Abstract
Many of the most ambitious and important South African novels of the past fifty years have been written in Afrikaans, but in order to reach a global audience the authors have had to turn to translators. Focusing on Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf and Agaat, this article examines the challenges that this fiction, and the particular character and social status of different varieties of Afrikaans, present to the translator, and discusses the significance of the differences between versions addressed to an English-speaking South African readership and versions addressed to a global readership.
1
Some facts first. Afrikaans is spoken as a first language by just under seven million people in South Africa, and a small number elsewhere (principally Namibia). The larger proportion of these Afrikaans speakers are what the apartheid classification termed “Coloured”, that is, so-called “mixed race” peoples, living mostly in the Western and Northern Cape. Somewhat less than half of speakers of Afrikaans are “white” Afrikaners, largely descendants of early Dutch settlers with an admixture of later German and French immigrants. A small number of indigenous Africans speak Afrikaans as a first language. 1 This makes Afrikaans the third most common mother tongue in the country, after isiZulu and isiXhosa, but ahead of English — though English is spoken as a second or third language by a very large number and is the dominant lingua franca in urban areas. 2
These figures alone might suggest a fairly significant reading public for literary works in Afrikaans. But a large segment of the Afrikaans-speaking population lives in considerable poverty and suffers from inadequate education; the number who read fiction is small, and the number who read “literary” fiction even smaller. In spite of these facts, many of the most ambitious and important South African novels of the past fifty years have been written in Afrikaans, and some of them, I would argue, merit comparison with best fictional writing anywhere in the world. Surprisingly, perhaps, given the conservative bent of the white Afrikaner establishment, many of these works explore unconventional subject matter in formally inventive and linguistically bold works. Afrikaans is a relatively young language, and although strenuous efforts were made during the twentieth century to standardize a “pure” form, it has in practice always been involved in an interchange with other South African languages; and perhaps these two facts have something to do with the continuing creativity of its writers. Although the reading and purchasing public for literary fiction in Afrikaans is small, it is loyal; Afrikaans novelists don’t suffer from the global competition experienced by South African writers in English, and as a result their books sell more widely than those of most of their Anglophone counterparts in the country. 3
In order to enter that world arena, of course, Afrikaans novels have to be translated, most importantly into English. Unlike many novelists who rely on English translations to reach a global audience, most Afrikaans writers have an excellent grasp of the other language; some write in English as well as in Afrikaans, and if they do turn elsewhere for the translation, it’s usually not a matter of handing the text over and hoping for the best, but of working closely with the translator to produce a version that satisfies both. Novels primarily in Afrikaans may also make use of English, in the knowledge that this will cause no trouble for their readers (though the practice creates headaches for translators). I am concerned in this essay with that process of translation, and its implications not just for the writers and translators but also for a worldwide readership. 4 A secondary purpose of this essay is to introduce readers unaware of this body of work to some outstanding literary fiction. 5
Let me sketch the terrain before I focus on particular examples. 6 Afrikaans literature developed with an eye constantly on European traditions and with very little attempt to engage with indigenous literary cultures, and it was successive waves of European influence that brought about its major transformations. The first occurred in the 1930s, with the work above all of N. P. van Wyk Louw (who was a professor of Afrikaans at the University of Amsterdam for eight years), and the second in the 1960s, with the work of the group of writers known as “die Sestigers” — the sixtiers — who deliberately outraged the Afrikaner establishment by means of sexual explicitness, political outspokenness, unrepentant blasphemy, and formal experimentation. These writers, who included Etienne Leroux and André Brink, were influenced above all by surrealism and existentialism and by French avant-garde fiction — Brink’s Orgie (1965; “Orgy”), for example, is set out to be read with the pages top and bottom rather than side to side. South African fiction in English had nothing to compare with this body of work in its challenge both to generic and formal conventions and to social and ethical norms. Afrikaans fiction, it must be said, remained the preserve of white writers; although the Afrikaans of the Cape coloured community was ably exploited in poetry and drama, notably in the work of Adam Small, this rich version of the language did not give rise to any novels or short story collections of real significance.
