Counterpoetics: Translation as Aesthetic Constraint in Sembène’s Mandabi and Ndao’s Buur Tilleen

Modern Wolof literature and film emerged in the 1960s, when artists set out to break with French and yet ended up being obliged to make francophone versions of their works anyway. This chapter explores how the first Wolof film and novel, Ousmane Sembène’s 1968 Mandabiand Cheikh Aliou Ndao’s 1967 Buur Tilleen,make creative use of this paradoxical situation. As a condition of his funding, Sembène had to shoot two versions of Mandabisimultaneously, with his actors performing first in Wolof and then in French. Ndao had to translate his Wolof novel into French after failing to find a publisher. Working between the multiple versions of these artworks that now exist (including the unreleased, French version of Mandabi), this chapter explores how Sembène and Ndao develop a multilingual strategy that can be called counterpoetics, which refashions the obligation to work in two languages into a productive aesthetic constraint.