Afrikaans Poems Pdf

[Lu Rounsaville]

BreytenBreytenbach (.mw-parser-output .IPA-label-smallfont-size:85%.mw-parser-output .references .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .infobox .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .navbox .IPA-label-smallfont-size:100%Afrikaans pronunciation: [brɛɪtən brɛɪtənbaχ]; born 16 September 1939) is a South African writer, poet, and painter who became internationally well-known as a dissident poet and vocal critic of South Africa under apartheid, and as a political prisoner of the National Party-led South African Government. Breytenbach is now informally considered by Afrikaans-speakers as their poet laureate and is one of the most important living poets in Afrikaans literature. He also holds French citizenship.

Breyten Breytenbach was born in Bonnievale, approximately 180 km from Cape Town and 100 km from the southernmost tip of Africa at Cape Agulhas. His early education was at Horskool Hugenote and he later studied fine arts at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. He is the brother of Jan Breytenbach, co-founder of the 1st Reconnaissance Commando of the South African Special Forces against whom he holds strongly opposing political views, and the late Cloete Breytenbach, a widely published war correspondent.

His committed political dissent against the ruling National Party and its white supremacist policy of apartheid compelled him to leave South Africa for Paris, France, in the early 1960s, where he married a French woman of Vietnamese ancestry, Yolande, as a result of which he was not allowed to return. The then applicable Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and Immorality Act (1950) made it a criminal offence for a person to have any sexual relations with a person of a different race.[1] He is the father of the French journalist Daphnee Breytenbach.

On an illegal trip to South Africa in 1975, he was arrested and sentenced to nine years' imprisonment for high treason. His work The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist describes aspects of his imprisonment. According to Andr Brink, Breytenbach was retried in June 1977 on new and fanciful charges that, among other things, he had planned a submarine attack by the Soviet Navy on the prison at Robben Island through the conspiratorial "Okhela Organisation." In the end, the judge found him guilty only of having smuggled letters and poems out of jail for which he was fined $50.[2]

During his imprisonment, Breytenbach wrote the poem "Ballade van ontroue bemindes" ("Ballade of Unfaithful Lovers"). Inspired by Franois Villon's "Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis", Breytenbach compared Afrikaner dissidents Peter Blum, Ingrid Jonker, and himself to unfaithful lovers, who had betrayed Afrikaans poetry by taking leave of it.[3]

After free elections toppled the ruling National Party and ended apartheid in 1994, Breytenbach became a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town in the Graduate School of Humanities in January 2000[4] and is also involved with the Gore Institute in Dakar (Senegal) and with New York University, where he teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program.

Breytenbach's work includes numerous volumes of novels, poetry and essays, many of which are in Afrikaans. Many have been translated from Afrikaans to English, and many were originally published in English. He is also known for his works of pictorial arts. Exhibitions of his paintings and prints have been shown in cities around the world, including Johannesburg, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, Brussels, Edinburgh and New York City.[5]

Ingrid Jonker was born on a farm near Kimberley in South Afrika on 19th September 1933. Her parents separated before her birth and she (and her mother and sister) lived with grandparents who moved to another farm near Cape Town. her grandmother died in 1938 and her mother died in 1943 when Ingrid was still only 10. After her mother's death she and her sister lived with her father and his third wife but relations with their children were not harmonious.

She produced her first collection of Afrikaans poems, entitled "Na die somer" (After the summer) at the age of sixteen. Despite the fact that several publishers were interested in her work, she was advised to wait before going into print and her first book of poems "Ontvlugting" (Escape) was not published until 1956, the year she married Poeter Venter. her daughter Simone was born the following year.

Her father was a member of the South African Parliament and one of his jobs gave him responsibility for the censorship of publications and entertainments. Ingrid did not agree with his policies on this and the subsequent conflict and stress caused a breakdown which involved her spending time in Valkenberg psychiatric clinic in 1961.

She died at Three Anchor Bay near Cape Town by deliberately walking into the sea to drown herself. Her father, upon hearing of Ingrid's death is reported as saying: "They can throw her back into the sea for all I care".

Perhaps the greatest tribute to her came in 1994 When Nelson Mandela read her poem Die Kind ( wat doodgeskiet is deur soldate by Nyanga) in the original Afrikaans

during his address at the opening of the first democratic parliament.

She was granted the Order of Ikhamanga by the South African President for her outstanding contributions to literature. She wrote her poetry in her native Afrikaans though much of it has been translated into other languages.

Due to the intensity of her poetry and her troubled life she is often refereed to as a South African Sylvia Plath.

The child is not dead

The child lifts his fists against his mother

Who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath

Of freedom and the veld

In the locations of the cordoned heart

The child lifts his fists against his father

in the march of the generations

who shouts Afrika ! shout the breath

of righteousness and blood

in the streets of his embattled pride

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga

not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville

nor at the police station at Philippi

where he lies with a bullet through his brain

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers

on guard with rifles Saracens and batons

the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings

the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers

this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere

the child grown to a man treks through all Africa

the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world

Without a pass

Copyright Notice: 2019. The Authors. Licensee: AOSIS OpenJournals. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

For the English reader who does not feel comfortable enough with their own level of Afrikaans to approach its poetry in the original language, this anthology offers a welcome format: every poem appears in the original Afrikaans and in English translation. This presents the reader with an opportunity to still read and enjoy the sound and feel of the poem in Afrikaans, while at the same time benefitting from the availability of the translation. This might enable readers less familiar with Afrikaans poetry to enjoy the originals on their own terms, while at the same time allowing for the reading of new depth into these Afrikaans poems based on the interpretations that are the English translations.

The publication of a text such as Afrikaans poems with English translations should be welcomed and lauded. I hope that the availability of these poems in English will spark further interest in Afrikaans poetry and lead to more translations and even comparative studies. Perhaps, through a text such as this, which offers a timeously updated corpus of translations of not only older works but of some of the most exciting poetry that has appeared in Afrikaans since the 1980s up to the present, Afrikaans poetry in translation might find its way into the literature curricula and research foci of English literature scholars around the world. If not that, then this collection certainly still offers an enjoyable journey through Afrikaans poetry over the course of about a century.

The current study explores language use in selected Afrikaans poems from a corpus linguistics perspective. The aim is to determine whether the poems can be distinguished from other general Afrikaans texts, other Afrikaans literature texts and from one another (poems written by men versus poems written by women). By analysing the corpora from a corpus linguistics perspective it is possible to determine whether the poets make use of specific grammatical or lexical characteristics that are unique to the corpora as a whole, but also to the male and female poets. Thus, language use and gender are investigated within the genre of Afrikaans poetry.

This study is based on previous research concerning gender and differences in language use as well as gender and genre. Differences in language use with reference to gender and genre have been researched from a variety of perspectives (Mulac 1975; Mulac and Lundell 1994; Barrette 2004 and Herring and Paolillo 2006). However, only a few studies focus on the Afrikaans language and specifically Afrikaans poetry. Poetry is an interesting genre to research from a linguistic perspective since it conceptualises language differently from other text genres. In poetry, language is probably used in the most creative way and words are often chosen very carefully. This study illustrates that certain characteristics can be identified that not only separate the two main corpora from other genres, but also separate the poetry of male and female poets. This suggests that there are both grammatical and lexical characteristics that could be attributed to male and female poets.

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