Germanicus Page 5

  Van Wyk Louw’s Germanicus

  Introduction

  Historical background

  The South African poet and dramatist N.P. van Wyk Louw based his metrical drama Germanicus (1956) on the first chapters of the Annales of the Roman historiographer Cornelius Tacitus (c.55-c.116 AD). The dramatic structure of Tacitus’ Annales has been the subject of considerable scholarly interest. Louw turned Tacitus’ narrative relating the role of Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso in the death of the Roman prince Germanicus, step-grandson of the emperor Augustus, into a cohesive play.

  The drama, like the historical narrative upon which it is based, treats of the era that was initiated by the death of the Roman emperor Augustus in 14 AD and ended with the death of Germanicus in 19 AD. Augustus had taken over control of an annually revolving electoral republican system that no longer worked and which his great-uncle and adoptive father, Julius Caesar, had, by initiating a ‘perpetual dictatorship’, effectively ended. Caesar’s assassination by a coterie of Republican-minded senators (44 BC) was followed by a time of political manoeuvring which ended with the ascendance of Caesar’s grandnephew Octavian over his rival, Mark Antony, who had served under the dictator Julius Caesar as his ‘Master of the Horse’. Octavian had been posthumously adopted in Caesar’s will as his son and heir. He later adopted the name ‘Augustus’, by which he was subsequently known.

  By 27 BC Augustus had perfected his adoptive father’s autocratic system of government in Rome under the guise of ‘restoring’ the Republic, with himself as princeps, that is, ‘first among equals’. The Roman empire as a geographical concept now gained its metaphysical stature as ‘principate’, a hereditary, virtually monarchical, way of exercising rule over almost the whole of Europe south and west of the Rhine, as well as the lands fringing the Mediterranean.

  Augustus’ supreme power in government was ostensibly subject to renewal from time to time, with the sporadic awarding of ‘tribunician power’. This meant that the princeps had the same rights as a so-called ‘tribune of the people’ (another of the annual positions within the state that had by now virtually lapsed in importance). Like the Republican people’s tribunes, the princeps had the power to convene the Senate and to veto laws, and most importantly, his person was sacrosanct. Anyone inflicting physical harm on him would be guilty of irreligio, which concept later became the basis for prosecutions of laesa maiestas (harm to the greatness of the princeps). By now the title of imperator (military commander), that had been won by Julius Caesar in a genuine military context, had also become the sole prerogative of the princeps or members of his family, simultaneously gaining the meaning that is now attached to the term ‘emperor’. The concomitant term ‘empire’ hence came to denote both the physical bounds of Roman hegemony and the new (unwritten) ‘Roman constitution’: the principate of the imperator.

  Augustus was desperate to ensure dynastic continuation with concomitant stability of rule in an empire that could no longer afford the annual republican electoral upheavals of the kind that had worked well when Rome had been a small, self-contained city-state. Hence he needed an heir who could continue the family name. Augustus had many years before married his second wife Livia Drusilla while she was still pregnant by her former husband, Tiberius Claudius Nero. She then already had a little boy of three, named after his father. Three months after her marriage to Augustus, Livia bore a son who was named Drusus. There was no issue from the marriage of Livia and Augustus, but their respective children and grandchildren intermarried, so that the term Julio-Claudian is applied to their combined dynasty, a dynasty that ended only with the death of the emperor Nero (AD 59). See the simplified family tree above.

  Augustus clearly did not see his stepson Tiberius (the elder son of his wife Livia) as a potential successor in the principate, but rather sought to find a successor within his own blood line. Having no son of his own, he adopted in turn various members of his immediate family. He coerced his daughter, Julia (usually known as ‘Julia the Elder’), his only child from an earlier marriage, successively to marry three different candidates that would be suitable for furthering her father’s dynastic aspirations, but she was twice widowed. Gaius and Lucius, Julia’s two sons by her second husband Agrippa, a friend and lieutenant of her father’s, were first adopted by their grandfather. Unfortunately both died young and their brother Agrippa Postumus was deemed to be of a totally unsuitable temperament. He was therefore banished to an island off the coast of Italy. Only as final resort was Julia forced to marry her stepbrother Tiberius. They had a child, but it, too, died. In the end Julia rebelled against such coercion by resorting to a life of profligacy, possibly also of political treachery. In 2 BC her third and last husband, her stepbrother Tiberius, divorced her, and she, too, was sent by her father into exile on a small island off the Italian coast.

