Elizabeth Eybers Se Nederlandse Bundels, 1962-1991.

[摘要] Since Eybers went to live in Amsterdam in 1961 her poetry has always beensimultaneously published in Amsterdam and Cape Town. Nine of her sixteen collectionssince she made her debut in 1936 can therefore be called Dutch in the sense that theyhave not only been published in the Netherlands, but have also been reviewed thereextensively and very positively. She is regarded as a poet belonging to the Dutch literarytradition, and was awarded the highest prize for Dutch literature in 1991. All of this hashappened without her losing her South African readership or status as one of the greatestAfrikaans poets.In this study I present an overview of the situation in Holland with regard to the scantacceptance and Jack of knowledge of Afrikaans and of its literature at the time Eyberswent to live there. The uniqueness of her Dutch acceptance is analysed against thisbackground. An overview of her Dutch and South African reviews (1962-1992)clearlyshows that Dutch reviewers have always been fascinated by the fact that they canunderstand her work in spite of the fact that Afrikaans is otherwise considered a languagefrom which texts need to be translated into Dutch in order to be readable and marketable.Because Eybers lives in the Netherlands she shares a frame of reference with her Dutchreaders. Her language has incorporated many typical Dutch phrases, allowing her poetryto become more accessible and familiar to Dutch readers. Basically,though, she still writesin Afrikaans and South African readers still read and regard her as an Afrikaans poet Inher poems - which often describe her state of voluntary exile and In which memories ofthe vast South African landscape are described - South African readers therefore findmuch which is familiar to them. Her themes -Iove.Ionellness, ageing, death, estrangement- are universal. In spite of this wide acceptance an in depth study or the particularities ofthe Eybers Idiolect and fields of reference clearly shows that both sets of leaders areconstantly faced with quite severe comprehension problems. I therefore argue that thework of Eybers offers a unique example of making it strange, the element which theRussian Formalists regarded as the essentiai difference between natural language andpoetic language. The double world and go between language of Eybers result in ablend of intimacy and strengeness which two sets of readers experience in different ways.I argue that particular ungrammaticalities make her Dutch volumes doubly poetical.Formalist, reception and semiotic theories are employed in a descriptive explanation ofthe Eybers phenomenon.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand