Pita Nwana, Omenụkọ(translated from Igbo into English by Ernest N. Emenyonu)

Summary

The publication in Igbo Language in 1933 of Pita Nwana's Omenụkọwas a literary milestone that established the father of the novel in Igbo language. A translation of this first Igbo novel into English by Ernest Emenyonu, Professor and Chair, Department of Africana Studies, University of Michigan-Flint, U.S.A opens it up to the world, especially literary critics and scholars. A biographical novel, Omenụkọis a travelogue of pain and joy. It excels in its didacticism, its realism, its cultural significance and its timeless appeal to the reading world. With its translation into English, it becomes a novel about everyman as he struggles to overcome or accept the burdens of existential conditions that throw him sometimes into joy and at other times into pains but ultimately pulls him to continue on the path of life.

Translation gives the meaning of a text in another language in the way that an author intended the original text to do.

This explanation underlines our appreciation of the laudable achievement of Ernest Emenyonu in translating the novel under review. This effort is an important achievement of the translator whose early interest in the ethnic literature of the Igbo, even as a doctoral student blossomed in the publication of The Rise of the Igbo Novel in 1978. It is in Emenyonu's ingenious effort to replace a novel written in the Igbo language with a version in the English language without any loss of information, cultural implications or other details in meaning and indeed style that his excellence lies. In doing this, he takes a revered seat among translators of first indigenous African language novels such as Daniel P. Kunene who translated Chaka (Shaka, a sotho epic novel) by Thomas Mofolo in 1981 and Wole Soyinka who translated Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmole into The Forest of a Thousand Demons: a Hunters Saga in 1968.

Omenụkọis a story of a real man, Igwegbe Odum, fictionalized as Omenụkọ, a name that means ‘One who acts during a period of scarcity’, an attribute which he ultimately lives up to. It is in fifteen chapters. There is a prologue and an epilogue. The translator has also added a very useful foreword.