  Augustus’ stepsons Tiberius and Drusus both served as generals in Augustus’ military campaigns to consolidate the empire. Drusus married Augustus’ niece Antonia (daughter of Augustus’ sister Octavia and Mark Antony) and fathered a boy who later was given the nickname ‘Germanicus’ after Drusus’ military victories. Tiberius was also an able general, but never as popular with the Romans as was his charismatic brother Drusus, who died young. Only when all other candidates had fallen by the wayside, did Augustus, who was then in his seventies, adopt his fifty-seven-year-old stepson Tiberius (who, by virtue of his divorce from Julia, was no longer Augustus’ son-in-law) as his son and heir, appointing him as his successor to the principate. Augustus simultaneously forced Tiberius virtually to repudiate his own son by an earlier marriage and to adopt as his heir his nephew Germanicus, the son of the late Drusus.

  This Germanicus (who was Livia’s grandson but also related by blood to Augustus through his grandmother Octavia, Augustus’ sister) was by then married to Agrippina, Augustus’ granddaughter, the daughter of Augustus’ disgraced daughter Julia. Germanicus, his wife and their offspring were therefore the closest that Augustus could get to successors of his own blood line.

  Patronage and obligation

  Such complicated familial arrangements were facilitated by the Roman custom of adult adoption (often necessary for the disposal of family inheritance) and, in a dynastic context, these arrangements were necessitated by military exigencies and encouraged by the Roman custom of obligatio. This system meant that in Rome rich and poor were tied together through a complicated series of mutual obligations: political, business or military ties were inherited into perpetuity. Political, military and civic roles were played out over time by the same sets of great families with their extensive obligatio-networks, and often by the same individuals, who moved from one sphere to another (civic to military and back) in an electoral system of rotating, unpaid positions, known as the cursus honorum. Annual elections more often than not resulted merely in the perpetuation of the power of these families. Occasionally a ‘new man’, such as the orator Cicero, who became consul in the year of Augustus’ birth, achieved a position within these ranks, but Cicero was the exception. Patronage of members of the poorer classes by these great families meant that so-called ‘clientes’ were obliged to give their vote to their affluent and powerful ‘patrones’.

  Soldiers swore loyalty not to Rome, but to their general. At the end of their military service, veterans were given the franchise at Rome, and also remained in a client-patron relationship with their general, who might then be seeking public office in the state. The combination of the systems of obligatio and patrocinatio (patronage) meant that veterans were expected to vote for their former general, or for anyone else carrying his family name. Almost invariably this name would represent one of the closed group of great families that dominated the higher public offices.

  Julius Caesar and Augustus after him had managed largely to supersede the power of these great families, while at the same time pretending still to adhere to the republican system, but the balance of power was precarious. In the widely spread-out empire there was always n
ot only the danger of revolt by local peoples, but also the threat of rebellion by competing Roman generals. Julius Caesar had been a great and highly successful military leader and so there were many soldiers tied to his family name by the bonds of obligatio. Augustus had to ensure that someone carrying the Julian surname could continue after him in the highest public offices so that stability and order would be maintained in the military (which offered the only means whereby the Roman empire was to be controlled). As we have noted, Roman custom did not expect Roman soldiers to be loyal to the state, but to individual generals, and so there had to be a successful general bearing the surname ‘Julius’. The Julian name was a guarantee of continued military stability. This fact underlies in part the obligation that Van Wyk Louw portrays Germanicus and Tiberius as both feeling to maintain the stability of the empire by whatever means possible. By adoption both had become Julians, as had Augustus before them.

  Tacitean antecedents of Louw’s drama

  The Roman historian Tacitus wrote his works toward the end of the first century AD, by which time autocratic rule had been so firmly established that the speciousness of Augustus’ vaunted ‘restoration of the Republic’ had become only too obvious. Tacitus’ various works (of which some large parts have been lost) reflect their author’s own yearnings for a lost Republic. His Historiae dealt with the Roman emperors from the year 69 AD, which had seen four emperors follow each other in bloody succession, to about the end of the first century. His Annales hark further back, beginning with the death of Augustus and the consolidation of the Roman ‘empire’ as a constitutional concept as well as a geographical entity.

