Translation and colonial landscapes: Ethiopia in A Time to Kill by Ennio Flaiano

Critical reception of the novel in Italy and other countries

In the wake of the recent focus on post-colonial and translation studies (Bertacco, 2014; Marais and Feinauer, 2017), this paper contributes to a critical perspective on the Italian colonisation and invasion of the Horn of Africa. It examines the translations (English and French) and the screen adaptation of Tempo di Uccidere (1947, reprinted in 2010), a novel, by the Italian journalist and screenwriter Ennio Flaiano (1910–1972), based on his participation in the Italo-Ethiopian war (1935–1936) and awarded the first prestigious ‘Premio Strega’ in 1947.

The chronology of the foreign-language editions is emblematic of the cultural context of post-war Europe and lack of marketing policy. The English version by Stuart Hood appeared in 1949 in two different editions for the American and the English market and was reprinted in 1992; the French translation (by Georges Charbonnier, André Frédérique and Jean Rémy) was published by Gallimard, a leading publisher, in 1951, and reprinted in 2009.

Notwithstanding its anti-colonial stance (Orlandini, 1992; Re, 2017), the novel failed to achieve the global recognition it deserved, unable even to capitalise on Ennio Flaiano's fame as a script and screenwriter for Federico Fellini (The White Sheik, I Vitelloni, La Strada, La Dolce Vita, Otto e Mezzo) and other directors such as Billie Wyler (Roman Holidays). ¹ There were several dynamics which, combined with the centrality of the poly-system (see Even-Zohar, 1976, 1979) and the international market, contributed to its lack of visibility.

One important factor was the omission of the appendix which the original Italian edition has (around 20 pages). The appendix, with the significant title Aethiopia: note per una canzonetta, contains aphorisms and jottings which represent the paratextual information regarding the author's impressions which counteract the rhetoric of military invasion and attack. All these elements are crucial to understanding the author's viewpoint as distinct from the first-person narrator, and all the more so in translation (see Batchelor, 2018). Thus, the writing technique of Flaiano and his contribution as screenwriter goes unacknowledged in more recent editions in English (1992[1951]) (see also Trubiano, 2010: 20–25).

It could be argued that information about the author should have been updated, and marketing promotions abroad would have benefited from a critical introduction and, possibly, translator's notes regarding the historical sites and sacred places of Ethiopia mentioned in the book, such as Axum and Gondar. Likewise, historical events cannot be taken for granted; it cannot be assumed that readers across cultures and time will be familiar with them. By contrast, Anglophone readers may be familiar with the military expeditions and campaigns in Ethiopia through British history and literature, starting from Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia to the siege of Maqdala which was reported by journalists and featured in modern travel writing (i.e., Carnochan, 2008; Marcus, 2002[1994]; Markham, 1869; Marsden, 1990, 2005, 2007; Pakenham, 1998[1958], 2003[1991]; Pankhurst, 1999; Simpson, 2002[1868]). ²

Other confusing factors were titles, graphics, and cover designs: the English edition was A Time to Kill (Flaiano, 1992[1951]), while the American edition was The Short Cut (Flaiano, 1951b) which was also the title of the first chapter. There was also a 1949 edition with another title, Mariam. The Short Cut is also used for the French film, Le raccourci. The phrase ‘short cut’ (in Italian ‘La scorciatoia’), was also one of Flaiano's possible options for the book title when, at the start of the project, he had considered several alternatives. Furthermore, these editions have different graphics and cover designs: one the original 1947 Italian edition features a portrait of a woman wearing a turban and earrings; an American edition of the The Short Cut (1951b) features a luscious green tropical forest; other editions, in Italian and English, have covers foregrounding the back of a black female body and a small colonial soldier with a rifle in his arms in the background. In this case, the design seems at odds with the verbal depiction. Thus, the classic theme of the bathing woman ‘possessed’ by the coloniser-invader seems to be subverted in dimension and, in any case, the soldier in the book had a pistol. ³ There are also covers of the DVD that feature the naked black woman from the film suggesting hackneyed clichés of sexism and colonization.

As well as the mix-up over the titles and the sometimes inadequate editions, there were important transcultural factors and ideological barriers.

Perhaps the huge corpus of existing narratives and travel writing about Ethiopia as the land of the fabled treasures of Prester John, the Lost Ark, and the Queen of Sheba (see also Carnochan, 2008; Munro-Hay, 2002) constituted another element impeding the international fame of the novel.

Moreover, the fact that the novel was marginalised on the international scene is accounted for by the success of best-selling work bearing the same title, such as John Grisham's first novel A Time to Kill (2013[1989]), and its successful film adaptation (1996). The topic here is racial violence (the brutal rape of a nine-year old Black girl by a group of white men), and the corruption of justice. The action is set in Mississippi in the 1980s. Doubtless, the performance of the actors like Matthew McConaughy, Samuel L Jackson, Donald and Kiefer Sutherland contributed to the international success of the film, and also of the legal thriller, which established Grisham's fame on the global market through translations.

Wilbur Smith also produced an action-packed war thriller on the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, Cry Wolf (1998[1976]), stereotyping his white Anglo-Saxon male heroes. Although Cry Wolf has not been made into a block-buster movie like his other novels, it had a consistent international adventure novel readership. It is just a pity that Flaiano's recognition was well below what he deserved due to the poor promotion and marketing of the book, and the difficulties of its cinematic adaptation, as further analysed.

Landscape, topography and colonial conquest

The present contribution problematises the dynamics of the conquest of territory and the representation of landscape, as seen from the perspective of the first-person narrator, the young Italian lieutenant Enrico Silvestri, at the time of the most ferocious battles and infamous mustard gas attacks, the use of which the Italian government admitted in 1995. The ambiguity in the descriptions of space and the lack of any orientation in the text correlates to the way the fascist invasion affected the territory, its people and its flora and fauna. Landscapes and topography remain blurred as if in a dream and as unreliable as the outdated military maps, unknown and impenetrable. The existing narratives and accounts by Italian geographical and botanical explorers and zoologists in the Horn of Africa, such as Orazio Antinori (1811–1882), have no overt intertextual citation (Barili et al., 2007; Settesoldi et al., 2005).

