Abstract
When Marlene van Niekerk’s volume of stories Die sneeuslaper [The snow sleeper] (2010) was published, several reviewers commented on the fact that the Afrikaans used in the text was “perforated” or “infiltrated” by other languages, especially Dutch. This article explores the interlingual and cross-cultural movements between Afrikaans and Dutch in this volume, more specifically in “Die sneeuslaper”, the story that lends its title to the volume. Die sneeuslaper has an unusual publication and translation history. The text was commissioned by the University of Utrecht, written in Afrikaans and translated into Dutch by Riet de Jong-Goossens as the writing of the text progressed. According to Van Niekerk she constantly adjusted the Afrikaans text on the basis of her translator’s comments and questions. Finally the Dutch translation was published before the Afrikaans original.
In order to explore the “perforation” of Afrikaans by Dutch in the Afrikaans version of the text, I make use of Waïl Hassan’s (2006) concept of “translational literature” and Rebecca Walkowitz’s (2015) notion of texts born in translation in this article. Hassan (2006:754) defines translational literature as follows: “In the space between translators and translated, there are texts that straddle two languages, at once foregrounding, performing, and problematizing the act of translation; they participate in the construction of cultural identities from that in-between space and raise many of the questions that preoccupy contemporary translation theory. I call such texts translational literature. While all bilingual and multilingual discourse dramatizes the interaction of languages, the texts in question lay special emphasis on translation as an essential component of cross-cultural contact.” Although Hassan discusses the relationship between English as the language of the coloniser and Arabic as the language of the colonised in Ahdaf Soueif's novel A map of love, his insights can, to a certain extent, be applied to the relationship between Dutch and Afrikaans in Van Niekerk’s text.
It is well known that Marlene van Niekerk enjoys a considerable degree of international success as a writer, due to the translation of her texts into English, Dutch, Swedish, German, French, Italian and Danish. In the case of “Die sneeuslaper” the process of translation happens inside the original Afrikaans text. As such the text “performs acts of cultural translation in the original itself”, thus problematising “the notion of the original”, as Hassan writes about Soueif’s novel. The text is also an example of that kind of text that Walkowitz describes as “born translated”, referring to texts that are written for translation from the outset and that are published in more than one language at the same time. She writes (2015:4): “Translation is not secondary or incidental to these works. It is a condition of their production.”
Taking as a cue Hassan’s (2006:755) statement that these kinds of texts “are performances of interlinguistic, cross-cultural communication, operating on several levels of mediations and contestations”, the first section of the article focuses on the interlinguistic and cross-cultural communication in “Die sneeuslaper”. The two main characters in the story are Helena Oldemarkt, who participated in a project on urban vagrants as part of her doctoral study, and a vagrant she calls the snow sleeper because she does not know his name. The story is her report of her meeting with “the snow sleeper”, whom she interviewed and who succeeded in disturbing her profoundly. He reminds her of her father, who also took to wandering the city streets in the first stages of dementia. Although the characters are Dutch and the story is set in Amsterdam, the Afrikaans version of the text depicts them as speaking Afrikaans to each other, something which is easy enough to understand within the context of “suspending one’s disbelief” as a reader in order to accept the fact that a character in a literary text uses a language that is not the one he or she would speak in “real” life. One could thus argue that the use of a plethora of Dutch words or phrases in the Afrikaans text constitutes an attempt at creating a sphere of authenticity in the text.
On the other hand the reader of the Afrikaans text gradually becomes aware that the Dutch characters use of a variety of references to Afrikaans poems and songs in their conversation with each other, so that the speech of the Dutch characters seems to be inflected by an Afrikaans cultural awareness. The reader also gets the impression that the character Helena’s descriptions of the spaces that she shared with her father (his farm with animals and corn fields, his garden, his orchard) are “animated” or infused by typically South African landscapes. This becomes even more apparent from the similarities of these landscapes to those that Van Niekerk describes in her novel Agaat (2004), which is set in a rural setting in South Africa. The linguistic hybridity of this story attests to a linguistic strategy intent on foreignising, deterritorialising and enriching the Afrikaans language through the use of Dutch (a subject to which Van Niekerk often refers in interviews). The cultural hybridity is evidence of an artistic awareness that will not hesitate to transgress borders.
The second part of the article focuses on the figure of the snow sleeper, the Amsterdam hobo who seems to be the embodiment of the kind of artist and work of art that Van Niekerk (2013) describes in an article titled “The literary text in turbulent times: an instrument of social cohesion or an eruption of ‘critical’ bliss. Notes on J.M. Coetzee’s Life and times of Michael K”.In this article Van Niekerk (2013:2) argues that the ethical importance of the work of art lies in “the autonomy and singularity that makes it ‘stand on its own’ through nothing but its own internal conceptual clarity and formal cohesion”. She expresses her preference for the kind of artist or writer that will work against “essentialisms, complacencies and ideological closures” and quotes Jean-Luc Nancy, who writes that it is “the task of literature as event/fragment to express not the foundations, but the groundlessness of human existence” (2013:6). I propose in this article that the Amsterdam vagrant, the “snow sleeper”, can be read as an embodiment of the kind of artist or work of art that will not conform to any political pressure to become instrumentalised to aid a cause, that will not be tamed into submission or domesticated, that will slip away from any attempt at a coherent interpretation and that will disturb and alarm, rather than console, the reader. The language used by the snow sleeper as well as the language used in the story carrying his name can also be read as an injunction to the writer to explore language in such a way that it can accommodate the infusion, “contamination” and inspiration by other languages.
Keywords: Afrikaans literature; “born translated”; Die sneeuslaper; Marlene van Niekerk; Rebecca Walkowitz; translation; “translational literature”; Waïl Hassan
Lees die volledige artikel in Afrikaans: Intertalige en kruiskulturele verkeer tussen Afrikaans en Nederlands in Marlene van Niekerk se verhaalbundel Die sneeuslaper
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