Abstract
“[L]aat my so hard skel tot die valse vrou”: Representations of femininity in Anna Neethling-Pohl’s Afrikaans translations of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra
In the period 1964–1969 the actress and theatre director Anna Neethling-Pohl (1906–1992) translated William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) Julius Caesar (1599) and Antony and Cleopatra (1607) in Afrikaans. Neethling-Pohl is the second most productive Afrikaans translator of Shakespeare’s works although this fact has not yet been published or attracted significant academic attention. Her legacy as an actress, producer, radio broadcaster, and language activist has been rigorously documented but her contribution to the canon of Afrikaans drama translations, especially with regard to Shakespeare translations, is still sparsely discussed.
This article has a twofold aim: firstly, tribute is paid to Neethling-Pohl for her extension of the register of Afrikaans drama translations (especially of Shakespeare’s work). By heralding her in this manner, attention is drawn to the underdiscussed subject of mid- to late twentieth-century Afrikaans women translators of dramas. With brief reference to her contemporaries and contemporary figures, Neethling-Pohl is canonised as a pioneer in this area. Secondly, her Afrikaans translations of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are discussed as gender-sensitive in nature. This investigation sheds light on the translation strategies that Neethling-Pohl employs to elucidate the gender-based power relations in these two dramas. Special attention is paid to the ways in which idioms, diminutives, pejoratives, idiolect and gendered pronouns from the source texts are reshaped in the target language in order to highlight the gender-related themes in the translations.
This article maintains a feminist approach in two ways: Neethling-Pohl is put forward as a trailblazing Afrikaans woman translator, with special consideration of her documented opinions on gender role divisions in the Afrikaner-nationalist milieu in which she was based. Additionally, the insights that her translations shore up on an internationally venerated dramatist like Shakespeare are cast against the backdrop of the hegemonic representation of Afrikaner women in a mid- to late twentieth-century moment when feminism had not yet attracted much attention in South Africa.
The Afrikaner nationalist gender (essentialist) ideal known as the volksmoeder [mother of the nation] has most frequently been understood as a patriarchal construct, and as disempowering towards women. Neethling-Pohl’s embracement, manipulation, appropriation and application thereof in her autobiographical writings convey her sense of its emancipatory potential for women. She does this especially in reference to her involvement with the Ossewabrandwag in the 1930s. This, I argue, demonstrates Neethling-Pohl’s protofeministic sentiments. I use this inference to substantiate my reading of Neethling-Pohl’s translations as protofeministic in nature.
In my discussion of Neethling-Pohl’s translation of Julius Caesar, I focus, firstly, on her exploitation of Afrikaans’s lexical capacity for diminutives and its wealth of gendered idioms to explicate the manner in which male characters in the Shakespearean source text effeminise each other in insults. In doing so, she underlines the misogynism that prohibits the only two female characters’ attempt to prevent the drama’s tragic outcomes. These translation strategies signal the drama’s male antagonists’ fear of female authority. In this way, Neethling-Pohl anticipates this theme’s more extensive dramatization in its sequel: Antony and Cleopatra.
Secondly, I close-read the translation of Portia’s appeal to Brutus to entrust her with his secrets after the visit of the conspirators. Portia lays claim to the rights invested in her as his wife. Neethling-Pohl’s lexical choices assist this line of argument: she uses words that consistently enable punning on gender, genealogy and marital status. In this way, she spotlights Portia’s wit and her awareness of the perlocutionary nature of these interlocking ingredients of her social status: woman, wife, daughter.
My analysis of Neethling-Pohl’s Antony and Cleopatra-translation (Antonius en Cleopatra) firstly scrutinises the translation of misogynist pejoratives. While, as in Julius Caesar, male characters are branded unmanly when insulted, female characters are lacquered with charges of unchastity. In the source text Cleopatra is almost always snubbed with pejoratives pointing to transactional sex. In Neethling-Pohl’s translation, however, most of these pejoratives are translated with words that merely suggest easy virtue or hypersexuality. In Shakespeare’s drama Cleopatra’s cunning and shrewdness (and by implication, her intelligence) are hardly ever questioned, whereas in Neethling-Pohl’s translation, her male antagonists underestimate her and reduce her to her libido. This, I reason, indicates Neethling-Pohl’s concerted intensification of the already manifest misogyny portrayed in the source text, possibly to put Cleopatra’s intelligence in greater relief.
As in her Julius Caesar-translation, Neethling-Pohl smuggles in pejoratives in Antonius en Cleopatra, but in this case, it serves a different function. Neethling-Pohl highlights Cleopatra’s skill as a social actress by having her speak in diminutives when she infantilises herself in Octavius Caesar’s presence. She does this in order to convince him of her submission to his authority and her ignorance of his intention to betray her if she concedes to his ultimatums. With her use of this device Neethling-Pohl re-presents Cleopatra as strategically playing into the misogynist construct of womanhood that Octavius Caesar promulgates and as such, she augments the plasticity of this feminine ideal. In addition, her triumph over Caesar reads as more climactic.
Cleopatra’s multiple references in Antony and Cleopatra to matrimony, married women and housewives (especially in reference to Octavia) are carefully inspected and compared to Neethling-Pohl’s translation of these instances. The conclusion is drawn that Neethling-Pohl magnifies the critique by Shakespeare’s Cleopatra of marriage as socially sanctioned prostitution and the sine qua non of womanhood. Her own propensity for social performance attunes her to the insincerity of women who instrumentalise marriage as a political mechanism or survival strategy. Neethling-Pohl’s Cleopatra vocalises her contempt of Octavia’s reinforcement of patriarchal projections of women’s passivity more aggressively than in the source text.
Neethling-Pohl’s condensation of synonyms from the source text into a single word that is used repeatedly in the target text is interpreted as a commentary on idiolect and sarcastic wordplay.
Two instances are discussed where, in Neethling-Pohl’s translation, characters echo each other’s vocabulary, thus demonstrating their bondedness as confidants: these characters’ shared vocabularies point to a shared idiolect. Furthermore, the words in question mark the chief shared concerns that bond the characters who speak it.
Lastly, Neethling-Pohl’s Cleopatra is shown to repeat and modify words used by and connected to Caesar so as to underscore both her sarcasm and wit. Her linguistic dexterity marks her mastery of the discourses that are weaponised against her.
While I am cautious not to suggest an overidentification, on Neethling-Pohl’s behalf, with Portia and Cleopatra, I do connect her sympathetic translation of their dialogue with her own status and experience as a woman who, within her received and chosen cultural framework, transcends hegemonic expectations of women. She excelled in vocations relegated (albeit by convention, not law) to men and she did so with assertiveness, confidence, and success.
In the critical history of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra the female protagonist is often described as un-representable on stage. Even Cleopatra herself voices her distrust in a boy’s ability to depict her (5.2.220). She is, however, re-presented in Afrikaans by a woman translator, who herself had proved her mettle as both an actress and a stage director. I do not suggest the impropriety or impossibility of translations of Julius Caesar and/or Antony and Cleopatra by a man. A certain harmony is, however, created by the givens of Neethling-Pohl’s status as a publicly assertive woman, and her stellar reputation as a theatre practitioner and political activist, which supports this article’s aim to canonise her in the gallery of Afrikaans women translators of dramas.
Keywords: Afrikaans Shakespeare translations; Afrikaans female translators of plays; Anna Neethling-Pohl; feminist translation studies; (South)African theatre translation; William Shakespeare
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