‘Sa bezsominn Shakespeare la’ – The Brave New World of Dev Virahsawmy

Summary

Inspired by the fact that two of his predecessors at the University of Edinburgh – Julius Nyerere, who was later to become the President of Tanzania, and Thomas Decker from Sierra Leone – had translated Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in Swahili and Kriyo respectively, Dev Virahsawmy took the decision to delve into translating Shakespeare during his university days in the mid-1960s. For Virahsawmy, this was concrete evidence that Shakespeare was perennial and accessible to all. Urged by his university lecturer to explore Mauritian Creole (Kreol) as a language, Virahsawmy's endeavour became even more pressing. However, his first translation was not that of Julius Caesar, but of Much Ado about Nothing. It was done with one objective in mind: he felt that comedy, being culturally loaded and more difficult to translate, would prove the opponents of Kreol wrong. Stirred by the post-independence nationalist spirit and an appreciation for a national language that was not yet officially recognised, the dramatist sought to prove that his mother tongue, like any other foreign language, could articulate philosophical thoughts. Shakespeare was to become his instrument to popularise Kreol and to contest the bias of the elite against the language, for at that time, Mauritian writers preferred the colonial modes of expression – English and French.