‘Aren't you the one who speaks other languages affluently?’ (Couto 2004b, 3). The question is directed at the narrator of Mia Couto's novel The Last Flight of the Flamingo. ‘I speak a couple of languages, yes,’ (2004b, 3) he answers the soldier – and is soon asked by the administrator in the town of Tizangara to act as his official translator, specifically for an Italian who is about to investigate the local mystery of exploding UN soldiers. This surprises the narrator, not least since he doesn't speak Italian. The administrator replies that it doesn't matter. He can translate into ‘English, German. One of those, it doesn't matter. We’ll get by’ (2004b, 5). But of course it does matter that he knows English or German or some other powerful European language. Just any language wouldn't do for the administrator, anxious that a government worthy of respect must have its translators.

Thus begins the comedy of errors that is The Last Flight of the Flamingo – by foregrounding translation as implicated in the exercise of power. But as the satirical bite of this passage implies, and as the Italian investigator, Massimo Risi, is soon to find out, translation also turns out to be powerless when confronted with the radical incommensurability of worldviews in Tizangara. These worldviews could be labeled ‘Western’ and ‘African’, or ‘global’ and ‘local’, or ‘national’ and ‘traditional’, or ‘urban’ and ‘rural’, or ‘technical’ and ‘spiritual’, or ‘literate’ and ‘oral’ – but none of these binaries remains securely in place in the novel. It is only the simultaneous need for and impossibility of translation between the respective poles that remain constant.

The Last Flight of the Flamingo is in this respect not unique but exemplary. Translation looms large as we approach Couto's work, and in multiple ways. Note, for instance, that I have consistently quoted a translation of Couto above, which in itself could lead to a discussion of how David Brookshaw has solved the problem of rewriting Couto's parable of mistranslation and untranslatability in English. Hence – and this is the central issue that this essay will revolve around – not only is translation a central theme and concern in Couto's writing, but it is both an obstacle to and a conduit for the global circulation of his work.