Thank you for sharing this! I am not fluent in Afrikaans, but my feeling is that English doesn't do it justice (as with any language, I'm sure). Despite this, I found the experience of reading your translation of the poem to be quite moving! I've always appreciated how descriptive Afrikaans is -- 'skitter' says so much more than 'glitter' does, doesn't it? (My favourite word is 'tarentaal'). Great to get a glimpse into the decision-making involved in translating! I'd love to read more of your translations!
Baie dankie! Poetry is of course notoriously difficult to translate. This was relatively easy because of the simplified vocabulary and because I hardly attempted to preserve the rhythm and completely ignored the rhyme. I'm working on a longer piece on Afrikaans counter-culture in which I'm planning to include translations of both poems and rock songs.
Nice translation! Re: Anglos, this is all I can think of, not sure if it's what you had in mind:
"In [Nick] Land’s Compact articles on the English canon, he was so magnanimous as to promote [Octavia] Butler, alongside some nameless 'Jews and Scots,' into a DEI English 'para-canon.' Seeking to establish the paradox of a people-who-are-not-a-people, the maritime liberalism-imperialism of an 'out-breeder culture,' he identifies the central revolutionary dialectic within English literature, which can be described ethnically as Anglo vs. Norman, politically as left vs. right, religiously as Nonconformist vs. Anglo-Catholic, or aesthetically as Romantic vs. Classical, with the latter side relegated always to the role of ineffectual (indeed sabotaged) brake on history’s runaway train. As I hinted in my most recent Invisible College lecture, you can use even Jane Austen to stage a global revolution. To this revolution are we 'Jews and Scots' summoned, those of us who have spiritually interbred with this literature which was not the literature of our forefathers—my forefathers had no literature, you see, and so I had no choice—whether we are the Pole Conrad, the Dutch-American Melville, the African-American Butler, or the Italian-American Pistelli."
Thank you, that’s it exactly! I’m still not sure I share the post-racial optimism expressed elsewhere in that post (at least in our lifetimes) but I do think we need to reckon with the English language as one of the most powerful universalising agents out there. The story of the Afrikaner could be told as a long and somewhat futile rebellion against that universalising tendency (which of course extended the colonial subjugation of the other inhabitants of South Africa). So I understand the impulse to resist what our friends on the left call neocolonialism and what our friends on the right call GloboHomo, but rather than retreat into little affinity groups (Sam Kriss and others have remarked on the rather pathetic id pol turn on the right), I think a better option is to strive for a Weltkultur which celebrates both variation and synthesis.
Yes, and English is a good vessel for both variation and synthesis since it's already two languages in one (a "colonial" and a "native" language at that) and can accommodate more languages still.
Beautiful translation
Thank you for sharing this! I am not fluent in Afrikaans, but my feeling is that English doesn't do it justice (as with any language, I'm sure). Despite this, I found the experience of reading your translation of the poem to be quite moving! I've always appreciated how descriptive Afrikaans is -- 'skitter' says so much more than 'glitter' does, doesn't it? (My favourite word is 'tarentaal'). Great to get a glimpse into the decision-making involved in translating! I'd love to read more of your translations!
Baie dankie! Poetry is of course notoriously difficult to translate. This was relatively easy because of the simplified vocabulary and because I hardly attempted to preserve the rhythm and completely ignored the rhyme. I'm working on a longer piece on Afrikaans counter-culture in which I'm planning to include translations of both poems and rock songs.
Ek sien uit!
Nice translation! Re: Anglos, this is all I can think of, not sure if it's what you had in mind:
"In [Nick] Land’s Compact articles on the English canon, he was so magnanimous as to promote [Octavia] Butler, alongside some nameless 'Jews and Scots,' into a DEI English 'para-canon.' Seeking to establish the paradox of a people-who-are-not-a-people, the maritime liberalism-imperialism of an 'out-breeder culture,' he identifies the central revolutionary dialectic within English literature, which can be described ethnically as Anglo vs. Norman, politically as left vs. right, religiously as Nonconformist vs. Anglo-Catholic, or aesthetically as Romantic vs. Classical, with the latter side relegated always to the role of ineffectual (indeed sabotaged) brake on history’s runaway train. As I hinted in my most recent Invisible College lecture, you can use even Jane Austen to stage a global revolution. To this revolution are we 'Jews and Scots' summoned, those of us who have spiritually interbred with this literature which was not the literature of our forefathers—my forefathers had no literature, you see, and so I had no choice—whether we are the Pole Conrad, the Dutch-American Melville, the African-American Butler, or the Italian-American Pistelli."
https://grandhotelabyss.tumblr.com/post/743857044752367616/thoughts-on-nrx-do-you-agree-that-they-basically
Thank you, that’s it exactly! I’m still not sure I share the post-racial optimism expressed elsewhere in that post (at least in our lifetimes) but I do think we need to reckon with the English language as one of the most powerful universalising agents out there. The story of the Afrikaner could be told as a long and somewhat futile rebellion against that universalising tendency (which of course extended the colonial subjugation of the other inhabitants of South Africa). So I understand the impulse to resist what our friends on the left call neocolonialism and what our friends on the right call GloboHomo, but rather than retreat into little affinity groups (Sam Kriss and others have remarked on the rather pathetic id pol turn on the right), I think a better option is to strive for a Weltkultur which celebrates both variation and synthesis.
Yes, and English is a good vessel for both variation and synthesis since it's already two languages in one (a "colonial" and a "native" language at that) and can accommodate more languages still.