‘Crowd noises in the street (before Riot).’

Stockenström is an important Afrikaans writer who won the prestigious Hertzog Prize in multiple categories. She debuted in the seventies with a poetry collection and, following the Sestigers, brought her own critical perspective to Afrikaner nationalism.4 See T. T. Cloete, ‘Wilma Stockenström’, in Perspektief & profiel: ’n Afrikaanse literatuurgeskiedenis: Deel 2, ed. H. P. Van Coller (Pretoria: J. L. van Schaik, 1999), 607–20. As an actress, she worked with progressive playwrights Barney Simon and Fugard, both of whom explored the human cost of apartheid. Fugard recalls her as ‘a woman with a big heart and certainly not a supporter of the regime’.5 Athol Fugard, conversation with the author, 20 April 2023. Her husband, Ants Kirsipuu, co-translator of Andorra, was an Estonian linguist who came to South Africa in 1950 and worked as a translator at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Little is known about Kirsipuu beyond the fact that, within seven years of arriving, he had learnt Afrikaans well enough to translate into it.6 See ‘Ants Kirsipuu’, Encyclopedia of South African Theatre, Film, Media and Performance (ESAT), available at https://esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/Ants_Kirsipuu.

Years later, Schiess remembered their Andorra as ‘the finest translation of a German play into another language’, concluding: ‘A good translation is a recreation in a new language, and this one was the recreation of a poet.’7 Schiess, ‘Chronicle’, 48.

Kirsipuu and Stockenström’s translation navigates between domesticating and foreignizing strategies. In terms of domesticating choices, they often render German expressions into idiomatic Afrikaans: ‘Michelin-Männchen’ (‘Michelin man’) becomes ‘pampoenspook’ (‘pumpkin ghost’) and ‘platzt mir der Kragen’ (‘my collar is about to burst’), ‘raak ek die donder in’ (to become angry, literally ‘thunderous’).8 Max Frisch, Andorra (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), 7, 43; Frisch, Andorra, trans. Kirsipuu and Kirsipuu, 1, 25. Throughout, kilograms are changed to pounds. Some of their choices illustrate the inevitable ethnocentric violence wrought in producing a legible translation. The German expression, ‘Gott sei’s geklagt’ (‘Let it be lamented to God’), for example, is translated as ‘God weet dis eie my skuld’ (‘God knows it’s my own fault’), while ‘Pfui Teufel’ (literally ‘Urgh, the Devil’, but meaning ‘Urgh, that’s disgusting!’) is rendered as ‘Siesa’ (‘Urgh’).9 Frisch, Andorra, 32, 21; Frisch, Andorra, trans. Kirsipuu and Kirsipuu, 18, 11.

Yet Kirsipuu and Stockenström also employed a foreignizing strategy, resisting the values and ideologies of the receiving culture. They often retain language that could offend Afrikaner Christian sensibilities. ‘Dann nehm ich sie von hinten’ (‘then I’ll take her from behind’) is translated word-for-word.10 Frisch, Andorra, 23; Frisch, Andorra, trans. Kirsipuu and Kirsipuu, 13. ‘Geil’ (‘horny’) is rendered faithfully, so, too, ‘wir scheißen in die Hosen, daß es zu den Stiefeln heraufkommt’ (‘we’re shitting in our pants so that it’s coming up the top of our boots’).11 Frisch, Andorra, 25, 22; Frisch, Andorra, trans. Kirsipuu and Kirsipuu, 14, 12. This includes potentially blasphemous expressions, such as the German ‘Um Gotteswillen!’ (‘for God’s sake’), translated as ‘In Godsnaam!’ (‘In God’s name!’).12 Frisch, Andorra, 71; Frisch, Andorra, trans. Kirsipuu and Kirsipuu, 43.

