Translator's Introduction to Saint John the Baptist — Web Exclusive
By Guerda Romain Châtelain
This text is an excerpt from "Sen Jan," or "Saint John the Baptist," from the Creole-French bilingual collection Ravinodyab/Ravine aux Diables, written in 1982 by the poet-playwright Felix Morisseau-Leroy. Morisseau-Leroy first came to national attention in Haiti in 1953 when he adapted the play Antigone into Creole. (Legend has it that he translated Sophocles' work on a dare from a fellow writer who believed that Creole did not have the depth and range of classical languages.) Until his death in 1998 at age 86, he was known as a staunch defender of the Creole language and as an opponent of injustice in Haiti, particularly during the Duvalier dictatorship.
In "Saint John the Baptist, " Morrisseau-Leroy imitates the style of the traditional Haitian conte, a tale meant to be shared in a social setting. This passage from "Saint John," characterized by the author as a "tale for singing and dancing," is the story of a devastating hurricane in a small village on the southern coast of Haiti and the survival of the village's population thanks to its faith in vodoun spirits.
While the appearance of these spirits, who possess the inhabitants of the village and lead them to unity and to extraordinary feats of physical strength, clearly qualifies "Saint John" as a "ghost" story of sorts, the theme of ghosts actually runs much deeper in the narrative. The history of the village of Grandgozier, its previous experiences with natural disasters, and the ancestry of the narrator who, unlike most descendants of slaves in the Americas, can retrace the names of his African ancestors, all give a sense of a place that time has forgotten but whose people never will. The nature of the spirits themselves also helps the villagers remember their past. Like many highly venerated spirits in the vodoun religion, Pa Ogou, featured prominently in the story, is a fierce warrior, a spiritual descendant of the former slaves who fought for emancipation and independence in Saint Domingue, the French colony which was to become Haiti in 1804.
The richness of Grandgozier's history—and daily life—is further reflected in the language of the text itself, where Latin, French, and Creole intertwine to weave an intricate cultural tapestry. The Catholic Mass is said in Latin, a fact apparently resented by some of the vodoun spirits who speak and sing in both Creole and in an African ritual language not used in any other circumstances in life in the village, and therefore known only to initiates. In my translation, I tried to convey some of that richness and complexity of the multilingual original, as well as some of the poetic quality of Creole, which relies a great deal on sound and image to convey meaning. I also attempted to imitate the gender and verb-tense flexibility that characterizes Creole. For example, when the woman Germaine is possessed by a male spirit, not only do her actions and power become fused with his; her personal pronoun does too. Germaine's feminine pronoun becomes "li," a pronoun that can refer to either a man or a woman, thus blurring Germaine's identity within the language itself. Similarly, the borders between the past and present tenses are unclear in Creole, at times giving the narrative an active, almost breathless quality.
Of course there are many words, including several vodoun terms and the names of certain foods, which cannot be directly translated into English. Creole is onomatopoeic, and therefore I have left certain terms untranslated in an effort to maintain some of the musicality of the work. The first-person narrative was particularly challenging to translate because the characters are often not quite "themselves"—their identities become blurred with those of the spirits that "enter their heads." The narrator, for example, frequently and seamlessly melds with Saint John the Baptist himself. The past, too, often "possesses" the different characters, conflating their current and farmer identities and further blurring the lines of voice.
Guerda Romain Châtelain was born in Colombia and raised in the United States and Haiti. She earned a Ph.D. in French from Princeton and currently works in Haiti as a translator/interpreter. Her clients have included the American Embassy in Haiti and Hillary Rodham Clinton.