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Patrick Chamoiseau. Solibo Magnificent. New York: Pantheon, 1998. 190 pp. $23.00.
Solibo Magnificent, first published in French and Martinican Creole in 1988, is the second of Patrick Chamoiseau's novels to be available in an English translation (the first one is the more recent Texaco, 1992 [1997]). The two translators, RoseMyriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov, ought once again to be applauded for their splendid work. Their version of this novel reads like a cross between Aime Cesaire's poetry and Ishmael Reed's early fiction. An English whose texture is all the more supple and savory for being in intimate contact with French Creole makes reading Solibo Magnificent an exhilarating and intellectually satisfying experience. The title itself-"Solibo Magnificent," rather than "Solibo the Magnificent" or "The Magnificent Solibo"-announces this odd linguistic covenant at the root of memorable neologisms such as "Mothercrocker" and "snickt by the word" (the cause of Solibo's death). The translators also add a third part to Chamoiseau's novel: "Bringing the Word" includes two glossaries, one devoted to particularly colorful "Names and Nicknames," and an Afterword by Rejouis that comments pithily on the challenge, and the joys, of coaxing into English phrases and cadences the novel's at times precipitous levitations between metropolitan French and francophone Caribbean Creole.
As a Carnival novel, Solibo Magnificent self-consciously comments on the ever-slippery slopes of translation and interpretation on which the text, thanks to its translators, continues happily to slide. To translate is to metamorphose (mofwaze in Creole), and metamorphosis, as literary and political practice, is...