Radiophonics

Translating ‘Sing Like A River’ into ‘Sing soos ‘n rivier’

by Henning Pieterse

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The initial “brief” for the poem - language-related words as basis - is still fresh in my mind. I tried to stay as close as possible to Graham Mort’s excellent reworking of the poem during my translation process - I tried to imitate the metre, movement and flow, and was successful up to a point (Afrikaans and English are both Germanic languages after all, although the character of Afrikaans is becoming more and more African), but had to change word order here and there to render grammatically “correct” parts of speech. The level on which I could “gain” the most in my translation, was that of sound - internal and half-rhyme (first and fifth stanza), alliteration and assonance: [e:] and [?] in the first stanza, [f] in the second, [i] in the third, [x] in the fourth (“elusive thought” = “glipperige gedagte”, here contributing on an onomatopoetic level as well), [?] in the fifth, etc. In the tenth stanza, I had to choose between “treiter” and “folter” (“torments”); I chose “treiter” and the result was assonance with “Vyand” and a reduction in the alliterating [f] sounds. Still on the phonologic level: I lost the play on “mimed/mind” (stanza 4) in my translation. “Open” and “closes” (stanza 11) could be effected as “ontsluit” and “áfsluit”, with an element of morphologic playfulness.

I had difficulty in finding a suitable equivalent for “strains”. In the original poem, there are connotations with “(blood)lines”, “sounds” and “exertion” (“baggage”). I opted for “tone” (“tones”/ “strains”), because of its connotations with sound spectra, “ways”, as well as with the exertion implied by the action of “telling”, here in the alliterative sense. Here I lost out on Graham’s “streams”/“strains”.

The whole translation exercise was very rewarding and educative, as was the initial “fabrication” of the poem.

February, 2006