L'Ivrogne dans la Brousse

First edition of the French translation, by Raymond Queneau, of Nigerian author Amos Tutuola’s first novel. One of 86 copies on Lafuma-Navarre pur fil wove paper, the only deluxe issue.

A fine copy.

The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town was published in London by Faber & Faber in May 1952, after the manuscript had initially been rejected by a missionary press and an educational publisher in Nigeria.  The book enjoyed prestigious support: T. S. Eliot, then literary editor at Faber & Faber, recommended it for publication, while Dylan Thomas wrote the first influential review, describing it as a « brève, dense, macabre et envoûtante » tale.  The work is now regarded as one of the earliest African novels in English to have been published outside Africa,  written in an unconventional Yoruba-inflected English that, from the outset, provoked sharply divided responses, ranging from enthusiasm to contempt among both Western and Nigerian critics.

The French translation followed with unusual speed, appearing at the same time as the American edition. It was undertaken by Raymond Queneau, who already held a position of considerable influence at Gallimard: having joined the publishing house in 1938, he became a reader, a translator from English, and subsequently a member of its editorial committee. 

The encounter between Queneau and Tutuola went far beyond a routine publishing commission. A scholarly article devoted to the translation observes that « l’anglais bizarre de Tutuola va dans le sens de ce que Queneau essaie de créer en français » and that the Nigerian author « réussit en quelque sorte naturellement ce que Queneau se donne pour tâche de recréer » (Elsa Veret, « Queneau, lecteur et traducteur du “néo-anglais” de Tutuola »): namely, the narrowing of the divide between written and spoken language, a project Queneau would soon call « néo-français ». Veret also emphasises the chronological proximity between this translation (1953) and Zazie dans le métro (1959), in which these principles would find their most celebrated fictional expression. The text itself is presented as a consciously embraced challenge of translation: in his prefatory note, Queneau explains that he rendered the English « palm-wine tapster » as « malafoutier », although the term was used in the Congo rather than West Africa, and « juju » as « gris-gris », while adding that he had been obliged to « résister à la tentation de rationaliser un récit dont les “inconséquences” et les “contradictions” se glissent parfois dans la structure même des phrases ».
 
A foundational work of modern Nigerian literature, whose linguistic and narrative inventiveness profoundly influenced Queneau’s thinking on orality and novelistic writing, at the dawn of his composition of the genre’s masterpiece: Zazie dans le métro.