‘A full-scale air-conditioning system ensures ideal conditions in the auditorium, foyers, and restaurant.’

A symptomatic reading of Die Besoek begins with the ways Smit domesticates Dürrenmatt. Although the play’s fictional town names are retained, certain landmarks and personal names are domesticated.3 ‘Platz-an-der-Sonne-Hütte’ is translated as ‘Sonne-Oord’, and the old lady’s name, ‘Kläri Wäscher’, changed to ‘Klaartjie Wasser’. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch der alten Dame (Zürich: Arche, 1956), 9, 12; Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Die besoek van die ou dame, trans. Bartho Smit (Johannesburg: Simondium, 1962), 10, 12. Throughout, kilometres are converted to miles. For some German phrases, Smit finds idiomatic Afrikaans equivalents, like translating ‘uns sonntäglich herzurichten’ (‘to prepare ourselves in a Sunday-way’) as ‘om ons kisklere te gaan aantrek’ (‘to put our coffin clothes on’).4 Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch, 14; Dürrenmatt, Die Besoek, 15. Some of these involve larger shifts in meaning than others. ‘Cowboy-film’ replaces the German ‘Ganghoferfilm’ (a reference to the Bavarian writer Ludwig Ganghofer) and ‘Feuerglocke’ (‘fire bell’) becomes ‘vreugdeklokke’ (‘bells of joy’), a translation that entails a significant semantic shift.5 Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch, 44, 11; Dürrenmatt, Die Besoek, 46, 11.

For all its fluency, the text’s discontinuities are easy to spot. There are numerous errors where dialogue or stage directions are omitted or attributed to the wrong character.6 See Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch, 24, 49; See also Dürrenmatt, Die Besoek, 42. Without rhyme or reason, Smit also tinkers with time. Sometimes, the year ‘1910’ becomes ‘1916’, and while forty-five years have passed in the German text since Claire and Ill’s youthful romance, this interval is sometimes reduced to thirty-five in the Afrikaans version.7 See Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch, 25, 33–4; See also Dürrenmatt, Die Besoek, 26, 34–5. The ‘Rasende Roland’ still arrives at 11:27, but the train from Kalberstadt now arrives seventeen minutes later.8 Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch, 9; Dürrenmatt, Die Besoek, 9. Monetary amounts, too, are curiously altered: the Afrikaans train conductor is paid the same as the Swiss one, but when the old lady tries to buy justice with Ill’s death, she offers the Afrikaans townsfolk ten times less.

Already in 1985, Salomi Louw noted inconsistencies in Smit’s translation – his haphazard recourse to French loanwords, for instance, or his tendency to render the same German word differently in different contexts.9 Louw, ‘Die Bartho Smit-vertalings’, 57–8. Yet, for Louw, Smit at times hews uncomfortably close to Dürrenmatt, once again revealing the historical preference that critics and audiences alike have shown for domesticated translations.10 Ibid., 57. Examples she cites include the direct translation ‘opereer vreugdevol die arts’ for ‘operiert freudig der Arzt’ (‘operates joyfully the doctor’), one instance where Smit mirrors the German syntax. Yet despite this, Louw still praises the drama as ‘fluent and playable’.11 ‘vlot en opvoerbaar’. Louw, ‘Die Bartho Smit-vertalings’, 57–8.

Writing in 1986, Louw failed to recognize the inscription of the receiving culture in Smit’s translation. A close comparison between the texts reveals numerous shifts that align the play with the generally accepted mores and values of Afrikaner Christian Nationalism. Where Claire and Ill, seventeen and twenty years old, respectively, kissed each other under the trees in Dürrenmatt’s text, the Afrikaans has them merely embracing. Smit also pertinently inserted the word ‘buite-egtelik’ (‘out of wedlock’) to Dürrenmatt’s ‘Vater ihres Kindes’ (‘father of her child’).12 Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch, 33; Dürrenmatt, Die Besoek, 34. Where, in the German, the eunuchs admit they had falsely claimed to have slept with Klara, the Afrikaans text has them euphemistically seducing her.

The respect for church and faith that was such a cornerstone of mainstream Afrikaner society is woven into Smit’s text in other ways as well. Smit handles each of the five appearances in Dürrenmatt’s play of ‘Mein Gott’ (‘My God’) differently. Yet, arguably, this choice was not taken to avoid blasphemy, but to better approach equivalence. Infrequently uttered by the majority of Afrikaners, and never casually, ‘My God’ would hardly have had the same effect on an Afrikaans audience as ‘Mein Gott’ on a German one. Translated as ‘Vader’ (‘Father’), ‘Vader in die hemel’ (‘Father in heaven’), and ‘Genugtig, man’ (‘Goodness, man’), or else simply left out, Smit renders only one ‘Mein Gott’ as ‘My God’.13 Dürrenmatt, Die Besoek, 15, 69, 55, 17, 94. This is Ill’s existential cry after he is condemned to death, the only moment that might be read as a genuine attempt to communicate with God. Yet thirty years later, it still had the potential to offend. When the University of the Free State staged a revival of Die Besoek in 1997, leading figures in the university registered their objection to it, as actress and lecturer Stéphanie Brink remembers: ‘We were actually reprimanded, you know, as people who ought to know better.’14 ‘Ons is eintlik oor die vingers getik, jy weet, as mense wat beter behoort te weet.’ Stéphanie Brink, author interview, 25 November 2020.

