TT Cloete – vertaal deur/translated by Heilna du Plooy & Michiel Heyns
T.T. Cloete was born on 31 May 1924 in Vredefort. After matriculation he studied at the University of Pretoria, the University of South Africa, Potchefstroom University and at the Gemeentelijke Universiteit, Amsterdam. He lectured in Afrikaans and Dutch at the University of Potchefstroom, and in 1965 was appointed as professor at the University of Port Elizabeth. Since 1970 he has been professor in Afrikaans and Dutch and Literary Theory at the University of Potchefstroom, and was appointed professor extraordinaire after his retirement in 1983. Cloete was awarded the Gustav Preller Prize in 1976 and in 2002 the NP van Wyk Louw medal for his literary-scientific publications. He made his debut as poet in 1981 and has to date published eight volumes of poetry, a drama and two volumes of short stories. For his poetry Cloete has received the Ingrid Jonker Prize, the W.A. Hofmeyr Prize, the Louis Luyt Prize, the CNA Prize, the Rapport Prize and the Hertzog Prize. Cloete’s recasting of the Psalms in Afrikaans was widely acclaimed. In 2011 he published the volume Onversadig (Tafelberg).
Spectacular I
from the glittering thin horns and the face
pointed and refined out over the lightly arched back
to the tufty tail tapered drawn
up down the crystalline fragility
of the legs prances switch-alight
the springbok sprints with the speed
of a spear bounces with the whip
of a hairspring hoop-supple
beneath the lion majestically safe
and fearsomely beautiful
under its weight
crackscollapses
the springbok with a clapsnap
legs and back are broken and elegance is turned
into prey guileless grace
is down and sprawls
before the violent beauty of a torture spectacular
(From: Jukstaposisie, 1982:12, Tafelberg)
(Tr. by Heilna du Plooy)
homecoming
Vredefort: This remarkable geological phenomenon
SESA
I grew up
on a seemingly godforsaken fortress of peace, a vredefort
I must have known from birth what later on
I would discover that living on this dome was living on a miracle
… that somebody could have thought that it was not something special
that the hills were merely there for climbing and the Vaal River merely water
for swimming and catching yellow fish … forgive the cliché:
in the crescent of hills rippling from west to east, curved and centring
on a granite bubble, there, up to this day, the Creator is visibly near
having poked the place in times earlier than early with an enormous finger.
(From: Driepas, 1989:191, Tafelberg)
(Tr. by Heilna du Plooy)
Translator:
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Heilna du Plooy grew up in Alberton, completed a B.A. degree and a Teacher’s Diploma at the Potchefstroom University for CHE. She completed her D.Litt in 1985. She is teaching Afrikaans and Dutch Literature and Literary Theory at the North-West University in Potchefstroom. She regularly publishes academic articles but has also published several short stories in literary journals and contributed to collections of short stories. She also published two volumes of poetry, Die donker is nooit leeg nie (1997) (Darkness is never empty) and In die landskap ingelyf (2003) (Inaugurated into the landscape). She also translates poetry from Dutch into Afrikaans and from Afrikaans into English. |
fairy tale of the birds narrated in a monologue
some birds are made for poems
does anybody watch over them in bad weather?
they puff up their cold feathers
shake themselves up and fly far away
to fetch straw
they mate, lay eggs, sit on eggs
along comes a snake that wipes out nest and eggs
they start afresh
puff up their feathers
gird their loins and fetch straw
they sing and repeat everything exactly
as before
they mate, lay eggs, sit on eggs
a storm comes up, it breaks trees
and branches and dreams
do birds feel pain?
does their faith let them down?
can they dream dreams
that shatter like precious chinese porcelain?
can they miss someone so much that they die?
can they plummet with grief,
fly headlong into branches
and hang upside down from their feet
for a last desperate clutch and then fall?
can they die of bad weather?
the birds pull up their socks,
they glean and they mate
gather the bits and the bobs
of the old nest again
in the bad weather
can they understand
how insipid a life
that makes no demand?
can I teach them anything
of the tireless hormic blindness
of the strongest driving force of all drives
bad weather?
(Uncollected)
(Tr. by Michiel Heyns)
the decorative patterns of the dancing filthy fly
too quick for our sluggish tongue
faster than the flutter of the sugar-bird
from bloom to bloom and the swallow-dive of the bat
in search of insects and swifter than the dance of bees
is her back-flip ballet
against the wall she walks up
without up or down or upside down
nimbler than the gymnast or acrobat
she performs six pirouettes per second
she flies in reverse and hovers against the ceiling
in one composite flight
she weaves three triangles, describes a loop
and then a G-clef, she writes a dollar sign
and ties a bowtie, then she weaves numerals
unrolls a ribbon in the wind
that traces trefoil and cloverleaf
after that a pound note sign
an ampersand
and arabesque
then again traceries of a mosque
circles and spirals, esses and question marks
she trails like a tendril and draws vases with calices
she makes ornaments and writes arabic script
she leaves ice skater’s tracks
white on white barely visible
too quick for our sluggish tongue
and eye in one movement
everything is stitched together
and she has a brain smaller than a sesame seed.
(Uncollected)
(Tr. by Michiel Heyns)
of the love we call friendship
when on a warm winter afternoon
we rented a boat
we went and drifted
far in the middle of the town dam
the sun’s angle
a light breeze and soft chill
stirred the water delicately
into a curious colour purple
together in silence without prior arrangement
we wove at a single dream
sometimes we lay down in the hull of the boat
and turned on our backs
to search for stars far above the clear-bright sky
and found one
against all our obtuse expectation
the one that for other eyes
only flickers when darkness falls
there we waited for the dusk
we watched the white egrets
that ghostlike before the coming night
rocked on long thin reeds by water’s edge
head above water
and cars cockroaching on far dry roads
that find poems redundant
continents drift slowly and surreptitiously
from each other in centimeters per year
and between them the silent ocean grows
and grows, a new panthalassa
where are you drifting now
the poet waiting inside you
like a foetus in a womb
what came of it
or was it safer to remain silent
perhaps my question-quest is pointless
perhaps you are already wandering invulnerable
in the Beyond
but I still remember after more than half a century
you are a wound within me that just won’t heal
and I miss you still as you were then
a poetic mere young man
how succumbs the love we call friendship.
(Uncollected)
(Tr. by Michiel Heyns)
Translator:
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Michiel Heyns grew up in various towns and cities all over South Africa, and studied at the Universities of Stellenbosch and Cambridge. He lectured in English at the University of Stellenbosch until 2003, when he took retirement to write full-time. Apart from a book on the nineteenth-century novel and many critical essays, one of which won the English Academy’s Thomas Pringle Award for Criticism, he has published four novels: The Children’s Day, The Reluctant Passenger, The Typewriter’s Tale and Bodies Politic (a fifth, Lost Ground, is due out in 2011). He translated Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat, which won the 2007 Sunday Times Fiction Award. For this translation he was awarded the English Academy’s Sol Plaatje Prize for Translation 2008 and the South African Institute of Translators’ Award for Literary Translation. His translations of Etienne van Heerden’s 30 Nagte in Amsterdam and Chris Barnard’s Boendoe were published in 2011. He reviews books for the South African Sunday Independent, and was awarded the English Academy’s Thomas Pringle Award for Reviewing in 2006 and again in 2010. |