Contemporary Afrikaans Fiction in the World: The Englishing of Marlene van Niekerk

Abstract

Many of the most ambitious and important South African novels of the past fi fty years have been written in Afrikaans, but in order to reach a global audience the authors have had to turn to translators. Focusing on Marlene van Niekerk’s novels Triomf (1994; English translation by Leon de Kock, 2000) and Agaat (2004; English translation by Michiel Heyns, 2007), this article examines the challenges that this fi ction, and the particular character and social status of different varieties of Afrikaans, present to the translator, and discusses the signifi cance of the differences between versions addressed to an English-speaking South African readership and versions addressed to a global readership. Derrida’s claim that the only thing to be translated is the untranslatable is discussed, and the untranslatability of Triomf and Agaat, it is suggested, also means that they can only be translated and retranslated.