Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Translation and What It Costs

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Translation and What It Costs

Almost everything an English reader will encounter about the odu has passed through translation, and translation from Yoruba into English is not a neutral operation.

Yoruba is a tone language: the pitch pattern of a syllable is part of the word, and most English language publishing drops the diacritics that carry it, so distinct words become identical strings on the page. Ifa verse also leans heavily on proverb, on wordplay and on the names of the diviners and clients in its narratives, and those are the first things a translation loses. Bascom printed Yoruba text facing his English in 1969 for exactly this reason, so that a reader could see what was being carried and what was not.

For a reference page the practical upshot is caution about single English words. A gloss that reduces a figure to one keyword is doing a great deal of work invisibly, and keywords of that sort circulate widely without any indication of who produced them or from what.

The atlas gives no such gloss for Otura Meji, thirteenth of the sixteen principal figures. It records the figure's place in the corpus, the state of the published record and the terms of transmission.

The verses themselves, and the readings and prescriptions taken from them in consultation, are conferred by initiated practitioners and are not set out here.

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