TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

      Alain Mabanckou’s writing is like a Chinese line drawing. His economy of words is a brushstroke that reveals a subject’s inner and outward character and an aching longing for place. Moki is a village hero in Blue White Red because he becomes a “Parisian,” the title conferred on those who “make it” in Paris. His presence there transforms a village father, who now holds forth in the proper French French of Guy de Maupassant, as befits a man whose son is in the country of Digol. Moki chastises his wannabes for speaking in French but not French and cautions those who dream of emulating his leap from the former colony to the métropole: Paris is a big boy. Not for kids.

      In Alain Mabanckou’s text, it is apparent when people break into French for affect to emphasize their class status and distance themselves from the miserable economic and political circumstances of postcolonial Africa. French French is generally italicized in the original novel. In an English translation of the book, I wrestled with how to convey the complex nesting of languages, French bursting out in conversations in African languages and vice versa, without flattening the contours of the text in English. I experimented with leaving the italicized French in French, followed by an English translation. That device, however, proved too heavy to carry over the course of the whole novel and drew attention to the translation instead of the originality of Alain Mabanckou’s book.

      I switched back to translating the French French into English, but left it in italics. This note is therefore to help readers understand that italicized text denotes not merely emphasis in spoken language but a shift to a different language for added emphasis. Some words remain in French to allow an English reader to travel with Alain Mabanckou to the places he writes about. That requires leaving home to wander rues, not streets, hop the Métro, not the subway, and calculate the kilometers, not miles, whizzing past as a captured sans-papiers is driven in defeat in the back of an unmarked police car to detention.

      This book exists because of my enthusiasm for Alain Mabanckou’s novel and because Susan Harris obtained permission to publish a short excerpt on the Words without Borders website. It also exists because Dee Mortensen at Indiana University Press persevered for years to secure the rights to bring out the full text. Many thanks to Dominic Thomas for his careful reading of the translation and his suggestions, which finally brought Blue White Red into print for English readers as part of the Global African Voices series.

       Alison Dundy, January 2012