Fluency is often eschewed in favour of direct translation that preserves the syntactical and lexical peculiarities of the German. This approach is particularly significant at the very start of the play, where ‘weißle’ (‘whitewash’) is rendered as ‘wit’ (‘white’). Thus the German line, ‘Weißelt, ihr Jungfraun, weißelt das Haus eurer Väter, auf daß wir ein weißes Andorra haben, ihr Jungfraun, ein schneeweißes Andorra!’ (‘Whitewash, you virgins, whitewash your father’s houses, so that we have a white Andorra, you virgins, a snow-white Andorra!’) becomes in Afrikaans: ‘Wit, julle jongedogters, wit die huise van julle vaders, opdat ons ’n wit Andorra het, julle jongedogters, ’n sneeuwit Andorra!’13 Frisch, Andorra, 8; Frisch, Andorra, trans. Kirsipuu and Kirsipuu, 2. For the English translation, see Max Frisch, The Fire Raisers, Andorra, Triptych, trans. Michael Bullock (London: Methuen Drama, 1993), 98. Similarly, ‘Schwarze’ (‘blacks’) is translated as ‘Swartes’, equivalent to ‘Blacks’ with a capital ‘B’.

Translation theorists have long argued that translators are responsible not only for representing a foreign text’s distinctiveness, but also for ensuring its reception in a new domestic context.14 See Matthew Reynolds, Translation: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 78. Given South Africa’s racial preoccupation regarding ‘black’ and ‘white’ and the constant threat of censorship, these two crucial decisions risk compromising that responsibility. At the very least, they conflict with Eugene Nida’s concept of ‘dynamic equivalence’, which has the admittedly improbable goal of ‘producing in the ultimate receptors a response similar to that of the original receptors’.15 Eugene A. Nida, Toward a Science of Translating: With Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 159, 163.

It is clear that Schiess sought to honour the commitment he had made to Frisch regarding the translation, recalling his avowal that he always worked from the German text and altered the translation ‘if it does not agree’.16 Schiess to Czech, 4 November 1963. Perhaps even more than in the case of Die Brandstigters, it is Schiess – not the play’s translators – whose presence we glimpse underneath the cracks in this translation, behind the discontinuities and the uneven mixture of fluent, idiomatic language and close adherence to the original German. Ultimately, Schiess came to regard the resulting translation as ‘much closer to Frisch’s German than the published English one’ by Bullock.17 Mario Schiess to Dr S. Czech, correspondence, 12 May 1964, private collection.

In 1963, confusion over who held the English-language rights to Andorra led to a curious exchange between Schiess and Czech. The state-funded PACT had falsely claimed exclusive rights to the play but also stated that they did not intend to stage it ‘because of such expressions as “The Blacks”’.18 Mario Schiess to Dr S. Czech, correspondence, 30 December 1963, private collection. Writing to Czech, Schiess remarked: ‘This sounds so lame that I am now convinced that their original claim was pure bluff.’19 Ibid. This was before Schiess had conceived an Afrikaans Andorra. Was it still absurd to him that ‘die Swartes’ could be misread as referring to one of South Africa’s official population groups, or had PACT’s reaction to the play sparked an idea?

Any answer to this question must remain speculative, so, too, whether he and the play’s translators intended the constant evocation of black invasion as a veiled political gesture. Nevertheless, it seems inconceivable that Kirsipuu and Stockenström would not have known that rendering ‘weiß’ as ‘wit’ and ‘schwarz’ as ‘swart’ immediately situated the play within a South African context. It is here that the Afrikaans Andorra, similar to Smit’s Die Besoek, releases a ‘domestic remainder’ absent from the original, the implicit racialization inherent in the uncontextualized use of ‘wit’ and ‘swart’ generating unforeseen connotations that enable a fresh reading of the play.

In the Afrikaans Andorra, Andri becomes the offspring of an interracial sexual relationship, his mother being one of the blacks from ‘over there’. This was illegal during apartheid. Andri is persecuted, therefore, not for being Jewish, but for embodying ‘blood-mixing’, to imitate the blood-curdling terminology of Geoffrey Cronjé, author of ’n Tuiste vir die Nageslag discussed in the first chapter.