Ethiopia had a large variety of forests covering the highlands, forming an eco-region of the Afro-tropical zone, extending to western Eritrea, south-east Sudan and north-western Somaliland. Almost a hundred years ago, at the time of the events narrated and prior to deforestation, a complex variety of botanical species covered the highlands. Likewise, Ethiopia is difficult to define geographically given the complexity of its reliefs; its topography is built on four geological formations. It is one of the most rugged areas of Africa. Even geographic descriptions seem to challenge definitions as can been seen from this Encyclopaedia Britannica excerpt: ‘Ethiopia's complex relief defies easy classification, but five topographic features are discernible. These are the Western Highlands, the Western Lowlands, The Eastern Highlands, the Eastern Lowlands, and the Rift Valley.’ ⁴

Regarding landscape and language, although the terms are not in the narrative, a diachronic shift in the use of English scientific borrowings has affected Italian as well as other languages: in the 1950s and 1960s the term for the ‘Rift Valley’ in Italian geography was ‘fosse tettoniche’ while today it is commonly ‘rift’ or ‘Rift’ with specific reference to Ethiopia (Corti and Manetti, 2012). The landscape of the Rift Valley is recognised as one of the natural wonders of the world. The Italian military geographers had already started working on maps during the first Italian invasion of Ethiopia and at the time of the second war they were working frantically to draw new maps for the territories of the Horn of Africa, especially of the Dankil Rift and Afar Depression (Lupi and Lenci, 2009).

In the fertile area of travel writing, human geography, post-colonial and translation studies the element of diversity is a cultural and linguistic asset. The representation of spatial diversity is, in the case of A Time to Kill, a disorienting geo-colonial frame and ethical dilemma. For the first-person narrator and others, Abyssinia – as Ethiopia was then known - is an unknown space, an imagined topography which seems to baffle orientation, as it seems to end where it starts, like a maze according to the description in the first chapter (‘The Short Cut’). Likewise, when seeking to describe spaces and places, travelogues and travel writing rely mainly on the hypotyposis effect to make the reader see things vividly, ‘as if’ real (see Eco, 2001: 50–51; Hamon, 1981). Flaiano sees through the eyes of a disoriented Italian invader who, amidst the spectacular central massifs of Ethiopia and the eastward advance of the military expedition, has lost direction among the mountains, valleys and rivers, and feels doomed, from the first page to the last. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist's main concern is to find a short cut and get back to his encampment as he is plagued by a tooth ache, but he is lost and unable to find his way back. The hallucinatory atmosphere and the elusive landscape are reflected in the absence of precision in direction, and geographical terminology, as spatial coordination blurs. His wristwatch has stopped working, a symbol of the timeless dimension of the country, just as the military cartography leads him down an erroneous path. The reader and the translator have to rely on the eyes of the beholder in the progressive representation of the Ethiopian territory which the Italians have occupied. The lieutenant, Enrico Silvestri, will keep on posing questions to himself from beginning to the end, in a ‘yes’/‘no’ continuum where the border of space, ethics and conscience are blotted out. Likewise, the fancy Italian toponyms are unreadable on the map he has, while the real native toponyms are expressed in a language he does not understand. The protagonist cannot make sense of the surrounding space, as if the fascist invasion of the Horn of Africa had deleted traces of former knowledge based on the surveys carried out by earlier Italian geographers and ethnographers.

It was Flaiano's intention to suggest vagueness or blurred boundaries and to avoid specific terminology as he was later to experiment in screen writing for Fellini's black and white masterpieces, like La Strada, Le Notti di Cabiria, 8 ½, La Dolce Vita, and Giulietta degli Spiriti. The oneiric atmosphere of these films, in fact, seems to correlate and interface with the flow of thoughts and indefiniteness in the representation of the spaces and places in Flaiano's novel. Like Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini's most acclaimed movies, the Italian officer seems not to know where he is going, there is movement but no direction. A sense of overhanging ambiguity and ironic fatality seem to hang over the colonial enterprise and on individual destiny, as in a nightmare.

The colonial possession of space is called into doubt in his encounter with Mariam, a very young Ethiopian girl at a pool near a cave. In this episode, the first-person narration has the authorial authenticity in manifesting the impossibility of making sense of the land and its people. The task of the translator is to reproduce this ‘untranslatability’ through the iterated ‘what if…’ hypothesis recurrent in the protagonist's monologue and narrative discourse, and in his metaphors. The young Italian lieutenant does not speak a word of Amharic, and the Ethiopian woman he sees bathing in a pool of water cannot understand him. Ambiguity and misunderstanding occur at all levels, military and personal, as the colonised space turns out to be deceptive and contradictory, like the charts and maps. What seems blurred in perception—but firmly resistant to the coloniser—are Ethiopia's sacred spaces and sacred soil, with the country's ancient Christianity and its memory and identity (see also Sheldrake, 2001), as the pretext for invasion was the civilising mission of Italy in the Horn of Africa.

In the first note of Flaiano's Appendix, expunged in the foreign editions of the novel, he observes that colonies are made with a Bible in hand, but are never inspired by what is written therein. The idea of forgiveness and Coptic spirituality is also better understood in another note in which he records that the Muslim Ascar machine gunners were accurate when shooting their Coptic enemies, while the Coptic Ascars were rather inaccurate when shooting their brothers in Christ (Flaiano, 2010[1947]: 312). Historically, forgiveness with acceptance and reconciliation were the basic tenets of Emperor Haile Selassie I when restored to the throne after the war. This was also recorded in a note in the Appendix, where an interpreter translates for His Majesty how an Italian prisoner was received: “They sent you to war and you did well to serve your king. But do not fear anything from us. You are Christian and likewise are we” (Flaiano, 2010 [1947]: 312). Flaiano deemed it necessary, after reading all sorts of deplorable defamation and shameful accusations regarding the Emperor, to get live testimony from the Italian prisoner. The Italian Air Force had bombed the regions heavily with mustard gas, but the battle of Dembeguinà was lost. ⁵

The spiritual dimension of the land and the principles of forgiveness of the people are highlighted in the Mariam episode, as she is ‘possessed’ and then killed by the narrator, who in turn would not only be forgiven but cared for when ill by her father, whose village and family had been exterminated in an act of retaliation.

The biblical paradigm is suggested by the element of water and the Ethiopian rivers. The myth of Ethiopia as the land of the garden of Eden with its waters and rivers (the Blue Nile → Gihon) will, conversely, turn against the invader as things fall apart, and the curse of leprosy lurking in the dark will turn out again to be another deception caused by erroneous interpretation after his Fall with Eve/Mariam. ⁶

The narrative proceeds in terms of geo-poetics or imaginative space, registered on shifting and uncertain perceptions, where the elements of ancient spirituality and rituals raise new issues on Italian colonialism in Africa (see also Palumbo, 2002), colonial literary landscapes, translation, and the adaptation of A Time to Kill.

