Your jersey is coming along, but send your measurements soon, my love, I want to start with the sleeve. I’m knitting it a bit bigger than the red one, because you’re fatter now, aren’t you, and I am not knitting squares, because then you’ll look like a chequerboard, and not diamonds either, because then you’ll look like a clown, especially with the smiling mouth, and not stripes because then you’ll look like a zebra. But it will be charcoal black and white, you’ll see. Pitch black is too harsh for your fair skin. Where do you get your funny ideas about clothes, my darling little idiot?
Now I’m going to go and walk by the sea because today really is a lost summer’s day in the middle of winter, and I had to accompany Simone all morning in front of the cameras for advertisements. She enjoys it so much and considers it part of her career as an actress. And I’ll think of a face, a beloved face, your face …
Be good with all our secrets,
Your Cocoon.
Grahamstown
Tuesday night, 27 April 1965
Dear child,
Finally back again after my long silence. My apologies. I spent the whole time rushing about, back and forth between Potch, Pretoria and Johannesburg.
Thank you for your letter that was waiting for me here, so mature and so lovely; and yet also a bit strange, suddenly, in the semi-formal voice of a typewriter. Easter weekends, unless one could be in Paris, hiding away in Notre Dame during Mass, are always so lonely, so melancholy.
My lectures went off well; the one for the students especially was a major success. The evening talk before the Academy’s working community was a chilly thing: an icy wet night, 100 people in a hall that holds 200, cold chrome chairs, “and every coat with its face”. The party afterwards at Van Wyk Louw’s was an improvement; but also not without the irritations of social people. Would have loved to talk to him more; but the precious times when it was indeed possible, were unforgettable. He’s such a human being, so wise. Some people have an aura of wisdom that they hide behind: he’s so human, so wise.
You’ve probably also seen the recent while’s vicious reviews of Orgie – Bill and the rest. Funny, a while ago this kind of thing would’ve upset me enormously. Now, not at all. A smile, at most. It’s not out of a sense of feeling superior – just a feeling that if I’ve done something that for me was truly imperative and honest, then people can make as much noise as they like. I don’t care.
Send your story. I must have it for the final Sestiger (copy must arrive by June).
Is Contrast paying you? Or is it a “service of love”?! How are you getting by? For my part, I thought things were going better, before the holiday, but then I had to pay R120 for Estelle’s two weeks at her mother’s, and now I’m terribly broke.
Two years.
Yes, two years. Praise the Lord, my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
But:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
April.
Dear child, sit with me now and listen. And try to understand that it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say to anyone, ever. I want to do it in the fewest words possible, because you’re a woman – and you would have known it already: a month ago, before me, you knew it.
Yes. I was with her [Salomi Louw]. And we slept together.
I stand naked before you; I don’t want to retain any clothing or protection. I dare not even ask for forgiveness, because that implies guilt – and as little as I can ever feel guilt about me and you, can I feel it about this.
All I know is that it’s a terrible thing to do – to have to say this, to you, now. More than that I don’t know. Just that you’re irreplaceable in my heart. And that I always carry the burden of your happiness.
I am in the hands of the living God.
And I say farewell to you, my Cocoon. With tears.
And with love.
André.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Three months before his death, André Brink offered his correspondence with Ingrid Jonker to Penguin Random House for publication. It consisted of some two hundred original letters written over a period of almost two years, from April 1963 to April 1965. The project to collate, edit and translate the letters was launched soon after Brink died in February 2015. A core team was assembled, consisting of Francis Galloway (editor and overall project adviser), Lynda Gilfillan (English copy-editor), Karin Schimke (translator of Jonker’s letters into English), and Leon de Kock (translator of Brink’s letters), with Fourie Botha acting as project manager, while further assistance was provided by Willie Burger (professor of Afrikaans literature at the University of Pretoria), Karina Brink (writer, critic, and André Brink’s widow), the Ingrid Jonker Trust under the curatorship of Greg Marsh, and Erika Viljoen.
Flame in the Snow contains all the letters preserved by Brink. They are published here in full. Brink kept carbon copies of his typed and handwritten letters; Jonker occasionally typed hers, but most of them were handwritten. The letters were duly arranged in chronological order and scanned. Thereafter, the letters were re-typed, and the typed textual record so produced was checked against the original letters, creating a working manuscript. A decision was made to publish an exact version of the correspondence.
This record of correspondence, which Brink preserved for fifty years in brown envelopes in his study, is, however, incomplete. A handful of letters are missing as a result of mail not reaching its destination, or because in certain cases a carbon copy was not made of a particular missive. In addition, several letters that Brink wrote to Jonker during her travels in Europe in 1964 do not appear here, though Jonker refers to them in her own letters. In the inventory of documentation on Ingrid Jonker that Jack Cope handed over to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) in 1979, nineteen letters are listed as issuing from Brink between 23 March 1964 and 3 June 1964. Sixteen of them do not appear in Brink’s collection. These original letters (some “torn into fragments”, some with their “fragments taped together, fragile”, according to the NELM inventory) are currently in Portugal in the archive of the late Dutch writer Gerrit Komrij, who bought the Jonker documentation, consisting of diaries, clippings, and letters. It was not possible to secure copies of Brink’s letters from the Komrij archive.
