The Oral/Aural: Sound & Meaning in Yorùbá Poetic Prose Translation: Akínwùmí Ìsola and the Fágúnwà Tradition

After the tragic and mysterious death by drowning of pioneer Yoruba writer, D.O. Fagunwa, in 1963, scholars, critics, readers, and audiences averred that no writer could match, let alone rival, the skills of this master rhetorician. In fact, Fagunwa adulators viewed translations of any of his five classics with suspicion, deeming such attempts irreverent, or even treacherous. Fagunwa\u27s preeminence in the Yoruba literary canon had already been established and crit­ics preferred that his legacy remain untarnished. After all, this con­summate storyteller had blazed the trail, commencing a literary tra­dition for the Yoruba language shortly after it was orthographed. Fagunwa was renowned for his creative manipulation of the language and acclaimed for pushing it to its linguistic limit with such dazzling rhetorical devices as word play, ideophones, hyperbole, metaphors, and repetition, which have become hallmarks of Yoruba creative writing. Notably, he made the language sing, imbuing it with a musicality that is at the core of a distinctive legacy known today in the Yoruba canon as the Fagunwa tradition, a tradition that arguably places the Yoruba\u27s sheer love of rhetoric above choice of material in creative writing and oral art. Contemporary writer Akínwùmí Ìsola attributes this collective cultural response to the manipulation of language and its characteristics: This love of rheto­ric, this preoccupation with beautiful words, this delight in verbal celebration, is a feature of the Yoruba novel today (1976: 473)