Translational issues: Lexical constraints and cross-cultural filters

This section provides a contrasting analysis of the French and English translations of the novel. The selected corpus features passages in a Romance language (French) and a Germanic language (English), where the languages have a significant lexico-semantic asymmetry.

The French translation was published in 1951 under the title Le chemin de traverse, translated by Georges Charbonnier, André Frédérique and Jean Rémy (Flaiano, 1951a), with a note informing the reader that: ‘Tous droits de traduction, de reproduction et d’adaptation reserves pour tous pays, y compris la Russie.’ (All rights of translation, reproduction and adaptation reserved for all countries, including Russia). After several editions, a more recent one (2009) restored the title of the original: Un temps pour tuer. The translation has no changes, notwithstanding its claim to be a ‘new’ translation.

The first English translation published in 1949 was by Stuart Hood, a notable figure in the British media (BBC) and well known for translating Italian literature. Like other remarkable Anglophone translators (such as Archibald Colquhoun, Ben Johnson, and William Weaver), ⁷ Hood's contact with Italy was from the time of the Second World War. ⁸ His translation appeared under two different titles, Mariam (1949) and then The Short Cut 1951. It was singled out for praise, and the reviews of the novel were uniformly good. However, the reference in the reviews to an Italian officer ‘lost in the savannah’ underscores the confusion and misconception of African landscapes (Healey, 1998: 43). ⁹

The two translations alike follow the normative practice that prevailed in the Western world in the 1940s and 1950s and prioritise the target language following national literary standards of ‘domestication’ (see also Venuti, 1998).To maintain the novel's subtle ambiguity between space and its representation was not an easy task for the translators who were poets, critics and prominent literary figures in their own right. It is not the occurrence of geo-specific terminology that adds to the difficulty, but the opposite; the more technical a term is in a description, the more monosemic it will be (Hamon, 1977[1972]). The addition of notes, charts and a glossary would be of help, and an updated critical introduction with the original appendix might also seem mandatory for the new editions and translations.

This is the opening sequence of the novel:

ST1 Ero meravigliato di essere vivo, ma stanco di aspettare soccorsi. Stanco soprattutto degli alberi che crescevano lungo il burrone, dovunque ci fosse posto per un seme che capitasse a finirvi i suoi giorni. Il caldo, quell’atmosfera morbida, che nemmeno la brezza del mattino riusciva a temperare, dava alle piante l’aspetto di animali impagliati. (2010[1947]: 25)

TTE1 dilutes metaphors showing an inclination to conform to literary English stylisation. The conceptual metaphor of a seed ending its days as a human being is partially lost (‘end up there’), and the original ‘atmosfera morbida’ is arbitrarily rendered with a ‘clinging quality in the atmosphere’. Preserving the author's unusual collocation would have meant ‘foreignization’ (Venuti, 1998), a practice which was not common in those decades. The metaphor and its translation have been also discussed online. ¹⁰ In ST1 and TTF1 the term ‘impagliato’ (der. ‘paglia’, straw) evokes a sense of dryness, which ‘stuffed’ in TTE1 does not have.

In ST2, there is a river running through a valley carved out over the course of centuries, where alligators hunt humans and the sky is white. Here, as in the rest of the novel, the common feature in landscape descriptions is the absence of colours, which is very strange considering the blue terseness of the Ethiopian Highlands, and the redness of its rich soil:

ST2 Oltre la valle, nel cielo bianco, appariva il ciglio opposto dell’altipiano. Il fiume aveva scavato attorno alle montagne lasciandole asciutte come ossi. Tra i due cigli correvano chilometri, quanti non so, perché le distanze ingannano con questa luce che disegna le più lontane minuzie: forse cinque o sei. E, oltre il ciglio, la vita calma dei depositi. (2010[1947]: 25–6)

There is a lexical asymmetry in the geo-morphological terms defining the surface of the region. The term ‘altipiano’ is ‘tableland’ in TTE2 and ‘plateau’ in TTF2. The same term ‘plateau’ is also used in English and denotes a ‘land area having a relatively level surface considerably raised above adjoining land on at least one side, and often cut by deep canyons’, referring also to ‘tableland’. ¹¹ When referring to Ethiopia, ‘highland’ is the more precise term. The Ethiopian Highlands cover a defined territory, currently advertised as ‘spectacular beauties’. The Highlands are dotted with ambas (in Amharic, āmbā; Tigrinya, imbā), or flat-topped mountains or elevated plateaus where fortifications were built, surrounded by villages and settlements which, in the past, were inaccessible fortresses, defensible against sieges, that were to become tragically famous during the Italian invasion. ¹² In this context, the Italian word ‘altopiano’ resonates with fascist rhetoric, as in the first lines of the popular song Faccetta Nera, bella abissina: “Se tu dall’altopiano guardi il mare /Moretta che sei schiava tra le schiave…” which was released to galvanise the invasion in April 1935. ¹³

The linguistic translations are flawless because the original ‘asperities’ of the language of landscape have been smoothed and scoured. Metonymically, the mountains may well be ‘dry as bones’: in a timeless land treasuring the bones of dinosaurs and of the first human beings, the association with ‘bones’ and the mountains tightens the textual cohesion as we read the text today.

In ST3, there are iterated questions Enrico Silvestri asks himself in his silent monologue, regarding the distance, the orientation, expressing his uncertainty. In the translations the landscape diverges:

ST3 Era ancora molto lontano il ponte? Avrei potuto prendere una scorciatoia, ma non ho troppa fiducia nelle scorciatoie africane. Pure ogni tanto la strada, dalla parte del fiume, si apriva a qualche sentiero. Che, dopo brevi giravolte, precipitava verso la boscaglia. (2010[1947]: 26)

The use of the impersonal pronoun ‘vous’ in TTF3 is unwieldly. ‘Giravolta’ denotes a twirl, a swirl around. Furthermore, the Italian term ‘boscaglia’, also featured in other excerpts (ST4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12) is the semantic equivalent of the French ‘broussaille’, but TTF generally translates it as ‘forest’. The Italian term denotes wild and trackless vegetation. English bilingual dictionaries give several synonyms: brush, brushwood, bush, scrub, under-bush, undergrowth, etc. In any case, it is not geo-specific or localised veldt or savannah. These terms present translational issues, as there is no exact way to translate them considering the broad range of meaning covered by ‘woods’ and ‘forest’ when not preceded by an adjective or localised reference. French, Italian and English are not symmetrical, as recognised also by Umberto Eco for the term ‘foresta’ and ‘bosco’ (2001: 12–13). ¹⁴

