Late Essays : 2006-2017

  To Witbooi, the liberty he fights for is no abstract idea but a deeply felt freedom to ride and hunt where you will, to move your cattle from pasturage to pasturage according to the season, and sometimes perhaps to practise your skills as a cattle-rustler. In other words, he wants to preserve into the twentieth century an attractive way of life, semi-nomadic but ultimately parasitic. ‘It is neither a sin nor crime for me to want to remain the independent chief of my country and people,’ he writes defiantly to Leutwein in 1894. ‘If you want to kill me for this without any fault of mine, there is no harm done, nor is it a disgrace: I shall die honestly for that which is my own.’ (p. 140) Part of the pathos of his position is that the way of life in whose defence he is prepared to die had become economically unsustainable: even if there had been no German invasion, it would soon have had to come to an end.

  It is a blessing that Witbooi did not live to see the fate of his Red people under the German heel. Like the Herero, they lost their firearms, their cattle, and their land. New laws were brought in to proscribe ‘vagabondage’ (i.e., nomadism) and turn them into a labour force for the new German settler class, whose number had by 1913 climbed to 15,000. Of the survivors of the great uprising, some were transported to remote German colonies, others confined in concentration camps. In the most notorious of these camps, on Shark Island in Lüderitz Bay, 1,032 of the 1,795 inmates perished within a year, of cold and illness.

  Of all Herero and Nama prisoners, forty-five per cent died in captivity. Between 1904 and 1911 the Herero population declined from 80,000 to 15,000, the Nama (‘Red’) population from 20,000 to 10,000. It is hard not to see the camps as part of a programme whose goal first became apparent in the sequel to the Battle of Waterberg, when Trotha drove the remnants of the Herero fighting force, together with their women and children, into the Omaheke desert to perish of thirst. Defeating the Herero on the battlefield, and subsequently the Nama too, was, it turned out, only a first step in a larger and more sinister project: genocide.

  In 2004, at an event marking the centenary of the 1904 uprising, a spokesperson for the German government delivered to the Namibian people a carefully worded speech that included a ‘Bitte um Vergebung’ (plea for forgiveness) for German crimes but avoided the word Entschuldigung (apology). ‘The atrocities committed at that time would today be called genocide [Völkermord],’ she said, ‘and nowadays a General von Trotha would be prosecuted and convicted.’4

  * In Witbooi’s racial typology, the Oorlams and the Nama belong together as Red peoples, as distinct from the Blacks (the Herero) and the Whites (Boers, British, Germans).

  Notes and References

  1. Daniel Defoe, Roxana

  1. Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise (Paris, 1863), vol. 3, pp. 266–7.

  2. Daniel Defoe, Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress, ed. David Blewett (London: Penguin, 1982), pp. 105, 243.

  3. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, part 3, chapter 1.

  2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

  1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Preface to 1851 edition of Twice-Told Tales.

  2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The Custom-House’, in The Scarlet Letter, eds. Sculley Bradley et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 11.

  3. Review by Arthur Cleveland Coxe, reproduced in Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, eds. Bradley et al., p. 257.

  4. Henry James, Hawthorne, ed. Tony Tanner (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 109.

  5. Edgar Allan Poe, review (1847) of Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse, reproduced in James McIntosh, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), pp. 333–4.

  6. Herman Melville, ‘Hawthorne and his Mosses’ (1850), reproduced in McIntosh, p. 341.

  3. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

  1. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, in The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford, ed. Graham Greene (London: The Bodley Head, 1962), vol. 1, p. 42.

  2. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Paul de Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), p. 250.

  4. Philip Roth’s Tale of the Plague

  1. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London: Penguin, 1948), p. 252.

  2. Philip Roth, Nemesis (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2010), pp. 118, 75.

  3. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, in Complete Greek Tragedies: Sophocles I, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), line 1,415.

  4. Philip Roth, Indignation (New York: Vintage, 2008), p. 12.

  5. Philip Roth, Everyman (New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 180.

  5. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

  1. Goethes Werke, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: Beck, 1951–68), vol. 6, p. 521.

  2. Thomas Mann, ‘Goethes “Werther”’, in Hans Peter Herrmann (ed.), Goethes ‘Werther’: Kritik und Forschung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), p. 95.

  3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit: The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, trans. John Oxenford, 2 vols. (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1971), vol. 2, p. 212.

  4. Goethes Werke, ed. Trunz, vol. 6, p. 522.

  5. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Erotic Poems (London: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 125 (my translation).

  6. Conversations with Eckermann, 2 January 1824.

  7. Thomas Mann, ‘Goethes “Werther”’, in Herrmann (ed.), p. 101. Charlotte Kestner’s letter is quoted in Thomas Mann, Lotte in Weimar, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London: Secker & Warburg, 1947), p. 330.

  8. Mann, Lotte in Weimar, pp. 280–1, 25.

  9. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. David Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 103.

  10. Ehrhard Bahr, ‘Unerschlossene Intertextualität: Macphersons “Ossian” und Goethes “Werther”’, Goethe-Jahrbuch 124 (2007), p. 179.