Writers associated with the Sestigers, including Brink and Breyten Breytenbach, continued to produce innovative fiction, but we need to jump two decades to find another flowering of Afrikaans fiction that fully exploits the formal resources of the genre and the linguistic resources of the language, and does so with powerful ethical and political implications. The 1980s saw the first English translations of the Afrikaans novels of Etienne van Heerden, a writer always finely alert to the nuances and possibilities of the Afrikaans language, who, more recently, has pushed the language almost to breaking point in 30 nagte in Amsterdam (2008; 30 Nights in Amsterdam). We should also note an Afrikaans novel by a writer better known as a poet: Wilma Stockenström’s 1981 Die kremetartekspedisie appeared in an English translation in 1983 as The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, by none other than J. M. Coetzee. This linguistically dense monologue of a fifteenth-century slave woman living in a hollow tree must have appealed to Coetzee on account of its linguistic and generic inventiveness; it’s the only Afrikaans work he has translated. Arriving somewhat later on the scene were two women writers whose work, in very different ways, has renewed the possibilities of Afrikaans as a literary language. The first is Ingrid Winterbach — her first five novels were published under the name Lettie Viljoen — who has cultivated a mode of ironic detachment and understated but subversive humour unusual in Afrikaans literature, in novels such as Niggie (2002; To Hell with Cronjé, 2007), Die boek van toeval and toeverlaat (2006; The Book of Happenstance, 2008), Die Benederyk (“The Underworld”, currently being translated by Leon de Kock), and the untranslated Die aanspraak van lewende wesens (2012) (“The Claims of Living Beings”). 7
My chief exhibit, however, is a pair of novels by Marlene van Niekerk, the Afrikaans writer whose claim to belong to the pantheon of world literature is strongest, in spite of, or rather because of, the remarkable locatedness of her work in specific South African settings — settings that are linguistic as well as geographic, social, and economic. 8 The first is Triomf, a sizeable novel published in South Africa in the year of the first democratic elections — 1994 — and set in the run-up to those elections. It’s a work whose originality lies both in its subject matter — the hilariously repulsive goings-on of a violent, dysfunctional Afrikaner family living in the poor white Johannesburg suburb of Triomf, erected by the apartheid government on the site of the demolished multiracial community of Sophiatown — and in its language, a hugely creative version of Afrikaans drawing on non-standard usages with frequent switches between Afrikaans and English (sometimes even within single words), a helter-skelter verbal energy, and an uninhibited use of slang and obscenity. 9 There couldn’t have been a more massive onslaught on the myth of “pure Afrikaans” so carefully promulgated by the white establishment over many decades.
The second work is Agaat (2004), an even weightier volume — 718 pages — that uses a very different Afrikaans, that of well-educated Afrikaners who are familiar with English and Dutch as well as with a repository of Afrikaans high and low culture combined with the more local, specialized vocabulary of the Cape Overberg farming community. Set against this master-language is the mimicry of Agaat, the coloured servant who, in the present-day narrative set in 1996, is caring for seventy-year-old Milla de Wet, nearing the end of her life as a result of motor neurone disease and capable of communication only through blinking. This present-day narrative — the thoughts of Milla as she lies paralysed — is interleaved with three others: Milla’s diary entries, which Agaat is reading out in revenge for her treatment after being taken from her parents as a young child; Milla’s recounting of the story of her marriage and subsequent events, including her pregnancy and consequent demotion of the twelve-year-old Agaat from the status of adopted daughter to servant (this section is addressed by Milla to herself in the second person); and stream-of-consciousness interludes meditating on the disease and its unforeseen onset and painful consequences. The book is framed by the first-person narrative of Milla’s son, returning from Canada to his mother’s death-bed. This narrative technique allows the criss-crossing stories of Milla’s and Agaat’s lives to emerge piecemeal, formal relations enacting power relations. And, of course, these two characters, the white Afrikaner farm matriarch and the coloured servant, stand for much broader populations and politico-economic forces, in a story whose temporal span stretches from shortly before the institution of apartheid by the new Afrikaner Nationalist government to its aftermath. 10
2
The challenges and decisions facing the translator of literary works have often been enumerated. In particular, the question of “domestication” has been much discussed, from Goethe and Schleiermacher to the present: is the task of the translator to produce a version in the target language that reads as if it had been originally written in that language, or is it to develop strategies that keep the reader aware that she is reading a translation? The latter course involves “foreignization”: the inclusion of features characteristic of the source language in the translation as constant reminders that it is a translation and as a means of conveying some sense of the distinctive qualities of the original language and culture.
