Hi everyone! My writers name is “Ongehoorde”, which basically means “unheard”. I am a South African poet and artist. I heard of Hive from friends and decided it would be interesting to share my Afrikaans (home language) poetry here as translations! I am inspired by Umberto Eco and his view on linguistics, which I read as stating that the translation of especially poetry itself becomes poetry. Hence, my slogan or banner photo: translation as poetry.
Through this, I hope to inspire an interest in South African poetry and to improve my own translation skills. There are about 6 million speakers of Afrikaans, and not everyone is interested in poetry. The scope of potential readers is thus very small. I would like to see if my translated poetry might find some new readers, especially here on Hive!
For this introduction post, I will translate one of my published poems! I am so lucky to have had some of my poems published and I hope for more publications.
I will go through some of my reasoning why and how I translate certain things, which then leads to the English translation to be a new poem. I think poetry is one of the few translations where you cannot really “say” what the poet in the original language wanted to say without losing some or most of the meaning. But again, this is not a bad thing. If the translation is good enough, the English poem will become a new poem! Without further ado, here is the published poem.
[photographs: the book my poem was published in]
Tussen die Here en die Hel
in ʼn graf
(ses voet onder die grond)
begrawe lê my ontbindende liggaam
verrot vol maaiers
en langs my lê die Here
en onder my lê die hel
kriewelende bewegings
ontsnap ek met siel deur die fyn krake van my kis
saam met die Here
en ons dans om my graf
terwyl die hel onder my brand
en die duiwel vir my siel veg
gaan ek ooit tot rus kom liewe Here
vra ek terwyl ons om my graf dans
en dans en dans op die maat van stilte
ons vergeet van tyd
en ek vra die Here om van my te vergeet
Now the English version.
Between the Lord and Hell
in a grave
(six feet beneath the ground)
buried lies my decaying body
rotten busting with maggots
and next to me lies the Lord
and underneath me lies the hell
squirming movements
I escape with my soul through the cracks of the coffin
with the Lord
and we dance on my grave
while the hell burns underneath me
and the devil fights for my soul
will I ever find peace Lord
I ask while we dance on my grave
and we dance and we dance on the tempo of silence
we forget about time
and I ask the Lord to forget about me
I will now briefly list some of the things that got lost in the translation.
The title and in the poem in the original language has different alliterations which cannot be translated.
The word “kriewelend” says in such a manner that the squirming movements are visualized in the sound, which is not necessarily the case with squirming.
In Afrikaans you can place the subject of the sentence in various places, while still holding the same meaning and being grammatically correct. (For example, the poem reads: “ontsnap ek”, but it could also have read “ek ontsnap”, while in English I escape makes sense but when you say, “escape I” it just sounds strange.
Some of these may be due to my own lack or inexperience in English, but it may also be that as I am trying to show that the translation is a new poem and cannot hold on to the original one.
I hope that this is at least somewhat interesting. I hope to write some more of this linguistic type posts, but I would like to use Hive as a platform where I can pin down ideas. I hope you will take this journey through translation with me!