  11. Quoted in Dafydd Moore, ‘The Reception of The Poems of Ossian in England and Scotland’, in Howard Gaskill et al. (eds.), The Reception of Ossian in Europe (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 31.

  12. John Dryden, ‘On Translation’, in Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (eds.), Theories of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 26.

  13. Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, vol. 2 (1889), p. 432.

  14. Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, vol. 2, pp. 110, 208.

  15. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. Constantine, p. 5; The Sorrows of Werter, trans. Daniel Malthus (London, 1787), p. 1.

  6. Translating Hölderlin

  1. Michael Hamburger, Collected Poems 1941–1983 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984), p. 21.

  2. Friedrich Hölderlin, Gedichte, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), p. 217.

  3. Quoted in David Constantine, Hölderlin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 34.

  4. Quoted in Constantine, Hölderlin, p. 20.

  5. Quoted in Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems, trans. J. B. Leishman (London: Hogarth Press, 1944), p. 12.

  6. Quoted in Stephan Wackwitz, Friedrich Hölderlin (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985), p. 25.

  7. Quoted in Constantine, Hölderlin, p. 169.

  8. Quoted in Hölderlin, Selected Poems, trans. Leishman, p. 23.

  9. Constantine, Hölderlin, p. 110.

  10. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner (New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 130.

  11. Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6/1, ed. Adolf Beck (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1954), p. 297.

  12. Quoted in Constantine, Hölderlin, p. 270.

  13. Constantine, Hölderlin, p. 305.

  14. Quoted in Ulrich Häussermann, Friedrich Hölderlin in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961), p. 166.

  15. Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 239.

  16. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 93.

  17. Martin Heidegger,
Existence and Being, trans. Werner Brock (London: Vision, 1949), p. 311. The lines are from the poem ‘Rousseau’. Cf. Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Hamburger, p. 181.

  18. ‘Idea for a Universal History’, in Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 52.

  19. Humboldt is quoted in Joachim Wohlleben, ‘Germany 1750–1830’, in K. J. Dover (ed.), Perceptions of the Ancient Greeks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 195.

  20. Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Hamburger, p. 325.

  21. Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1961), p. 221.

  22. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6/1, ed. Beck, pp. 425–6.

  23. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, ed. Beissner, pp. 150–1.

  24. Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Hamburger, p. 505.

  25. ‘The Only One’, in Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Hamburger, p. 537.

  26. Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 249.

  27. Michael Hamburger, String of Beginnings: Intermittent Memoirs 1924–1954 (1973) (London: Skoob Books, 1991), p. 118.

  28. Preface (1966) to Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, pp. x, xi.

  29. Michael Hamburger, ‘Hölderlin ins Englische übersetzen’, in Christophe Fricke and Bruno Pieger (eds.), Friedrich Hölderlin zu seiner Dichtung (Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini, 2005), p. 130.

  30. Preface (1966) to Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, p. xii.

  31. Hymns and Fragments, trans. Sieburth, p. 111.

  7. Heinrich von Kleist: Two Stories

  1. Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise von O– and Other Stories, trans. David Luke (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 114. Luke’s translation of ‘Michael Kohlhaas’ is used throughout.

  2. Thomas Mann, ‘Preface’, The Marquise von O– and Other Stories, trans. Martin Greenberg (London: Faber, 1960), p. 14.

  3. Heinrich von Kleist, ‘On the Gradual Formulation of Thoughts while Speaking’, in Selected Prose, trans. Peter Wortsman (New York: Archipelago, 2010), pp. 255–63.

  4. Quoted in Mann, ‘Preface’, trans. Greenberg, p. 20.

  5. Kleist, ‘The Marquise of O–’, in Selected Prose, trans. Wortsman, p. 121.

  6. Quoted in Nancy Nobile, The School of Days: Heinrich von Kleist and the Traumas of Education (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), p. 148.

  8. Robert Walser, The Assistant

  1. Quoted in George C. Avery, Inquiry and Testament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), p. 11.

  2. Quoted in K.-M. Hinz and T. Horst (eds.), Robert Walser (Frankfurt a/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 57.

  3. Quoted in Mark Harman (ed.), Robert Walser Rediscovered (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985), p. 206.

  4. Quoted in Idris Parry, Hand to Mouth (Manchester: Carcanet, 1981), p. 35.

  5. Quoted in Peter Utz (ed.), Wärmende Fremde (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), p. 64. See also Katharina Kerr (ed.), Über Robert Walser (Frankfurt a/Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), bd. 2, p. 22.

  6. Robert Walser, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Jochen Greven (Frankfurt a/Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), bd. X, p. 323.

  7. Robert Walser, The Assistant, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions, 2007), pp. 178–9.

  9. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

  1. Review dated 4 May 1857, in Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: Backgrounds and Sources, ed. and trans. Paul de Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), p. 325.

  2. Letter of 26 July 1852, in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830–1857, ed. Francis Steegmuller (London: Faber, 1979), p. 166.

