Abstract
This article deals with the issue of cultural translation in a postapartheid text through the analysis of language, setting and discourse to highlight cultural transition in a society where socio-political mutations elicit new literary codes and symbols. The discussion is developed around concepts such as gender and ethnic identity or citizenship in a geographical environment where multi- and transcultural identities are endlessly being contested. The concept of translation is explored to show how Moele’s text represents cultural transition within a postapartheid urban context by analysing the authorial transposition of everyday experience into the textual fabric. The article also examines how the narrative voice negotiates across the current multicultural divide in order to highlight cultural change both in South African literature and in society as a whole. This article addresses in the discussion the controversial debate raised by Michael Titlestad’s (2007) review of the book published in the “Sunday times” on 25 March in which the critic evinces a negative reception of the book. This is used as a point of departure in order to explore a wide range of possibilities that fiction can offer by means of textual representation of the daily experience of black people in a postapartheid urban context.
Highlights
Hierdie artikel bespreek die kwessie van kulturele vertaling in ’n postapartheidsteks deur middel van die analise van taalgebruik, Literator 31(1) April 2010:57-75
The end of apartheid has opened doors for new imaginings in South African literature as well as for novel perspectives in its literary criticism in order to claim a place in the global imaginary
The only way to remedy the crisis in the readership of South African fiction is to ensure that novels are as interesting, as cogent and compelling, and as readable as possible
Summary
The end of apartheid has opened doors for new imaginings in South African literature as well as for novel perspectives in its literary criticism in order to claim a place in the global imaginary. The pitfalls of the literary debut, published in the Sunday times of 25 March 2007, Michael Titlestad assesses the aesthetic validity of Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 by stating that the novel is an “unfinished work” (2007:2), because “[i]t eschews the niceties of novelistic prose and the formal criteria of plot and character development in favour of immediacy It sprawls, comprising as it does seemingly random encounters and loosely related narrative lines” (Titlestad, 2007:1). This article uses Michael Titlestad’s reception of the book as a point of departure to discuss the emergence of new literary features of postapartheid writing, using the concept of translation to analyse literary representations of the South African cultural transition This concept is deployed to assess the degree of change in literary representation of the postapartheid context by exploring the literary, linguistic and cultural aspects of translation
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