To review new works by Antjie Krog critically in the midst of a controversy over whether she is correctly scrupulous with regard to her borrowings is to risk coming over as another bashing Stephen. Nor, as a fellow practitioner, do I wish to belittle the achievement of her hard-won eminence. But be it noted that both her new books contain a garbled defence of this shady matter of stolen quotations on the last page, which must be her last-minute wriggle to get off the hook. The more usual convention of using quotation marks would have served.
One fondly remembers Krog, with her gutturals and rolling ”r”s, as an endearing broadcaster, and her wacky columns, spurred by this very newspaper, did lead her to movie stardom. Now we are to believe Krog just sommer writes in both the old official languages, producing two separate publications, meant to be equal and, of course, for the price of double.
Be prepared as well to meet her undressed and ever so candid, now with her loose pelvic floor, the ”biestings” on her nipples (when she is not laving them in honey), exclaiming how she can or cannot masturbate any longer. For this is her grand number on the dreaded menopause.
But still, how good is Krog’s second language, English? Is her daring in publishing 112 pages of it justified? (Without explanation, the Afrikaans version is shorter by 10 pages.) Get over the words such as ”filigree”, ”unbeknownst”, ”tendrils”, ”wisps”, ”tintinnabulous bliss”, which are poeticisms that went out with pounds, shillings and pence, while phrases like ”nimbular mush” are of the kind that gives poetry a bad name.
There are also the bathetic, Eliotic paradoxes (”to be able to write one has to enter the self / by going beyond the limits imposed by self”); the nouns forced to do duty as verbs (”nobody humans language more than you”); and the giveaway broken concords (”it is here that one’s beloved sleep tonight!”). ”Meter” is not the same word as ”metre”. I could go on with examples of the general lack of scrupulousness of this tone-dead effort.
When one gathers Krog is transliterating herself, right hand to left hand, how adept is she? My tally of inaccuracies runs to over 500 instances, but let’s begin with just the titles. Verweerskrif (Umuzi) is surely a written defence or apologia, implying an active resistance to some threatening circumstance. The English Body Bereft (Umuzi) is not only limply passive, but has an entirely different sense. For those whose Afrikaans is as inadequate as Krog’s English, what may really have helped is a single volume with translations on facing pages. Thereby one could work through with two fingers, enjoying some interesting dialogue.
But, as the English version stands alone, it takes me back to the hard lesson learnt as a teenager, the one about not confusing one’s readers. When Krog writes that ”her thumbs are crumbling away and refuse [stanza break] to open bottles”, one thinks she means she is turning into garbage.
Then how did the Afrikaansisms in ”you know my downsitting and mine uprising” ever get through the editorial process? Agreed that words such as ”stoep” and ”voetstoots”, though still quite hard on her foreign translators, have become sufficiently nativised in South African English to cross over unaltered for local readers, but ”getting the moer in” has not. Nor can ”drooggebakte poes” ever work as ”drybaked cunt”. Never mind, meanwhile, that such private ache confessions in the English-language sphere went out when Sylvia Plath gassed herself, and such obscenities exited with the Beats.
In a few cases, other translators are employed by Krog, with results equally adrift. For Gus Ferguson to render the rather rueful, questioning three lines, ”Was dit ‘n minuskule jellytot / Wat in hormoon-verrykte bloed / Die stresses op homself laat klot?”, as a jingly couplet statement — ”It might have been a jelly-tot / Transmogrified to fatal clot” — is astoundingly inadequate. Also, it manages to delete what one would have thought the entire point of the collection: more evidence of the derangement caused by hormonal imbalance. Where some items in the original are too challenging for an English pitch, even though the publishers claim the contrary, one notes that they are simply omitted. This leaves one feeling short-changed.
One poem works in English, though. There Krog asks her mother how she endured her period drying up during that watershed change of life. The dear soul replies: hard work and taking showers. Perhaps her daughter should have followed that manner of coping. For, this way, Krog’s poetry represents the end of once-brave Afrikaans literature as such, as it collapses into pretension and incompetence.