Michiel Heyns, well-known translator and English professor, recently won two prizes for his novel Lost Ground. The book is packaged as a crime novel, but readers of more serious novels will be pleasantly surprised by the story, if not completely blown away. Naomi Meyer asked Heyns about this memorable book.
Michiel, thank you for taking the time to answer these questions and congratulations on winning the Media 24 as well as the Sunday Times prizes with your novel Lost Ground.
In this YouTube interview you spoke about your rethinking being happy about your shortlist nomination of Lost Ground. How do you feel about winning the actual prize in the end?
Unambivalently delighted.
I know that you were raised Afrikaans ... Well, no, I am unsure of this after having read the book and experiencing the whole story as if it was written by a mother-tongue English speaker. Please tell me about your background and why English comes so naturally to you.
In fact I grew up in a very Afrikaans background – Thaba ‘Nchu in the Free State. But my parents wanted us to be bilingual, as they both were (my father’s mother was English), and so they put me into the little English class at the local school for one year when I was nine. This gave me confidence in English at an early age, and of course, once you have that confidence, it increases.
English writing coming from an Afrikaans person - why, how and for whom? Who is your ideal reader? Thoughts from your main narrator on meeting the hotel manager – "like so many conversations like this in South Africa, it can quickly turn political ..." – it struck me that this book was clearly written by an outsider (which is exactly what your character is, being an expat). There is a feeling that you have the need to tell this story not to an "Afrikaans reader" but to the world. Would you say this is true?
I don’t really have an ideal reader in mind - my books are too different from each other to be aimed at a particular target market. I hope, of course, that my friends will read and enjoy my books, but I also hope to make the world of my novels accessible to readers from elswhere.
Deon Meyer writes about the book's good storytelling. I agree, as well as with his mentioning the deftly drawn characters. This is a brilliant book - packaged neatly for the market (crime fiction), but at the same time being so much more than that, becoming a tale of one man's story of loss and his awareness of everybody else's losses in the country. How did this story originate? As a whodunnit? Or as literary fiction?
I think the novel originated as a “whydunnit”. I thought I knew who the murderer was, and that the main interest would be in why the murder was committed. But as I wrote, the novel did, in fact, turn into a whodunnit – though, as you suggest, the focus was also quite strongly on the narrator’s own plight, his sense of dispossession and loss.
Do you think a lot of Afrikaans people in this country read the books of South African English writers? They do read English, but South African English?
I don’t know about “a lot of”, but it’s my impression that my books are read by a fair number of Afrikaans-speaking people. In general, Afrikaans readers are a small but loyal group, I think.
Do you not have the self-consciousness many Afrikaans people have when they speak English? Or have you never experienced this self-consciousness?
I feel comfortable speaking English (see question 1 above), and no, I don’t feel self-conscious.
There is a strong outsider theme in Lost Ground – the expat, the gay man, and always the strong feelings and reactions from the "other" side towards the outsider. Being Afrikaans, writing for an English world, writing in English – is this an outsider job?
I don’t really feel like an outsider when I’m writing, and in general I don’t think I’ve been treated as one in South Africa. It has proved very difficult, though, to break into the international market; I think there I am seen pretty much as an outsider.
In the first sentence of the book you introduce your two main characters: your main narrator and the town of Alfredville (which, in fact, becomes a microcosm of the whole of South Africa). Why did the story have to take place here, in this dusty town?
My previous two novels had been set in England, so I thought it was time for a homecoming. Why this dusty town? I don’t really know. I suppose I thought a small town provided a more convenient concentration of people, a more natural “mix” of characters.
How long did it take you to write Lost Ground?
I interspersed it with other writings, so all in all probably about two to three years.
Who are your favourite authors? And in which languages?
There are the classics – Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Henry James – and then there are the moderns: Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Richard Ford. I’m ashamed to admit that I seldom read translations – and coming from a translator, that really is a shameful admission.
You are famous also for being a brilliant translator, associated with the best: Marlene van Niekerk and Etienne van Heerden. What are your main aims when you do the translating – can you ever be true to exactly what a writer is trying to convey in his own language and bring it across in the same way to a reader speaking another language and often experiencing the world completely differently due to his different culture?
No, there will always be something missing in a translation. But the translator can try to create a kind of equivalent to the original, accessible and intelligible to a reader from another culture. This may sometimes occur at the expense of the local resonances of the work, though the ideal is, of course, to be both faithful to the source and also meaningful to the target.