a footnote under the night of history
in the night when everything was black
burnt to a cross of ash
on the blind glass
and the dog’s bark a dark kite
blowing away in darkness
to where the moon
tears like the keel of a sinking boat
I dreamt my language
the title page smeared black
with signs now undecipherable raw
and inside the book
I saw my reflection
standing there three times
first among dead friends
with mottled grieving faces
like dogs staring directly into the blind window
while their thoughts like empty glasses
turning in the hands
and I was there
thin neck and moustache
our poems are slaves each with a full wave
feathers proudly on the head
then in a tableau at departure
in the garden of the night
with cape of white hair
my mother an aged virgin in my embrace
and further back
in the folds of memory
all other trusteds as torches of forgetting
were I now the prophet
sent to spy if there is life
in this world
or the senseless exile returning to say
our language was a footnote
under the illegible page history?
a last time on a bench in the empty garden
of a madhouse of toothless ageds
as skeletons with little bitter flesh
swaddled in the blanket
and wild tuft and eyes blind marbles
bow and mutter bow and mutter
many words oh many words
but only the whispering of dead slaves
but not enough to groove or make boat
and outside of the book beyond all listening
the bark and the wind and the ash
of the moon in dark water
Words Against the Clouds
for Yehuda Amichai
—‘shoe’ ‘desert rose’ ‘mud’—
(luck wanted
that I could today pick up a few words
for you
to be able to describe
that one doesn’t only walk and think about nothing on the ground,
but also about words in their meaning
be seen, between toilet rolls, images, fossilised fish
(don’t step on the wrong words!
‘laying the terror of mines,’ you once said
‘is in the delayed action; plant your bomb
and one day, much later, someone
who you don’t know
is blown sky high’
so the word also becomes flesh
(‘I have read your verses and fears:
like desert roses they are: anachronistic, with an outside
and an inside, they come from deep
without past or future, and yet they can withstand
the soft explosions of sand and time
(in times of war people eat mud
to survive like frogs on land and in water;
in times of peace it is a
a beauty cleanser . . .
I doesn’t matter
(the moon walks on
even if she day by day becomes more of
an empty shoe without bunions or rhythm
the moon carries her steps
across the sprawling dove grey dunes of the Kalahari
and the restless hills of Juda:
at least she doesn’t at all befoul the mud
(in a shoe full of mud I would want to plant your desert roses
to give the moon a sentence
and a little word—sum I shall write on the laces:
‘when you sleep on too long
you eventually rot’
that what is known as
death on the feet . . .
(like this I tried stopping the words in the verse
dear and sad Yehuda,
is death in the picking up or in the word?
Two Poems
Breyten Breytenbach
translated from the Afrikaans by Ampie Coetzee
One of Breyten Breytenbach’s theories about poetry is that ‘the poem is the meaning of the poem.’ The meaning of Breytenbach’s poems can perhaps be found in his striking metaphors, although he often seems to resist interpretation: ‘. . . now you say my friend / you want to study the fruits of my pen / no please no / it was born for reading / to throw away / and the mouth to throw away and wipe in satisfaction.’ Throughout his poetry there is a search for meaning; his metaphors function as a key (for the interpreter at least) in this search, although the search is often in vain; the key does not open the lock. In order to interpret his poems, indeed any poems, one often has to ‘feel’ intuitively rather than attempt to break down the door.
To translate metaphors is never easy and Breytenbach sometimes makes this task near impossible—for example, the use of two Afrikaans words, almost-homonyms on which the meaning turns. The advantage is that one sinks into the depth of the poem, feeling intuitively for a way to convey its essence.
The experience of translating Breytenbach’s work is maybe best described by Breytenbach himself. In a note at the end of oorblyfsel/voice over, his 2010 side-by-side translation of a ‘conversation’ with Palestinian poet Magmoed Darwiesj/Mahmoud Darwish in Afrikaans and English (hence the double translation of the poet’s name), Breytenbach explains that translations are a ‘journey,’ a ‘go-between tongue from the known to the unknown.’
To translate metaphors is never easy and Breytenbach sometimes makes this task near impossible—for example, the use of two Afrikaans words, almost-homonyms on which the meaning turns. The advantage is that one sinks into the depth of the poem, feeling intuitively for a way to convey its essence.
The experience of translating Breytenbach’s work is maybe best described by Breytenbach himself. In a note at the end of oorblyfsel/voice over, his 2010 side-by-side translation of a ‘conversation’ with Palestinian poet Magmoed Darwiesj/Mahmoud Darwish in Afrikaans and English (hence the double translation of the poet’s name), Breytenbach explains that translations are a ‘journey,’ a ‘go-between tongue from the known to the unknown.’
Breyten Breytenbach is a renowned poet, painter, activist, and novelist. He was born in 1939 in the small town of Bonnievale, South Africa. He studied fine arts at the University of Cape Town before immigrating in the late 1960s to Paris, where he wrote much of his early poetry. His first published work, Die ysterkoei moet sweet (The Iron Cow Must Sweat, 1964) was hailed as a triumph of Afrikaans poetry, breaking new ground in structure, metre, and imagery. In 1975, Breytenbach returned to South Africa under a false name in order to form an underground organisation. He was arrested and charged with treason under the Terrorism Act and sentenced to nine years in prison, two of which he spent in solitary confinement. While in prison, Breytenbach wrote prolifically, producing among other works the acclaimed True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984). After serving seven years of his sentence, Breytenbach was released from prison. He subsequently returned to France where he lived in exile until South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994. Breytenbach has won numerous literary awards, including the Alan Paton Award and the Hertzog Prize for Poetry.
Ampie Coetzee was born in 1939. His academic career began at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, after which he transferred to the University of the Western Cape, where he was politicised. Coetzee’s fields of study included Afrikaans and Dutch literature, specifically poetry. At the time, the apartheid regime began censoring literature and other cultural productions, such as music and film. As a result, Coetzee’s academic focus shifted to the role of literature in society and its function as a form of protest. In the mid-1970s, around the time that Breyten Breytenbach was imprisoned, Coetzee and two colleagues began publishing ‘underground,’ aiding published writers who had been banned as well as upcoming writers whose work had the potential to be censored or banned, among them Breytenbach, André P. Brink, John Miles, and Nadine Gordimer. In 1978 Coetzee edited an anthology of Breytenbach’s work, And Death White as Words: An Anthology of the Poetry of Breyten Breytenbach. Coetzee’s later research has focused on Breytenbach’s poetry.
