Bantè, Benin · November 2024
Local Arts and the Psalms in Incà

The recording of Psalm 118 in Incà that Bio Athanase played for the consultants in Cotonou took a room of people eleven days and one rule to make.

The workshop had gathered two groups who do not usually work in the same room: the Incà translation team, and Christian singer-songwriters who compose in Incà. They worked on four psalms. Psalm 118 was one of them.

The exegesis was done together, out loud, verse by verse and phrase by phrase. Every participant examined the text. When a term was hard to carry into Incà, the group argued about it. And then the rule: the agreed rendering went up on a board in writing, and it did not go up until everyone in the room accepted it. When the group got stuck, they opened Scriptura’s Translation and Performance Notes for that psalm and worked through the problem there.

Only after the whole psalm was on the board did they move to internalization — living inside the text until it is held rather than read — following the psalm’s poetic structure, section by section.

Then the room split. The translators went off to work on their own drafts. The composers went off to work on theirs. The translation team recorded their audio, exported the final file to a phone, and sent it to their consultant for checking. His observations came back to the team, who carried them through the oral translation process again for final approval.

It is a slow way to translate a poem. The board is the slowest part of all — one person’s objection stops the whole room. But the result is a psalm that nobody in that community has to be persuaded of later.