There can be no simple answer to this question, since translation is not a single activity carried out for a single purpose. A novelist who wants his books to sell widely in foreign markets will not thank a translator who makes reading uncomfortable as a result of oddities of phrasing or vocabulary designed to suggest the original language. (It’s obviously meant as praise when a reviewer says “This novel doesn’t read like a translation”.) As readers, we don’t seem to have any difficulty in undertaking a work in language A while appreciating that the narrator and characters are to be understood as using language B, and we don’t need constant stylistic reminders of this fact. 11 On the other hand, a novelist who wants her work to be appreciated for its exploitation of the particular textures of the language in which it was written may well seek out a translator who is keen to evoke those textures in the translated text. What, then, of linguistically inventive prose fiction, of writers who show that the novel can be exhilaratingly productive at the level of the word and the sentence as well as that of the character, scene, and event? In these cases, decisions about domestication and foreignization may not be so easy.
The challenge of translation is articulated in extreme form by Jacques Derrida: “What remains untranslatable is at bottom the only thing to translate, the only thing translatable” (1992: 257–8; emphasis in original). 12 One way of understanding this paradox is to consider machine translation. It’s sometimes claimed that in the foreseeable future, nothing will be beyond the capacity of the best translation software. Whatever one may think about this assertion, it’s surely the case that in principle just about everything in any text could be translated — or let us say converted — into another language by a sophisticated enough computer, and that to the extent that the human translator is dealing with these elements of the text, she is behaving like a machine. 13 What requires a specifically human translator are those elements, if there are any, that could never be converted in this way by a computer, those that require the translator to make decisions, in the full sense of that word as it is used by Derrida. (A decision, he argues, is not of the order of the calculable but is the leap one takes when all possible calculations have been made, when the alternatives before one are undecidable.)
Translation is a form of interpretation, and the responsibility of the translator, like that of any interpreter, is to do justice to the singularity of the work — the work as text but also the work of the author in creating that text. The work’s singularity is, precisely, its untranslatability: that is what calls out to be translated not by a machine but by an equally singular human. This is the impossible but necessary task of the translator. But note: the singularity of the work is not a fixed thing; it varies from time to time, place to place, reader to reader, reading to reading; it’s the product of an encounter between what I’ve called an idioculture and a set of signs encoding a historical creative act. 14 This is why there can never be a final translation (as opposed to a machine conversion) just as there can never be a final interpretation. Furthermore, the work’s singularity is itself multiple, if that’s not too much of a paradox; it often includes its own translations of itself — its own repetitions and rewritings, metacommentary and reflexivity, and internal linguistic borrowings. It also translates the language and culture within which it is written, a language and culture which are themselves products of ongoing translation. So translation into another language is only a continuation of what the work does when we read it, and what we do when we read the work.
3
With these issues in mind, let me now turn to Triomf and Agaat. The extraordinary achievement of Triomf’s version of Afrikaans can’t be conveyed in extracts. Van Niekerk develops her own distinctive technique as she gives us the interior verbal life of a damaged individual (Lambert Benade, the son in the incestuous family of poor whites), switches registers and languages, and introduces lists, subheadings (many in English), and snatches of song lyrics, to create a style that is unique and original, yet immediately recognizable as based on the language of a particular group of poor white Afrikaners, the fodder for the Nationalist campaigns of the 1950s and 60s. This is modernism not as Afrikaans’s nod to European cultural traditions but as a revitalization of the language that is at the same time a vehement attack on the myths that had sustained it and many of its speakers.
Here is an extract from the climactic (or rather anticlimactic) scene in which Lambert is given the fortieth birthday gift he has been eagerly looking forward to: a visit from a prostitute, and the chance to have sex with a woman other than his sixty-something mother. (Given the deep racism of the family, he assumes the visitor will be white, and doesn’t get the joke when she is introduced by Treppie, his uncle or father, as a Creole.)