In ST4, the metaphor referring to the vegetation seems to suggest that the Italian soldier approaches a spatial dimension where there is no admittance for him, an ancient sacred space and religion of no current value to the invaders, expired like an obsolete currency. There is a recurrent absence of colours in a haunting landscape:

ST4 Trascurai, dunque, le scorciatoie e dopo due ore (il caldo era aumentato e gli alberi spaventosamente cresciuti, ma sempre più di cartapesta, sempre più vecchi e untuosi, come santi di una religione scaduta), vidi che la boscaglia infittiva e che la strada diventava calda e sabbiosa. Il fiume mi fu davanti all’improvviso. Stavano costruendo un altro ponte. (2010[1947]: 26–7)

The standard semantic equivalent for the metaphor of ‘cartapesta’ in TTF4 is ‘papier-mâché’, in TTE4 it is ‘cardboard’. The cohesion in the sequence of images suggesting an old church with statues of saints in papier-mâché which could be found in small country churches in Italy, reinforced by the unctuosity and greasiness of trees rendered with the adjective ‘smooth’, dilutes the effect of repulsion for a religion which has ‘expired’. ‘Scaduta’ (expired) is an irreverent collocation whereas TTE4 has ‘abandoned cult’, suggestive of pagan rituals. The metaphor of ‘discarding’ a religion as a soldier would discard his military rations tins is lost.

The Italian officer tries to find a significance in his being there and is suspended in what is a violation of an ancient Christian soil where the descendants of Solomonic lineage still reigned and, in particular, a violation of the sacred city of Axum where the Ark is assumed to be, which Flaiano cites in his appendix, after Adwa has been ‘conquered’. In ST5, signals of death and decay come from the invaded nature and from the soil, swerving between the real nature of things and biblical metaphors of doom and the damnation of colonisation. Also here, there are no colours; the sand is ‘grey.’

ST5 Tra i grossi alberi c’era ancora qualche croce e sotto la sabbia calda, nelle cassette della carne in scatola e delle gallette, c’era ancora qualche cadavere. Qualche soldato che s’era fermato dicendo: “non ce la faccio” e aveva anche penato a convincere il sergente e poi il tenente e poi il capitano che lo lasciassero riposare. E qualcosa di quella natura l’aveva avvertito (forse la sabbia grigia, o le gemme degli alberi), che il suo riposo cominciava davvero. (2010[1947]: 27)

In TTE5, the colloquial ‘a cross or two/a corpse or two’ shifts from the more respectful and indeterminate ST5 ‘qualche’. There are lexico-semantic constraints, but TTE5 adopts a standard language expectancy usage, like ‘I’m finished’.

The humanisation of nature with its warning or foretelling is cohesively balanced in ST5 (qualcosa di quella natura l’aveva avvertito) and difficult to maintain in translation. The French renders it adequately (je ne sais quoi dans cette nature), while TTE5 uses ‘something in the surrounding’, weakening the cohesion with the concept of nature as a living being and its power to communicate.

ST5 uses the adverbial particle ‘davvero’ (for real) as intensifier, positioned at the end of the sentence, enhancing dramatisation of death signals. The two translations achieve less dramatic force, as TTF5 turns ‘davvero’ into the adjective ‘vrai’, and TTE5 features a standard marker (indeed). A more adequate translation would have placed the adverb at the end of the sentence.

In ST6, the first-person monologue recording the flow of instant impressions is combined with the recurrent use of theatre-derived metaphors: not even the popular action of ‘touching wood’ can be performed as there is no /wood/. The stream of thoughts suggest a mimetic dimension where things are surreal and events enacted as if on a stage, and the spatial dimension fosters the hallucinatory state of the protagonist and of the war.

ST6 Per scongiuro toccai il legno di una pianta; ma le piante di quella boscaglia erano di cartapesta, veri fondi di magazzino dell’Universo. “Soltanto un trovarobe senza scrupoli può averle messe in queste terre fuori mano” dissi. E a un passo deciso imboccai una scorciatoia. (2010[1947]: 30)

The occurrence of the stage metaphor is again thwarted in TTE6: in ST6 there is another recurrence of ‘cartapesta’ expanding the imagery of stage props and backstage. Also, polysensorial metaphor of ‘fondi di magazzino’ implying warehouse and stocks is deleted. Moreover, the capitalisation of ‘Universo’ as a supreme entity in ST6 is normalised in both translations (TTF6 and TTE6), and in TTE6 ‘boscaglia’ is eliminated as there is a lexical constraint with ‘bois’ and ‘wood(s)’, and iterated homonyms.

The smell of the rotten carcasses of the Italian army’s mules is the only sign of orientation to reach the encampment. ST7 epitomises the corruption infecting the wholesome native soil with its macabre load of death of all creatures, while the plateau is hovering above. The description relies on sensorial metaphor, visual and olfactory as the protagonist proceeds along his path:

ST7 Il sentiero era stretto, talvolta si sdoppiava per riunirsi subito dopo: abbastanza agevole, troppo agevole, con qualche breve salita e lunghi tratti in piano. Fu questo particolare che mi fece pensare d’aver sbagliato. E da mezz’ora non incontravo che resti di muli marciti al sole. Ma ciò era spiegabile, i muli non muoiono sulle pietre miliari, non si distribuiscono equamente lungo un percorso, anche se avvezzi alla disciplina militare. Ne trovate tre in una buca […] L’altopiano si ergeva ancora davanti a me, più nitido, benché spesso la boscaglia me ne impedisse la vista. (2010[1947]: 30–31)

As noted, one of the key elements of the colonial space, signalling its power and unattainability, is the Ethiopian highland. It stands above everything, above the vegetation and can be seen from everywhere, yet the perception of the protagonist is not from a romantic ‘Happy Valley’ as he is baffled by its predominance above the landscape. There is the putrid stench of carcasses, and no shining sky. TTE7 distorts the visual description of ‘nitidity’ by adding ‘shining brightly’ to the hallucinatory atmosphere.

In ST8, the protagonist progresses through the seemingly immobile landscape, where the stench of carcasses is enhanced by the stench of hyena dung. This episode furthers the sense of loss when the natives laugh at the Western horror for the cursed biblical animal.

