In this thesis, I discuss Portuguese-born Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira (1935–) and his work of translation and in translation, examining the ways in which translation constitutes a central principle of his literary project. This examination draws on close-readings of and archival research into selected works by Luandino Vieira and their English and French translations, his critically neglected translation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1974), and the more recently published Papéis da Prisão (2015). Through this corpus, I introduce into critical debates surrounding the Angolan writer’s multilingual work an attention to language and its function as a site of experimentation, which seeks to expand—in light of the Angolan anticolonial struggle (1961–1974), Angolan independence (1975), and the promise of decolonisation—the ‘horizon of possibility’ for a post-independence Angola.

Where extant criticism has read Luandino Vieira’s ‘linguagem luandina’ through a predominantly Bhabhian vocabulary, which emphasises the frameworks of ‘hybridity’ and the ‘third space’, I turn instead to the concepts of translation and translationality. This shift, I argue, an interpretation of this ‘linguagem luandina’ that takes seriously recent developments in African linguistics and its efforts to decolonise broadly Eurocentric conceptions of language and language use. By recasting Luandino Vieira’s work in terms of three key terms—multilingualism, translation, and prefiguration—I seek to take the measure of its least for the ways in which criticism approaches language itself.