“You know what we call this type of dance, Mary?” Die krulle wip hier in sy neus soos sy haar kop skud. “Soft guava, we call it the soft guava.” “Papkoejawel, ek weet mos, nè!” Mary lag. Daai lag like hy nie. Try iemand hier die fool speel met hom of wat? Lat hy maar liewer saam lag. Ha-ha-ha! En sy hemp toegeknoop kry. En nog ’n dop skink. En as sy wil lag, kan sy loop sit en klaar lag. “So, you can speak a bit of Afrikaans?” Nou pak sy glad haar cigarettes in. Waantoe dink sy gaan sy miskien? Miskien het sy dan gedag hy praat van háár koejawel? “Look here, man, what do you take me for? The man in the moon? Of course I can speak Afrikaans.” “I thought you were a Creole, from Creolia or someplace!” “Creolia? Ha-ha-ha! Very funny. ’n Creole, lat ek vir djou sê, Mister ballroom champ, is mos ma’ net ’n lekka meid wat haar tale kan mix.”
In the original, when people speak English, English is what we read. And the Afrikaans spoken by both Lambert and Mary frequently switches between languages: “Daai lag like hy nie”; “That laugh he doesn’t like”; “Try iemand hier die fool speel met hom?” — “Is someone trying to play the fool with him here?” Mary even uses the English word “mix” to boast of her ability to mix her languages (“tale”). She uses the English words “cigarettes” and “Mister ballroom champ”. (The word-order of all these sentences remains that of Afrikaans, however.)
As will be obvious, the text is a translator’s nightmare. This is the version by Leon de Kock, who worked closely with Van Niekerk, published in South Africa in 1999:
“You know what we call this type of dance, Mary?” She shakes her head so hard the curls whip into his nose. “Soft guava, we call it the soft guava.” “Papkoejawel, ek weet mos, nè!” Mary laughs. He doesn’t like that laugh. Is she trying to play the fool with him or something? Let him rather laugh along. Ha-ha-ha! Then he can button up his shirt again, pour himself another drink. If she wants to laugh she can sit down and laugh till she’s finished. “So, you can speak a bit of Afrikaans?” Now suddenly she’s packing her cigarettes back into her bag. Where does she think she’s going? Maybe she thought he was talking about her guava. “Look here, man, what do you take me for? The man in the moon? Of course I can speak Afrikaans.” “I thought you were a Creole, from Creolia or someplace!” “Creolia? Ha-ha-ha! Very funny. ’n Creole, lat ek vir djou sê, Mr Ballroom Champ, is mos ma’ net ’n lekka meid wat haar tale kan mix.”
The Lamberts, like virtually all Afrikaners, are able to express themselves in English, and Van Niekerk can assume that her readers will have no problem with extended passages in that language. The translator writing for a South African audience can’t expect an equivalent ability on the part of first-language English readers, but most would be able to deal with Mary’s comments, including her distinctive dialectical pronunciations such as “djou” for “jou” and “lekka” for “lekker”. (Not that Lambert’s Afrikaans is schoolbook Afrikaans by any means — like Mary he says “lat” for “laat”, and the correct “daardie” and “waarnatoe” become “daai” and “waantoe”, in his mouth.) Nevertheless, the passage in its English dress plays havoc with the reader’s assumptions about the languages being spoken. Since the default situation is that we are reading in English what is “really” Afrikaans, the reader of the translation will have assumed that Mary — whom we know to be coloured, though Lambert has only a dim awareness of this fact — is speaking Afrikaans too. So it comes as a surprise for the reader when, with “Papkoejawel” she does speak Afrikaans, and Lambert comments on this. The reader of the translation then has no way of knowing which language is to be assumed when Mary says, “Of course I can speak Afrikaans.”
My point is not that the translation is flawed; far from it. It is to highlight the literal untranslatability of the original, the complexity of its internal translations, and the compromises any translator is forced into. These compromises become even more evident when the reader has to be assumed to possess no Afrikaans. De Kock and Van Niekerk were well aware that the translation for a South African readership wouldn’t do for the international market, and they worked simultaneously on a global version that removed most of the Afrikaans, and supplied a glossary of those terms they kept in the original language.
15
Here are two excerpts from our passage in the British edition :
“You know what we call this type of dance, Mary?” She shakes her head so hard the curls whip into his nose. “Soft guava, we call it the soft guava.” “Papkoejawel! You think I don’t know that word?” Mary laughs. …. “I thought you were a Creole, from Creolia or someplace!” “Creolia? Ha-ha-ha! Very funny. ’n Creole, lat ek vir djou sê, Mr Ballroom Champ, is ma’ just a lekker coffee-colour dolly what can mix her languages.”