ST8 Più della iena vi fa orrore il suo sterco, che un indigeno vi addita sul sentiero, ridendo per lo schifo […]

In ST8 and TTE8, Sì and Yes are affirmative in a thematic position graphically marked by a comma, and they are not hypotheses. TTF8 interpreted the Italian ‘Si’ as an ‘If’ hypothesis.

ST9 underscores the inadequacy and dejection of the protagonist: he progresses in his march, this time cursing the landscape, and encounters other fastidious animals, the African termites:

ST9 Traversai un torrentaccio secco (c’erano poche pozze d’acqua quasi pulita e un ciuffo di alberi verdi, sempre gli stessi alberi abbastanza maledetti, anche se verdi), e ripresi il sentiero che s’apriva tra una fitta boscaglia cosparsa di termitai. (2010[1947]: 32)

In ST9, the locution ‘alberi abbastanza maledetti’ (lit. trees rather cursed), marked by disparaging affixation ‘torrentaccio’, is standardised in TTE9 to ‘cursed trees’ and rendered in first person agency with ‘the same I had cursed’ in TF9. The pejorative affixation used in ST9 (‘torrent-accio’) is a salient feature in emotional discourse and acts as a constraint when translating from Italian; in TTE9 and TTF9 it is unmarked. Moreover, in TTF9, the term forêt connotes high trees as in most European languages, and not low scrub (boscaglia).

Ethiopia has a varied record of endemic vegetation, such as frankincense, myrrh, acacias and other imported plants like eucalypts that give out perfume in the hot air and which are featured in tourist promotions today. On the contrary, Lt. Silvestri is plagued by the stench of hyenas and rotten carcasses, as if all the nature of Ethiopia was revolting against the colonisers. Eventually, even Lt. Sivestri's Italian military maps, drafted at the dawning of Italy's fledgling colonialism, augment his frustration and dismay, as the names in the maps are not even real toponyms:

ST10 Spiegai la carta topografica, cercando il fiume e il villaggio sull’altipiano che sarebbe stata la mia prima tappa. Vari sentieri si dipartivano dal fiume, trovai il traghetto, ossia la località del ponte. Tutto era estremamente sommario, il fiumicello non figurava e i nomi dei sentieri dicevano quale romanticismo aveva ispirato il topografo. Incapace di licenziare tanti vuoti, vi aveva aggiunto a capriccio brevi frasi: Residenza eventuale di pastori , oppure: Qui si incontrano molti struzzi . Soltanto allora mi accorsi che quella carta era vecchissima, stampata ormai da mezzo secolo. (2010[1947]: 35)

Humour is slightly diluted in translations as ST10 ironically enhances the status of space elements In ST10, ‘residenza’ denotes some official and high-class estate, and ‘traghetto’ (ferry) an ironic metaphor, is corrected in French to ‘chemin’. In both cases irony is lost. Also, as in the previous excerpt, affixation referring to the morphology of territory and its vegetation suffers from the lack of semantic connotation: ‘fiumicello’ is translated as ‘petit fleuve’ in TTF10 and ‘stream’ in TTE10.

The map distorts topography, and the place names conceal deceptions as the local fauna is met along the way, in an array as in an ominous symbolic bestiary. The scorciatoia (short cut) is one of the recurrent keywords of the narration, and is here deceivingly indicated as ‘Harghez’, that, as he will soon learn from the woman at the pond, means crocodile.

ST11 Ancora guardai la carta: c’era un sentiero, forse proprio quello che avevo abbandonato prima, o la scorciatoia che non avevo saputo seguire. Si chiamava Harghez. Ripresi a camminare: rifeci le due terrazze, infilai daccapo la boscaglia. Dopo un’ora, sfinito, mi sedetti vicino a un termitaio. (2010[1947]: 36)

Both the translations provide different action dynamics to ‘infilai daccapo la boscaglia’ (lit. ‘plunged again into the bush’): TT11F has ‘par hazard’, and TTE11 expands it with the addition of ‘found a path of some sort and plunged into the bush’, both arbitrarily change ST11, impacting on the rhythm and narrative sequence of actions and verb of movements. Ironically, he ends up sitting ‘vicino’ (near) an ant-hill, but not ‘on’ an ant-hill, which is rather ludicrous. As in all the above examples, punctuation is consistently changed, and also the grammatical structure, the phrasal and the word order, so as to conform to standard domestication and the literary canon of the receiving culture.

After being lost in the maze of a hostile landscape which is also a symptom of resistance to invasion and colonisation, the narrative description veers into a utopic space. The first-person narrator enters a verdant landscape, with pools of water, and the trees become ‘dear’ as signs of salvation. Ironically, this place will turn out to be the scene of his crime. The mistake in taking the short cut leads to the fatal encounter with a young girl, whom he will call Mariam, bathing in the water. More than bathing or swimming, she is squatting near a pool trying to wash. The descriptive sequence develops similes and metaphors, based on the yes/no/maybe hypothesis and impossible communication, preceding and following sexual intercourse. ¹⁵ The features of this ‘Mariam’ are somehow different from the other ethnic groups of Ethiopia, and like the land of the Queen of Sheba, Mariam is a historical enigma. We know that she is very beautiful, naked, and that her blackness is diluted, as are the ‘desires’ or pulsion of the other females, as a result of racial mixing with Europeans. Again, the concept of ‘negative’ blackness may recall the Canticle of Solomon (Song of Songs) and the ‘Nigra sum sed Formosa’.

ST12 Era di pelle molto chiara, ma non badai a questo particolare, sorprendente in quella boscaglia. Soltanto sulle montagne di Gondar avevo incontrato donne di pelle così chiara, dove, suppongo la dominazione portoghese ha schiarito la pelle e i desideri delle donne che si incontrano. (2010[1947]: 3)

In the novel, the descriptive dimension evolves under imaginative parameters and the topography fades with hints of the country's Christian history: Gondar is, as noted, a sacred and ancient imperial capital and Christian stronghold against pagan invasions. TTE12 shifts the impersonal ‘si incontrano’ to the factual first-person, thus eliminating the historicisation of the encounter. The result blurs the suggested narrations of white invaders and travellers, thus excluding the presence of other Europeans before him.

The term ‘boscaglia’ is polysemic, denoting a sense of ‘wilderness’. The arbitrary addition of ‘a new quality’ to the aspirations, whether intellectual or erotic, expands an unexpressed concept which is that of equating ‘quality’ with light skin.

