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Translation and History in Karel Schoeman's Na Die

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Translation and History in Karel Schoeman's Na Die “You Can’t Go Home Again”: From Karel Schoeman’s Na die geliefde land to Jason Xenopoulos’s Promised Land Lesley Marx, Department of English University of Cape Town Abstract: This article examines the changes rung on Karel Schoeman’s 1972 novel by the 2003 film adaptation. I take into account the crucial effects and demands of the medium of film as well as the historical moment of production to conclude that the filmic updating of the novel is interesting, finally, for its use of its source material as a vehicle for commenting on post-Apartheid South Africa and the world of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, rather than as an exploration of how Schoeman’s play with exilic consciousness might be brought to screen. Keywords: Post-apartheid South African film; exile; adaptation; Afrikaner identity Na die geliefde land (1972) is marked by the ironies and ambiguities of a modernist sensibility. Karel Schoeman wrote the novel when he had “translated” himself to the Netherlands and was engaged in what would become a lifelong dialogue on the relationship between Europe and South Africa. The novel was duly translated into English as Promised Land (Friedman 1978) , and then into film (Xenopoulos 2004), a transformation of medium that would radically alter its meanings. Of course, the mere change of title involves transformations of meaning: “to the beloved land” (the literal translation) suggests desire, quest, process, yearning for that which was known and is still loved. “Promised land,” however, proposes a given destination, a bequest; the protagonist is a recipient; agency is external to the subject of the narrative. In the film, this shift in meaning will enable less emphasis on the unfolding consciousness of the protagonist, while the visuality and materiality of the land (however symbolically weighted) will take centre frame. Where the invocation of Eden or Canaan in the revised title is explicitly ironic in the film, it is much more ambiguous in the English translation of the novel, which, as verbal translation, tries to engage with the spirit of the original more closely (always acknowledging the dialectic between gain and loss that marks any translation).i As adaptation, however, the film must free itself sufficiently to work as a “multitrack” medium— to use Robert Stam’s 2 phrase (2000: 60). Stam writes persuasively of the flaws in the “fidelity” approach to film adaptations, arguing that the “literary text is not a closed, but an open structure…to be reworked by a boundless context. The text feeds on and is fed into an infinitely permutating intertext, which is seen through ever-shifting grids of interpretation” (57). Writing of Jean-Luc Godard’s adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel Il Disprezzo, he describes how the film, entitled Le Mepris (Contempt, 1963) suggests that “art renews itself through creative mistranslation” (62),ii which may have some consonance with Harold Bloom’s theory of poetic “misprision” (1973: 95). The ways in which Xenopoulos has “mistranslated” Schoeman’s novel reflects not only his personal interests, but his fascination with new technology (high-definition video), and, in terms of Stam’s “ever-shifting grids of interpretation,” the immediate post-apartheid moment of the film’s production. Published at a time in South African history when apocalyptic anxiety was on the increase, Schoeman’s novel tells the story of George, son of Anna Neethling and a diplomat father, a nebulous presence, who is responsible for his son growing up largely in Switzerland. George has only the faintest memories of young childhood on his mother’s family farm, Rietvlei. After her death, he returns to the country of his birth in order to visit the farm, his mother’s bequest to him, and deal with matters of the estate. During his absence, the country has experienced revolution and what is assumed to be a black government is in control. The new government bears all the characteristics of the old in an unnerving inversion of black struggle history: now it is not black prisoners who die in prison, but white; not black families whose homes get invaded and their sons arrested, but white; not black communities that suffer violent destruction, but white. The bittereindersiii with whom George stays greet his arrival with a mixture of hope that he has come home and will join their struggle; bitterness and resentment at the fact of his having escaped their fate; and cynicism and sadness in the face of his determination to return to Switzerland, after the arrest of three young Afrikaans men engaged in resistance. The burden of the novel is George’s attempt to understand why he has come back, and his hope that he will find an answer, notably through encounters with the land. He is caught between various kinds of strangeness and alienation. Hans Ester, comparing the novel with Kafka’s work, notes how George is threatened with a torn and fragmented identity (2002:130). He is about to fall apart. Dissociation marks his narrative consciousness as it does that of Kafka’s protagonists. The dissociation from language is repeated several times: Hattingh, his host, tells him, “You speak Afrikaans like a foreigner”(1978: 2). Later, George wonders if he should have stayed in Switzerland to study his mother’s collection of photos and scrapbooks, instead of coming to “this strange and remote land among people who spoke the same language as he did but with whom he had nothing else in common” 3 (19-20). As he is about to leave, Carla, Hattingh’s daughter—who makes the most trenchant analysis of the Afrikaner’s plight— tells George: “We’re speaking different languages… even though the words sound the same. We remain strangers to one another, and you’ll never understand what I’m talking about.” She adds a poignant plea: “But try”(221). More complex, perhaps, is the sense that George frequently has of being on the brink of understanding and, also, of belonging. At the start of the novel, when George’s grandmother is the topic of conversation, the text suggests that if he could get past words, memory would awaken: “ ‘I can just remember her,’ said George and sought in the shards and debris of his memory, among dreamlike images and the rhythm of sentences of which the words were long lost” (3). The importance of dreams and the proposal here of a sensual, rather than conscious, apprehension of the past become central to George’s quest. Early in the novel, attempting to engage consciously with his mother’s lost world, George walks out onto the farm and gazes at it hoping that he will understand the love and longing that defined his mother’s life: “But no revelation came: he found only solitude and silence, self-sufficient facts, as it were, before him”(8). (The English translation, curiously, uses the word “revelation” for the Afrikaans “antwoord,” meaning “answer”—Schoeman’s George wants a dialogue, a conversation, a process of relation with the land, rather than to be the passive recipient of a revelation). The possibility that dreams will offer answers is explored twice by Schoeman specifically through a dream that George has of being on a beach, walking into the waves and then turning at the call of a group of women behind him. But when he tries to respond to the call, he cannot find them. He cannot decide whether the dream is a memory or a fantasy, whether the coastline is the product of his imagination or the North Sea beach where he had been on holiday as a child. Ester makes the point that the coastline of the Netherlands is a stretch of natural uncultivated terrain, remarkable in a country so imbedded in culture. He describes it as a place of aloneness in the midst of community, a synthesis of solitude, self-sufficiency and social connection (2002: 128). At the end of the novel, George’s dream takes on sharper definition: he sees a white house and women walking: “With a cry of joy he recognized it and the women walking away looked around and stood waiting for him to catch them up” (206). Given the potential for Jungian symbolism, George seems to have achieved at least tentative individuation, shaped by encounters with the female element and the image of the women. Given, too, that it is his mother’s farm that he inherits and her longing that he carries so strongly as both memory and desire, the promised land is a motherland rather than a fatherland. 4 The pivotal moment of return takes place when George finally visits Rietvlei and discovers an overgrown ruin, the buildings having been blown apart by soldiers (63-68). Even while trying to come to terms with the shock, the past begins to infuse the place of the present and he sees his grandmother among the flowers, hears her scissors and her voice. Unsure of whether these are his own memories or those his mother recounted to him or the product of the photographs she used to show him, he is finally convinced by the sound of his grandmother’s voice – for how could he know that voice if the memory were mediated? Here the mediation of his mother’s memories and stories seems to give way to his own memories and a concomitant sense that he knows: time has folded back; the place has answered him. Carla, however, challenges him in her role as reality principle, and he concedes that the experience may be the result of imagination or wish-fulfilment. Her brisk response to his sense of desolation is that nature should be allowed to hold sway again and that he should go home; he does not belong here.
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