Mqhayi's chapter and verse: Kees van die Kalahari becoming u-Adonisi wasentlango
Xhosa's best and most well-known imbongi and poet, S. E. K. Mqhayi, once translated an Afrikaans book Kees van die Kalahari into Xhosa-a story about the trials and tribulations of a leader baboon and his tribe. The Xhosa translation had been prescribed for generations of pupils and became one of the language's most well-known texts. As part of a larger project which will compare the two texts in their totality, this essay is a preliminary exercise to determine the history of the translated text and more specifically to explore what Mqhayi's possible translation strategies could have been which rendered the book so 'home-grown'. According to Sindiwe Magona, 'It was prescribed to me in high school and I taught it, but neither I, nor my colleagues, realised that it was a translation. And even now, there is no feeling that behind this text there is another one, it feels so authentic!' There are in fact two other texts: the original English text which spawned the well-known Afrikaans book Kees van die Kalahari, written/translated by the brothers S. B. and G. C. Hobson. The Afrikaans text won the coveted Afrikaans Hertzog Prize for prose and was reprinted 33 times.
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Digital revista |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde Association, Department of Afrikaans, University of Pretoria
2015
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| Online Access: | http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0041-476X2015000100001 |
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