Michael Dash, Translating the Caribbean Text (1996)

Professor Shari Benstock of University of Miami introduces J. Michael Dash, head of the Department of French at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. Dash has translated the works of Edouard Glissant, particularly the novel La Lezarde (The Ripening; 1985) and Discours Antillais (Caribbean Discourse; 1989). Dash talks about translating those two books and Guadeloupean/Creolite author Gisele Pineau's short novel La Grande Drive des Esprits, which he translated as "The Drifting of the Spirits." Dash recalls how he learned to translate as a schoolboy and discusses the difficulty of rendering a text so that it will be friendly to an audience speaking a different language.