Walcott Translating Derek Walcott in America Today, Term Paper

Walcott

Translating Derek Walcott

In America today, the 1992 Nobel Prize winner for literature Derek Walcott is perhaps best known for his poetry. His collective work explores themes regarding the Caribbean experience from colonial slavery to independence, and the nature of the Caribbean's post-colonial identity a mixture of different cultures. Walcott's writings reflect own ethnic and racial heritage and cultural background, both African and European. Walcott writes his works in English but with Creole vocabulary and calypso rhythm to evoke an image of his homeland in his poems and verse plays. Walcott was first known as a playwright when he was a young West Indian intellectual living in St. Lucia. Then, Walcott thought that theatre was the most relevant and culturally valid artistic form was the theater, as it had the unique ability to communicate poetry and stridently political themes through the wider audience of heard as well as written speech, yet with the dense and rhythmic language of literature. Although Walcott's beliefs have softened, his political concerns and the political and linguistic negotiations of his work remain constant.

Two critical elements to understanding this particular author's work, thus, are Walcott's often polymorphous use of language, his blend of French, Creole, and English, and his desire the lager dialogue between the language of the colonized peoples of the world, and the colonizers -- an additional reason that re-exploring his use of language in Spanish, another language similarly used by the oppressed and the oppressing peoples of the world in history is so crucial. Walcott's early 1956 play "Ti-Jean and his Brothers" is an often unrecognized work in the rest of the world, despite the acknowledged and awarded excellence of the author's verse, yet it explores many of the author's most cherished themes of colonialism. It is both a universal play in its depiction of family relations, yet typical of the concerns of this great author -- and particularly suited to its re-expression and recognition in the 21st century, though the expression of Spanish. It features particularly Caribbean elements, such as a bolom or the angry ghost of an murdered, unborn,…