  Van Wyk Louw’s drama is closely based on the first three books of the Annales (but with use of some elements taken from the Roman biographer Suetonius’ Life of Tiberius). That Tacitus composed like a dramatist was first mooted by C.W. Mendell in 1935 in an analysis of, among others, the first eight books of the Annales. Tacitus did not, of course, write an extended dialogue, hence by ‘dramatic’ one should understand ‘selection, arrangement and presentation’, even ‘fictionalization’ of material. Mendell concentrates on what he terms the ‘drama of Tiberius’ in which Germanicus, his military colleague Piso and the chief of the praetorian guard, Seianus, in turn are used as foils to highlight Tiberius as chief protagonist. In the unfolding of Tiberius’ story two concepts are deemed by Mendell to stand out almost as dramatis personae: first, libertas (freedom), represented by a ‘group’, Piso and two other nobles named Arruntius and Gallus; next, the ‘progress of oppressive legislation’ linked with the career of Seianus, who later became Tiberius’ right-hand man until he, too, was struck down.

  What Mendell has termed successive ‘acts’ within a greater drama have provided material for two distinct plays, Germanicus being the second. Centuries earlier, Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson exploited the dramatic potential of Annales 4-8 in his five-act drama Sejanus, His Fall. As a play it did not work for its contemporary audience and it has seldom been performed. Its merit as a literary reworking of an interesting era has been variously extolled and criticized. Sejanus depicts the career of its eponymous anti-hero on a stage cluttered with characters. The drama entails a powerful analysis of the problem of corruption inherent in a despotic regime. Its single production touched the nerve of the despotic monarch James I, who had shortly before the first presentation of the play tried and executed Sir Walter Raleigh for treason. Its published version probably had to be censored by its author to avoid the further ire of the King.

  Louw’s Germanicus is a far more successful reworking of the Tacitean dramatic potential inherent in Tacitus’ Annales 1-3. Chronologically, its action precedes that of Jonson’s play. Louw chose to limit his drama to ‘the tragedy of Germanicus’, ending with the hero’s death. The structure of the drama is unconventional, comprising eight (unnumbered) ‘scenes’, rather than the more conventional five acts. These form three locality-based groups: four scenes on the Rhine front, two in Rome and two in the Roman Near East. I have chosen to number the scenes in my translation and to mark the tripartite grouping by labelling the ‘Parts’ as I, II and III. See the Overview of the Contents of the Drama for a brief summary of each scene.

  The origins and reception of the drama

  Van Wyk Louw was a creative and imaginative poet. Germanicus deals with the corruption inherent in absolute power and the paradoxical powerlessness of the powerful to counter the forces that sweep him into despotic rule. Louw was clearly steeped in the Classics and continued reading Latin authors after attaining a BA at the University of Cape Town in 1925, where Latin had been one of his majors (Steyn 1998:54). His continued interest in Latin literature is attested to also by the title of a later collection of poems (‘Tristia’ 1962, based on the name of Ovid’s exilic work) published while he was in voluntary ‘exile’, teaching in Amsterdam during the late forties and most of the fifties.

  Louw’s Germanicus was composed during the second World War and soon after, but first published in 1956. Parts of Germanicus had been published even earlier, and these had also been produced on radio. Kannemeyer (1978:408) traces its genesis through 1944-8, as the byproduct of an uncompleted drama based on the life of the emperor Caligula (the son of the historical prince Germanicus whose story inspired the composition of this drama).

  Van Wyk Louw’s poetry is forceful and much admired. Yet as a play Germanicus is considered too static – for some it does not ‘work’ as a dramatic production, although it is considered eminently playable in a non-visual medium, the radio. Antonissen (1962:8) waxes lyrical about the profound impression a broadcast version made on him in early 1950. In this aspect Germanicus is ‘more dramatic’ than Jonson’s Sejanus, which has apparently been more frequently treated as reading matter than as a stage presentation. Germanicus elicited considerable contemporary critical interest. Grové (1965:185) considered the work to be a ‘dramatic poem’ rather than a ‘play’, whereas Brink (1959:1-25) argued for a reappraisal of both Louw and Shakespeare in terms of a new definition of the essence of drama: that its hero must serve as defender of order in its conflict with chaos. Antonissen (1962:180-5) wrote of a ‘sublime dispute’, and labelled the play as essentially a ‘psychological idea-drama’.

  The drama has frequently been set by various examining bodies as compulsory reading for the South African Matriculation examinations in Afrikaans literature. The reception of, or reaction to, the drama of both comparatively ignorant high school students and the intelligent layman is a further point of discussion within the Afrikaans literary world. It may be assumed that the average young reader comes to the text with very little knowledge of the historical background, as presumably did the larger part of each audience at its various productions. Germanicus was staged for the first time in the Western Cape in 1956, the year of its publication, and again at Stellenbosch in 1971. I saw the first performance as a callow high school Latin student, then still totally unfamiliar with both Germanicus and Tacitus. What troubled me then (a powerful hero concerned with keeping ‘pure’ but unwilling to do anything to retain his purity) is exactly what disturbs many modern readers of Tacitus (see below). In this, too, Louw was true to his source.

