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【经济学人】你就是战士！—终身非洲作家 | 2016.10.22 | 总第706期

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翻译 | 栏目四第一组

审核 | Mo

小编 | 澜意

Memoir

名人回忆录

Song of Africa

非洲之歌

Ngugi wa Thiong’o recalls his upbringing in colonial Kenya

恩古吉-瓦-提安哥回忆他在肯尼亚殖民地的成长经历

Oct 22nd 2016 | From the print edition

2016年10月22日| 来自印刷版

Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening. By Ngugi wa Thiong’o. New Press; 238 pages; $25.95. Harvill Secker; £14.99.

《造梦者的诞生：一个作家的觉醒》，作者：恩古吉-瓦-提安哥。新兴出版社：238页，哈维尔-赛科出版社：14.99英镑。

IN THE latest volume of his memoirs, Ngugi wa Thiong’o advocates a certain revisionism about his native Kenya. In a brief preface titled “Note on Nomenclature” he asserts that the British-termed “Mau Mau” rebellion will instead be referred to as the “Land and Freedom Army”, the two main goals for those who rose up against the British colonial presence in Kenya. According to Mr Ngugi, the term “Mau Mau” comes from a corruption of the movement’s motto: “Oath of unity for (demanding) Land and Freedom”. It was the colonial state that opted instead, he says, to refer to the soldiers with the “meaningless mumbo-jumbo” of “Mau Mau” in order to obscure both their goals and their purpose.

在恩古吉-瓦-提安哥自传的最后一卷中，他主张对肯尼亚本土史作一定的修正。在这篇名为“术语笔记”的简要序言中，他断言英国人口中的“矛矛“起义军将指的是”领地与自由军“，这个名字为那些站起来反抗英国殖民统治者的肯尼亚人们指明了两大方向。恩古吉先生提到，“矛矛”这一名称是这场运动格言的变体：“为国家统一和自由而宣誓”。他说“矛矛”这一无意义的名字就是殖民国家给起义军所取的，其目的就是为了模糊起义军对于起义目标和目的的认识。

Mumbo-jumbo ：毫无意义的活动

Obscure：遮蔽、模糊

The uprising began in the early 1950s, when Mr Ngugi was still a teenager. It grew from the armed struggle for liberation by the Kikuyu and other tribes, but was characterised by the colonial power as “mass mania manifesting itself in violence and witchcraft”, what Elspeth Huxley, the white settlers’ literary spokesman, called the “yell from the swamp”. The rebellion would have a momentous impact on the novelist’s future work.

这场起义开始于19世纪50年代早期，那个时候恩古吉才十几岁。当时基库尤人和其他部落先使用暴力争取自由，而后发展成为起义，然而这场起义却被殖民当局描述成“（起义军）对暴力和巫术的极度狂热”，而赫胥黎作为当时白人殖民者的文学代言人，将之称为“从泥沼中发出的呐喊”。这场起义对未来小说的发展产生了极大影响。

Mr Ngugi’s unstated goal throughout this book is reclamation, not just of the Land and Freedom Army, but of much of the colonial endeavour in east Africa. Over and over again he condemns the denigration of Kenyans as “primitive” and “zoological” and goes on to present a clearer rationale for the Kikuyu people’s desire for freedom. Mr Ngugi’s own wish to wrest the narrative away from the colonial thread comes at a cost, though; at times the story of his development as a thinker and writer is muddled and seems secondary to the broad political and social upheavals happening across the region.

期待您的翻译，您可以将翻译留言到文章底部，第二天会有详细解析哦。他反复谴责任何将肯尼亚人民贬低为“原始人”“动物般人类”的行为，并且反复清晰地强调了基库尤人渴望自由的强烈愿望。尽管恩古吉试图从殖民者手中夺取话语权的愿望代价巨大，但是有时候关于他如何成为一个思想家和作家的故事却显得很混乱，而且这些故事在当地的政治社会动乱背景下显得不大重要。

Thread：思路，头绪

Muddle ：混乱，困惑

Secondary：次要的

Mr Ngugi attended the missionary-run Alliance High School near Nairobi and, later, Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. It was here that he began writing plays and novels against colonial oppression in east Africa. The motto of Makerere University was “to seek the truth”, Mr Ngugi points out, but his accounts of the censorship and bigotry of that time are shocking.