What is more enigmatic about Mariam is the fact that her eyes appear like fixtures, green-grey and semi-closed under her long lashes. According to the narrator, as in the case of the light skin, also the colour of her eyes are to be connected to the Portuguese presence in Gondar: here, the Portuguese Jesuit Father, Jerónimo Lobo, was invited by the Emperor Susenyos; subsequently, another Portuguese Jesuit, Father Manuel de Almeida, built many churches in Ethiopia in the first half of the seventeenth century, following in the footsteps of the Spanish Jesuit, Pedro Páez; a century earlier (1520–1540), a Portuguese mission with Father Francisco Álvarez had come in response to a request for help against the Ottoman expansion from the Ethiopian emperor (Tomei, 2018). ¹⁶

ST13 Mi guardava sempre con i suoi occhi socchiusi e fu allora che mi accorsi che aveva le pupille molto chiare, verdi e grigie, comunque non quel prepotente color nocciola comune a tutte le dame di quaggiù. Gli antenati portoghesi avevano lasciato un segno, a meno che non fosse stato il proconsole o il cacciatore di leoni. E sempre più mi meravigliavo che una simile principessa fosse scaduta a vivere in quel bassopiano, mentre nelle città qualche generale o qualche autista sarebbe stato assai lieto di proteggerla.

[…] Da sotto il turbante le spuntavano ciocche di capelli: non aveva dunque i capelli acconciati a treccine. (2010[1947]: 50)

Geographic terminology is semantically asymmetric: ST13 has ‘bassopiano’ as a geographical term, the lowlands as opposed to the highlands of Ethiopia, whereas TTF13 has ‘plateau’ and TTE13 ‘low-lying territory’.

The ‘imperialist’ invader perceives a sign of royalty in her demeanour, but the white turban and the ‘Roman’ tunic and toga will tragically turn out to be his damnation. Erroneously, this lady Mariam (‘they are all called like that’) will be identified as a member of the colony of lepers who are likewise attired. To the very last, Lt. Enrico Silvestri will believe he has been contaminated, in a type of a crime-and-punishment effect, a punishment that he escapes at the conclusion. This is also connected with the theme of language and untranslatability. Notwithstanding verbal incomprehension when trying to communicate through sketches, the Coptic cross is the sign that ‘Mariam’ wishes to show:

ST14 Infine, mi tolse il lapis dalle mani e disegnò lei qualcosa. Disegnò uno sgorbio che poteva essere una croce, una croce copta. Voleva farmi sapere che era cristiana. -- Molto bene,” dissi “come si fa a non esserlo in tempo di guerra?” Ma lei non capì, ed era inutile che tentassi di farle capire le mie sciocchezze. (2010[1947]: 51)

The Italian word ‘sgorbio’ is almost insulting and used for children's incapacity of proper drawing. It has a stronger negative connotation than ‘scrawl’ as it extends to physical deformity. It is reinforced by ‘sciocchezze’ as a childish silliness, more than adult ‘divagation’ in TTF14 and ‘foolishness’ in TTE14. Again, this adds up to a negative trait in the description of the woman.

In the following passage, there is a description of a religious procession and the narrator focuses his attention on a traditional instrument, the masinko, ¹⁷ a single-stringed bowed lute, used also by Ethiopian minstrels (‘azmaris’ or singers). The procession where the Coptic crosses are carried, accompanied by members of the church, such as deacons or young clerics (‘dabtara’), is a practice still observed today. The two youngsters will later be found hanging from the trees, and the old man will turn out to be Mariam's father. Again, the narrator seems to be baffled by the spiritual resistance of this timeless land.

ST15 Un suono di strumento a corda mi fece appiattire a terra. […] Avanti veniva un prete (sapevo che era un prete perché portava un alto copricapo bianco senza falde), accompagnato da un vecchio che si teneva sulla sua sinistra, silenzioso nemmeno preoccupato di ciò che il prete gli andava dicendo a bassa voce. Seguivano due adolescenti e un bimbo, ed erano essi che parlavano allegramente. Uno degli adolescenti suonava un lungo strumento di legno, una specie di rozzo violino capace di emettere soltanto note stridule e pigre. Il suonatore muoveva sbadatamente l’archetto su e giù, come se la faccenda lo annoiasse, e l’altro accennava, ridendo, passi di una danza molto semplice ma vivace, rubando sul tempo. (2010[1947]: 70)

The representation follows the negative stereotyping of Ethiopian sacred music featured in travel narratives. The instruments are described as rudimentary, the music is perceived as stridulous, the player seems to be bored, and the boys behave in a silly way. If the narrator is less factual in describing the scene and relies on what he perceives but cannot make sense of, the translations opt for a pejorative disambiguation. If ST15 suggests a religious alterity from which he is excluded, TTE15 opts for negative marking in connotative nuances. ST15 had ‘nemmeno preoccupato’ and TTF15 permutes to ‘not in the least interested’. A syntactic inconsistency is also in the way the priest is talking to him in a soft voice, and not singing in a bass voice. TTE15 intervenes on the perception of music: the ‘lazy’ notes become ‘reluctant’, and the concept of ‘rubare sul tempo’ (stealing) is domesticated to the conventional ‘keeping behind the beat’. TTF15 deletes the gerundive mode ‘rubando’ but expands the syntactic structure of the whole passage (in a rhythmic hopping).

The enigmatic mysticism of Ethiopia and its ancient history is revealed in another episode, in the village square, at dusk among the shadows. In villages and communities, people traditionally gather under the wide branches of trees to hear the story-telling and music of the dabtaras, the itinerant religious figure who also sings and dances. The gathering places are usually within the church gates. Ethiopian churches, usually circular, have a space which is enclosed by gates and where the congregation gathers before mass. In ST16, Silvestri, now in the company of the second lieutenant, sees a village piazza for the first time:

ST16 Dalla piazza partivano varie strade, una delle quali portava alla chiesa, un edificio che vedevamo in fondo a un cortile, tra due baracche a veranda. Era una vecchia opera del periodo portoghese, nobilmente invecchiata, asimmetrica, in piedi per miracolo, e ci fermammo ad osservarla. (2010[1947]: 78)

As seen in other examples, TTE16 shifts the thematic position, thus giving a different emphasis on the introductory item of the whole space: the piazza. TTF16 respects the order. The polysemy of the Italian word ‘strade’ is defined by the English word ‘street’, denoting something more structured in an urban space. The specificity of the word ‘barrack’ in the context of military occupation is changed to huts. In TTE16, the ‘vestige’ of the Portuguese is lowered in status to ‘old piece of work’, and the typo ‘a symmetrical’ for ‘asymmetrical’ does not help the visual description of the complex history of the place space.

