translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

cultural values, and to nurture humanity – understood mainly in its
emotional dimension in interpersonal relations.
Whereas for most African American writers before and after him the
“soul of black folks” found an expression in folklore and in religious songs
(the so-called spirituals), in the very severe environment in which he was
socialized nothing else flourished but dogma, religious strife, domestic
violence, verbal abuse and rigidity.
Neither volume of the autobiography features any positive example
of family life. The destruction of the Black family, carried out at the time of
slavery by selling parents and children to different owners, seems to be
going on after slavery was abolished via loveless relationships, domestic
violence, poverty, slack morality and lack of imaginative horizons.
In the family in which he was born, the father was the bread-maker
and the tyrant, whose presence imposed silence and total obedience. In
Jackson, the disappearance of the father from the family entails lack of
money and lack of food. When Richard’s father leaves, hunger possesses
his body and mind, and defines his formative years in the South:
Hunger stole upon me so slowly that at first I was not aware of what
hunger really meant. Hunger had always been more or less at my
elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find
hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly. The hunger I
had known before this had been no grim, hostile stranger; it had been
a normal hunger that had made me beg constantly for bread, and
when I ate a crust or two I was satisfied. But this new hunger baffled
me, scared me, made me angry and insistent. (14)
This poignant bodily sensation, associated with the absence of the father,
together with the portrait that Wright draws of his father as he sees him
twenty five years later, justify Michel Fabre’s argument that Richard had a
dual relationship with his father and his birthplace – “both turned into
negative metaphors,”– that “South mingles with Nathan Wright” and
“geography with genealogy.” (Fabre, 1987: 7)
Left only with his mother and brother, Richard has to learn how to
survive, how to fight for his right to use the streets, how to hide his hunger
and, later, how to act out the social role assigned and allowed to Negroes in
the South. Initially, Richard had taken it for granted that the whites had all
rights to beat the “colored” and that by nature, the two races that co-existed
could only interact in violent ways:
And when word circulated among the black people of the
neighborhood that a ‘black’ boy had been severely beaten by a ‘white’
man, I felt that the ‘white’ man had a right to beat the ‘black’ boy, for I
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