Click here for the Dutch translation of this essay.
This essay is the second in a series commissioned by SKUT about the politics of (literary) translation, inspired by the controversy surrounding the Dutch translation of Amanda Gorman’s ‘The Hill We Climb’.
Words’ meanings, but also the rhythm and syntax that frame and propel their concatenation, seek their culture as the final reference for what they are describing of the world.
— Amiri Baraka
In 2020, I was commissioned by an Afrikaans publisher to translate Jason Reynolds’s verse novel Long Way Down into Kaaps. The story, set in the projects and narrated by Will, a young black boy seeking revenge for his older brother’s gang-related murder, is written primarily in African-American Vernacular English. I felt it was a bold and intelligent choice on behalf of the publisher to ask someone who writes and speaks Kaaps to do the translation. And even now, I feel nothing but appreciative. However, it was also a politically loaded decision with a lot of implications.
To better understand the translation of Long Way Down into Kaaps, it is essential to first explain the difference between Kaaps and Afrikaans, as well as the history of Coloured people in South Africa. Coloured people are composed of a mix of ancestral lineages, including the Khoi (First Nation, indigenous to Southern Africa), South Africa’s other indigenous Black tribes, and various groups who arrived in the country either as slaves or settlers, such as Indonesians, Malaysians, Sri Lankans, Germans, Irish, French, English, and Dutch.
The Coloured population is considered one of the most mixed in the world. The term Coloured is an official racial designation in South Africa, though many people are aggrieved by this and prefer being called Black or Brown — due to the term’s roots as an apartheid classification designed to socially and politically divide mixed-race people from Black people. I will continue to use Coloured here, because, in the context of my upbringing, it’s a defanged word and one I use every day.
Kaaps or Kaapse Afrikaans is inaccurately referred to as either a dialect of Afrikaans or a street language. It is not yet recognised as an official language, even though it is the oldest version of the language, created by enslaved workers of Dutch settlers. It was only later, around 1914, that Afrikaners co-opted this language, standardised it, and renamed it Afrikaans. Even the term Afrikaners originated from Coloured people before it was taken by the Dutch settlers. Despite this, people continued to speak Kaaps, and the language has evolved, changed, and grown over the decades. It’s the home language of artists, writers, academics, builders, factories workers alike. It’s not tied to a social class but to a racial community. The first official Kaaps dictionary is currently in development at the University of the Western Cape, which will provide a great service for the future of the language and the translation of Kaaps literary and academic work.
I write in a variant of Kaaps, spoken on the Cape Flats. My childhood and young adulthood on the Cape Flats were spent in an environment that’s best described as a jail away from jail. Inhabited by murderers, rapists, bootleggers, drug dealers, small-time crooks, and many people like my family who committed the unforgivable crime of being born black and poor. My experience aligned well with the violent, impoverished world illustrated by Jason Reynolds in Long Way Down. And my language, equally well. I’m not a linguist by any means, but I’ve always assumed that oppressed people’s languages, across the world, evolve and are shaped along similar lines, since a language will always rise to meet the experiences of its speakers. Similar social conditions require similarities in grammar and syntax. At least in the case of Long Way Down that intuition proved correct. I found easy correlations between common expressions, often word for word, and within the speech rhythms of the speakers of poetry. The dreaded label of ‘untranslatable’ was avoided almost every time. Interestingly, the biggest obstacle in translating Reynolds’s text was the pervasive gun culture in America and the concept of revenge. The latter seemed contrived to me, feeling more like an action film narrative. In South Africa, people who are not gang-affiliated tend to passively accept the tragedy of a loved one’s murder rather than seek revenge. Translating the various street names for guns was especially challenging. Ordinary South Africans generally do not have ready access to guns, so we haven’t developed an extensive vocabulary for them. I soon ran out of names and had to dig deep to find more.
Compatibility between my work and that of Reynold’s is undeniable. At the same time, it’s a choice accompanied by an unusual admission from a publisher: a white South African, Afrikaans speaker couldn’t translate this text.
