Worlds Elsewhere (52 page)

According to an interview given much later to the Johannesburg
Star,
Plaatje followed this up with
Othello
(‘translated partly in 1923 on a voyage from Quebec to Cherbourg and completed on a journey from Southampton to the Cape a year later'),
The Merchant of Venice, The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing
and
Romeo and Juliet.
All but the last three, I suspected, he had seen on stage.

There was one maudlin note. The article in the
Star
would not be published until July 1930, two years before Plaatje's death. The project would take over thirteen years, and in the end outlive him.

I was early, but beneath the concrete cliff-face of the Unisa building Daniel Matjila was already waiting. Heftily built, with a ready grin, he folded my hand into one large paw and pumped it enthusiastically. I surmised that it had been a while since anyone had come to interview him about Solomon Plaatje.

In his office high up in the superstructure, with a commanding view over the hills back to Johannesburg, he gave me a brief language lesson. Setswana is a Sotho tongue, its speakers living primarily in what are now the north-eastern areas of South Africa and Botswana (‘Place of the Tswana'). Although it was one of the earliest African languages to acquire a written form, it had little tradition of written literature. In Plaatje's day, other African languages, notably isiXhosa and Sesotho, had begun to develop a contemporary literature of their own – Thomas Mofolo's Sesotho novel
Chaka
(1925) had been a strong success – but Setswana limped behind. It was this that Plaatje had been determined to address.

Matjila's theory was that Plaatje's interest in Shakespeare had earlier roots than the performance of
Hamlet
he'd seen as a teenager. He might well have encountered stories from the plays as part of the Tswana storytelling culture, and other black South Africans of his generation had been taught Shakespeare in mission schools. (There is a story that part of
Twelfth Night
had been translated by a Setswana-speaking Christian priest in Bloemfontein as early as the 1880s.) But there was politics, too, in choosing to put Shakespeare into Setswana and publish the results.

‘He wants to demonstrate that we have a language that can handle the very same ideas as English. Just as Shakespeare writes about Greek monarchs or Italian monarchs, we have a culture which is just as sophisticated.
Macbeth
has royalty; we also have chiefs.' Matjila tapped his chest. ‘There is an
equivalence
there. This is what Plaatje realises.'

Although
Julius Caesar
was the first play Plaatje translated, the first translation actually printed, in 1930, was
Diphosho-phosho,
which translates literally as ‘Mistakes upon Mistakes' –
The Comedy of Errors,
a play I'd encountered back in London courtesy of the Afghan group Rah-e-Sabz, and which had cropped up with surprising frequency on my journeys. Plaatje had completed the work by stealing time from political activism and paid journalism, but publishers, once again, weren't interested. He was forced to fundraise privately. The stark reason why his translation of
The Comedy of Errors
made it into print was that this – the shortest play in the canon – was the cheapest to produce.

From a shelf behind his desk Matjila fished out a modern reprint of
Diphosho-phosho
and flipped it open. The dimensions of a paperback, it was more pamphlet than book, just fifty-two pages long. The title page read ‘The Sayings of William Shakespeare', in blocky and rough type. It looked an underwhelming way for Shakespeare to embark on a new life at the other end of the world.

But
Diphosho-phosho
was a quietly radical act of translation, Matjila explained – one that recast the relationship between the greatest poet in the English-speaking universe and an African language. In his essay for the
Book of Homage,
Plaatje had emphasised the vigorous oral traditions within Tswana culture. Translating
The Comedy of Errors,
he went one step further; he made the writer he playfully called ‘William Tsikinya-Chaka', William Shake-the-Sword, an oral storyteller too, in the most honoured Tswana style.

Although Shakespeare's comedy contains its share of fruity jokes, Elizabethans seem to have been particularly attracted by its elegance and gloss – its mellifluous wordplay, its clever-clever reworking of the conventions of Roman comedy. Plaatje detected something different. The Latin names and locations were approximately transliterated (Antifoluse oa Efesuse/Antipholus of Ephesus and Antifoluse oa Sirakuse/Antipholus of Syracuse were the two leads; Agione/Egeon their father), but to the playtext itself Plaatje made sweeping changes. Stoutly set in Africa, it became a rambunctious family farce.

In place of Shakespeare's stylised and highly patterned poetry, Plaatje offered idiomatic and salty Setswana prose, seeded with day-to-day aphorisms. The text made local reference to the farms and fields, livestock and wild animals and Northern Cape landscape he and fellow Tswana knew intimately. Adriana and Luciana addressed each other as
nnaka
(‘younger sister') and
nkgone
(‘elder sister'). The two Dromios called their respective masters simply
mungwaka
(‘boss') and their wives
Mmisis,
a borrowing from the English ‘Mrs'.

Whenever Plaatje encountered a figure of speech that struck him as over-ingenious, he didn't hesitate to replace it, usually with something more geographically appropriate:

Where Shakespeare made reference to the legendarily icy ‘Poland winter', Plaatje neatly substituted an example that would make more sense to his southern-hemisphere readers: ‘the cold month of June'.

Plaatje's relish in the work is palpable, but this wasn't simply for fun; at the back of his mind was the brute fact that Setswana was fast losing out to colonial languages such as English and Afrikaans, especially in schools. ‘It has not been an easy task to write such a book as this in Setswana,' he wrote in the introduction:

Perhaps that also accounted for Plaatje's decision to translate
The Comedy of Errors
rather than a more familiar set text; its homespun, knockabout qualities would make it ideal for schoolrooms. I wondered how many Setswana-speaking children had been given the opportunity
to roll their eyes at the preposterous goings-on of Antifoluse oa Efesuse and Antifoluse oa Sirakuse. Given how few copies remained in existence, not nearly enough.