恩古吉曾在内罗毕附近的一所教会联合高中就读，随后他在乌干达的首都坎帕拉，马凯累累大学就读。他是在大学期间开始创作剧本、小说以此来反对殖民者对东非的压迫。恩古吉指出，马凯累累大学的校训是：“寻找真理”，但是他对审查机构和偏执的解释，在那个时代是很令人震惊的。

Censorship ：审查机构

Bigotry：偏执

He describes attending the Conference of African Writers of English Expression, which was held at Makerere in 1962, near the end of his time as a student. Mr Ngugi was selected to participate alongside such writers as Kofi Awoonor, Christopher Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka—Africa’s first Nobel laureate in literature—and Langston Hughes, an American poet.

他描述道，他参加了在马克雷雷举办的“非洲英语作家研讨会”，这场会议举行与1962年，那时他快要毕业了。当时，他被选去参加此次会议，并有幸遇见一些著名的作家，比如科菲，克里斯多夫-奥基格博，齐诺瓦-阿切比，非洲第一位获得诺贝尔文学奖的作家沃莱-索因卡，以及美国诗人兰斯顿-休斯。

The conference opened with a discussion on the nature and meaning of “African literature”, and its thematic debates have gone on to shape writing across the continent for the past 50 years. One heated point throughout was language itself, with Mr Ngugi arguing that African novels should be written in African languages, an idea he would promote two decades later in a collection of essays entitled “Decolonising the Mind.” He published several novels in English and then brought out one of the first novels ever written in his native language of Gikuyu, which he later translated into English.

这场会议以讨论“非洲文学”的本质和意义的方式拉开了序幕，他们的这一主题讨论影响了后来50多年来整个非洲大陆的文学。其中一个贯穿于整场讨论的焦点就是语言，恩古吉争论道非洲的故事应该用非洲人的语言来写。20年后，这个观点在他的散文集《清除头脑里的殖民思想》中再次被他提起与提倡。他出版了几部英文小说，然后又出版了一部用母语——库尤语所创作的小说，这部小说随后被他译成英文。

During the Makerere conference, Mr Ngugi offered Hughes a tour of the city and was given editorial advice by Achebe on the manuscript that would become his first novel, “Weep Not, Child”. The Heinemann African Writers series, for which Achebe was an editorial adviser, published the novel in due course. Later it would be revealed that, unbeknown to many of the participants, the CIA had been the original funder of the Makerere conference in an effort to influence the eventual decolonisation of east Africa.

在马凯累累会议期间，他带休斯参观这个城市，阿契贝对他的一份手稿提了点建议，这手稿后来成为了恩古吉的第一部小说《孩子，别哭》。阿契贝作为海利门出版社非洲作家系列的编辑顾问，适时出版了恩古吉的这部小说。随后就有人透露说，当时很多会议参议者都不知道中央情报局是这场马凯累累会议的最初资助者，其初衷就是为了促进东非最终的殖民独立。

Manuscript：手稿

CIA：（美国）中央情报局

Mr Ngugi refers to Makerere as “hell in paradise”. Idi Amin, who seized power in Uganda in 1971, would send a generation of writers and thinkers into exile abroad. Yet the violence and depravity of Amin’s regime—including the decapitation of his captives and the subsequent feeding of their bodies to crocodiles—should have come as little surprise. Amin once served the British in Kenya as a member of the King’s African Rifles. He worked as a headhunter, in the literal sense, fighting a rebellion once called the “Mau Mau”.

恩古吉谈到马来累累会议，把它称作” 天堂里的地狱“ 。伊迪-阿敏在1971年夺取了乌干达政权，上任后把当时一代的作家和思想家流放到国外。阿敏的政权暴戾残酷，砍去战俘的头，随后把尸体喂给鳄鱼，这样的行为不足为奇了。阿敏曾经是“英王非洲步兵团”的一名战士，服务于英国殖民者。他完完全全就是一个猎取人头的蛮人，还曾经参与镇压名为“矛矛”的起义。

Subsequent ：后来的，随后的

In the literal sense ：完完全全，按字面意思来说。

往期精彩

大学生对种族主义者的命名(英文材料摘自《经济学人》11.28刊)

【经济学人】丑闻中窥视美国对银行的态度丨2016.10.15丨总第698期

【经济学人】管理视野丨2016.10.08丨总第699期

Try to translate

Mr Ngugi’s unstated goal throughout this book is reclamation, not just of the Land and Freedom Army, but of much of the colonial endeavour in east Africa.

Put Chinese below

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2、中文翻译仅供学习交流，未经我社许可或授权，严禁商业用途；

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