  Dominant themes in the drama

  There are two dominant themes in the drama. First, Louw presents us with a picture of the conflicting claims within any society of the need for orderly rule, and the ruler’s loss of essential human values, which results from a clash between his sense of humanity and his desire for power. Louw does this by means of intelligent reconstruction of hints given by the ancient historians, and by imaginative re-creation of conversations that, in the tradition of the speeches we find in such authors, portray what ‘might have been’ said. It is perhaps too simplistic to interpret the drama as a graphic illustration of the adage about ‘absolute power corrupting absolutely’. For classicists, the main interest lies in its clear presentation of Tacitus’ interpretation of the moral dilemma inherent in power.

&nbs
p; Louw chose to propound this timeless human problem within a specific historical framework, extracting the dramatic elements of Tacitus’ strongly republican interpretation of the ills of the beginnings of the principate. Louw himself was very aware of the importance of the classical tradition, and on occasion cited the concept of literary influence as being ‘not a physical mixture but a chemical process’, that is, the elements of imitation are so intermixed that they create what is essentially something new (Schutte 1996). This is a very interesting view of the nature of intertextuality and its role in the creation of original works. Louw’s use of Tacitus as source was not a mere rewriting of the historian’s narrative in dramatic form, but a profound recasting of the classical text into a totally new format. Louw’s Germanicus appears on the surface to follow the details of Tacitus’ narrative almost exactly, but events recorded by Tacitus are conflated or elided, and scenes, even characters (Marcus, Lucius, the doctor), are invented for the sake of the dramatic portrayal of the main protagonists.

  As second theme, Louw’s Germanicus as a drama reflects his own creatively imaginative interpretation of the end of an era and the dawning of another. His character Germanicus’ prophetic adumbration (in 19 AD, before the most conservatively reckoned date for the public career of Christ) of the changes to be wrought in the world order by His coming, will be, to the literal-minded, a chronological impossibility. We must accept that Louw, in creating his work of art, chose this era as a vehicle for putting forth his own interpretation of the sweep of history, with the hind-sight of close on two thousand years. The anachronism hardly matters, for our interest lies, rather, in Louw’s interpretation of character and his timeless portrayal of the human condition.

  As a drama Louw’s Germanicus, like its Elizabethan counterpart, has its own problematic areas. It has been the object of much critical appraisal; for this, see the Select Bibliography below. Some of these critics, as non-classicists, might clearly have benefited from the insights that would have been afforded by greater familiarity with Louw’s ancient sources. Of importance is Olivier’s (1992) analysis of Louw’s intellectual contribution to South African self-awareness, which can serve as clarification of aspects of Louw’s ambivalence about the relationship between intellectual and political freedom. This relationship is one of the contemporary issues highlighted in the drama.

  Criticism of the South African Nationalist government (that had been in power for eight years when the drama was first published) and dire warnings of its potential for absolutism have sometimes been read into Louw’s drama. The title of Louw’s earlier set of essays Lojale Verset (1939) can be translated as ‘Loyal Resistance’, but Louw’s approach here was literary, not political. Only one chapter of this work (pp. 106-8) refers to matters political, but in it Louw merely discusses his concern about the inability he perceives in Afrikaners to accept criticism. For Louw, ‘criticism is a nation’s conscience’ (p. 108, my translation). The concept of ideology as springboard for literature is a valid literary concern. However, in the light of the fact that Germanicus had largely been completed by December 1944 (Steyn:414), twelve years before its publication and when the Nationalist government had not yet come into power, this aspect may be largely discounted. Louw himself, in a lecture given at Stellenbosch as early as 1936, had called for Afrikaans literature to rise above the parochial to treat of universal themes (Van Wyk 2004, translating Louw’s own ‘Die rigting van die Afrikaanse Letterkunde,’ 1939).

  Yet Louw himself admitted that certain passages in Germanicus were aimed at General Smuts, leader of the South African Party that had been dominant during the Second World War, whom many Afrikaners, still embittered by memories of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, blamed for his so-called ‘pro-English’ stance (Steyn: 406). Smuts’ involvement of South Africa in the Second World War, seen by many as an ‘English war’, was one of the reasons for the Nationalist Party’s ascendance by 1948.

