Translating Swiss Theatre in Apartheid South Africa

Examines how Afrikaans translations of Frisch and Dürrenmatt's plays shaped identity and resistance in apartheid South Africa.


In apartheid South Africa, the plays of the Swiss writers Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt found an unexpected life in Afrikaans. Because they did not follow their international contemporaries in supporting the cultural boycott, their works were frequently translated and staged there between 1948 and 1994.

This book investigates these Afrikaans translations through close readings of surviving scripts, interviews and archival traces to uncover the lives and motives of the people who translated, directed and performed them. In the process, it reveals the sparks generated between the plays themselves and the South African political context in which they circulated.

Frisch and Dürrenmatt's plays helped to shape the growth of Afrikaans as a world language and an emblem of Afrikaner identity. Yet they were also enlisted as vehicles of resistance, carrying new ideas into an increasingly airless intellectual environment. Exploring these crosscurrents, this book moves beyond the specific concerns of translating Swiss literature into Afrikaans to consider cultural boycotts, censorship, and the ways translation can be harnessed to promote or subvert political and aesthetic values.


On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC. The open access version of this publication was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.43971971