Review: Vivien Horler

The Interpreters: South Africa’s new nonfiction, edited by Sean Christie and Hedley Twidle (Soutie Press)

When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission sat in the mid-1990s to dig out the secrets of South Africa’s nefarious past, it was decided to use simultaneous interpretation, a process relatively new here.

It all sounds quite simple and obvious, as quoted in a piece titled The Interpreters: “Speakers speak as they normally would while the interpreter listens to one language and reproduce the same content in another, lagging slightly behind the speaker.”

But, as a moment’s reflection would make clear, it is neither simple nor obvious. It is hard to do, and The Interpreters Office in the Southern District of New York says simultaneous interpretation “calls for concentration, mental flexibility, wide-ranging vocabulary in both languages, good diction, voice control and the ability to deal with many stimuli at once”.

In addition, the TRC interpreters had to invent vocabulary in indigenous languages. “There were no references we could check and countercheck nothing. We just had to work [things] out as we were running.”

Sometimes words had to be invented, such as a Sesotho word for multilingualism, which did not exist in the language. Writer Antjie Krog found there was “no good word for perpetrator in Afrikaans – “oortreder” was felt too light.

There were also taboos: in one hearing in Pietermaritzburg an old man refused to describe his torture, which involved his private parts, when his words were to be interpreted by a woman. He said he could speak freely only if a man interpreted his testimony and so a male interpreter took over.

This is just a snippet from a fascinating piece by Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele in this collection.

In an introduction, UCT academic and writer Hedley Twidle says the book contains writing – and some “graphic nonfiction” – concerned with actual people, places and events.

Initially the editors were looking at pieces that fell roughly into a category known in the United States as literary journalism. But later, says Twidle, they shifted the anthology’s centre of gravity to other modes: less journalistic, more reflective, more essay-like.

He quotes Nietzsche saying there are no facts, only interpretations. And he says of the anthology: “The writers collected here have taken up this task of absorbing, shaping and interpreting the overwhelming complexity of our world for the reader – and trusting that reader more than most writing does.”

All of which sounds high minded and literary, which can be off-putting. But don’t be put off – this is a wonderful volume, full of interest and commentary and, yes, interpretations of events we remember.

There are plenty of well-known names: Njabulo S Ndebele, Krog, Mark Gevisser, Jonny Steinberg, Anton Harber, J M Coetzee, Bongani Kona and Zanele Mji – but lesser-known ones too.

I’ve read about half the pieces in the book, and their subject matter is wide- ranging and  generally enlightening. There’s a very long piece by Riaan Malan on the story of Solomon Linda’s song Mbube, misheard by Pete Seeger as Wimoweh; there is Steinberg revisiting the area in KwaZulu-Natal that he wrote about in his first book Midlands; there is William Dicey on the struggles of being a pear farmer in the Boland; Harber on the clash between Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee over Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses; a diary-like piece by Alexandra Dodd on the drama that ensued when Brett Murray’s painting The Spear went on display at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery; and Julie Nxada’s moving piece on realising, as a child, she was not part of the family for whom her mother worked as a housekeeper.

There is a great deal more – The Interpreters runs to almost 500 pages – but all of I’ve read has been fascinating, informative, insightful and truly interesting. It sheds a light – a galaxy of light – on the world we live in. The Interpreters is well worth reading.