Publisher: Human & Rousseau
ISBN: 978-0-7981-4832-0
Date: June 2007
Price: R145
Pages: 272
To Hell with Cronje is a largely faithful (although a few departures from the original may be noticed) English translation by Elsa Silke, working with the author, of Winterbach's own 2002, Hertzog Prize-winning Afrikaans novel, Niggie. The straightforward narrative tone is kept intact, and the original's play with magic realism juxtaposed with accurate depictions of the war climate the story is set in is as strong a feature of the translation.
To Hell with Cronje succeeds in recreating the psychological intimacy of comeraderie and the effects of trauma during warfare in both the individual and the collective experiences of its characters. The poignancy with which the novel depicts its characters trying to negotiate their way through a war many of them are disillusioned with-echoed by the novel's title-is more than merely anti-war in its sentiments. The deep glances inside the minds of many who are emotionally fragmented by warfare carries harbingers of what, in 1902, lay ahead in terms of South African history after the South African War/Anglo-Boer War: there is a subtle but noted warning of an ongoing ‘struggle' that would appear to never find a resolution.
The novel seems to almost comment on and respond to what has perhaps become familiar and commonplace in terms of trends and tropes associated with war stories by serving up a battleground that is at once eerie, distant and unfathomable. Set during the final months of the South African/Anglo-Boer War in 1902, the action of the novel is marked by a lack of movement and activity that is itself unsettling, as if a gestation occurs that is more fatal than any confrontation in the heat of the battle. The violence of the war is seen in its after -effects, in shell-shock, and bitter commentary on the Boer leaders, and incoherent personal narratives in some characters. The one crucial military action in the novel is delivered distortedly, as if a greater entity was really at work instead of mortal hands, and is left open to doubt, like much of what transpires in the novel. Overall, war is presented as something of a senseless maze of confused rhetoric, debates between science and religion, tension between romance and obsession and rehabilitation after, as well as during, loss. Numerous topics are taken in and delivered within the framework of writing about the experience of living through war; the lack of conclusions that these topics are deliberately shown to come to is in itself where much of the novel's drawing power lies.
The lives of men without, or removed from women, are explored with great sensitivity and illuminated compassion through the two central characters, Steyn and Maritz. They are a study in companionship between men faced daily by their own mortality as well as desperate but intriguing and well-rounded characters, the closest the novel offers to conventional protagonists. When female characters are finally introduced, they are not supplementary or supportive but a driving force in the narrative and the interaction between them and the men strongly invites consideration of the Afrikaans original's title, Niggie. Not only the name of a key character, the term ‘Niggie' could almost relieve ‘Neef' in Afrikaans South African writing on the war, drawing attention to the similar roles of men waiting out war on the combat field, and of the women waiting for their husbands to return from action as well as looking at the salvation found for the two characters, Steyn and Maritz, in the women who take them in and shelter them. Before these moments in the novel, women feature as almost otherworldly, abstracted objects of longing and obsession, the ‘other' that operates only in a dark void that is the only escape from the battlefield. That the time with actual, and not imagined or fantasy women, is a watershed for these men is clear in the way the novel then appears to blur its timelines when actually it merely follows chronological events viewed from this shelter and not the battlefield. It is when the novel dispenses with surrealism that it actually does seem that the characters are living a quiet dream.
With an unusual mix of Modernistic stream-of-consciousness overtones in some of the conversations between characters, moments where the influence of oral tradition and story-telling are prevalent and touches of a magic realism almost uniquely African at times that features as an undertone of the dual drive for sex and death, the novel provides a concentrated but somewhat formless take on war that is haunting and exceptionally thought-provoking. The novel also seems to offer a few nods to C. Louis Leipoldt's Stormwrack, (which itself pointed to Leipoldt's infamous poem, "Oom Gertel Vertel", a dramatic monologue narrated to a ‘Neef' character) with which it shares a few thematic and obvious points, from botanical references to the examination of personal disillusionment with war.
The poetry of Niggie is not lost in the translation, and while greater variety and embellishment could have been expected of To Hell with Cronje, it succeeds in both retaining and transposing the authorial tone and emotional resonance of Niggie. One may anticipate arguments stating that To Hell with Cronje is nothing more than a "mere" translation, but that would be to overlook the way English prose, in this instance, so readily accommodates the finer complexities of rhythm and continuity Winterbach has mastered in Afrikaans, and in so doing the end result is a book invaluable to a general canon of South African literature.