Doris Lessing
A LETTER FROM HOME
...
ja,
but that isn't why I'm writing this time. You
asked about Dick. You're worrying about him?-man! but he's got
a poetry scholarship from a Texas university and he's lecturing the
Texans about letters and life too in Suid Afrika, South Africa to you
(forgive the hostility) and his poems are read, so they
tell
me,
wherever the English read poetry. He's fine, man, but I thought I'd
tell you about Johannes Potgieter, remember him? Remember the
young poet, The Young Poet? He was around that winter you were
here, don't tell me you've forgotten those big melting brown eyes
and those dimples. About ten years ago (ja, time flies,) he got a
type of unofficial grace-gift of a job at St. - University on the
strength of those poems of his, and God they were good. Not that
you or any other English-speaking
domkop
will ever know, because
they don't translate out of Afrikaans. Remember me telling you and
everyone else (give me credit for that at least, I give the devil
his
due, when he's a poet) what a poet he was, how blerry good he
was-but several people tried to translate Hans' poems, including
me, and failed. Right.
Coed.
Meanwhile a third of the world's popula–
tion or is it a fifth, or to put it another way, X5Y59 million people
speak English (and it's increasing by six births a minute) but one
million people speak Afrikaans, and though I say it in a whisper,
man, only a fraction of them can read it, I mean to read
it.
But
Hans is still a great poet. Right.
He wasn't all that happy about being a sort of unofficial Laureate
at that University, it's no secret some poets don't make Laureates.
At the end of seven months he produced a book of poems which
had the whole God-fearing place sweating and sniffing out heresy of
all kinds, sin, sex, liberalism, brother-love etc. and so on; but of
course in a civilized country (I say
this
under my breath, or I'll get
