Fathers and Fugitives: A Book Travels North in a New Language

Fathers and Fugitives: When a Book Travels North in a New Language

I have just made my debut in the U.S. with my novel Fathers and Fugitives, a book that garnered praise and won prizes in South Africa, but has, until recently, been unknown to readers in America, as am I as a writer. Unless you live in the English-speaking world, and unless your book is written in English, you initially have a relatively small potential readership. There are some exceptions; Chinese and Spanish books certainly have a large audience, for instance. But when you write in the Global South, and in a small language like Afrikaans, as I do, then you have to first achieve success in your country of origin—and then hope that international agents and publishers will notice you and take a chance on your work. And that it will then find a wider audience. It is the case with many authors that they may only ever find success within their own country and cultural sphere, and that’s fine too. But it is in the DNA of most writers to want to be read as widely as possible.

In my own case, ironically, I used to live in New York and London, the two centers of publishing in the modern era. But back then, my life was lived in an entirely different sphere. I was trapped in the world of corporate law, working first in a New York law firm, and then in a U.S. multinational company. In 2010, I left my job and London behind and returned to the country of my birth to write. Leaving a lucrative job in the world of international lawyering with a plan to start a literary career in South Africa is not what most people would recommend. Somehow I’ve made it work. Apart from being widely reviewed and read in Afrikaans, my books have also appeared in some continental European languages. Some were published in English in the U.K. previously, by small U.K. independent publishers. It is only now, though, that the more established Europa Editions, an outstanding publisher of translated fiction, has taken on the book both in the U.S. and U.K. and with real enthusiasm.

This has been an interesting journey, detouring via law and a professional life in New York and London, and then back to my home country and writing in my mother tongue, a small language spoken only at the southern edge of the world. On top of that, it is a language with a complex history—it was, for a long time, associated with Apartheid, even though the majority of its speakers are in fact Black, and it had its origin in the mouths of slaves who were emulating their masters’ Dutch. It was then hijacked by the Apartheid architects, who tried to erase this history and refashion it as a white language. So, I started my second career—writing fiction—in this marginal language, in a small southern outpost of the world with a difficult and complex history, and then my writing slowly started traveling northwards from there. Particularly for someone who used to work as a cross-border mergers and acquisitions attorney in New York City, this is an unusual journey. Perhaps I can now think of myself as a cross-border author.

The story of Fathers and Fugitives, to some degree, mirrors this back and forth between north and south. My protagonist, Daniel, is a South African journalist living in London. His father’s will compels him to visit a long-lost cousin on the old family farm in the Free State, deep in the South African hinterland. Daniel and his cousin then travel with a seriously ill boy to Japan for an experimental cure, on a voyage that will change their lives. The cousins ultimately return to South Africa. And go to the U.K. again. And then Daniel returns to South Africa once more. I wanted to take Daniel out of the cosmopolitan life he has established in a first-world urban world and destabilize the precarious balance between home and non-home that he had established. I wanted, in effect, to “reparochialise” him, embed him in a remote South African landscape. And then see how that works out for him.

I admire the approach of the revered Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who has for decades been an activist for inverting the hierarchy of languages. He switched from writing in English to Gikuyu when he was in detention in Kenya in 1977, making the point that his writing is aimed at those who are politically oppressed in his own country. In 2017, a Pan-African writers’ collective resolved to translate wa Thiong’o’s story into 27 African languages. Their question was: why should every work of literature from Africa be either produced in or be translated into English? And the assumption that they—and Thiong’o—are constantly challenging is that African languages cannot accommodate or express intellectually complexity. Shouldn’t monolingual English speakers, rather than translators or non-English-speaking authors, be doing the work? Shouldn’t they meet literary works on their own terms, or at least in the language in which they are produced?

In theory, yes. But the practical reality in the world as currently works, is that, in order to reach out to readers across the English-speaking world, an English text is what you need. In the past, i.e. in the case of my first three books, I translated my own work. This time I experimented with a third-party translator—a veteran of South African literary translation, Michiel Heyns. For the first time, I didn’t have full control over my work in both Afrikaans and English. When my work is translated into languages I don’t speak (it is currently being translated into Italian), I am happy to give up control. Letting go of a translation into English, the language that isn’t (quite) my first language, but one in which I studied and lived and worked for much of my life, was difficult, though, and I did remain involved in the process to some degree, especially the copy editing.

But now that writing, translating, and editing are done, one can only let go and let the book make its own voyage into the bigger world. Like a boat gently launched into choppy waters. It will hopefully be an adventurous tour, with lots of surprises along the way.

Fathers and Fugitives is available now wherever books are sold.

S.J. Naudé is the author of two collections of short stories, The Alphabet of Birds and Mad Honey, and two novels, The Third Reel and Fathers and Fugitives. He is the winner of the Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award, the University of Johannesburg Prize, the kykNet-Rapport prize, and is the only writer to win The Hertzog Prize twice consecutively in its 100-year history. The Third Reel was shortlisted for the Sunday Times prize. His work has been published in Granta and other journals in the US, UK, the Netherlands, and Italy

Fathers and Fugitives: When a Book Travels North in a New Language