I am very grateful to you for agreeing to this discussion.
I know from things that you've said already in public and in other occasions, but first of all, this kind of oral medium is not your favourite.
It's not your favourite, primarily because, of course, you're a writer.
And so this kind of somewhat occasionally thoughtless speech can cannot be the best the best way of going conducting things.
But also the other thing is, of course, we're conducting this discussion in English, which is not your first language.
It's not your primary language as a writer. It's not the language that is inevitably most important to you.
What I would like to try to do as far as possible in this discussion is to turn those to manifest disadvantages into something of an opportunity,
partly to talk about your relationship to other languages, to talk about, of course,
your relationship to Afrikaans and to introduce people to the broad range of your work from the beginning to the end.
So thanks so much. I know it's a pleasure.
And the format that we thought would work is to have you read a few sections from some of your work for them.
We've got and then to have a brief discussion about them afterwards and to move on to the next one and the first.
And in each case in each case, I've chosen the extract or the text I would like you to read and and and to use the discussion.
So that's that's my part of my responsibility in this whole project.
The first text I want to read is actually just the first stanza, the first verse of a poem called Unaggressive,
which is Teacher in Afrikaans, which comes from your first collection of poems, which is called Doctor from Yeutter.
The daughter of Jefa would be the the English translation, which appeared in 1970 in a publication by human rights in South Africa.
So maybe if we could just begin with you reading initially, you reading in Afrikaans, the short first verse of all of the.
Owner Viser, Yes, stone forms and the glass by your Darfor, by your mother, by your book you wicky and you.
Does he stand for Onasis a claim yeary who oenology a mirror or Mirabeau drawing a
ton of sulphur in hot oenology Vortis and also during the Blader or Ralcorp Inyo.
Great. Thank you. I know for the benefit of those who don't follow, Africans have my own bad translation of this poem and it's entirely wooden.
It's not it it's just an attempted a literal translation, which I just just for the sake of our discussion, I just read out the rough translation.
You stand before us in the class, beside your table, beside your mother tongue, beside your books, your little cap and your bag.
You stand before us like a little Jerrica. And even if you have built walls around you, you wear teeth of silver and gold.
And even if you have gods in your towers, Rahab lives in you.
I think it'll be fairly obvious why I'm interested in this poem.
It's because it is a young Afrikaans girl at school.
Still, one of the things I'd like to know is just if you can remember exactly when you wrote this and what age you were, but in all sorts of ways,
taking up a bit testy, perhaps even adversarial relationship to your own language and the medium of instruction in all sorts of ways.
There are things there were so many things in the translation that were problematic for me.
You know, one of them was just a little preposition bay, which I went for beside in a lot of things.
But it's but it's also it could be just with Bay in Afrikaans, does a lot of things at your table, Bajo, Taufel, etc.
But of course, in many ways the most the most powerful thing that doesn't communicate in the translation is the fact that, you know.
Late 20th century English has lost any distinction with the second person between a formal and an informal,
and in Afrikaans it would be an In and Yei.
In French it would be. And two English is lost that, you know, in some ways, one of the first things that strikes you,
somebody with a knowledge of Africa, Afrikaans, is, you know, this is a poem called Always a Teacher.
And it begins with yeah, that in itself almost is a kind of a provocation.
It's not formal enough.
And I would imagine surely for your generation you would have addressed your teachers or would it have always more or less 16 when I wrote the poem,
but it was specifically about a particular teacher, ah, Afrikaans teacher.
And at that stage I have read because my mother is a writer and both her and my father read and bought Afrikaans books.
And because Afrikaans is such a young literature at that age,
I would say I have read practically everything that has been published in Afrikaans, especially during the time.
So the new books were bought, the new poets were read and discussed in our house.
So I was ahead of well then also of the teacher.
And I couldn't bear him reading the poems because he had no feeling for what is being said.
He couldn't explain the power and in his way he was terrified of me.
I quickly realised. So what makes this poem even worse is that I wrote it on his request for poetry, for the Eisteddfod, for a yearly competition.
So this poem deriding him and his subject and the way he teach literature was given to him.
And he sent it duly to the Eisteddfod and it won first prise and then it was published in the school yearbook and then became widely known,
well, at least in the town and to the whole school yards or quotes in a way.
Pathetic. Yeah, but one thing I could just because we did it, we have just brutally extracted the first the first verse.
What what just I'm really interested in what you've just said because you do end up by identifying two,
that he's particularly committed to two Afrikaans writers.
And you mentioned Mahadeva and Tushies is again, which is that if that is the only interested in the old stuff, the old stuff, the religious stuff.
Right. And the stuff that was easily explainable, explicable.
So he felt safe there. Yeah.
And and within that was already the rottenness of what one experienced.
