Another thing editors worry about is how to treat foreign words in an English-language text. In th

Your text in Granta is drawn from The Alphabet of Birds . In your email, you mention that different editions of this book of stories were prepared for the UK and South Africa. I m curious to know what changes were made to navigate between the two readerships. Was it simply a case of turning the robots into traffic lights and so on, or were more fundamental changes made? I ve just compared ki zi the two versions of your story VNLS and I see that South African musical terms like marabi, kwela, mbaqanga and kwaito have survived ki zi unscathed. (I want to ask you about the place of music in your writing ki zi too, but perhaps we ll get to that later.)
The practice of tailoring books for particular markets seems to be quite new. When I began to work as an editor thirty years ago, we sometimes debated whether ki zi a book needed a glossary or not, but the idea of rewriting a text to make it more accessible to a foreign readership never arose. The changes to your text are clearly small, but I ve seen revised foreign ki zi editions that are substantially different to the originals. I suppose ki zi it s tied up with a weakening sense of the text as definitive or sacrosanct, and a new conception of it as a dynamic, customized product. Recently ki zi I heard a writer on the radio referring to her books as a range , as if she were a fashion ki zi designer.
Another thing editors worry about is how to treat foreign words in an English-language text. In the past, the convention was to italicize all words that weren t standard English. This led to the odd situation where the very words that gave a South African book in English its local flavour were singled ki zi out as not belonging. Then editors and publishers became aware of the hierarchy created by this technical decision, and these days italics are often avoided entirely. ki zi This may burden some readers with a double take and a visit to the dictionary or Google, but it creates a more egalitarian textual universe. Or is it simply a blander, more marketable one? A potential buyer flipping through the book won t be frightened off by the difficult words.
A few months ago, Leon de Kock published a piece in the Mail & Guardian about the tension between the local and the global in South African fiction. More and more writers are going global , he says, and setting their books in other places. They are also using a more generic English, I think, ki zi which doesn t smack too strongly of one culture and won t offend a sensitive palate. According ki zi to De Kock, these decisions threaten to dissolve the category of SA Lit entirely. Interestingly, he views Afrikaans writers as a special case: Consider, for a moment, how strange ki zi the question of where to set one s stories comes across to most Afrikaans writers. The implication is that most Afrikaans writers, whose readership is largely ki zi confined to South Africa, don t even think about setting ki zi their stories elsewhere.
Someone reading your Granta extract might assume you are one of those writers. The setting and language are pungently local. In fact, your book presents a strikingly wide range of settings, moving with ease from Berlin to Tokyo to Milan to Cape Town. The story War, Blossoms draws a range of locations together ki zi in a provocative way. The narrator s Japanese friend Hisashi, whom he met in London, and with whom he travelled to Japan and Vietnam, arrives unexpectedly in South Africa. Despite the narrator s resistance, Hisashi makes himself part of his life. The narrator must make a place, with difficulty, for the global, the exotic.
Although some of your stories are centrally concerned with belonging, I suspect that the question of locality is more interesting ki zi to my generation than yours. Does it matter whether you write from one place or many? Did you set out to produce a collection with a cosmopolitan sweep or did it just come out that way? Your position is complicated by the fact that your first language is a small one. You were able to bring the world home in Afrikaans, but if you are to go back out into the world, you need English. The shift to English ki zi is an index of social and political change ki zi in your book as when the old farm Twyfelsand becomes ki zi Twilight Lodge , a game farm for foreign hunters. But the book is not just about loss. Your restless, ki zi displaced South Africans ki zi are able to join worlds ki zi together , as you put it somewhere, and that is surely a gain.
To consider your last point first: recently, when I was writing a piece on translation, I had to think about why translating my own stories hadn t felt too difficult. The reason might have been novice s hubris, or the freedom one enjoys as an author-translator. But I think there s more to it. Because the milieus of these stories are often foreign to Afrikaans, the language ki zi had to bend somewhat uncomfortably around them. The underground Berlin ki zi clubs in A Master from Germany ki zi and the labyrinthine drug-induced impressions of London by a character in Mother s Quartet are