Deep South Publishing

"Our little tropical scars" by Ari Sitas, from 'Rough Music: Selected Poems 1989-2013' (Deep South, 2013)

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Berold’s more expansive belief that “writers who can bring the different fragments of reality together will have an important healing function.”

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the young poet Kabomo’s belief that he could “let the bullshit out on paper … (and) be more honest on paper than with my mother, my girlfriend, my best friend and even myself” to

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It is little wonder, therefore, that after liberation the poetry’s potential for exploring and processing psychological anguish has manifested itself, in terms that vary from

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“fragments of psyches … together presenting a picture of a traumatised disturbed society. … I began to realise that in a society like ours it is extremely difficult to distinguish between psychological and social manifestations.”

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In the early years of his editorship, Robert Berold (editor of the poetry journal New Coin between 1989-1999) speaks of receiving poems demonstrating

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From this perspective, the duty of poetry is, according to Bila, “to ask embarrassing questions”; an attitude increasingly removed from the poets of the ruling order.
[...]

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Any perusal of the poetry of Mbongeni Khumalo, Press, Motsapi, Bila, Rampolokeng, and many others shows a radical, critical spirit of enquiry at work.

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These poems highlight the degree to which a country awash with nationalist rhetoric has accepted old habits that do not challenge people’s preconceptions of, or responses to, structures of power.

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In others — such as Karen Press’ “Tiresias in the City of Heroes” and Bila’s “Mandela, Have You Ever Wondered?” — heroes are shown to have feet of clay.

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In some cases, such as Chris Mann’s poem “Where is the Freedom For Which They Died?” the names of heroes and martyrs of the anti-apartheid struggle are used as a comparative counterpoint to shame other South Africans involved in internecine conflict, family abuse and violence.

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In the face of a media obsessed with icons and role-models, the trope of the “hero” has been subjected to scrutiny.

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Since liberation a chorus of poems have emerged critical, at times harshly so, of the new generation of politicians, and the corruption and nepotism that has attended them.

Kelwyn Sole 2017 © Poetry Africa

Cover Art: Mongezi Ncaphayi, 'Come on, now - 2013'

From the article by Kelwyn Sole: "Licking the Stage Clean or Hauling Down the Sky?: The Profile of the Poet and the Politics of Poetry in Contemporary South Africa” for 'Mediations', 2009

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Cover Art: Colbert Mashile, 'Leru Leso'

"A burning sea" and "Songs from the earth" by Mxolisi Nyezwa from 'Malikhanye' (Deep South, 2011)

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consumption by the dominant-culture audience, meeting their often stereotypical expectations of this ‘Other’ — instead of allowing scope for the same range of diverse experiences that are allowed to authors from the dominating cultures, those at the top of Schimel’s pyramid.

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— a representation that is often exaggerated further in translation. In this frame, every book by an author from any of these backgrounds carries the weight of having to represent the experience of ‘the Other’, packaged in predetermined ways for

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Books from ‘Other’ cultures are selected for publication because they fetishise or exoticise the suffering of the ‘Other’; foreground a fictionalised and reductive representation of ‘the Other’ that serves the interests, economically and ideologically, of the dominant culture

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This is at the root of what Glastonbury, in an interview with writer and translator Anton Hur, has called the “trauma porn industrial complex”:

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What do differences in these thresholds tell us about power dynamics?
[...]

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And then the ethical question: Should translators attempt to represent experiences distant to their own embodied experience in the world? And if so, what degree of knowledge is seen as necessary in order to be able to translate, for different translation contexts and directions?

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Are they able to, and if so, how? What kinds of yardsticks do we use to judge whether a translator has done this well (or not)? How are these yardsticks connected to larger social and ideological dynamics?

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The keyword I use for this question is ‘representation in translation’, and the questions that arise here are ones like: How can/does the translator represent experiences that are different from their own (whether close or distant)?

Cover Art: Willem Boshoff, 'Dromomania'

Excerpts from the article by Haidee Kotze: "Translation, representativeness, representation" for 'Medium', 2021

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something felt by many South Africans after liberation and certainly felt by a left-left-leaning poet from Peru living in Paris during the crisis years of the l 930s.

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but are also a fit style for the new human subject tossed about by rapid political change and the sudden impingement of a demanding and confusing global world,

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At the same time, while he makes clear Vallejo's influence, Nyezwa's swift associative oscillations between macrocosm and microcosm, the local and the universal, the familiar and the surreal, not only bring something new to the form Vallejo mastered,

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The South American's poetry characteristically bears stylistic markers that anyone from the Eastern Cape (Nyezwa is from Motherwell), with a knowledge of oral culture and poetics, would recognise - especially the use of initial linking and various kinds of parallelism and repetition.

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Nyezwa's usage, and acknowledgement of, Vallejo should be seen in these terms.

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What is crucial here is not only that Vallejo's formal idiosyncracies resonate with what is culturally or aesthetically similar within local culture, but also that his poems make affective and social sense within some aspects of South African life as it is synchrorically experienced.