  3. Review dated 18 October 1857, in Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed. and trans. de Man, p. 340.

  4. Letter of 23 December 1853, in Letters, ed. Steegmuller, p. 203.

  5. Letter of 14 August 1853, in Letters, ed. Steegmuller, p. 195.

  6. Letter of 4 September 1852, in Letters, ed. Steegmuller, p. 169.

  7. Letter of 9 December 1852, in Letters, ed. Steegmuller, p. 173.

  10. Irène Némirovsky, Jewish Writer

  1. Irène Némirovsky, A Life of Chekhov, trans. Erik de Mauny (London: Grey Walls Press, 1950), p. 71.

  2. Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky (Paris: Grasset, 2007), p. 403.

  3. Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française, trans. Sandra Smith (New York: Vintage, 2007), Appendix I, p. 376.

  4. Philipponnat and Lienhardt, La Vie, p. 347.

  5. Jonathan Weiss, Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).

  6. Quoted in Alan Astro, ‘Two Best-Selling French Jewish Women’s Novels from 1929’, Symposium 52/4 (1999), pp. 241 ff.

  7. Irène Némirovsky, Les Biens de ce monde (Paris: Albin Michel, 1947), p. 319.

  8. Irène Némirovsky, Les Chiens et les loups (Paris: Albin Michel, 1940), p. 200. The title carries a double meaning: entre chien et loup is the hour of twilight.

  9. Némirovsky, Les Chiens et les loups, p. 150.

  10. Némirovsky, Suite Française, p. 348.

  11. Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 366.

  12. Irène Némirovsky, Le Vin de solitude (Paris: Albin Michel, 1935), p. 17.

  13. Némirovsky, Le Vin de solitude, p. 281.

  14. Némirovsky, Le Vin de solitude, pp. 301–2.

  15. Elisabeth Gille, Le Mirador (Paris: Stock, 2000), p. 421.

  11. Juan Ramón Jiménez, Platero and I

  1. Juan Ramón Jiménez, Platero and I, trans. William and Mary Roberts (New York: New American Library, 1956), p. 78.

  12. Antonio Di Benedetto, Zama

  1. Antonio Di Benedetto, Zama, trans. Esther Allen (New York: New York Review Books, 2016), p. 15.

  2. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, trans. James Irby, in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1962), pp. 184-5.

  3. Quoted in Steven Gregory and Daniel Timerman, ‘Rituals of the Modern State’, Dialectical Anthropology 11 (1986), p. 69.

  4. Eduardo Luis Duhalde, El estado terrorista argentino (Barcelona: Argos/Vergara, 1983), pp. 155-9. Duhalde is not to be confused with Eduardo Alberto Duhalde, president of Argentina 2002-3.

  5. Quoted in Natalia Gelós, Antonio Di Benedetto Periodista (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2011), p. 66.

  6. Quoted in Liliana Reales, ed., Antonio Di Benedetto: Escritos periodisticos (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2016), pp. 45-6.

  13. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

  1. Leo Tolstoy, ‘Master and Man’, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Vintage, 2009), p. 244.

  2. Quoted in Henri Troyat, Tolstoy, trans. Nancy Amphoux (New York: Octagon, 1980), p. 485.

  3. Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, p. 44.

  14. On Zbigniew Herbert

  1. The Collected Poems 1956–1998, ed. and trans. Alissa Valles (New York: Ecco Press, 2007). All passages quoted are from this volume.

  15. The Young Samuel Beckett

  1. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 1: 1929–1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 53, hereafter cited as Letters.

  2. Quoted in Brigitte le Juez, Beckett before Beckett, trans. Ros Schwartz (London: Souvenir Press, 2008), p. 19.

  3. Letters, p. 99. Poena (Latin), punishment.

  4. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 92.

  5. Quoted in Letters, p. 511, note 9.

  6. The notebooks for the Johnson play are preserved at the University of Reading. The surviving dramatic fragment has been published in Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984).

/>   7. Arnold Geulincx, Ethics, with Samuel Beckett’s Notes, trans. Martin Wilson, eds. Hans von Ruler, Anthony Uhlmann, and Martin Wilson (Leiden: Brill, 2006).

  8. Quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 171.

  9. Quoted in Mary Jacobus, The Poetics of Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 180.

  10. Wilfred Bion, Attention and Interpretation (London: Tavistock, 1970), pp. 55–6.

  16. Samuel Beckett, Watt

  1. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 1: 1929–1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 15, 55.

  2. Letters 1929–1940, p. 518; The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 2: 1940–1956, eds. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 48.

  3. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove, 1959), p. 254.

  4. René Descartes, Philosophical Works, trans. Elizabeth Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), vol. 1, p. 92.

  5. See C. J. Ackerley, Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated Watt (Tallahassee: JOBS Books, 2005), p. 84.

  17. Samuel Beckett, Molloy

  1. Samuel Beckett, Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1959), p. 176.

  18. Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett

  1. First published in 1959, this essay forms part of Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).

  2. William James, Psychology (Briefer Course) (1892) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 11.

  3. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 36.