And even as a schoolchild, the political rottenness of a country was also embedded in the literature.
Both were Malaby wrote beautiful books where white people lived on farms and there's
no black person that does any work or so to ignore 80 per cent of the country.
Yeah. So the poem derided him, but then also, I think derided.
The literature that he taught and I mean also the you know,
the because of the collection is called Dr. Yeutter is the biblical the biblical Frater of the title of the whole collection.
And then you use that wonderful little simile, the Swiss like like a claim a little Jeriko would.
What would you think that is there some sense in which even at that age where you say, yes, you responding to the literature?
But it also is the implication that if you're responding to his version of Afrikaans, it was that also part of what you're aware of,
that it's a you know, it's extraordinary that you describe him as having this word mulatto, which is there with his books.
But it's also then comes into the simile where you've got this walled city with its gods.
And of course, then there is then there is the the king of Jericho worried about spies.
And there's one. And interestingly, a woman figure and a prostitute is harbouring spies.
Rahab Yeah. So there's there's a there's inevitably there's there's issues about the creative control of the culture,
but also the linguistically almost a kind of a a guarding, a protecting of a version of the language.
Was it was that linguistic consciousness also because of the mood of violence?
That's what a part of what you would think. You must remember the mood of all.
I was taught at the grammar itself.
And in a way, I still use it because it was a very good book.
Yeah, it's as thick as two Bibles in a way. But what half of it did was to say this is this is an English versions of it.
So you shouldn't use that because this is under our system.
This is foreign to all the the words by black people and by slaves was then included in foreign.
So you had this grammar book that had you remember the title of it or at the hospital that's
going to have this sort of this this is ORNGE mother and the rest is or and don't use that.
So it's not that you could even make an argument. It's it's what we were told that this is this is not part of the law.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But it it was it was a mental attitude as well from teachers, from school, from parents.
And I would also in a way. Add literature to it, although I.
Adored the Afrikaans literature and had my favourite poets, my sense that things were wrong in the country.
I didn't get from the literature. Mm hmm. You you got it from observing, just observing.
That things were not translated into literature.
Mm hmm. So there's something missing in the literature, in the literature.
Um, and in a way, I think it continues up until today.
And that is that you can do right by the rulers.
And that is what most of the sisters in Afrikaans literature did.
And once the voices of the 60s is written about right in all of them, though, they resisted the apartheid government.
So the derision and the attacks were against the government and the political leaders.
But there wasn't black people in the polls, there weren't black context or content in the homes, nobody could speak the language.
No one was really interested in what is being said in the language,
nor who is writing in that language, of course, is they wrote in Afrikaans or English.
Then people took notice of that.
But it was as if both in the town, in the language, in the literature, in the country, in the law, 80 per cent, 90 per cent of the country was absent.
Yeah. Let me before we leave the the first collection,
this is your debut in 1970 in because of your your obvious political awareness at that at that age of 16, 17.
One of the most striking things for anybody coming across this collection now
is that in many way you're the poem that was the greatest sort of cause celeb
of that early moment of your career that made your name nationally and in many ways because of other things like translation made it internationally.
And so there's also an idea which, you know, your your relationship to English comes later.
Well, it's not it's almost instant. Your relationship, you know, you're being translated into the poem.
It's a wonderful eroticized utopian poem of longing, of longing beyond insufferable racial boundaries, et cetera.
Sort of called in Afrikaans may movieland translated into English.
But unfortunately,
as my beautiful and I'm feeling too beautiful just doesn't have the irony of me here is that my writing is pretty more but more pretty.
And so there's a there's a kind of and I always like the play of the irony in Afrikaans because there's this utopian longing and desire in the poem.
But it's also slightly undercut by the title, which makes it you know, it's a complex fantasy and a bit of a very politically charged one.
And it did it became a big sensation when it was a scandal as a scandal.
Yeah, exactly. And so this collection came out in 1792, 1771 in, you know, fascinatingly again,
the poem appeared in English as my beautiful land in search of which was the ANC in-house magazine in 1971,
January, I think 1961, and where it was, of course, banned.
The did not circulate openly in South Africa at all, but it's not in the collection of the document you have that does not have that poem.
Most famous poem it doesn't have or the poem that put the the my work on the map was not in it.
Yeah. And when when the first scandal broke in the newspaper to say this is a 17 year
old girl and this is what she writes about Afrikaans mother told her language.
This is what she writes about teachers. This is what she writes about sex.
Because I also had an essay on Adam and Eve.
Yeah. And then this is what she writes politically. You know, what's wrong with our youth and what's wrong with her parents and the school, etc.
And the publishers phoned my mother.
The publishers of publishers find my mother's work.
They phoned and said to her, Don't you want to send us her work so that we see whether we can publish it?
