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Poeticizing the Psalter in an African Language

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Wendland E. R.

Open Theology

2016

vol. 2

issue 1

This study illustrates the application of a literary methodology to the analysis and translation of biblical poetry. The aim is twofold: first and foundational, to reveal salient aspects of the beauty and power of Psalm 13 in the original Hebrew; and second, to experiment with different methods of communicating the original meaning of the psalmist’s passionate prayer with respect to lyric form, content, and function in Chichewa, a major Bantu language. After a thorough examination of the principal structural and stylistic features of the biblical text, a typical lament psalm, several published and unpublished Chewa translations are critically discussed. The ultimate purpose is, as the title of this paper suggests, to produce an acceptable, functionally equivalent, poetic version of the Hebrew text in the vernacular. In conclusion, the main principles illustrated in this study are summarized in an effort to encourage more dynamic, idiomatic, indeed melodic translations of the Scriptures in local languages, where circumstances allow. “How long” must so many reader-hearers suffer under the burden of a less than communicative version of the Psalter in their mother tongue?

Re-telling the Word Rhetorically: The Example of Shadreck Wame, a Chewa Itinerant Evangelist

100%

Wendland E. R.

Open Theology

2016

vol. 2

issue 1

This study presents a rhetorical analysis of Shadreck Wame, a popular Malawian revival preacher. After an overview of the “rhetorical setting” in which these vernacular sermons were preached in the 1990s, ten “oral-rhetorical techniques” that characterize Wame’s preaching style are identified, based on a corpus of nearly 50 of his Chewa-language sermons that I recorded from radio broadcasts in the 1990s. These features are then illustrated in selections from a specific sermon that Evangelist Wame preached in 1997 in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. In particular, his situationally-influenced “re-tellings,” or paraphrases, of a familiar biblical text, Christ’s Parable of the Wicked Tenants (Luke 20:9-18), are identified and elaborated upon in footnotes. I conclude this description of a popular preacher’s dynamic, contextualized homiletical style with a number of applications to contemporary communicators in Africa. Both the content and the methodology of this analysis may be significant for comparative purposes when teaching sermonic technique in different, especially non-Western, sociocultural settings.

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2 Open Theology

2 Wendland E. R.

2 2016

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Poeticizing the Psalter in an African Language

Re-telling the Word Rhetorically: The Example of Shadreck Wame, a Chewa Itinerant Evangelist