The Global South

African nations strive in their various ways to preserve artistic traditions, such as oral literature (folklore). Preservation is an ethical-political act, as is translation of African folklore into world languages such as English and French. Two disciplines, folklore and translation studies, can now make common cause in the translating of folkloric systems. The example of a Malagasy folktale, grandly inflated by its narrator into epic scale, shows the utility of typographical devices in celebrating, if not overcoming, the abiding sense of difference between western poetic tastes and a nonwestern literary system. Translation takes a necessary place in the global context of cultural creolization.