And so she decided that because I am now known as a political poet, which I'm not,
I'm this innocent child, which is an experiment, she says in an interview with the Oscar.
Don't take us seriously. She just experiments with language as a young girl with lipstick.
The fact that neither she nor myself ever will tell you something about metaphor.
But so it was then decided this is then an attempt to say don't.
This is not a political poem. She is writing about a lot of other things.
But then, of course, that you have noticed correctly,
the whole volume in many ways is is a political accusation against a very close a dying, angry community in a way, or stagnant.
So it was primarily intellectual at your mother's insistence that it got dropped.
And so did the publisher agreed with that? Absolutely, because this came on.
And so. Yeah, yeah. Because they would have had to censor and it would have been another issue.
Exactly. OK, that's great. I mean, of course, because the collection is called dr.
Yes, Jeff. Jeff, you know, you are the leader of the Israelites successful in the battle against the Ammonites,
but who then is willing to sacrifice his daughter to do that for him?
But what is then ironic is that they thought that the poem would die.
Yeah. And then within six months, the poem was translated by Ronay Kestrels.
He told me afterwards. Yes. And and probably since each other and in that way it found its way to Mandela and on Robben Island.
And they were saying that if a schoolgirl is saying this, we will be free in our lifetime.
Yeah. So when in fact, that's how it appears in search of a school girl of 17 can say this, Kronstadt.
Yeah, you know, there is hope. Yeah.
So when Ahmed Kathrada was released from jail just before Mandela was released and he had a big, huge rally in Soweto.
I just got in Kronstadt. I have children. I raise children.
I teach at a black training college.
I get this phone call that he just read the Founda to millions.
I you know. Yeah. And it's just a strange route or something that you never recognised was never in black and white printed.
But how it takes on a life of its own. And it's really actually also not a good.
So you never knew about that when you when did you find out about that translation?
Because I mean, there's there was there was an article in the newspaper to say that this controversial in English newspapers,
not that it was translated, but I, I didn't know who read the job or where it ends up.
Nobody approached you about translating it. Nobody approached. No, no, no, no, no.
It just appeared to be fascinating. Great.
Thank you. Can we move on to the second the second extract that I've chosen?
And this wasn't all entirely planned.
But but it is a neat move. We've discussed many things about your relationship with your mother.
You mentioned the fact that your mother is a very eminent writer, considerable output herself.
And so the extract that I would love you to read next for two reasons partly is,
is that that that issue of of your your relationship to your mother in that sense.
But it's also not just a personal biographical thing.
It's a generational, cultural, many things at work, but also the reason why I wanted you to focus on this passage.
It is from Country of My which appeared in 1998 and which was, you know,
although you've had these early things that are starting to circulate much more widely beyond South Africa,
you know, via Shuba would be, you know, an international audience would have been picking up my movieland, my beautiful land in that version.
But in 1998 country, my skull comes out. It is the book in many ways.
It's your it's your book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
about your experiences of of reporting on it, but also about much more than just your experiences.
It's a it's a work that plays all sorts of complex games with factual reportage and and fiction.
And that's part of its fascination and what makes it an absorbing thing to read.
But of course, it is also your first self translation into English, is that right?
I mean, when I started working with Disney, even back, we moved from the free state in 1993 to Capetown.
And I couldn't speak English. I was editor of the I could read and write at honours in English.
Yeah, but I couldn't speak. Yeah. So when we moved here, I was editor of the only current affairs left wing magazine, Decide Africa,
but I had to attend many, you know, English events here in Capetown where I couldn't speak English.
So we always had to take one of the board members were to do the English part and I did the Afrikaans.
Yeah. So I was really it was not my language.
I grew up completely functioning in Afrikaans.
I could what I eat, what I saw on television, what I read was, was a was cissoko.
Yeah. And of course Cape Town shattered all of that.
Yeah. And then. I moved to SABC and in SABC, you had to report on in both languages because SABC, the radio,
covid or languages, so he can only report in one language, you cannot work there.
I then were forced to start working in English.
And I remember the first time I made a broadcast, the phone calls from English speaking people complaining about my accent.
And I said at one stage, when one is afraid of your past and then someone please help that girl,
it's not when one is afraid of your is when one is afraid of one's.
Please help that goal. Yeah.
So in that way I began to work in two languages, but I found it very helpful to first write in Afrikaans because I could fully express myself.
And then the translation came in bits and pieces, but it was always less than that Afrikaans.
So country of my skull. I wrote in Afrikaans first, then I.
My English was simply not good enough to translate it.
So I asked someone to translate and he sent me a chapter and I felt completely alienated from the text.
It felt as if somebody else translated it.
It sounded English and I couldn't bear this.
English ness that I sounded like, and so I asked my son, who was then at city architecture student,
and he needed pocket money, and I said, but translated as if you as you would imagine me.
