Thesis submetted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degre of "Master of Literary studies"

The aim of this study is twofold, namely to explore the realites which have surrounded various practices of appropriation of dominant nations' languages and literature through translation by other nations, and to analyse Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow as a case study.

In view of this, the work operates on the premise that subversion is done a two main textual levels in Wizard of the Crow : first by the incorporation of translated and non- translated expressions and other identifiable components of African orality ; second, by adopting methods of expression or aesthetics typical of the African verbal art.

The first chapter discusses the realities which have characterized the practice of subversion through literary translation in various contexts, in order to establish the relationship between the postcolonial African literary practices and other contexts. As it has been found out, he practice of subversion to appropriate powerful cultures was not a new invention.

First implemented by the Romans while taming the Greek culture, as Joachim Du Bellay states, other nations later adopted this conduct to upgrade their civilizations long before the Africans took it as a way to cultural redemption. Applied to literary translation however, appropriation tremendously problematizes the old norm of translations' faithfulness to their source texts. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, whose novel is focused upon as a case study in this work, considered the use of English in African literature as a continuation of Europe's imperialism upon the independent Africa, and recommended to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Nairobi, in 1962, to abolish the Department of English and replace it by a Deprtment of African Literature and Languages.

As far as literary career was concerned, Ngugi's a awakening was marked by his shift to his mother tongues, Gikuyu and Kiswahili, for his literary activities to only appear in English through translation.

Wizard of the Crow is a self-translation of one of his recent novels originally published in Gikuyu.. This study is therefore an attempt to evaluate how such a radical scholar subverts the Standard English through literary self-translation, to try clarifying some of the features upon which postcolonial literary self-ranslation bases its activity.

The second chapter describes the transposition of the African names into Wizard of the Crow comparing the process of character creation to known African naming practices. In addition, this part discusses the multilingual passages in this novel, and accounts for the translation methods by which they are rendered accessible to the non-Gikuyu or Kiswahili reader.

The third chapter accounts for presence of translated components typical for the oral tradition in Wizard of the Crow. In addition to the most recongizable genres like proverbs, this part focuses on elements of the verbal arts aesthetics, especially the interaction between the figures of performer and audience in selected passages.