Here are some of the reasons. The white-centric Standard Afrikaans language lacks the vocabulary to convey the struggles and realities of black people. Standard Afrikaans is a language deeply rooted in political oppression, having been weaponized by the apartheid government. For Coloured people, it will always be the language forced upon us to supplant our indigenous languages. The hurt for Black people might go even deeper, forever tied to the Soweto riots of 1976. During these riots, Black students protested the mandatory use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in schools. The protests ended in a massacre, with police killing an estimated 176 children.
It primarily accommodates the white experience and is so closely tied to white Afrikaner identity in South Africa, as to be almost inseparable. It is a language that only incorporates blackness as something to be viewed from a distance.
When I translate a story set in a ghetto, written in African-American Vernacular, everyone can agree it’s a brilliant bit of business on the publisher’s behalf, and indeed I was even rewarded with an award for my efforts. It all makes perfect sense; you might say there is a sort of inevitability to it. On the other hand, if it was a book by Ian McEwan, Martin Amis or Jonathan Franzen, I would be far lower on the list, most likely not even a contender. For one, it would automatically be assumed that these books would be translated into Standard Afrikaans. Standard Afrikaans possesses the sociolinguistic infrastructure to accommodate any white, middle-class experience. And the white experience is deemed the universal default. There is an unsaid but clear assumption that I cannot translate a universal experience because my own duality in language and constant code-switching while experiencing white spaces, might be common but not universal. I am seen to write and speak a language that is only appropriate within a context of poverty and violence. I speak a language that can only capture a black experience. With this, it should also be said that not all Coloured or Black peoples experience are monolithic, my background and context is not the universal experience.
Criticism from my own community is plenty, to some the world I describe is unfamiliar, and they’re always afraid that they might get lumped in with me. Which I find understandable, to be clear. I’m a poet and comic book artist who writes about the people who are on the lowest rungs of South African society. My work is very popular. And it’s often used as a reference point by people who are unfamiliar with Coloured culture. The danger of this is you unintentionally become a representative of a community.
In my defense, I only try to encapsulate the world that I understand the best. As with the word Coloured, it’s not the most flattering cultural identity. But it’s mine and I’ve given up on feeling ashamed about it. We did not racially classify ourselves, like being named after your dad you hate. At some point it becomes just a name. I try to convey my experiences in an as unvarnished, honest, and realistic way as possible. As a result of this, my writing is often interpreted as shocking and raw. I can’t see what kind of person sits down and decides to write raw and shocking poetry. But this raises the question: if readers and critics in my country misunderstand my intentions as a writer, what can I hope for from a foreign audience?
In thinking about this article, I tried first to understand what a translator is. Not just what the translator does, but what embodies the translator. And the thing I think that unifies all translators irrespective of method or philosophy, is reading. A translator is first a reader of the work they’re translating. So, to me, it becomes a question of who is qualified to read a text.
To put myself in Reynold’s shoes: who would be able to translate my work? My fear is always that the translator will filter the work through a white paradigm and not fully appreciate the cultural references and experiences depicted in the writing. This leads to the work being celebrated or criticised for the wrong reasons and misunderstood by readers who have never interacted with the culture depicted. But that might be true for most literary reading, the work we read and consume goes through so many filters and individual interpretations that as a writer we can only hope readers read our intentions and find meaning in the work that speaks to their own experience.