So he kept that Afrikaans understructure, author of the book.
And there's lots of literal translations in the book, because what I wanted to say that is, is two things.
I'm an English, but it's not because.
Because I want to be English or because I want to escape my past or escape the responsibilities and the the damage that my language has done,
I am from there. And you must hear it and you must.
Buried in the back of your mind all the time.
And so this is then but the last book I translated for myself, my English, meantime, have improved significantly.
I know that's great. I mean, in a sense, the fact that you say that about this book, you know,
makes the passage that I've selected for you to read even more kind of complex and interesting,
because actually this is now a the passage I'd like you to read is the short little extract that you have from an essay that your
mother wrote where she's describing the moment at which she witnesses or thinks she witnesses the plane carrying Hendrickx Farhood,
the prime minister, at that point, his body back to presumably it's going up north.
Yeah, from from he was assassinated. It was stabbed like a pig with a knife in parliament.
Exactly right. In something in Cape Town, in Capetown in 66.
I've got the date right here. So and she she it's the moment which she responds to this.
There's this possibility that this plane going overhead is bearing his body.
Yes.
Because our farm was halfway between Cape Town and and of course, we already know that your mother has what we will talk about this a little bit more.
Moment has a particular relationship to the language, the culture, the political system, et cetera.
But it's also, in a sense, just what you said about the translation, the fact that this is now not only a translation of your words,
but it's your mother's Afrikaans words now coming out in English and in this book that then became an international
success and became one of the most important reflections on on the on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
So this is just that that extract out of the page.
As long as I live, I will never forget that Thursday morning,
when I was far from the house alone in the field, a clump of trees grows there that I water regularly.
Everything was bitterly dry. I stood with my foot on the wire fence, watching how the thin stream trickles over the cracked earth.
But suddenly I became conscious of a drone from the Southeast in one way or another, it was different from any other plane that I have heard.
I looked up and remembered that I had heard over the radio that the coffin with the body of the prime minister would be taken to Pretoria that day.
Could it be and I looked again, but no, I thought this is only one plane,
there should be a whole squadron of our most beautiful, noble air giants to take this man to his last resting place.
It was a lonely, heavy bomber.
It flew lower than I have ever seen a plane before, and it's motus I don't know how it sounded muted and its flight very stall,
as if it should be handled with the utmost tenderness.
And I realised it is so that I'm standing all by myself on the Pelphrey state landscape while the body of this great man passes me by.
In this moment, the life of the man I only saw and admired from afar had touched my life.
And I don't have the arrogance nor the confidence of the new generation to control such a touch.
It moved in my soul and I was wondering what I should do.
Should I go out on the streets and call upon people to consider what is happening to our country?
Should I call on them? Were the only call that I know that of concentration camps, tears and blood.
And I prayed that my hand should fall off if I ever write something for my personal honour at the cost of my people and what has
been negotiated for them through years of tears and blood that I will always remember that to write in Afrikaans is not a right,
but a privilege bought and paid for at a price, and that it brings with it heavy responsibilities.
And the context in which that passage appears is the voice, which, of course I'll keep calling in.
I voice the I figure the uncle figure in any country of Moscow is.
Is angry about politicians. F.W. de Klerk not saying things in public about not admitting things, getting away with too much,
there's a kind of anger about what's going on in that moment in the in the in the early 90s.
And then you shifted to this passage. And then after it again, there's this Ulyana shift to that passage.
Then you return to what should an Afrikaans leader, a responsible Afrikaans leader, really be doing at this moment in the early 90s,
going back, thinking about your mother, and then you come back to your mother's message. You say this, I think of the peace that my mother wrote.
So having again said something about the failure of leadership is a comment you made.
How easily these two words that I particularly wanted to ask you to maybe elaborate on,
ponder on, but how easily and naturally the story shifts from politics to language.
So it's where she's witnessing a moment of, you know,
political history and that you're interested in the fact that it immediately moves to the
right and her relationship to the language and how easily and naturally that happens.
I just wondered if if you could reflect for a moment about those words easily and naturally,
but also in particular how you feel they apply maybe in your mother's case in that passage.
And what are you thinking about there,
but also how maybe in South Africa today and perhaps maybe in too many countries that don't want to face up to these sorts of things,
that move is often very common and very easy or very natural.
It lies with the fact that Afrikaners chose to call themselves Afrikaners after the
continent and chose the language off to the continent of which they knew nothing.
Mm hmm. Which they in very many aspects deep down despise.
So they very name is linked to a continent and to politics.
They are off and they're not they're not being part of the continent, really.
Mm hmm. But by choosing the word Afrikaner, they also excluded calling other people Afrikaners from the continent.
So it's actually only us who speaks Afrikaans, who are from the continent.