The original collection of letters on which Flame in the Snow is based will be made available for consultation by researchers after the appearance of this book.
Flame in the Snow is intended for a general readership and it therefore does not contain explanatory annotations, although this (English) version of the letters does contain limited annotations in the form of square-bracket references after some Afrikaans titles, for the sake of clarity (see explanation under “Translation” below). The writing style of the correspondents has been respected, and so the text includes language that might be perceived as salacious, as well as critical comments about fellow writers.
Obvious errors and cases of mistyping were corrected, and occasionally a word or phrase has been added in square brackets for the sake of clarity. Words that are unreadable in the original letters are indicated by way of a question mark within square brackets. Brink and Jonker’s use of punctuation and paragraph divisions has mostly been kept unchanged in the Afrikaans version of this book, and is similarly respected in these translations. (Exclamation marks, however, have been reduced significantly.) In certain cases it proved necessary, for the sake of typographical consistency, to make small adjustments (such as the addition of commas and periods in postal addresses, and in the opening and closing of the letters). On occasion, paragraphs have been indented for the sake of readability.
Where the correspondents underlined certain words, these have been italicised. Words and phrases in foreign languages have not been italicised unless Jonker and Brink themselves underlined such words or phrases in their original letters. Words written entirely in capi
tal letters have been retained as such. Longer quotations have been indented. Telegrams are given in capital letters. The first text on p. 404 has been replicated from a postcard. Wherever possible, words or sentences that were crossed out by the correspondents in their original letters have been retained as such in the translations. Author additions to the letters by way of marginalia – whether in pen or pencil on typed letters, or added onto the writing sheets in handwritten letters – are given between curly brackets.
The sources of quotations used by the correspondents are not provided, except in cases where Brink and Jonker themselves identify the authors. Only these references have been included in the Index of Persons. Obvious errors and identifiable mistakes in quotations have been corrected.
Translation
In rendering the letters into English, we have assumed a mainly South African audience, given this book’s predominantly regional distribution and probable range of circulation. In view of such a readership, we have retained certain key Afrikaans terms that are all but untranslatable and are likely to be understood by most South Africans, including those who are not mother-tongue speakers of Afrikaans. At the same time, non-South African readers should be able to deduce the meanings and connotative range of such terms from the context of the letters themselves. Examples include Jonker’s frequent term of endearment, “liefsteling” (literally “dearestling”, a play on the term “darling”), and both correspondents’ frequent play on the word “Kontjie” (a derivation from “Kokon” or “Cocoon”, their term of endearment for Jonker; “kontjie” translates literally as “little vagina”). Brink and Jonker frequently use the term “moesie” (a mole or beauty spot) in a playful manner, referring to their oft-imagined baby daughter as their “moesie-girl”. The translators and editors decided, after much deliberation, to retain the term “moesie” in the English version of these letters, as it is a word in fairly common use in South African English, and even more so in the early 1960s, when these letters were written. Of course, the “moesiemeisie” that Jonker and Brink repeatedly claim so ardently to wish for in these letters would never be conceived.
The letters abound with literary quotations from the work of Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Italian, German, and other foreign-language writers – mostly poets. Some of these intertextual additions in the letters consist of whole poems or extracts that are longer than just one or two lines, and these are presented as indented quotations, while others are short excerpts or fragments, and we have rendered these in quotation marks in the text of the letters themselves. Brink and Jonker took each other to be highly literate mutual “audiences”, and Brink’s act of preserving, and then handing over for publication, carbon copies of most of his letters suggests that he meant them to be read by a wide range of equally cosmopolitan readers. In view of this, the project team decided not to translate (and thereby possibly diminish the power of) original quotations. They are presented here as they were in the letters, in Afrikaans, Dutch, German, Italian, and so on. This rule has been observed in all cases where the quoted excerpts and fragments are identifiably taken from published, existing literary work. In cases where Jonker and Brink versify to each other in the course of their correspondence (that is, the verse so produced exists nowhere as literary artifacts except in these letters), we have generally translated such versification into English for the sake of readability and flow. In a few cases, where one of the authors copies out in a letter a fuller poem, recently composed (but otherwise unpublished), we have given the Afrikaans original, followed by a translation in square brackets.
