How does Bucknell University Press #StepUP? Through a Commitment to Publishing Translations

In the summer of 1978, U.S. President Jimmy Carter proclaimed the first University Press Week. Since 2012, members of the Association of University Presses have celebrated this week with events, celebrations, reading lists, and a blog tour.

The theme of this year’s UP Week, November 11-15, is #StepUP, and Bucknell University Press is proud to showcase how our books help to “educate and enlighten, motivate and inspire, support and act,” through our work to foreground underrepresented voices by publishing translations.

Today we speak with Judith G. Miller, editor and translator of the newly-released Contemporary Francophone African Plays: An Anthology, an important volume that gathers English translations of eleven plays dating from 1970 to 2021. This essential collection includes satirical portraits of colonizers and their collaborators (Bernard Dadié’s Béatrice du Congo; Sony Labou Tansi’s I, Undersigned, Cardiac Case; Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou’s We’re Just Playing) alongside contemporary works questioning diasporic identity and cultural connections (Koffi Kwahulé’s SAMO: A Tribute to Basquiat and Penda Diouf’s Tracks, Trails, and Traces…).

Plays in this anthology memorialize the Rwandan genocide (Yolande Mukagasana’s testimony from Rwanda 94), question the status of women in entrenched patriarchy (Werewere Liking’s Singuè Mura: Given That a Woman…), and follow the life of Elizabeth Nietzsche, who perverted her brother’s thought to colonize Paraguay (José Pliya’s The Sister of Zarathustra). Gustave Akakpo’s The True Story of Little Red Riding Hood and Kossi Efoui’s The Conference of the Dogs offer parables about what makes life livable, while Kangni Alem’s The Landing shows the dangers of believing in a better life, through migration, outside of Africa.





“The translator seeks to locate, to grasp, and to bring forth this language in what can only ever be an approximation. In translating theatre, one always hopes to speak directly to an audience, as theatre is the meeting of those on stage with those attending a performance. The essential work of the translator is to find a way to best communicate the author’s particular voice.”

BUP: How might we think of moving from one colonial language to another in translating these plays? How might one think of these languages (English and French) from a decolonial perspective?

Judith: I am of the opinion now that most Francophone and Anglophone speakers in Africa think of the language once understood as the “colonial language” as their own language, not the language of the colonizer. Languages grow and change. French and English have been inflected differently from African country to African country; words have been added and changed; the languages remade according to the cultures of the country. This has meant an enrichment for both French and English. But, the language of an artist, a writer, is not ever simply the language of a country. It is their language—honed, weighed, crossed out and rewritten in the effort to form a personal writing identity, a “vocabulary” that defines the work. The translator seeks to locate, to grasp, and to bring forth this language in what can only ever be an approximation. In translating theatre, one always hopes to speak directly to an audience, as theatre is the meeting of those on stage with those attending a performance. The essential work of the translator is to find a way to best communicate the author’s particular voice.




Contemporary African Francophone Plays is available to order here in paperback, hardback, and ebook.


Judith G. Miller is an emerita professor of French at New York University. She has published over thirty translations of plays, essays, and novels, most recently The Théâtre du Soleil, the First Fifty-Five Years by Béatrice Picon-Vallin and And the Whole World Quakes: Chronicle of a Slaughter Foretold, a play by Haitian author Guy Régis Jr., in New Plays from the Caribbean, ed. Stéphanie Bérard.

Photo by Ellen D. Kolikoff, n-kphotography.com


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