There are several things to do when one is a “retired” foreign language teacher with time on his hands. One could begin to translate a book of English fiction into Yoruba just for the sake of it – never mind that many of our “modern” people don’t read in the language anymore. At least one can convince oneself that it is an effort in the furtherance of literature.
One could also begin to read old books, some of which one had bought over a year ago but had not got a chance to open due to the busy nature of one’s teaching and learning commitments. As much as catching up on old books is concerned, my bed at the moment is littered with open copies of “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, “Slow Man” by J.M. Coetzee and Chika Unigwe’s “On Black Sister’s Street”.
But yesterday, I stumbled on a copy of Wole Soyinka’s “Collected Plays 1” which I had bought from Amazon two months ago. It had in it A Dance of the Forests, The Swamp Dwellers, The Strong Breed, The Road, and The Baccae of Euripides. I’ve read all of them at one point or the other before, but it struck me that there was a part of The Strong Breed that once seemed very strange to me in grammatical accuracy. Today I began to look for it, and it didn’t take me too long for me to to spot. I’ve found it. Wole Soyinka, or his editor at the time, seemed to have missed an almost negligible grammatical rule for one of the lines in the play. Almost negligible, but not quite forgivable for an author that has now gone ahead to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here:
SUNMA: You don’t even want me here?
EMAN: But you have to go home haven’t you? *
SUNMA: I had hoped we would watch the new year together – in some other place.
pg 120.
The first time I spotted this in 2001, I was sure that it had missed the editor’s eye especially since a random internet search did not produce any result of anyone having spotted it before. But seeing it still in another edition of the book convinced me either of the author’s insistence, or on the forgivableness of the slip on some level. Or not. The character of Emma is neither a teacher known for grandiose language nor an illiterate known for the same. In fact, his ability to speak well was never in question throughout the short play so it couldn’t have been part of character. It could only have been an error. What surprised me was how it was repeated in all the editions I have read. So I’ve brought it here for debate. What special reason could be given for this sentence written like this?
Of course after this, I shall be expecting a cheque from the publishers for my eagle-eyed spotting of a faulty line in a book more than four decades old.
1
aitrai at http://YourWebsite
Speech in drama is meant for character portrayal and/or dramatic effect. Ask yourself: where is the emphasis in the question, and how does the question tag help us to locate that emphasis? I am not holding brief for Soyinka. You would find plenty of errors in The Credo of Being and Nothingness. I have found some bad errors in your own short post. He who comes to equity…
Posted at June 13, 2010 on 6:47am.
2
Kola Tubosun at http://www.ktravula.com
Alright. First, I have not compared my (usually hurriedly-written) blogposts to Wole Soyinka’s published plays, so I take full responsibility for all the bad errors on this blog that have sometimes given me sleepless nights after spotting them. I’m the least qualified person to be a grammar policeman.
Now to dramatic effect, I’ll refer you back to the book and ask you to see if any other part of the work emphasizes Eman’s speech deficiency or idiosyncrasy. There are none as far as I could see. In this case, not only was there no comma to separate the question tag from the rest of the statement, the question itself does not reflect any of the thoughts expressed before or after the question was made. In the first part of the question, the invisible auxiliary verb was “do”, as in: “But you (do) have to go home…” so the question should have been “don’t you?” If the question had been: “But you have got home…”, then the auxiliary verb would be “have” and the question would have been “haven’t you?”
See some more examples of the wrong usage of the main verb as a question tag. In all of them, like in the Soyinka example, the invisible auxiliary verb is a “do”, but incorrectly assumed to be something else:
a. You need to buy it, needn’t you? *
b. I hope to go there, hopen’t I? *
c. She has to get pregnant, hasn’t she*
Of course, there could be another way to look at it: Eman meaning to say that “But you have to go home, haven’t you (gone already)?”. It just doesn’t seem right still considering the way it was written. Grammar police, anyone?
Posted at June 14, 2010 on 7:01am.
3
aitrai at http://YourWebsite
I only see a missing a comma, and that’s all. Please check your post. The errors there are not forgivable. For instance, ‘a novel of English fiction’. What’s that?!
Posted at June 14, 2010 on 8:01am.
4
Kola Tubosun at http://www.ktravula.com
Well, you may have to look at the sentence again and see where the emphasis of the question is, or ought to be. Maybe you should read the book.
I’ve corrected my own error. That was exactly what I was talking about. Now imagine if this were a book, or that your own “forgiveable”* error slips past an editor’s eye.
Posted at June 14, 2010 on 8:16am.
5
Myne Whitman at http://www.mynewhitmanwrites.com
Funny I was just reading another post on errors in published books. I think authors should take responsibility as I do for the ones in A Heart to Mend.
I guess that line is OK as it is, one could argue though that it could have been “But you have to go home, don’t you?” Bottom line, it is forgivable IMO.
Posted at June 13, 2010 on 3:03pm.
6
Abimbola at http://YourWebsite
From what I heard, Soyinka doesnt correct his books. Once it goes out, all other editions go like that
Posted at June 13, 2010 on 4:06pm.
7
naijalines at http://YourWebsite
It is definitely “But you have to go home, don’t you?”.
I hate errors, esp in publications. I edit my posts repeatedly, when I spot errors after I’ve posted. But sometimes, one has to learn to live with it, I guess.
Posted at June 14, 2010 on 6:11am.
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Kola Tubosun at http://www.ktravula.com
Of course it is an error. I hate errors too, yet I keep finding them over and over again in my own posts that I’ve read many times over before publishing. I guess it is always easier to spot someone else’s slip than one’s own. Still, bloggers have it better than authors and editors because of the chance to correct ourselves at a later date without having to pay for reprints. But on the bright side for editors, one faulty sentence will never successfully remove from the overall quality of a great work. And I consider The Strong Breed a great work. So there. Still, it is fascinating that after several decades, there is no one publication that references this glaring grammar error.