The reader without Afrikaans can now read most of the text in English. Especially striking is the treatment of the word meid, a word for a coloured girl or woman that carries with it a depth of racist sedimentation but can be used, as here, with self-ironizing jokiness: “coffee colour dolly” is an attempt to capture something of that tonal complexity, but hardly has the same offhand humour. 16 But because the passage is about the relation between English and Afrikaans speech, De Kock has, unusually for this version of the translation, retained some of the Afrikaans, signalled by italics (except for “ma” — an abbreviated “maar”, “but” — and the now regularized “lekker”) and not explained in the glossary. Had he converted everything into English, the reader would have understood more words but lost the sense of a speaker who constantly switches between two languages.
In both versions of the translation, Van Niekerk and De Kock have, against the odds, succeeded remarkably well in conveying a great deal of the original’s linguistic energy. However, and this is no doubt wishful thinking, I would have liked to see the South African version tested on a global readership, to find out if Anglophone readers would be willing to undergo the crash course in colloquial Afrikaans it presents. Unfortunately, no publisher I know of would risk this.
4
Agaat is an even more substantial achievement, both an homage to the tradition of the Afrikaans plaasroman or farm-novel, and an exposure of the racism and exploitation on which the farm culture celebrated in that tradition was based. At the same time it is a minutely detailed playing-out of a shifting power relationship between two women (at first a woman and a small girl), a riveting account of a mental life all the more active after the body has been paralysed, and a mystery narrative in which dark family secrets are gradually revealed. The novel’s five different styles — four reflecting Milla’s perspective and one her son Jakkie’s — create a braided temporality that weaves together different stages in the characters’ and the country’s history. As with Triomf, the achievement of the novel is in large part owing to the virtuoso handling of language, hence the enormous difficulty of the translator’s task.
Agaat was translated by Michiel Heyns and published under the same name in South Africa in 2006; 17 in 2007 it was issued in the UK as The Way of the Women, and in 2010 in the USA under its original title. Heyns has described the close collaboration with Van Niekerk that produced the translation, which, aiming for an international readership, preserves very little of the original Afrikaans, but does retain some particularly idiomatic words in the original language and provides a two-page glossary of these words at the end of the book. More problematic is the Englishing of an important feature of the novel’s texture: the use of Afrikaans verse and song, both popular and literary. Snippets of these traditions frequently materialize in Milla’s consciousness, and popular songs are always on Agaat’s lips. Heyns and Van Niekerk decided to replace many of the Afrikaans allusions with allusions to English poetry, and this decision has provoked much discussion and a certain amount of criticism. 18 Although there is some justification for the presence on Milla’s bookshelves of these poets, the reader’s compact with the translator — we are reading English but we know the characters are thinking and speaking in Afrikaans — is put in question by this unexpected Anglophilia on her part. However, the alternative would be, for the reader unfamiliar with Afrikaans song and poetry, the disappearance of the crucial element of almost subliminal allusiveness that runs through the fabric of the novel.
As an example of Van Niekerk’s superbly wrought prose and the challenge it poses a translator I could give an extract from any of the five narrative strands, including lyrical passages of intense physical consciousness in the present-tense representation of Milla’s thoughts, discourses on farming filled with down-to-earth details in her diary, expressions of self-recrimination and self-justification in her second-person narrative, and sequences of unpunctuated poetic phrases in the italicized stream-of-consciousness sections. I’ve chosen to provide a taste of Milla’s mental world as she deals with, and is dealt with by, Agaat, her one-time adopted daughter, then servant and now nurse. This exchange takes place as Agaat carries out her simultaneously compassionate and aggressive programme of care:
Enige klagtes sover, mevrou De Wet? Sy kyk nie op van my voete nie. Sy beweeg vinnig om na die kant van die bed, kyk my vol aan. Haar stem ’n nabootsing van sagte oorreding. Jy word seer, jy word styf, jou bloed loop nie lekker nie, jy word koud, jou voete word blou, kyk hoe blou is hulle klaar, jy raak hardlywig, jou elgemene kondisie gaan agteruit as jy nie toelaat dat ek jou oefen nie. Tóélaat, sê ek met my oë, tóélaat! Sy pak my een arm by die pols, hou die elmboog reguit met die klein handjie. Wye sirkelbewegings maak sy, eers die een kant om en dan die ander kant om. Windpomp in die suidoos, sê sy, windpomp in die noordwes. Iksjee, iksjee, iksjee. Water in die dam, modder in die sloot, trap op haar kop, dan is sy dood. My arm met sy stywe klou aan die punt swaai deur die lug. Agaat se asem kom vinniger, haar oë blink. Nou knák, sê sy. Sy werk die elmbooggewrig. Knákkerteknák, sê sy. Búig die boompie, knák die riet.
