著者

溝口 昭子

出版者

東京女子大学比較文化研究所

雑誌

東京女子大学比較文化研究所紀要 (ISSN:05638186)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.79, pp.29-47, 2018

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For Sol Plaatje, who was originally a South African colonial elite of Tswana origin and later became a renowned nationalist, journalist and writer, William Shakespeare’s plays at first represented the colonizer’s culture to which African people were expected to assimilate themselves in order to prove that they were worthy of equal rights guaranteed to men of any race with education and income in the late nineteenth-century Cape Colony. Yet later he also became aware of the polyphonic nature of the texts and made use of it in order to criticize especially the Union of South Africa, which came into being as a selfgoverning dominion in 1910 and was consolidating itself towards an apartheid nation.Plaatje translated several plays by Shakespeare into Setswana, and Diphosho-Phosho (1930), which is a translation of The Comedy of Errors, is the only surviving translation. This paper discusses Plaatje’s politics in his translating The Comedy of Errors, a play which is part of the British literary canon and involved some subversive message when appropriately utilized, into his language which, with no unified orthography, he felt was in danger of perishing. The first chapter will discuss how his translation was part of his struggle against the“white specialists on African languages”to preserve his language and culture in a written form. The second chapter will discuss how he, through hisSetswana translation which involved some alteration of the original, attempted to conveypolitical messages to his contemporaries who were struggling under the white regime.