In cases where Jonker and Brink mention the titles of existing, published literary works (including their own), the original (Afrikaans or otherwise) title is given in italics, followed by an English translation of the title in ordinary type within square brackets at the first instance. Afrikaans poem titles, and their published English translations, are in quotation marks, following the usual convention. In rare cases where Brink’s English titles are referred to, they are given as such (The Ambassador in its life as a published English translation of the Afrikaans novel Die Ambassadeur gets a mention or two late in the correspondence), that is, when reference is made to the already existing English translation of the book. In such cases we give the English title in italics, as this English book did actually exist at the moment of its being mentioned in the correspondence. Elsewhere, when the Afrikaans version of the book is being referred to, it is called Die Ambassadeur [The Ambassador] – the translation in square brackets given at first mention only.
In cases where one of the correspondents translates from a foreign language into Afrikaans, we have rendered the Afrikaans translation in English (an example is Brink’s rendering of Jacques Prévert’s poem “Alicante” in his letter dated 30 May 1963). In some cases, the correspondents quote a foreign-language poem and translate it, as Brink does for Salvatore Quasimodo in his letter of 24 June 1963; here we provide the original quoted text and we translate the Afrikaans translation into English. In one case, Jonker provides her own translation of E.E. Cummings’s “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”, and here we retain Jonker’s Afrikaans translation for the sake of its originality, as published in her Versamelde Werke [Collected Works]. For the sake of interest, in this case, we add the English version so that readers can compare her translation to her source material. In cases where informal Afrikaans versification is used, such as the “words of a wise old lady” that Brink quotes in his letter of 2 June 1963, we have reproduced the Afrikaans, along with a literal English rendering in square brackets, for the sake of content comprehension. Occasionally, when an important refrain in the letters, consisting of a foreign-language fragment, is repeatedly accentuated in the correspondence, we have worked an explanatory translation into the text, without quote marks, such as “Good daayyy Fish! Daaag visselijn mijn!” which occurs in Brink’s letter of 26 June 1963, referring back to Dutch poet Paul van Ostaijen’s “Marc Groet ’s Morgens de Dingen”. In such cases, the aim was both comprehensibility and preservation of the original literary allusion, which is most directly legible from the foreign-language phrase. Where Jonker’s poems have been rendered in English, the translations have been taken from Black Butterflies, Selected Poems by Ingrid Jonker (Human & Rousseau, 2007). These poems were translated by André Brink and Antjie Krog. The translations do not always follow to the letter earlier versions of Jonker’s Afrikaans poems, as presented in the correspondence, though ultimately they represent the most refined translation available in English of these poems.
INDEX OF PERSONS
The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for items of interest. For your reference, the items that appear in the print index are listed below.
Achleitner, Marc
Achterberg, Gerrit
Albee, Edward
Alexander, F.L.
Anderson, Hans
Andrade, Jorge Carrera
Antonissen, Rob
Apollinaire, Guillaume
Ayling, Janet
Ayling, Ron
Bardot, Brigitte
Barker, George
Barnard, Annette
Barnard, Chris
Baudelaire, Charles
Beckett, Samuel
Behrens, Louise
Bergman, Ingmar
Blignault, Audrey
Blum, Peter
Bouscharain, Claude
Bouws, Juliana
Bowes Taylor, Desmond
Braaksma, J.B.
Brahms, Johannes
Breytenbach, Breyten
Brink, Anton
Brink, Estelle
Brinkman, Hendrik
Brinkman, Hilda
Butler, Guy
Celliers, Jan F.E.
Chagall, Marc
Chekhov, Anton
Cilliers, Annie (née Retief)
Cilliers, Johan
&
nbsp; Cloete, T.T.
Coetzee, Abel J.
Colette
Collins, John
Conradie, Louise
Cope, Jack
Cottrell, Leonard
Cronjé, Geoff
Cummings, E.E.
Da Vinci, Leonardo
Dante (Durante degli Alighieri)
Davidtsz, Bonnie
De Beauvoir, Simone
De Beer, Dan
De Klerk, Ena
De Klerk, W.A. (Bill)
De Vries, Abraham H.
Dekker, Gerrit
Delius, Anthony
Descartes, René
D’Ewes, Dudley
Di Lampedusa, Giuseppe
Disner, Sally
Donne, John
Driver, Jonty
Driver, May
Du Plessis, I.D.
Du Toit, Marcelle
Durrell, Lawrence
Duval Smith, Peter
Eglington, Charles
Eliot, T.S.
Éluard, Paul
Eybers, Elisabeth
Fischer, Anne
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Francis, St
Fried, Erich
Frost, Robert
Fugard, Athol
Gildenhuys, Jannie
Golding, William
Gorter, Herman
Greene, Graham
Grové, A.P.
Guinness, Alec
Hagen, Nico
Harris, John
Hastings, Julia
Hauptmann, Gerhart
Hiemstra, Louis
Hirsch, Manfred
Holst, Roland
Homer
Hope, Christopher
Hugo, Victor
Human, Koos
James, Henry
Jonckheere, Karel
Jonker, Abraham H.
Jonker, Anna
Jonker, Beatrice (née Cilliers)
Jordaan, Willem
Kannemeyer, J.C. (John)
Keats, John
Keeler, Christine
Keet, A.D.
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