If you if you take it to its fullest, its consequences. Yeah.
So Africanness, there's two things that they that they link as the essence of being an African.
And the one is the land and the other is the language, so the language is persay, your political survival.
Mm hmm. It's what makes you belong here, number one.
But it's what makes you different from the English and even from the Dutch.
Yeah, from Dutch. That everybody. It's only us.
And then it became a huge problem in after 1994 when it suddenly becomes clear that the majority of speakers in Afrikaans are not white,
are not African, as they are the coloured people. Yeah. And they demand a place in the language and in the literature.
Yeah. And that felt like an immense identity threat.
Mm hmm. So that is still shaking Afrikaans in its foundations.
What do you do with this messy Afrikaans that they bring with these different influences at this anglicised Afrikaans?
What do you kick them out? No, because you are such a small group, so we have to incorporate them and yet kept our Afrikaans,
our kind of Afrikaans and insistent, persistent as the essence of being an African.
Mm hmm. So in the following volumes, after the first two ones,
I deliberately started using what was called impure Afrikaans and what was eventually sarcastically described as I'm keycards.
Yeah, this is this is as a poet of your first volume, you know, poetry.
So you're talking. Yeah. Right back to the 70s. Yeah. So it's during the 80s especially,
I deliberately distorted the Afrikaans that I use so that the the real the true Afrikaans
speakers and the Afrikaners feel themselves alien in my work that they don't feel.
Yes. That's that's my language. Yes. That's my poet.
That you can divorce yourself in a way through the language and you have from the obvious readers of the language.
Right. And this will also be reflected in somebody like Adam Small's literary career in some ways,
the kind of what was called carps Afrikaans that he that he started workups.
Cops just called the cops that he started to use. And I know that, you know, recently and now that he was given the Harrison prise, in a sense,
many in many ways the most prestigious Afrikaans literary award, which is 20 years later, but 20 years later.
And he gave this extremely powerful I mean,
in absentia because he was so ill but extremely powerful speech about about his relationship to that kind of official Afrikaans almost.
You see that kind of dissidence was allowed by Adams, Walter Peterson.
And so they were published. People felt uncomfortable. But, yeah, you're OK.
This is this is a guess. Yeah. Yeah.
But what do you do if you're a writer within the language of which you despise deeply resent the teachers, the parents, the political leaders.
How do you avoid them honouring you like in your work and finding access to it in the most effective way?
I, I. Thought was to irritate them with a kind of Africa.
Yeah, yeah, so this is once we get into things like Jerusalem. Yeah.
In the mid 80s and then and then. And somewhere in Brauns, like all of.
Yeah, yeah. And that perfectly brings us onto the next text that I wanted to read, which actually comes from that that late 80s moment in your career.
But it's Lady M, but actually what I wanted to you to read again,
partly because we now I mean it's interesting that in the sense that we started off with your your early poems in
Afrikaans and we've inevitably moved always into the question of translation coming coming on in all sorts of ways.
And I wanted what I wanted you to read was the the short extracts or use various extracts from Lady and the original long poem, series of poems,
sequence of poems in 2004 in Down to My Last Skin, that collection of mainly self translations, but also translations by others of your work.
And it's this little poem here called Lady and as a Guide,
which in many ways sort of captures a key part of what the whole poem is doing is looking back to Lady and Bonard, end of the 18th,
beginning of the 19th century, coming out of the British into the Cape, she left lots of diaries,
recorded beautiful painting, beautiful paintings, artefacts of her of her being there.
And you use that those texts in all sorts of ways in an assemblage sort of way, collage way in bin Laden.
But in this poem you reflect on it's almost a kind of a meta poetic poem.
You reflect on the whole act of using a as a guide. And in the English translation, you actually give it a title, Liliana's guide.
You want me to read the English and read the English. And then one of the things I love to go and talk about is the fact that this is a
self translation in this case and it's so radically different from the Afrikaans.
I wanted to live a second life through you, Lady and Vinit show it is possible to hold the truth,
Bipin to live an honourable life in an era of horror.
But from your letters, you emerge hand on the hip, talented but a frivolous fool.
Penn in sly ink, snob, naive, liberal, being spoilt from your principles by your useless husband.
You never had real luck. Now that your whole frivolous life has arrived on my desk, I go berserk.
As a metaphor, my lady, you not worth a [INAUDIBLE].
Great. I mean, one of the things that's interesting in the in the preface to this collection,
you talk you reflect on the the the situation of the translator and you say this the translator of poetry has several choices,
either to stay as close as possible to the meaning of the original poem,
hoping that the translation will create its own internal rhythm or to search for equally rich sounds and
rhythms in the language of the translation and risk introducing new resonances of meaning or to create.
And then, in quotes, a version of the original that is in many respects a new pope.