In ST17, the protagonist recognises the old man he had seen in the procession, Mariam's father. He is moving about the piazza, worried and inquiring, before entering the church. The space within the gate is full of shadows and of creatures resembling heaps of corpses.

ST17 Fissavo lo sguardo nelle ombre della piazza, quando lo vidi venire verso la chiesa […] varcò il cancello prima di noi, dirigendosi verso la porta della chiesa. Sparì assorbito dall’ombra delle piante, nel cortile, dove vagavano altre ombre silenziose. (2010[1947]: 79)

The theme of corruption and rankness flows from the constant visions of death, in the small village and on the ‘macabre’ and surreal landscape, where a night ambush might come not from the humans but from the plants, and from the shadows. The yard surrounding Ethiopian churches is traditionally a sacred space, where people pray before entering and purify in ponds and pools if there is water. TTF17 has ‘the shadow’ thus deleting the suggestion of many shadows, within and without the ‘gate’. Moreover, ‘barrière’ does not have the implication of ‘gates’ as in a sacred space, and the ‘gates of heaven’. In TTE17, the fixity of the gaze of the beholder ‘Fissavo lo sguardo’ is under-translated in ‘I was looking’, and the more indeterminate ‘piante’ has ‘trees’.

In ST18, Silvestri and his companion are about to enter the church but remain outside where the local women try to attract their attention.

ST18 … arrivammo sulla soglia della chiesa dopo aver attraversato un cortile ornato da grandi eucalyptos. Strano come improvvisamente fosse scesa la sera. Non entrammo nella chiesa, attratti dalla pace di quel cortile dove vagavano, come assorte nella meditazione, alcune donne. Forse l’esperienza è nel capire il valore di certe parole, che la vita ci rivela lentamente e a volte non invano. Davanti a quella calma visione seppi le parole che radunavano quelle ombre attorno alla chiesa, come in un limbo già toccato dalla grazia. Tra le oscure ombre degli alberi, le ombre chiare dei fedeli. E, sopra, il cielo. Un cielo grave e nitido, di un profondo viola, più vicino a quanto si immagini, poiché là il cielo diventava un’opinione e quelle ombre l’avevano certo nel cuore, come già lo sentivo io. Pensavo a Mariam e volevo andarmene. (2010[1947]: 138)

TTF18 rewrites and domesticates a whole sentence to a standardised structure Subject–object–verb word order (SVO), changing the thematic order and the author's colloquial flow of thoughts: “Strano, come fosse…’ is respected in TTE18 as “Strange how…”. Also, in TTF18, the expressive conceptual revelation ‘seppi le parole’ is standardised to a conventional ‘je compris’, leaving out the agency of ‘learning’ which is implied in the effort of penetration and grace. The polysensorial metaphor of the ‘grave e nitido’ would fit well in the concept of ineffability in translation, and even more with the conceptual metaphor of heaven becoming an ‘opinion’ precluding objectivity. TTE changes the abstraction of metaphor, rendering ‘nitido’ with ‘glowing’ whereas ‘nitido’ in Italian primarily denotes terseness.

Intersemiotic translation and manipulation: The adaptation to film

In 1989, Flaiano's novel was adapted into a film, directed by Giuliano Montaldo, who also worked on the screenplay with Paolo Virzì, Giacomo and Furio Scarpelli.

The script was in English and the actors spoke in English, but the film was dubbed into Italian and French—also being an Italian and French production—and distributed with the titles Time to Kill, Tempo di uccidere, and Le raccourci. Notwithstanding the presence of a rich cast of actors, including Nicolas Cage (protagonist), Ricky Tognazzi (second lieutenant), and Giancarlo Giannini (army major), the film was almost unnoticed by the critics, probably because international audiences are not familiar with Flaiano or his work. ¹⁸

If the book was a challenge to interlingual translation, it was also a challenge to semiotic and multimodal translation, which means all the process of transposition to screen writing, dialogue, direction and production, and ultimately dubbing and subtitling. Firstly, because it is a first-person narrative with constant self-directed doubts reflecting a haunting perception of the Ethiopian landscape; and secondly, because the film was not shot in Ethiopia and the occupied land, depriving the audience of a chance to see what is a key theme in the film.

The physical absence of Ethiopia (or Abyssinia) with its sacred spaces and sites and its stunning panorama of ambas, its rock hewn churches and monasteries, was a missed opportunity, with the film being shot in Zimbabwe. Because of the military regime of the Derg (1974–1987), the dictatorship of Haile Mariam Menghistu, and the civil war (1974–1991), the filmmakers had to find another location. A further consequence regarding the use of colonial landscapes and visual imagery was that the well-known features of the Zimbabwean landscapes (i.e., the Victoria Falls) had to be blurred out. Thus, the misconception that all landscapes in Africa are alike, akin to the idea that all Africans are alike, lingered in the Western mind as a remnant of colonisation.

Conversely, Zimbabwe and its people have a colonial history of resistance in glorious battles, from the Anglo-Zulu Ndebele wars to the liberation movements. The African continent is a mosaic of languages, identities, geography, a history of exploration, myths and beliefs. For Southern Africans, it is the land of the Emperor Shaka Zulu and Cetshwayo, king of the Zulus, the land of Victoria Falls, and of its people and settlers. Ethiopia was the country of the Queen of Sheba and the Lost Ark, of the descendants of King Solomon, and Zimbabwe was the land of many Black nations, among whom the Zulu were known as the ‘people of heaven.’

As noted, in the novel the descriptions have hardly any reference, they are colourless with tones suggesting a black-and-white film, enhanced by the haunting presence of death and ghastly apparitions. In the film, in contrast with the textual cohesion of imagery, the landscape often becomes lovely. For example, when the protagonist is bound for home, there is a sandy beach with palms in the background, thus contradicting Flaiano's Appendix where he wrote that the Italian soldiers had come with the illusion of seeing ‘palms’ (‘alti palmizi’) and what they found was a wasteland (‘terra ingrata’). The narrator and his companion comment on the beauty of the landscape, but this conversation is not in the book. The sequence shows a deep blue sky, whereas in the text Flaiano shuns colours; the second lieutenant asks: “It is beautiful, isn’t it, seen from up here?” and Silvestri answers: “Yes, it is very beautiful indeed.”