Posted at June 14, 2010 on 6:47am.
9
Adeleke, John at http://YourWebsite
Kola, no writer is perfect. Can you please check the short note you wrote at the top and see how many grammartical flaws are there? You expect a 120,000-word novel to be perfect? What is the work of editors? Is it because it’s Wole Soyinka you a flogging this unncessary issue?
Posted at June 15, 2010 on 11:36pm.
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Kola Tubosun at http://www.ktravula.com
John, all you had to do was take time to understand the thrust of the post, and you won’t now become another footnote to the now redundant argument: “No writer is perfect. Correct your own grammar…etc”
The post was not meant to argue for perfection as it was to simply examine Soyinka’s usage.
But here are a few other logs in your own critical eye:
* Grammatical is not spelt as you spelt it, and neither is “are” spelt as “a”.
* The Strong Breed is not a novel.
Posted at June 16, 2010 on 4:40am.
11
Tomi at http://YourWebsite
LOL, nice comments, the conclusion of the matter- Nobody is farfect (perfect)
Posted at June 16, 2010 on 1:06pm.
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A. Kuffour at http://YourWebsite
‘”No,” said Gabriel, turning to his wife, “we had quite enough of that last year, hadn’t we?…’
I believe that’s a quote from Joyce’s “The Dead.” Perhaps, you, sir, have retroactively applied a law which only came into force later.Some kind of anachronism?
Posted at July 12, 2011 on 8:39am.
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Kola at http://www.ktravula.com
Kuffor, you could be right that it’s an anachronism. I definitely hadn’t come across it before. I was playing the prescriptive grammarian.
The problem with the use – as I’ve found, still playing grammarian – is in the deleted verb that presents the sentence as what it isn’t. Look at Joyce, now re-written: “We had eaten quite enough of that last year, hadn’t we?” Do you see what I did? Perhaps any other verb would fit in the frame now occupied by “eat”, or perhaps the writer deliberately used the anachronism to prove a point. To me it makes no sense because unless the verb is present, the “hadn’t we” makes little sense. It definitely doesn’t refer to “had” which, in this instance is not the main verb (as in the past tense of “have”) but a modal (e.g “had ___”).
In any case, Soyinka also forgot a comma. Indefensible! 🙂
Posted at July 13, 2011 on 2:17pm.
14
A. Kuffour at http://YourWebsite
Very well, sir. In the context in which it was used by Joyce, the deleted verb would be ‘cab’, although he used it as a noun for the horse-drawn variety, and I’m tempted to believe that the sense of the word ‘cab’ as a verb is a later day colloquialism that probably didn’t exist in Joyce’s day. Of course, I do not know that for sure, nor am I a grammarian learned in the diachrony of English, so I’ll defer to you, but I want to believe that Joyce used ‘have’ as the main verb and it makes a lot of sense to me, ditto Soyinka. We really can’t expect any right-thinking shepherd to abandon 99 commas in search of one nuisance now, expect we?Nor should we crucify them over it. LoL! Just pulling your leg.
Posted at July 14, 2011 on 7:48am.
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Kola at http://www.ktravula.com
Thanks for making me smile, and for an engaging discussion. Is this your first time on this blog? I think you’ll like a few more of the many discussions we’ve had here on grammar, language, and writing.
Posted at July 14, 2011 on 10:54am.
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A. Kuffour at http://YourWebsite
Thanks.I’ll just click the grammar tag and see where it takes me, and I was new to the blog when I made my first comment but I sure am a regular now
Posted at July 15, 2011 on 6:25am.
17
Ben-jamin at http://YourWebsite
First of all, this is a Nobel Prize winning, Nigerian play write, if anyone has earned the right to play with language, Soyinka is certainly in that group. Has it occurred to anyone that, since this is not the only place in the play where the language of the characters in the play is different from our common western english, that he did this intentionally to accurately reflect what language sounds like in his homeland?
Also, when you are writing an article to criticize an error in a published work of art, you should probably proofread your post at least twice, and make sure you spell the main character of The Strong Breed’s correctly, instead of calling him Emma.
Posted at February 2, 2012 on 10:12am.
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Kola at http://www.ktravula.com
Hey Benjamin, before you criticize a post on this blog, try sometime to read said post from beginning to end in order to understand its premises. It also helps to read all previous comments before falling into a position that has already been discounted.
However, to address some of your beaten concerns, the playwright (please note the spelling) was neither playing with words in this instance or being inventive. Emma’s character in the book was not characterized to be someone who disregarded the rules of grammar, so your point about that fails. Soyinka had used a wrong contraction, and that has not been corrected in the book either because no one had seen it until now, or because no one cared or was sure enough to call it out. Don’t take my word for it, ask a grammar teacher (preferably one who hasn’t won the Nobel Prize).
PS: Your last paragraph makes no sense whatsoever, but I’ll assume that you know what you were talking about.
Posted at February 2, 2012 on 10:26am.
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Albert at http://YourWebsite
There is nothing wrong with what Soyinka wrote there. You don’t just read plays for the grammatical stamina only, you consider the dramtical/artistic balance also. In this regard, ain’t nothing wrong with that. That was a perfect grama in at all angle.
Posted at December 11, 2014 on 6:37am.
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Ekeruke, Justin at http://YourWebsite
I believe that Soyinka consciously wrote that expression because, the character of Eman and the tension of his Mission- the carrier motif- could warrant him to express in that manner, as the playwright assigned him.
Posted at November 11, 2015 on 5:26pm.