During apartheid, a racial classification board was responsible for sorting South Africa’s diverse population into rigid, legally defined population groups. This was done by relying on racial stereotypes, questioning individuals about their habits, and subjecting them to physical tests designed to reveal supposed racial markers. One infamous example was the pencil test, during which a pencil was pushed through a person’s hair to determine whether it had a ‘European’ or ‘African’ texture. This board would have classified Andri as coloured. No other racial group faced as much negative stereotyping, nor struggled as profoundly with the internalization of such stereotypes: of being assumed drunk, lazy, and sexually promiscuous and, by existing between the ‘pure’ categories of black and white, of having no history or culture.20 See Zimitri Erasmus, ‘Introduction: Re-imagining coloured identities in post-apartheid South Africa’, in Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, ed. Zimitri Erasmus (Cape Town: Kwela Books in association with South African History Online, 2001).

South Africa’s racial classification board is eerily reminiscent of Frisch’s ‘Judenschau’, translated by Kirsipuu and Stockenström as ‘Jode-uitkennings-parade’ and by Bullock as the ‘Jew Inspection’.21 Frisch, Andorra, 106; Frisch, Andorra, trans. Kirsipuu and Kirsipuu, 64; Frisch, Andorra, trans. Bullock, 165. In this scene, Andorra’s inhabitants are physically examined. Turning to one of the play’s minor characters, The Somebody, ‘The Jew Detector […] scrutinizes him for a long time like an indifferent but conscientious official’, then ‘holds his ballpoint pen under The Somebody’s chin’.22 Frisch, Andorra, trans. Bullock, 176. When he examines Andri, ‘he empties out Andri’s trouser pockets; coins fall out’; next, ‘The Jew Detector feels Andri’s hair’.23 Ibid., 178.

At this point, a straightforward transplantation of Andorra into a South African context becomes complicated. By the time Andri is led to his execution, it is at the hand of the Blacks who have invaded, not the Whites – though the latter are complicit in both overt and subtle ways. The feared Blacks the audience had heard so much about since the start of the play were portrayed by white actors – not in blackface, which at the time would have been the only legal way to portray a black person alongside white actors. Moreover, those categories collapse: the Whites are to be feared just as much as the Blacks. Eventually, they become indistinguishable from one another. It is here that the subversive potential of the Afrikaans Andorra lies.

‘Ek kom van daar oorkant, jy hoor mos hoe ek hulle irriteer’ (‘I come from over there, you can hear, can’t you, how much I annoy them’), Andri’s mother explains when she arrives in Andorra. ‘’n Swarte! So noem hulle ons hier, ek weet …’ (‘A black! That’s what they call us here, I know …’).24 Frisch, Andorra, trans. Kirsipuu and Kirsipuu, 49. Confronting Andri’s father for perpetuating the lie about their son, she surmises that his motive was to show how different the whites in Andorra are – and that he did so out of hatred for her. Meanwhile – as she points out – they aren’t that different from their neighbours at all. Her words before she is stoned to death resonate powerfully in the aftermath of apartheid: ‘Geen mens verstaan sy ouers as hy die wêreld sien wat hulle hom nagelaat het nie’ (‘No person understands his parents when he sees the world they have left for him’).25 Ibid., 50.

At the end of the play, Andri’s sister-lover Barblin resumes her whitewashing, but she is changed. ‘Bloed, bloed, bloed, oral’ (‘Blood, blood, blood, everywhere’), she laments. ‘Ek wit, ek wit, opdat ons ’n sneeuwit Andorra het, julle moordenaars’ (‘I’m whiting, I’m whiting so that we can have a snow-white Andorra, you murderers’), she says, challenging Andorra’s inhabitants to go home and hang themselves.26 Frisch, Andorra, trans. Kirsipuu and Kirsipuu, 79. Finally, she turns to the priest: where were you, she asks, when they came to collect our brother for slaughter? White Afrikaners, confronted at the start of the play with the image of a hypocritical church stained with pig’s blood, might well have reflected on the dominees preaching to them from their own pulpits.