It was, in a sense, partly because of that last statement that I chose this poem because it is in many respects a new poem.
Unless there are resonances, it's clearly a version,
but it's also a radically new poem and a number of things that go for that, in a sense, many through abandonment.
The things that you do translate what's there is sort of comparable, but there's a lot that you just drop out.
And one of the things is, you know, for instance, I have, again, a very bad translation of my own where it comes out,
for instance, that you have you have the line in in the in the Afrikaans where you say bloater.
You describe Lady and Apptio Caernarfon. Exactly the bullet, which would be roughly translated, translated as a mere recorder of the daily bread.
So one of the things that's interesting about your decision to drop that line is there's also the whole problem of note taker.
It's almost kind of a bureaucratic, isn't it? Looks like a secretary official.
Kind of. So there's a kind of slight officiousness about that particular word.
But of course, the other thing that gets lost is entirely is the is the biblical resonance.
So that's the one thing.
But perhaps the most radical thing that you do is you drop Cut-out entirely in the second stanza where, again, this is a bad consolation.
So I'd love you to comment on the bad translation. And then just although I can, I can read and work with Afrikaans and so on,
I actually often used Google Translate to try to see what it did with some of some of these things, because it's new technology, new ish technology.
But anyway, this is what we got roughly of the Africans original, which is also there.
So we the second centre, which you dropped completely what you also wanted to do or you hoped Lady A. Guide would
give you the opportunity to weave a language of revolution and plots freed slaves,
rob nobles. And then the word, I suppose, of Google Translate gives us clinically and with you get through the interior.
And then he said to with you, you know, to yet move through the interior.
And then there's this wonderful line where you have it would be the potential word is kleve or split.
And then it's of course, it's the it's the most charged word in many ways, the most charged Afrikaans word in the South African context.
Bhura, which is literally farmers.
But of course, it's also a derogatory term for a certain version of African identity, etc., to cleave or split Bhura farmers to the bone.
And so I'm just interested in what what what you saw as an opportunity to create something new, but also that that was something that dropped a lot.
You know, a lady and as a volume was an epic.
It means it stretched over many pages where I tell her story.
But I chose then to be her bard as a hero needs a board and the board is telling the South African political story.
So these two strands weave through over many pages of her, what she sees, what she says, together with my political commentary and questions, etc.
So you work with her through slaves, through the plots, et cetera.
And in the meantime, I'm telling the the terror that is going on during the 80s, the killings, the the you know, the fear, the harassments of cops.
And so it was a terrifying time. So when I had the opportunity to to do one trons one volume.
That must come from. Eight solid poetry volumes.
You you pinch here and there because it's just so unsatisfying, you cannot take one thorough story and tell it.
The previous volume was Jerusalem. It's a group of Afrikaners who just who didn't couldn't think metaphysically.
They looked in the Bible and saw the Nile going up to Jerusalem.
And they thought, but listen, we can just pack our wagons and go to Jerusalem and live forever.
And they started moving north.
So this this notion of Afrikaners who think they can arrive in heaven, you just by tracking that the whole volume is about that.
There's no way in which I could portray that in, you know, in 30 years.
That has to cover a whole lifetime in a way. And the the essence of that poem was how popular our pro-Gadhafi,
which means you leave out parts of the words and leave out letters, know you can't do that.
So in essence, the new the English volume.
The English volume was then to introduce me to English. It was not that I was known.
I mean, I was known to older politicians and I was known to grassroots activists as a person, but not as a poet.
So when the 90s, the 90s dawned and no one knew me as a poet, that's why I reported,
etc. cetera under Samuell, because that was much more known than in Cairo.
Mm hmm. So by after country of my school, the publishers thought, but maybe she needs to be known as a poet as well.
So make a selection so that we can introduce her.
So the Lady and Po Epic was then reduced to a few poems in a separate part of the volume where the Bard is, for instance, not there.
The whole story of lady. And it's also not old.
It's just it's just to say, OK, I've written about lady and I've written so the of the plots, the revolution,
the slaves, her sharp commentary on the Afrikaners in the interior of the car, it's not there.
So in many ways, it's sort of an aborted example of of and it causes many problems in a way, because now I was.
Yeah. Anyway, so. Yeah. So I mean that's actually this is it's the it's not so much in many ways, just the details of the thing.
It's actually the fact that you're creating a whole new form of this self standing poems, which is the problem.
And so I have to let go of the style. So every volume has a specific style.
If I say to you, I distorter African, there's no way in which I could do that in English, then you you do an epic, OK?
There's no way in which you could do justice to that. You cannot do justice to the two two voices that's arguing all the time.
Yeah. But then what is even more is now you move into a language of which you don't really understand that
the the aesthetics and you and it's not that translators are falling over the feet to translate,
you know, so you translate so that of standardly I did translate it, but then it doesn't work.