The passage is translated by Heyns as follows in the South African edition of the novel:
Any complaints so far, Mrs De Wet? She doesn’t look up from my feet. She moves around quickly to the side of the bed, faces me head-on. Her voice a parody of gentle persuasion. You get sore, you get stiff, your blood doesn’t flow properly, you get cold, your feet get blue, look how blue they are already, you get constipated, your general condition deteriorates if you won’t allow me to exercise you. Allów, I say with my eyes, allów! She grabs one arm by the wrist, straightens the elbow with the little hand. Wide circular movements she makes, first one way round then the other way round. Windmill in the south-east, she says, windmill in the north-west. Ickshee, ickshee, ickshee. Water in the dam, mud in the ditch, step on her head, dirty rotten bitch. My arm terminating in its stiff claw swings through the air. Agaat is breathing faster, her eyes are shining. Now bend, she says. She works the elbow joint. Kníck knack kníck, she says, bénd the tree, snáp the stick.
Heyns skilfully captures the complexity of the relationship in his translation, here bringing out Agaat’s hostility even while she works expertly on Milla’s sick body. This hostility, clearly manifested in Agaat’s fast breathing and shining eyes, is also expressed through a repertoire of popular verses by means of which she succeeds in infantilizing her one-time mistress, a series of allusions that enrich the novel but refuse straightforward translation. Heyns wisely doesn’t replace these Afrikaans verses with equivalent English nursery-rhymes, which would not have been familiar to Agaat. Many of the rhymes that Agaat has recourse to while tending to Milla come from a well-known anthology of Afrikaans folksongs, the F.A.K.-Volksangbundel, first published in 1937 by the Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Organisations. 19 Van Niekerk’s first epigraph for Agaat is from this collection’s overtly pro-Nazi introduction — the volume is said to represent “the force and flavour of the Southland’s blood and soil” — or, in Afrikaans, “bloed en bodem”. (Perhaps out of squeamishness, Heyns refrains from translating this notorious phrase, thus losing a little of the sharp irony attending Van Niekerk’s inclusion of it.) There is considerable complexity in Agaat’s use of these rhymes, therefore: they bespeak an education in Afrikaner nationalist values, values now being inverted and traduced; they provide Agaat with a means for savagely ironic digs at Milla; and yet, in spite of the use to which Agaat puts them, they constitute a link between the two women, a shared culture and past. The line “Trap op haar kop, dan is sy dood”, for instance, comes from a song entitled “Siembamba”, a song of startling violence (although it’s addressed to “mamma’s little child”) that gives voice to feelings Agaat hardly ever utters in propria persona. 20 Heyns’s “dirty rotten bitch” sacrifices “then she is dead” but, importantly, preserves the rhyme. Swart (2007: 79) points out that when it matters more that there is a rhyme than what rhyme it is, an English equivalent is the better option, but when the meaning of the Afrikaans is important, it’s better to offer, as Heyns usually does at these moments, a direct translation.
An important feature of the original is its use of accents. Afrikaans often employs accents for emphasis where English would use italics, including double accents when the syllable has two vowels, as in “tóélaat”, the word on which the exasperation in Milla’s unspoken speech is concentrated. Van Niekerk uses such accents in Agaat with great freedom, exceeding the conventions of the written language. Heyns follows suit in his translation, introducing a slight sense of strangeness in the text, a little reminder that we are in the world of Afrikaans even though the words are English. 21 The international editions, however, omit the accents that Heyns carefully retained, thus eliminating an important source both of expressiveness and Afrikaansness (see Van Niekerk, 2007, 2010). Foreignization of this sort will always be anathema to the publisher wishing to persuade a potential readership that the text will be in wholly familiar English; but, as with the disappearance of the Afrikaans expressions in Triomf in the international editions, an opportunity has been lost to introduce the global reader to a characteristic of the original that is very much part of its singularity.
