Niri Tereza.
Dunia kitongoji.
Siku ri-zi-ka!
[Haiku in Swahili
(with a Tanzanian accent)]
Below is my English translation of Poromoko,
touched up using my poetic licence:
Found me on the skids.
The world's a marginal place.
I was not ass-u-aged!
[Alternatives to the last line: I was not satisfied /
I made no nothing / Day, be em-pow-ered]
I might as well have written the seven-syllable line as:
"The world's a seductive place". To me at least,
there's a thin line between Kitongoji (= marginal,
peripheral, peri-urban place) and the word that, I think,
intuitively and perhaps happily derives from it
(certainly in 'fertile minds'), Kitongozi (= Seducer), itself
treated, here, as a derivative of the more prosaic,
proletarian and Eastlander word: Kutongoza (= to seduce).
No comments:
Post a Comment