. Labyrinths , was published posthumously in 1971 by Heinemann editions. It then took more than half a century for foreign publishers to take an interest in this unusual work. In France, isolated poems by Okigbo were published in the 1960s in the review "  Présence Africaine  ", translated in particular by the Mauritian poet Edouard Maunick. The initiative for the translation of Labyrinths by Professor Christiane Fioupou, renowned anglicist and translator for Wole Soyinka, returns to the Okigbo Foundation, today run by the poet's daughter.

If foreign publishers have been slow to translate Okigbo, it is because , explains the translator, this work has long been considered inaccessible  ". Accused by his detractors of producing "  hermetic   ", "  incomprehensible   ", "  modernist   " poetry, the poet himself used to retort, says Christiane Fioupou, that meaning didn't matter to him. He wanted to transmit ," she explains in her long introduction presenting the poems, an " experience ", an image, a music. How to translate the experience of the poem into another language   ”

It is this challenge that Christiane Fioupou took up with brio, resolutely making the choice of a translation as literal as possible, and, above all, by making hear in French the words, the scraps of texts and sounds drawn from the poetry of world, which constitute the substrate of what she calls the "  poems-palimpsests  ". I had to re-read from Gilgamesh to Joyce via Virgil and TS Eliot, as the culture of Okigbo was vast and truly globalized  ", says the translator, for whom the originality of Christopher Okigbo's poetry essentially resides in his “borrowing and collage” aesthetic mixing the global and the local in which his poetics were forged. Citing from memory the poet's verses ("Suddenly making me talkative / like a weaver / Summoned in the offside of a / remembered dream"), she draws attention to the resemblance between this bird-weaver who gleans blades of grass, fragments of fibers and strips to build its nest and the intertextual work that characterizes Okigbo's work. The metaphor of the weaver bird," she points out, "is perhaps the image that most closely resembles the scriptural practice of the author of the Labyrinths for whom poetry was forged from multiple borrowings and varied, becoming from weaving to weaving its own personal weaving  ”.

The cover of the book "Labyrinths" by Christopher Okigbo at Editions Gallimard. Gallimard editions

A mystical and serious work

Resolutely mixed and intertextual, Labyrinths is also a serious and introspective work. This collection is made up of around fifty free verse poems, organized into 4 thematic chapters provided by the author and a “  Post-scriptum  ” added by the publisher when the English version of the volume was published in 1971. In the introduction that Okigbo himself had written for this edition which he considered "  definitive  " of his poems, he described his poetry as "  fable of the eternal quest of man for his own fulfillment  ". This motif of initiatory quest is introduced by the title of the collection: "  Labyrinths  ", which evokes a mystical journey between innocence and self-knowledge, between the material and the spiritual, the profane and the sacred.

The four sequences that make up the collection without including the "  Post-scriptum  ", as it had been imagined by the author before his disappearance in 1967, are entitled: "Porte du ciel", "Limites", "Silences" and "Distances". These sequences can be read as the four stages of the “research” of the narrator, both in the Proustian sense of the search for lost time and the ritual sense of the rejuvenation of being. The opening poem from the first sequence - The Passage - opens on the beginning of this quest with the offering to Idoto, mother goddess of the village river. In front of you, mother idoto, / naked I stand; / in front of your aquatic presence, / a prodigal ... /  ", sings the officiant. It is an invitation to an inner journey.

There is a lot of talk in these poems of the "dark waters of the beginning", of initiation, of "  scars of the crucifix  ", of religion and its overcoming. The march towards the psychic center which constitutes the central process at work in these pages takes place under the aegis of the drums, commemorating the spirits of the ancients, and to the sounds of "  fragments of yesteryear  " repeated by the "  players of the great haughty organs  ”. It is disrupted by the movement of the seasons, but also by social and political turbulence such as the death of Patrice Lumumba or the crises of governance in post-independence Nigeria plagued by widespread violence and corruption.

The violence on which this first movement of Labyrinths ends explodes in the last sequence of the collection, composed of six poems from the "  Post-scriptum  ", entitled "Sentier du tonnerre". Written in the years preceding the civil war, they herald the impending disaster. “  An odor of blood already floats in the afternoon lavender mist. / The death sentence is ambushed along the corridors of power… / 

Will poetry survive the coming apocalypse?  

Labyrinths , by Christopher Okigbo. Translated from the English by Christiane Fioupou. "From around the world" collection. Poems presented by Christiane Fioupou and prefaced by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Gallimard Editions, 2020, 212 pages.

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