Considering the thematic relevance of landscape and recurrent signs of religion and Ethiopian identity, there is no doubt that the intersemiotic transposition to the screen diverges from the novel. In parallel, the actors playing the roles of Ethiopians, like Mariam, bear no resemblance either to the people of Ethiopia nor to the descriptions in the book. In the film, what is so strikingly peculiar to Ethiopians, and the many ethnic groups who inhabit Ethiopia, from Oromo to Tigrinya, is lost. The features of the female protagonist are not what one would expect of an Ethiopian woman, as the actress, Patrice-Flora Praxo, is a French-Caribbean from Guadeloupe. The colour of Mariam’s skin and eyes are the only vivid colours described by Flaiano, suggesting her lineage back to the Portuguese or to the colonial administrators of imperial Rome. This is an important aspect as the rhetoric of the purity of race was fundamental to the fascist ideology. As observed, Praxo's eyes are not those described in the book (green-grey) as, they are a deep black. The bathing scene is a film cliché in the sexual subjugation of a Black girl who appears to be barely a teen submitting under force to the male's colonial possession (see also Duncan, 2005; Giuliani Caponetto, 2015). This illicit act will be only apparently punished by the protagonist's belief in having developed leprosy. The tensions and conflicting emotion and violence of the rape proceeds among ‘faux-pas’ ambiguities, misunderstandings, and false assumptions due to a lack of linguistic and cultural communication, between ‘seeing’ and ‘believing’. The cultural clash in the interaction and interpersonal emotional strain is diluted to the standards of romantic and passionate movie, where the winner takes it all, with no regret. By contrast, in the novel, the sexual act between them has a more complex interactional nature, and the reader is instead called on to read against the Italian lieutenant's account. The more overtly sexual nature of the incident in the film is also emphasised by the picture of the girl's naked back on the DVD covers. In addition, the turban she wears leaves the top of her head uncovered and is not the turban seen in images of lepers; her robe is not the traditional ‘nettela’ or any form of traditional Ethiopian dress.

The importance of the native space and native people seems to have been underrated at a time when native consciousness and post-colonial studies would have required more attention in visual representation and also in audio-visual translation.

Biblical metaphors and overt references to Ethiopian spiritual attitudes and beliefs occur throughout the narrative as a counter-narrative to the military campaign, and seem shadowed and marginalised, if not undetectable, in the film version. By contrast, from the first chapter of the book to the last, that counter-narrative is ever-present, for example, when the trumpet of Judgement Day is juxtaposed with the soldier's bugle sounding the ‘fall in’.

Sensorial perceptions and metaphors are difficult to render in visual imagery alone, and in film adaptation they might necessitate monologues, dialogues or voice-over techniques, along with other compensatory techniques in the soundtrack and landscapes to do the job done by visual descriptions in the written text. The fact that the protagonist keeps talking to himself while also acting as a narrator renders transadaptation more difficult. The voice-over effect is only used at the beginning and end of the film, as an artificial and arbitrary compensation, as it is not in the voice of the protagonist but that of one of his fellow soldiers.

As with many Italian films, the original version is in English and the film is then dubbed with labial synchronization into Italian. Nicolas Cage can speak in English in his own voice but is then dubbed into Italian. Giancarlo Giannini gives a formidable performance in English with tonal stress and a variety of pitches in his voice as he speaks English. He was then able to dub his own voice in Italian. Moreover, the soundtrack by Ennio Morricone and the haunting notes of the recorder well reflect the atmosphere of tension and threat that the spaces and places may conceal.

With particular reference to the use of interjections, there are differences between the written text, the dubbed text and the subtitling. The following are just a few examples among the many, one regarding a cultural item, the other a hard curse. The text does not mention specific brands of liqueur, only ‘cognac’ which the army major (played by Giancarlo Giannini) has obtained illegally; the dubbed version says ‘grappa friulana’ and the caption has ‘Italian grappa’ which is tautological, as all ‘grappa’ is Italian and, again, a regional identity is deleted. A curse which is not in the book has been added to enliven the verbal exchange: “Dio ti stramaledica!”. In the caption it is even more offensive ‘Oh f…ing God!’. Nothing like this exists even in the creative array of Italian religious cursing, and it is very unlikely that Flaiano or his Italian military staff would use it.

In conclusion, compared to Flaiano's descriptive texture, the adaptation does not seem to capture the progressive shift in the representation of landscape and the suggested impenetrable dimension of the spirituality of the invaded soil and its people. Ironically, the film lacks the magic touch of Flaiano, who had written and co-authored many masterpieces with Federico Fellini mostly in black and white and had several ongoing projects with famous film directors, such as the adaptation of Marcel Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu for René Clément (Flaiano, 1989). We may assume that if he authored the screen adaptation of his novel, and worked with Fellini, the oneiric dimension of the atmosphere and landscape would have been respected.

Concluding remarks

The limits of an essay prevent us from an in-depth multimodal critical analysis of the film and the narrative, but this is an initial contribution highlighting the imagined landscape of Ethiopia and its people. The source text, the translated texts (French and English), the film version and the audio-visual translation have been presented in an integrated approach following a quali-quantitative frame, thematised upon the landscape and its people. The research and the findings have accounted for the setbacks, the cross-cultural manipulation, and consequent marginalisation of the narrative and its film adaptation. The thematic model may likewise be applicable to other (post-) colonial narratives and transitions from dictatorship to democracy (i.e., apartheid and fascism). This leaves ample margin for further reflection in the fertile area of transcultural translation in post-colonial studies, and film adaptation. As noted, if the interlinguistic translation required serious attention to maintain the pitch of the almost hypnotic first-person narration, the intersemiotic adaptation was even more daunting, and this was due in part to force majeure and circumstances beyond the control of those involved. Apart from the domestication, distortion, and manipulation of features of thematic relevance (the land and its people), more attention to the promotional aspects as paratextual elements would have been commendable (i.e., conflicting titles, same titles, no appendix, confusing covers, etc.).

The cross-cultural transitions and translational reciprocity seem to leave more than an empty space as post-colonial literatures problematise the relationship between Europe-centred literatures and the colonial past in Africa. The expansion of the current research on the themes described above would necessitate a wider comparative perspective in other areas of Africa and colonisation, and we are already embarked on this course.