It doesn't work aesthetically for me and I don't have the knowledge to.
You had to transfer to and now what do I do, do I kick it out or do I rework it into something different?
And if it's boring, how do I make it a.
Fascinating. Yeah, I mean, there's a there's a quotation that you use from a wonderful lecture that you gave about translation in 2002,
which captures in some way some of the challenges.
It is a quotation from the reader where you say the reader said you quote this in the lecture, a text lives on.
Urtext lives only if it lives on.
And it lives on only if it is at once translatable and untranslatable.
So there's a sense in which this even just an act of self translation is partly also capturing that broader,
bigger issue to do with survival, living on of texts and textual life after lives in that way.
But it's also, you know, facing up to the specific charge of almost creating a completely new form.
As you say, there's a there's the epic and then now you're creating something that is, in a sense, a series of Free-standing lyrics, isn't it?
Yeah, but you've got a completely different form in English. Not it's not just the language.
And they had a specific form, a specific 15 line form which rhymes in particular intervals,
and the specific rhyme words that's repeated right through the whole epic, which is all gone now.
Yeah. So in in a down to my last ginzo, my first English volume, I would say an impoverished representation,
but at least it was a repetitive presentation and it did very well and it introduced me to a very large audience.
The second volume was Body Bereft, and that was a translation of an Afrikaans one Afrikaans volume five years ago.
And that is a much more equal. It's as the same problems of untranslatable ality often there, but at least the the space was there to to try.
Great. Thank you. The last text I wanted to turn to is, again, we inevitably seem to be sticking with the issue of translation again,
partly because we we're we're talking in English. So this is itself a part of the reflection of the issue, not just a reflection on it.
This is a an extract I'd like you to read next, which comes from a change of tongue, which appeared in 2003.
But but behind all of this is my my sense that, you know, post country of Moscow into the new millennium.
You you became much more committed in a way way beyond the issue of self translation of you appearing in English or other languages
and much more committed to a whole series of projects in which the the question of translation is absolutely at the forefront.
I mean, the the first was, in many ways, the fact that you translated Nelson Mandela's long walk to freedom into Afrikaans, which appeared in 2001.
There's your reworking of the poems.
The question, what used to be called Bushman Poems with came out in English and Afrikaans, not so called the stars say so in 2004.
Then there's a wonderful collection of of African language translations that you did, of course,
isiZulu, Sutta, etc, poems in Midfoot versus Calusa, which came out in 2002 in Afrikaans.
So you translated also Zulu poems into Afrikaans. And then also there's that wonderful volume co-authored with NEA involvement in Copenhagen.
Tell your colleagues at GWC there was this goat came out in 2009 that.
Extraordinary series of reflections on Mrs. Kornelius, the mother of one of the Gugliotta seven,
her testimony in the TLC that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
So there's a there's a whole project of of of translation which has been, you know, central to your life and work in the last 10 years and more.
And the passage I want you to have a look at addresses these things in many ways directly.
It's a it's a moment in which you go and consult an expert on the language and literature,
Professor Bieksa, and you go you go into his office at the university.
This is how it's presented. Of course, change of time is again, you know, I'm playing fast and loose with fiction.
Non-fiction. The eye is not at a Samuel in any straightforward way or coherent.
That's part of the thing that I'm interested in, but.
Just to set the scene of this, you go in and you say the ice is here, I go to Professor Mitsos office at the university.
On his door is a picture of a man captioned. Etcetc cutting.
He let me in, you then go in and you start talk about his translations of African languages,
you start to talk about the ways in which white colonials were received and understood and written about and recorded in oral traditions and so on by,
you know, in African languages. And you talk about that. And then you come to the passage that I wanted you to read.
And it's yeah, it's on it's the 85 year the translation of the of which is where it's where you start at the top.
Do you do you know guy? He asks. Suddenly I shake my head.
Never heard of him before. Oh, that's a deficiency.
A great deficiency. Samuel Edward crew named Kai was the Shakespeare of Southern African languages.
He wrote the words for Causes Echolalia Africa. He was the first poet recorded who took a firm stand on the selfish nature of whites.
This man in his immortal poem are silly.
Mayla silly manner is the initiation style, the harvest star, the Layard's plaited say again.
But Pleitez is hard to pronounce. Yeah, please, please go to Pleitez to you.
This is the star by which a Kossak counts the years of his manhood and Chi often
performed this poem in which he distributes the stars amongst the nations of the world.
When whites were present, he goes to his shelf and pulls out a thin, threadbare book.
Summon the nations, summon them here. Let me meet out the stars.
Come let me a lot the stars on merit you the best to take the dog star your harvest star before the winter.
