‘It means that given certain circumstances we too are capable of throwing a baby up in the air and catching it on a bayonet, or if we cannot see blood, that we, too, could order the murder of a whole village.’
2 Schiess, ‘Remembrance Day’.Henriette Lemmer is the only living translator of the Swiss plays who agreed to be interviewed for this book. Discussing Die Meteoor with her reveals how ordinary law-abiding white Afrikaners regarded the plays they were translating, an attitude that can be extrapolated to the actors who were giving life to Dürrenmatt and Frisch in Afrikaans.
Lemmer was born in Cape Town in 1938. Her paternal grandfather was German, but she doesn’t remember him ever speaking the language. Nevertheless, as she points out: ‘In my soul I just had an affinity for German.’
3 ‘In my siel het ek net ’n affiniteit vir Duits gehad.’ Henriette Lemmer, author interview, 10 September 2024. Having first taken German as a school subject, Lemmer obtained a BA degree from the University of Stellenbosch in 1958 with Afrikaans and German as her main subjects. She married shortly thereafter and moved to Pretoria, taking up various posts as a substitute teacher. Her first translations were made during these early years – novels by Wolfgang Ecke and Friedrich Feld that she translated for Van Schaik Publishers. She also began working for the SABC, writing Afrikaans dialogue for German films that were being dubbed. It was during this time that she translated
Die Meteoor. Later, Lemmer went on to work as a German teacher for South Africa’s foreign affairs department.
Lemmer describes herself as apolitical, even though she voted for the National Party and ended up working for its government. Like so many white Afrikaners of her generation, exposed to little other than the nationalist worldview and growing up in an environment that didn’t foster individual critical thinking, she doesn’t remember questioning the status quo. ‘I voted for the ruling party because my family did’, she acknowledges. ‘I fell in line, I fell in line everywhere, I was a bit of a fence-sitter, I think, you know? I wasn’t conscious of it but if I look back now, then I have to admit that.’
4 ‘Ek’t maar gestem vir die heersende party omdat my familie dit doen en so aan. Ek het maar ingeval, ek het maar orals ingeval, ek was maar so bietjie van ’n draadsitter, dink ek, jy weet? Ek het nie bewustelik so gevoel nie maar as ek nou terugkyk dan moet ek dit sê.’Yet for all this, she also describes herself as more liberal than her contemporaries. She doesn’t recall being shocked by
Der Meteor. If she were, she points out, she would have discussed it with her husband, later a general in South Africa’s defence force whom she describes as a mix of conservatism and liberalism. An ardent admirer of former statesman Jan Smuts, Lemmer’s husband never joined the National Party and frequently found his viewpoints at odds with theirs.
5 Smuts’s admittedly complicated political legacy included regarding ‘the idea of complete separation of the races extreme and unwise’. Saul Dubow, ‘South Africa’s racist founding father was also a human rights pioneer’, New York Times, 18 May 2019, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/opinion/jan-smuts-south-africa.html. Nevertheless, he later worked for General van der Bergh’s dreaded Bureau for State Security (BOSS), a secretive intelligence agency with a broad mandate to maintain national security. Involved in domestic and foreign activities, the agency was subsequently implicated in apartheid’s political killings and human rights abuses.
6 See Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, vol. 2 (Cape Town: Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1998), available at https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/Volume%202.pdf; See also Mary Braid, ‘Obituary: Hendrik van den Bergh’, The Independent, 21 August 1997, available at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-hendrik-van-den-bergh-1246509.html.That a young white Afrikaner, who would spend her life surrounded by and embedded in government structures, translated
Der Meteor and thought nothing of it reminds us that apartheid’s constituents didn’t necessarily share its views. At the same time, it throws into glaring relief that people like her continued to support the regime while it sought to silence those in violation of its most conservative tenets. It is also a reminder that translated texts carry their messages under the camouflage of the foreign. As far as Lemmer was concerned,
Die Meteoor was a Swiss play that did not have to answer to Afrikaans views on sex and religion: ‘We aren’t trying to communicate the Afrikaans spirit, after all. We are trying to do the Swiss thing. And, I mean, they have been liberal for a long time as far as that is concerned, right?’
7 ‘Ons probeer mos nou nie die Afrikaanse gees weer te gee nie,’ she points out. ‘Ons probeer die Switserse ding te doen. En ek meen, hulle is lankal liberaal wat dit betref, né?’It is there, of course, where translation’s subversive power lies, why translated texts are capable of smuggling fresh and contentious ideas into contexts too repressive to allow such ideas to grow from indigenous soil. Not only did Lemmer forget the 1967 attempt to censor her translation, she can’t remember considering why anyone would ever want to: ‘I can laugh at myself now’, she chuckles, ‘that I was so devoted at that stage to the translation that I didn’t pay much attention to the message that was communicated in that way, you know?’
8 ‘Ek kry nou lag vir myself, dat ek op daardie stadium so toegewy was aan die vertaling dat ek glad nie my baie gesteur het aan die boodskap wat daardeur oorgedra word nie, jy weet.’Lemmer describes her translation as an attempt to stay as close as possible to the original ‘without the German peeking through the whole time’.
9 ‘sonder dat die Duits die hele tyd daardeur loer’. Aiming for a fluent and idiomatic Afrikaans that communicated as faithfully as possible the contents and spirit of the German, her translation was motivated by a mix of domesticating and foreignizing strategies. Barring a number of mistranslations – ‘plafon’ (‘ceiling’) for ‘Decke’ (‘blanket), ‘my hart sit uit’ (‘my heart is expanding’) for ‘Mein Herz setzt aus’ (‘my heart is failing’), and ‘jonk!’ (‘young!’) for ‘Junge!’ (‘boy!’) – it is a close rendering of Dürrenmatt’s text
.10 Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Die Meteoor, trans. Henriette Lemmer, n.d., manuscript, private collection, 5, 11, 37; Dürrenmatt, Der Meteor, 12, 19, 55.Nevertheless, several domesticating choices transplant
Die Meteoor into an Afrikaans cultural context. These include rendering ‘ein Kotelett’ (‘a cutlet’) as ‘’n braairibbetjie’ (‘a barbecued rib’), and, most significantly – given the play’s religious preoccupation – ‘Pfarrer’ (‘minister of the Protestant Church’) as ‘dominee’ (‘minister of the Dutch Reformed Church’).
11 Dürrenmatt, Der Meteor, 42, 70, 14; Dürrenmatt, Die Meteoor, 28, 45, 6. On singular occasions, Lemmer also made accommodations for the translation’s likely audience, omitting an allusion to the scream of orgasm, for example, or translating the blasphemous ‘jesses’ (from ‘Jesus’) as ‘magtig’ (the equivalent of ‘goodness!’).
12 Dürrenmatt, Der Meteor, 46, 53; Dürrenmatt, Die Meteoor, 30, 35.Yet the play’s potential to offend conservative Afrikaner Christian watchdogs was undimmed. Its nudity was retained, so, too, its implied sex scene. In the Afrikaans, as in the German, Schwitter’s young wife is still a call-girl, his mother-in-law still a pimp. A dominee in the Dutch Reformed Church is still suspected of having had an extramarital affair. Most significantly, Schwitter’s persistent ‘dying’ and ‘resurrecting’ had the same power to disquiet. Schwitter still rejects a Christian interpretation of the supposed ‘miracle’, denying God’s existence and insisting that he has no soul. In the delightfully absurd and comical final scene, he still begs the choir of worshippers to cease their hallelujahs and tear him to pieces, stamp him out, throw him down the stairs, and beat him to death with guitars and trumpets.