Speaking in Tongues: The Texts Haunting Stevenson’s Samoan Adaptation of “The Bottle Imp”

In 1891, Robert Louis Stevenson and a member of the London Missionary Society, Arthur Claxton, adapted and translated Stevenson’s short story “The Bottle Imp” into Samoan. In this article, we read this Samoan adaptation – “O le Fagu Aitu” – in relation to earlier versions of the story published in the three countries struggling for control over Samoa at the time. We argue that the British, American, and German versions of the bottle-imp narrative reiterate this colonial struggle on a textual level in “O le Fagu Aitu”, and that the cacophonous incoherence of Stevenson and Claxton's Samoan translation mirrors the inability of any of these powers to either assert full control over or adapt their imperial efforts to Samoan cultures and epistemologies.