Share it with a Tswana and the taupe and all of those who wear loincloths.
You from Zululand take the belt of Oregon and share it with the Swathi, the GOP and the Changan.
And with all the uncircumcised people, you whites, you who are not able to share anything.
The English, the Germans and the butchers. You can have Venus and we we from the House of Parlo, we will cling to the seven stars.
We will have that star, the only one which counts our years of manhood.
I can't say that play play. Anyway, it's my English.
This is I would recognise the pronunciation is not a stable and consistent.
OK, I'm ok. Yeah.
I want to say why this obsession with translation during the 80s and the 70s once said that apartheid was wrong,
that we are all equal, that we are all South Africans, that we want to live in a country where we care and love one another.
After 1994 and after the Truth Commission and after you became aware.
Of the new voice that has to develop, in other words, the fact that your voice dominated,
the fact that your culture dominated, the fact that your way of living, your philosophy dominated.
Was then severely confronted, undermined, split and sort of fractured by and more and more assertive black majority.
And then to say, yea, yea yea, but we are now all equal,
we should just love one another was then dishonest because you realise you don't know what is this one that you claim to love.
You don't have a clue what is living in the heart, what is being said about you, how they see you differ from them or not.
And to me it concretised. One afternoon I was with friends in the rural areas and we went out to the farm to look at game.
But on the back a lot of the of the Buckie a lot of black men were sitting and they were laughing and joking.
And the farmer that I was sitting next to me understood and could speak to Sutta fluently, grew up with it.
And I said, what are they saying? Why are they laughing so hard?
He said to me, They talk [INAUDIBLE] like they always talk [INAUDIBLE].
You don't even have to listen to them because they just talk [INAUDIBLE].
Cock, cock is all that labrot. And so the whole translation project from all the other languages was to disprove this.
Yeah, because I know that Afrikaners hated the British for the Anglo World War, but they deeply respected the poets.
And because they loved the poetry, they sort of envy and looked up to the British, although you hated them.
So I thought poetry would be the the the main underminer of racism in Afrikaans as to bring in the literature that is there.
And I was you know, I was not disappointed.
It was it was after the truth commission, the most steep learning, the steepest learning curve I've ever had.
It was just phenomenal. What was in the African language, poetry, the forms, the sentiments, the writers, the whole life that was there.
So. I think, by pure chance, stumble across a piece by Roomi Bahbah,
in which he uses Salman Rushdie saying how this newness into the world is when you translate and you come across something that you see,
my language does not have that and that moment, you know, you are moving into the new and all the time we were translating from the African languages,
it was it was this thing saying, yeah, you know, this this is not the right English word.
It's like you with Bayeh, you were moving into the new bay.
Is it within? It's not really within.
It has it has another context of closeness and worthiness and yet of separateness that none of the English words were capturing.
And why does Africans have that word? For example, when I translated the book from Nelson Mandela, Africans didn't have a word for safe house.
So where you are when you went underground, you went to safe houses.
Afrikaans doesn't have a word for that, which tells you something about the history of Africans.
We never needed a safe house. We created a safe country for us through apartheid.
So and then during that,
the truth commission testimony is the relook that I did through there was this goat taking one testimony that when I heard that,
I thought this woman is either deranged. All she confirms, all the stereotypes that white people have of black people,
that they don't care, they care less, they are incapable of of caring for children, etc.
So I took of I asked two colleagues who spoke, Rosa, and we retranslated that testimony.
And as we were doing that, I realised that. My big problem that I had during the reporting of the Truth Commission was that the
testimonies in African languages were based in a philosophy that I don't understand.
It's a philosophy of being embedded with others.
And the essence of that, I did use in country of my skill at the heading of a chapter.
And it was saying they asked one woman about forgiveness, does she believe in reconciliation and forgiveness?
And she said in Khoza and that was translated by my team into English, if this thing they called trans, if this thing that they call reconciliation,
if it means that the man who killed my son can regain his humanity, so that he so that all of us can regain our humanity, then I am for it.
I used it because I thought it was important, but it's only by then literally taking two years off of studying African philosophy.
That I realise that statement from an illiterate woman is a profound philosophical statement of how humanity is interwoven.
And my life is immensely not only enriched, but I live.
I want to say in in embedded in a country, if things are being said, it's no longer like previously I said, what is happening?
Why do they do this? Why does this people kill that?
Why are these killing the foreigners? Why is everybody supporting Zuma, although he is Horwitt.
I have an understanding, and it's purely purely because of translation, so I find it in a way ironic and pathetic.
That no effort is made for translation in this country.
No money is given for translation. And we.
How will we get English to. B, Africa.
Mm. Yeah, yeah, like I had many other things I wanted, but I think I know much more than it is by far the best,
and I don't wish to end with an appeal to what English will do.