AIT:The Poet blabbed on Shakespeare's 400th anniversary

It is now clear why many critics say the quality of Nigerian literature has fallen.

So, last Saturday, AIT news hour brought “a writer, poet and one-time Secretary of the Association of Nigeria Authors” to say something on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death.

She said WS was well known and widely read, born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Bla bla bla. I say mundane!

Then came the fall when asked “Why do you think Shakespeare's work will not lose relevance given the popularity of web publishing and complain of difficulty in understanding him by some?”

She, with so much annoying confidence, started saying how Shakespeare's works have been translated into many languages; and then gave the number of plays and sonnets the Bard wrote. It was heartbreaking! How can a writer speak of what the (UK) Guardian described as “chameleon brilliance” in such banal and shallow terms?

There is the Bard's ability to capture human dynamism in his works: cutting across subject matters and themes—gender, race, love, slavery, dictatorship, trusts, indolence and so on.

In form, he invented styles and demystified literary canons, setting new “rules.” This AIT's guest's teachers should be shamed for not telling her the origins of tragicomedy. WS gave the English language over a thousand vocabularies.

And she sat there, telling the world that WS has been translated into many languages. The issue is why the need for such wide translations and not the act itself. Even the best example of modern day Nigerian (commercial) literary artistes, Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie, has been translated.

Ah!