Translating the untranslatable: Khal Torabully’s poetics of Coolitude

Abstract

In coining the term ‘Coolitude’ to re-imagine and re-vision the indenture experience, Khal Torabully has created a new identity and language, based on the strength and resiliency garnered through the rich intercultural exchanges among indentured workers. The central image in Khal’s seminal work, Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude , is a ship’s cargo hold from where its occupants – no matter their country of origin, language, religion, gender, caste or shade of skin – could still look up and see the stars. Believing that ordinary language was not capable of representing the myriad diverse voices of indenture, Khal’s ‘poetics of Coolitude’ or ‘corallian poetics’ intersperses French with Mauritian Creole, Hindi, mariner’s language, Bhojpuri, Urdu and neologisms, among other lexicons. To bring the music of this unique language into English, without sacrificing significant meaning, the translator employed a sound mapping technique to identify the salient patterns of assonance, alliteration, rhythm and silence that characterized each poem, performing a kind of ‘linguistic acrobatics’.