Writing a novel is difficult in any language. To fashion parallel versions of your work in two languages, and concurrently, almost beggars belief. But that is just what André Brink has been doing for decades, working on Afrikaans and English versions of his novels, lending mind, soul and ear to the varying linguistic, stylistic and cultural traits of each.
While Brink has been steadily bilingual, there is a growing trend among Afrikaans writers to seek new readers and larger markets by rendering previously published work into English. Indeed, some have even abandoned their mother tongue: the novelist Etienne van Heerden, for one, has made such a switch.
The ironies of the old linguistic enemy now giving new life to Afrikaans literature are pungent, especially in the light of impassioned pleas on the future of Afrikaans. Leon Rousseau — co-founder of leading local publishing house Human and Rousseau — wrote last year in the BY supplement to Die Burger:
“Moenie toelaat — en ek praat ook met die mense wat nog sal leef wanneer ek daarmee heen is — moenie toelaat dat ons agterkleinkinders die dood van Afrikaans in Engels betreur nie.” This translates roughly as: “Do not allow — and I speak also to those who will be alive when I am no longer — do not allow our great-grandchildren to lament in English the death of Afrikaans.”
Earlier in his article, Rousseau compared Afrikaans to a lamb sitting in a cage with the omnivorous English wolf; a wolf ready also to devour the other nine official languages of South Africa. Correctly, Rousseau pointed out linguists’ fear of a language holocaust: it is estimated that of the 6 000 languages spoken today, only 600 will survive to the end of the century.
Yet, in the South African linguistic context, it is English that — statistically at least — is the more endangered. Pardon? It’s strange, but true. According to the 1996 census, English is the country’s fifth language: 22,9% listed isiZulu as mother tongue, 17,9% isiXhosa, 14,4% Afrikaans, 9,2% Sepedi and just 8,6% English.
Of course, censuses never reflect the brutal reality that English is the language of government and commerce; while less than 9% of South Africans may treasure it as their mother tongue, far more are obliged to use it, in spoken or written form, every day.
Given this, the drift of novels — and poetry, too — from Afrikaans into subsequent (or contemporaneous) English translations is understandable, almost natural.
So it is that we see Antjie Krog translating her poetry into English and publishing simultaneously Verweerskrif and Body Bereft, both just out.
The novelist Marita van der Vyver has had her Die Hart van Ons Huis (literally, The Heart of Our House) translated into English as Where the Heart Is. It’s described as the story of “her life as a writer, wife and mother in a small Provençal village”.
Unlike Brink and Krog, Van der Vyver did not do the translation herself, relying instead on the skills of Annelize Visser. As a precedent, several Van der Vyver novels are available in English.
Without translations, English first-language readers would have been deprived of such South African classics as Vatmaar by AHM Scholz. Nor would the experiences of Marlene van Niekerk’s denizens of Triomf have been available.
Forthcoming is a book that did extraordinarily well, critically and commercially, in Afrikaans. Human and Rousseau will release Roepman by Jan van Tonder as Stargazer, translated into English by Elsa Silke. I have not read the original, but the translation (in uncorrected proof form, I must add) has made me eager to make the acquaintance of the Afrikaans.
Given its co-founder’s sentiments and concerns about Afrikaans, it is somewhat piquant that it should be an English translation by Human and Rousseau that sends me searching for the Afrikaans original. Perhaps, curiously, English is now the most secure — and least expected — of lifelines for Afrikaans.