Most significant, however, is how Smit’s volk consciousness and the Afrikaans language’s well-developed vocabulary around race and skin-colour are woven into his translation. ‘Was sind wir für Menschen’ (‘What kind of people are we’) is translated as ‘ons is ’n treurige ras van mense’ (‘We are a sad race of people).15 Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch, 77; Dürrenmatt, Die Besoek, 77. In Dürrenmatt’s text, Ill kisses Claire’s prosthetic hand and describes it as ‘die selbe kühle weiße Hand’ (‘the same cool white hand’).16 Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch, 27. Smit’s translation strategy adds an entirely new context to the play when Ill lovingly describes it as ‘dieselfde koel, blanke hand’.17 Dürrenmatt, Die Besoek, 29. It is in the invocation of the racial category ‘blanke’, formalized by the regime to refer to whites, that apartheid South Africa becomes indelibly inscribed onto the play.

In the context of apartheid South Africa, with its racist economic underpinnings that consistently won out over morality and compassion, the play’s central theme of the corrupting power of money is particularly apposite. When the townspeople of Güllen, at least at first, refuse the vengeful Claire’s offer of a fortune for Ill’s life, this context renders the mayor’s protestation even more ominous: ‘Mevrou Zachanassian, ons is nog in Europa, ons is nog geen heidene nie. Ek wys in naam van die dorp Güllen u aanbod van die hand. In naam van die menslikheid. Ons bly liewers arm as om ons hande met bloed te bevlek’ (‘Mrs Zachanassian, we are still in Europe, we are not heathens yet. In the name of the town of Güllen, I refuse your offer. In the name of humanity. We would rather stay poor than stain our hands with blood’).18 Dürrenmatt, Die Besoek, 37.

Smit placed Dürrenmatt’s play within a literary tradition concerned with the protection of Christian norms and values and the strengthening of the Afrikaner volk spirit, a tradition that supported key tenets of the apartheid agenda. And instead of producing a translation that challenged the dominant values of the target culture by highlighting the cultural and linguistic differences of the foreign text, his translation strengthened them. Crucially, even the instances where Smit pursued a foreignizing strategy stood in the service of the domestic.

The retention of German-language place and train names, the mention of figures like Brahms and Goethe, or the town meeting where only men may vote don’t have a foreignizing effect at all. Rather than facilitating an alien reading experience, they provided Afrikaans audiences with ‘the narcissistic experience of recognizing their own culture in a cultural other’.19 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 12. Paradoxically, Smit’s retention of what was different in Dürrenmatt’s play underlined sameness, underscoring Afrikaners’ connection to Western Europe. Put differently, it reassured them that the cultural other, in this case German-speaking Switzerland, was really no Other at all, but the genealogical and cultural self. As Smit had written from Europe in 1956: ‘the Boers remain, in the last instance, the only true Europeans in South Africa.’20 ‘die Boere bly in die laaste instansie die enigste werklike Europeërs in Suid-Afrika’. Smit to Neethling-Pohl, 14 February 1956.

This strategy isn’t merely apparent in the surface text of Die Besoek. It is woven into the very fabric of Smit’s Afrikaans. It is here where the play released its ‘domestic remainder’, textual effects that resonate only in the receiving culture and language.21 Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation, community, utopia’, in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2000), 470–1. In other words, something was created in Smit’s translation that was not present in Dürrenmatt’s text at all.

Dürrenmatt’s characters, ideas, and images found expression in the middle of the twentieth century in an established world language with recent memories of an imperialist appetite. Yet they did so with effort and not a small measure of mistrust on the part of their author. Dürrenmatt’s written German is marked by a stylistic simplicity, reflecting the fact that his first language was a rural dialect from the Bernese Oberland. ‘German was for him in fact an acquired language, one that the aspiring author still wrote only with difficulty’, writes Theodore Ziolkowski.22 Theodore Ziolkowski, ‘Introduction’, in Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Selected Writings Volume 2: Fictions, ed. Theodore Ziolkowski (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), xi. Pointing out that Dürrenmatt regarded the language as a hurdle, he concludes that he had a ‘continuing distrust of the written language as a mode of expression’.

In an ironically suggestive manner, Die Besoek shifted the historical-linguistic dimension of the original Dürrenmatt text within Afrikaans cultural history. Whatever was tentative or fragile about the Swiss playwright’s German was transformed into decisiveness and self-assurance as his play was cast into the increasingly muscular language of Afrikaans. On the shoulders of Dürrenmatt, amongst others, Afrikaners built a unique literary treasure, pulling off an extraordinary decolonial feat in demonstrating that former colonial victims could participate in world culture in their own language.

Along the way, the purification and standardization of Afrikaans was of paramount importance. Whether consciously or not, Smit’s retention of German syntax and close literal translations within an otherwise domesticated Afrikaans produced a version of the language that privileges its European origins rather than its creolized roots – a parallel to the feared concept in the Afrikaans vocabulary, ‘bloedvermenging’ (‘blood-mixing’).23 See Coetzee, ‘The mind of apartheid’. One could therefore argue that Smit’s translations contributed to the broader project of developing and privileging one variant of Afrikaans at the expense of its coloured speakers. By 1962, Dürrenmatt, through Smit, contributed not only to the development of Afrikaans as a world language, but also to the creation of a powerful symbol of Afrikaner identity.