My writing has been translated into French, Modern Greek and English. I don’t think much about the French and Greek translations because I don’t speak or understand those languages. Translations of my work in English terrify me. The writing often comes across as illiterate, without nuance or rhythm or anything that would make good poetry. And it leaves me thinking, is this how people experience my writing? Is this what they read? Is this what’s impressed them enough to want to translate it? It makes me feel lied to and betrayed by the reader. The translations, almost without exception so far, have always given away the translator’s biases. And what almost every one of these translations have in common, is a preoccupation with preserving the ‘impact’ of the poems. It’s the shock value that gets precedence in the translations. It’s the novelty of the experiences I portray, the exotic, the stories that are atypical for poetry that gets all the attention. It’s often made me question the quality of my writing. My work has only been translated by white translators. And I’m grateful to them, I think it’s an act of kindness and humanity to translate any text. And for that matter, I also appreciate my white readers. My position doesn’t stem from dislike, but from the awareness of our incompatibility. I don’t believe my writing can only be translated from Kaaps into a corresponding dialect. And I don’t think that of Jason Reynold’s writing either. But for a translator to achieve this difficult task, they would need to be able to understand the complexities of the culture they’re engaging with. They would need to understand the people and the language beyond the superficial level.
If a translator understood this, they could begin to understand that my writing is half a reflection of where I’m from and half a reflection of who I am. And those two things are very different. Neither one is better nor worse, but not nearly the same.
Hammie
Ek et dié gedig twie kee geskryf
wan my ma hettie eeste een gelies
toe sê sy vi my: “Jy kannie al dai goed skryfie,
hulle gan my innie tronk opslyt.”
It is by haa wat ek gelee et
hoe om te hustle.
Nie dai gangsta-hustle ie,
ma dai vrou-allien-sôg-vi-ses-kinnes hustle,
dai righteous hustle.
My ma het my gelee
ommie sentimental te wiesie.
Die eeste ding wat sy gepawn et
was haa trouringe.
My ma groet gangsters en kêkmense dieselle
wan sytie kêkmense geken
voo hulle gangsters geraak et
ennie gangsters voo hulle
hulle harte virrie Here gegie et.
My ma respek nieman te veel of te min nie.
Sy roek drie pakkies êntjies ’n dag as sy het
en as sy nie hettie, dan tel sy toppatjies op
en swai vi ôs pilletjies mettie phonebook.
As jy heeldag nie geroekittie
dan voel elke puff soese man-sized hit.
My ma gloe in niks én sy gloe in alles
en jy sal nooit wiet of sy liegie.
Syt vi my gelee hoe om te lieg
en hoe omme storie te vetel
en hoe om te worry:
die secret is om te gan slaap.
Jy worry bieter as jy ytgerus is.
Mammie
I wrote this poem twice
Because my mom read the first one
And she said: “You can’t write about all that stuff,
they’ll throw me in jail.”
She taught me how to hustle
Not that gangsta hustle,
that woman-alone-looking-after-six kids hustle,
that righteous hustle.
Mammie taught me
how to not be sentimental.
the first thing she pawned
were her wedding rings.
Mammie greets gangster folk and church folk the same
because she knew the church folk
before they became gangsters
and the gangsters before they
gave their hearts to Jesus
Mammie respects no-one
too much or too little.
She smokes three packs of cigarettes a day when she can
and when she can’t, she picks up cigarette butts
and rolls us Rollies with the phonebook.
If you haven’t smoked all day
every puff feels like a man-sized hit.
Mammie believes in nothing, and she believes in everything
and you’ll never know when she’s lying.
She taught me how to lie
and how to tell a story
and how to worry:
the secret is to sleep.
You worry better when you’re rested.
Poem and translation by Nathan Trantraal.
Nathan Trantraal (1983) is a South African author, comic book artist, graphic designer and illustrator. He has authored three poetry collections (Chokers en Survivors, Alles het niet kom wod, Oolog) and one anthology of essays (Wit issie ’n colour nie). Trantraal has illustrated four graphic novels (Stormkaap, Coloureds, Crossroads, All Rise and Die Man Wattie Kinnes Vang). In 2019, he translated Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down into Kaaps (Langpad Onnetoe). He has written a drama (Wit isse Colour) and a teleplay (Delilah). Trantraal is also an editor, reviewer and cover designer. He has received various awards for his writing, translation, design, illustration, and reviews. In 2023 and 2024, he received awards celebrating his contributions to the Afrikaans language.
The publication of this essay was made possible with a grant from the Thérèse Cornips Stipendium.