One critic described Plaatje's translations as ‘linguistic activism'; it struck me as a neat and accurate phrase. Perhaps, in fact, I'd been approaching all this from the wrong angle. Plaatje's Shakespeare translations weren't really about Shakespeare at all. Shakespeare was being hitched to a much braver ideal: saving an entire culture.

On my mind was something I'd been mulling since seeing so many foreign-language productions at the World Shakespeare Festival. The commonest British complaint about Shakespeare from overseas was that there was barely any point in seeing the plays in translation. Deny the language, and you denied the essence of what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare.

Yet of course every performance, in whatever language, is a form of translation; and most contemporary British audiences or students have only a hazy sense of the depth and fullness of Shakespeare's English. There is a reason why most scholarly editions contain far more explanatory notes than they do text, and why there is a brisk market for translations of Shakespeare into modern English, for use in the English-speaking world. As time passes, the early-modern language Shakespeare used inevitably becomes more and more remote from the English most contemporary English-speaking people speak. Translation is one way among many of keeping the texts alive.

Plaatje, I felt – like similarly creative translators in India and Germany – understood these issues deeply, and realised how much could be achieved by separating Shakespeare from his language: for his own people, for Setswana, for South Africa. It had been bold to claim in 1916 that an African language was capable of containing the greatest writer in the British Empire. Plaatje made it do so nonetheless.

Translation was generally figured as a loss. At a profound level, I began to realise, it could also be a gain.

When I asked how I might get down to Hillbrow to visit Johannesburg Awakening Minds, I went through the health-and-safety charade all over again. I'd be lucky to find a driver who'd drop me anywhere near. Even in the middle of the day it wouldn't be wise to walk the streets.
In
Hillbrow
? As so often in Johannesburg, it was impossible to gauge where sensible advice ended and white middle-class paranoia began.

I called Dorothy. She sounded amused. No big deal. If I could make it to her place, she'd be happy to take me.

As we jounced down through Johannesburg in her ancient white Mercedes, she told me more about the project. Despite a grant from the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, JAM were in a constant battle for funding, and (I sensed) struggling to find a focus. Some members wanted to write and perform their own material, focusing on HIV and gender awareness; others preferred classic texts. Some of the group had failed to show for a recent performance – they'd either managed to find paid work elsewhere or were struggling with the commitment.

‘It's hard enough for professional actors in South Africa, theatre is so marginal and badly paid here. And when you've been sleeping on the streets and there's all this other stuff going on …'

We were coming into Hillbrow. On all sides angular grey housing blocks loomed, floors packed as tight as eggboxes, roofs studded with white satellite dishes. There weren't many cars, but the streets were bustling with gangs of teenagers and pedestrians lugging shopping bags. Bar the odd shuttered or broken window, the shops looked busy. It was hardly downtown Zurich, but it wasn't the Armageddon I'd been promised either.

In the apartheid era, Hillbrow had been designated whites-only. Later it had become one of the few places in the inner city in which different races could mix and mingle. But an influx of population from rural areas and the townships during the 1980s, compounded by middle-class flight to the suburbs, had made it one of Johannesburg's most notorious slums. The area was still battling high crime rates and unemployment, mere blocks away from the offices and hotels of the city centre. The Hillbrow Tower, a slender spear of late-sixties concrete that had once been one of the nation's proudest symbols, soared above the high-rises. Into a square kilometre, Hillbrow packed many of the problems and paradoxes of modern-day South Africa.

Inside the church hall it was cold, with walls of unfinished plaster and chill light streaming on to the white-tiled floor. In the centre of the room were twelve or thirteen brown plastic garden chairs. Five men were seated, several of whom I recognised from the performance a few days before. They were hunched in jackets and hats, sipping steaming cups of instant coffee. More men wandered in. I took a seat at the back.

Dorothy wasn't joking about treating them like professionals: I had seen rehearsals at the National Theatre less taxing than this. They began with a fifteen-minute warm-up, then moved on to vocal exercises: singing, shouting, reciting short pieces from memory – chunks from Marlowe's
Tamburlaine,
Shakespeare's Sonnet 12 (‘When I do count the clock that tells the time'). The shuffling, uncertain men who had walked in began to carry themselves differently; more boldly, I thought. They looked as if they actually expected to be there.

A large part of me was sceptical about the idea of Shakespeare as self-improvement: it smacked of the Victorian schoolroom, with its finger-wagging insistence that culture paved the road to clean living. And I was unsure, too, about associating the horrors of
Titus Andronicus
– rape, mutilation and the rest – with the mean streets of Johannesburg: too many echoes of the scare stories told by white folk about the animalistic depravity of the inner city. (A British-originated production starring Antony Sher and a South African cast had been roasted when it came here in 1995, regarded as violent cultural tourism.)

But watching these men work, I began to wonder. It seemed unlikely that anyone before now had bothered to worry about their breathing, or asked them to fill a space with their voices, or made a group of well-dressed, rich folk stand obediently by and listen to them. No doubt one could do this with many kinds of outreach project. But I thought of Plaatje's Lear, raging against the Natives Land Act and ‘ungrateful man'. Why not Shakespeare?

At the tea break I got talking to one of the participants. His name was Thando Matodlana. He was twenty-seven. He'd grown up in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, and had come up to Johannesburg and struggled to find work. He ended up sleeping in a shelter, sometimes on the streets. He was now in a secure flat; no running water, but it was at least his own. He had ambitions to train as a sound engineer.

He'd been one of the first to sign up for Dorothy's classes. ‘We used to go and play cards and read stories. But we didn't really have anything to do, nothing concrete. I wanted to learn acting, so I got involved.'