In this passage we don’t have the problem of English wording in the original which becomes invisible when translated — though this crux does occur elsewhere in the novel, as in the following excerpt from one of the stream-of-consciousness passages: “sy slaan alarm met haar hoenderpoot waltzing mathilda jesu joy of man’s desiring blou donau jeepers creepers where’d you get those peepers strangers in the night what a wonderful world wie dink dit alles uit vir stommes?” (Van Niekerk, 2004: 578). Heyns has no option in these cases but to keep the English and give up on the distinction being made between the languages.
The character of any language is dependent on its history but also on the point of view from which it is regarded. Afrikaans for a long time was perceived by the majority of South Africans as the language of the oppressor, so much so that the attempt to impose it as the language of instruction in black South African schools in 1976 led to widespread insurrection and the beginning of the end for apartheid; and its image from an international perspective largely followed suit. Yet for millions of South Africans who suffered under apartheid it was their own language. Triomf and Agaat are bold attempts to redeem Afrikaans, to acknowledge not only its impurities and porous boundaries but also the fact that impurity and porousness are among its greatest strengths. The endeavour to remove all traces of the original language in a translation is a misguided one, therefore: even if we encounter them in English, it’s important that we read these novels as both occurring in, and engaging with, Afrikaans. Nevertheless, in a global context the English translation can’t by itself convey the particular force of the novel’s operation as an Afrikaans novel within Afrikaner culture; this aspect of the work’s untranslatability calls out for different kinds of translation — “translation” by means of commentary, for example.
5
To allude to Derrida once more, he stresses that a work lives only if it lives on, if it survives (see, for instance, 1979: 102–3); and it can survive only if it is open to change, if, in fact, its very existence as what it is depends on openness to change. A text that is totally tied to the time and place of its origination would quickly become unreadable. Translation is one of the ways in which works survive: translation and retranslation, transmedial and transcultural translation as well as translinguistic translation, domesticating as much as foreignizing translation. The works I’ve been considering are living on within Afrikaans culture, where they have been much discussed, and also within Anglophone culture, both in South Africa and in the wider world — and, of course, within the other linguistic cultures into which they have been ushered by the work of translators. Given the close involvement of Van Niekerk in the translations by De Kock and Heyns, it might seem that the usual view of translation as interpretation is inappropriate, but there’s no reason why the author’s own interpretation as reflected in his or her input into the translation process should be considered differently from that of the translator proper. The interaction between the two creative minds undoubtedly produces fresh insights, and helps to reinvent the work anew.
Agaat and Triomf are untranslatable, like any important work of literature, which is to say they are only translatable and retranslatable. The reader who can move between original text and translation, source language and target language, is in a particularly privileged position; not because she can search for errors (though that can be a source of satisfaction, as long as it isn’t one of irritation) but because a new work arises out of the act of comparison. 22 One begins to understand what Walter Benjamin meant when he remarked that translation “ultimately serves the central reciprocal relationship between languages” (1973: 72). For the reader who has access only to the translation, there is loss but there is also gain: exposure, thanks to the efforts of the translator, to an otherwise inaccessible world, with the flavours of a different linguistic culture and literary tradition.
There is a debate going on within the fields of comparative literature, translation studies, and “world literature” about the values and dangers of translation. Some see it as contributing to the effacement of minor languages, since the vast majority of translations are from minor to major languages, and to English in particular; others see it as a way of bringing to the attention of the speakers of those major languages important cultural productions in minor languages which they are never going to learn. 23 I’m swayed more by the latter argument than by the former: the existence, and dissemination, of these translations of novels that deserve their place on the world stage is vital to the flourishing of Afrikaans. Writers like Van Niekerk are more likely to pursue their difficult craft if they know that able translators are willing to take on the often thankless task of translation — and that readers are willing to take the risk of entering upon and living with a translated work. It’s the responsibility of readers who are able to cross the language boundary in question to assess and comment on translations, comments that will, ideally, lead to new translations bringing out different aspects of the original. All these processes are crucial to the living on of these extraordinary achievements in a minor language from a corner of Africa.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.