Swahili Coast, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries : Creativity, visibility and the bodily dimension of translating in classical Swahili poetry

Titelangaben

Talento, Serena:
Swahili Coast, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries : Creativity, visibility and the bodily dimension of translating in classical Swahili poetry.
In: Batchelor, Kathryn ; Odrekhivska, Iryna (Hrsg.): Translation Studies before "Translation Studies" : Nothing happened? - London : UCL Press , 2026 . - S. 93-107 . - (Literature and Translation )
ISBN 978- 1- 80008-987- 7

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Abstract

In the multilingual and cosmopolitan Swahili coast of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, literary translation was a significant activity practiced by Islamic scholars and judges for a cultivated public. Narratives from the Middle East were typically transferred through versification, adopting poetic forms that aligned with established modes of knowledge transmission in Swahili culture, where poetry functioned as a central medium for expressing ideas, values, and philosophical thought.
Classical Swahili poetry of the period also contains a discourse on translation that encapsulates conventions, concepts, and expectations regarding translation practices and products. In this contribution, I offer a reading of selected stanzas from two classical Swahili poems, Utenzi wa Ras al-Ghuli (‘Poem of Ras al-Ghul’, 1855) and Utenzi wa Katirifu (‘Poem of Katirifu’, late eighteenth/early nineteenth century). In their reflections on the translation of the poems and on translation more broadly, the composer-translators Sheikh Mgeni bin Faqihi and Abu Bakari bin Bwana Mwengo describe translation as both a metaliterary practice and a literary exercise to be valued as an art comparable to creative writing.
The discourse on translation in the poems under examination also contains deliberate appeals to translatorial visibility. Such visibility—and the construction of the translator as a persona—becomes particularly tangible in the way Mgeni bin Faqihi and Abu Bakari bin Bwana Mwengo portray translation as a meditative practice and a form of physical effort, thereby framing the cognitive process of translation also as a bodily experience.