Friday, March 29, 2013

Agaat

Why do we (young South Africans) dislike reading our own literature? That's a generalisation. Many of the young 'uns whom I know. Because it is about past, not our present into which the past is woven. Again, a generalisation. What about Zakes Mda? I enjoy Andre Brink but dislike JM Coetzee - the man and his work - intensely (don't get me started). Now, here I am, delving into Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (Kindle tells me I am 9% of the way - this means little to me though, I miss page numbers).

Thumbs up or down, I like to imagine you wondering, literally clinging to the edge of your seat. Don't disillusion me.

Let's get to specifics here. I managed about fifty pages of A Story of an African Farm before I placed it beside my bed and then on a bookshelf. What is it? The style? The subject matter? South African literature, to me, feels awkward, stilted, heavy with symbolism, with little relief. The stories are often manufactured and not enjoyable. Although I have argued differently before - why read a story without a plot? Perhaps Aristotle and Joseph Campbell were correct? Why else spend leisure time in someone else's world? (This doesn't bode well for me and my novel.)

I feel the same about contemporary North American literary fiction. Twisted into itself, moral tales, a game of academic critique. Maybe also because these are realities that I know, whether living them or watching them on big and small screens. Maybe I need distance to be able to face a story's moral tale - because, honestly, isn't there always some kind of symbolic warning? That's just how our brains work, folks, like it or not (always preaching my own paranoid doomsday tale of consciousness - dammit, and so it goes round and round and round).

Thumbs up! There you go! I threw it in here, sans reference to the book title, hoping you'll miss it as you scan down the page.

Perhaps it was the hype that attracted me - I enjoy translations, to wade through the logic of a language literally made foreign - I have been meaning to read Agaat (written originally in Afrikaans) since it was published. I have even taken it out from the library a couple of times, and stared at its very serious bulk, intimidated, before returning it. The Kindle version is far less intimidating (I yell in defence of my betrayal of the printed book - the very thing from which I make a living!).

Somewhere between high school and now, the desperate attempts of my Grade 11 Afrikaans teacher (truly desperate, she once told us we were horrible and left the classroom crying) sunk in. Afrikaans demonstrates meaning, it doesn't just present it; it embodies things that we don't have translations for in English; it has a different poetry, melody, physicality; it holds its own story of past and present tightly, while as an English South African, it sometimes feels as though I have no past - only a present and a future, here, in a country I love. That's it, too - it has loved this place for as long as it has existed.

In varsity, we were taught that new media has something in common with newspaper journalism, for a different reason: readers reading on screen scan, so serve them the who, what, where, when, why and how up front, in the first paragraph. It differs though, in that you should keep something back for the conclusion - something to keep this allegedly lazy reader reading. My posts ignore these 'rules' (I scoff at rules in this new realm of expression) and let you hang on (on my every word...?), hoping you'll bear with me to the end.

My point? My point is that I have a point, but I need to warm up before I find it. The translator, Michiel Heyns, no doubt in consultation with the author, has carried some of the conventions of Afrikaans into English, sometimes making the prose a syrupy river to wade through, but in others translating the physicality of a language, for which English has no equivalents. I am speaking (writing) specifically of the stresses: é and è. 'Thére,' she writes, and I know the character is nodding or pointing, verbally or non- or both, without her having to prosaically tell me that she is doing so or leaving it my imagination.

I am enamoured with this one little stroke, not only because it carries something of the language that I functionally understand, but also because I envy it. I envy its usefulness and its utility of written codes; its force and its subtlety... I imagine that I do not understand any Afrikaans, its culture or our culture, and I appreciate it more, for conveying meaning and context that written words alone do not; the written is uplifted to the verbal. Oh, how I envy a whole language (and others) that have this one little stroke that I cannot (says who?) use.

I confess though (why confess? why not recount or just explain?) that at first (the first 3%) I was a) confused and therefore annoyed (another characteristic of South African fiction, and perhaps of our culture(s)) b) reminded of A Story of an African Farm. At the risk of being superficial, I might have kept that book on-hand if it had used diacritics.

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