  Louw later reputedly ‘moved away from hard nationalism’. His Tristia was ‘virtually mythologised in a hermetically sealed off world of literature’. Such a stance served until very recently to keep Afrikaans intellectuals from contextualising any potentially explosive political writings of their time. To consider the degree to which Louw’s political attitudes may have changed over time is, however, not the aim of this Introduction. In a notoriously drawn-out polemic between Louw and a fellow-poet, Louw himself famously decried the so-called ‘psychological’, or biographical, approach that would read an author’s personal history or attitudes from his literary productions (Steyn 1998: 659-66, 688-93).

  Van Rensburg (1989) in a discussion of Louw’s changing attitudes to statutory literary censorship, points out that, to Louw, the artist ‘not only records reality but can change it’. This observation may perhaps also be applied to Louw’s general attitude to the state in political matters, but the set-up of the drama nowhere spells out such an intention in the case of his penning of Germanicus. There is, for example, no introductory essay by the poet. Yet if one accepts that an author of genius often reaches out in a wider sweep than he himself may be aware of, Louw’s vatic portrayal of the dangers inherent in absolute power can be taken to have reflected both the South Africa of his time and the world for all time.

  The character of Germanicus as presented by Tacitus and by Louw

  Tacitus’ portrayal of Germanicus is generally conceded to be problematic. Critical opinion of the historian’s intention ranges from ‘wholly positive’, to ‘ambiguous’, to ‘strongly negative’. The esteemed historian Sir Ronald Syme (1958: 498) saw Tacitus’ laudation of Germanicus as ‘grotesque in its disproportion’. The best of fairly recent discussions of the problem is that of Pelling (1993), who construes Tacitus’ characterization of Germanicus as ‘consistently inconsistent’ in an intentional series of contrasts with other key figures – Tiberius, Arminius, Piso himself. For instance, the actions of Piso and Plancina (Ann. 2.78-80) in acting together to quell a military uprising, mirror those of Germanicus and Agrippina (Ann. 1.33-6).

  Van Wyk Louw presents a ‘Tacitean’ Germanicus. This character appears on the surface to coincide with the Germanicus that was discernible in nineteenth and early twentieth century classical critics’ positive interpretation of Tacitus’ judgement of the hero. A more careful reading, however, reveals many of the same uncertainties that face Tacitean critics, and it gives us similar insights. Louw’s Germanicus is not wholly admirable. What is perhaps most inconsistent and problematical about the character is exactly what is most Tacitean. We must deduce that Louw, a classicist himself, was dubious about Tacitus’ intentions with this character.

  Afrikaans critics like Piek (1971) and Pretorius (1972: 30-44, 63) have no problem in construing Louw’s Germanicus as an Aristotelian hero, brought low by a single flaw in his character; yet Piek finds it to be impossible for the ‘ordinary person’ to identify with Germanicus’ inner passivity and his outward certainty of his own taint-free clarity of spirit. For Pretorius (1972: 45) the requisite ‘fatal flaw’ is the character’s concentration on his inner life and his consequent passivity. Kannemeyer (1978: 411-12) construes Germanicus’ passive acceptance of the inevitable as an essential element of his character, and deems the ‘true tragedy’ to lie in the sufferings of Tiberius, Piso and the other characters, where there is no chance of any redemption.

  The same insistent questions arise whether the drama is watched, heard on the radio or merely read: why does Van Wyk Louw’s Germanicus the man talk so much about ‘freedom’ and ‘simplicity’, while apparently doing nothing about either? Antonissen (1962: 181) defends this passivity in the hero as a sign of intense cerebration but notes (184) that Louw’s portrayal of Agrippina’s own increasing passivity is psychologically implausible. The parallel with Jonson’s drama is significant: the ‘Germanicans’ (‘republicans’, or harkers-back to the old order) seem too static. The fault may be traced to a common source: Tacitus’ portrayal of the ‘heroic faction’, which, in Mendell’
s (1935: 14) view, acts as a composite heroic foil to Tacitus’ ultimate villain, Tiberius.

  The second apparently unanswerable question is: why does the friendship between Louw’s characters Piso and Germanicus turn sour? A literary work is such because its author wills it so, even in an ostensibly ‘historical’ drama, working with ‘facts’. The dramatist selects and rearranges material in order to portray an issue to which his audience can relate; in other words, literature portrays – or should portray – the universal. The interaction of Louw’s characters portrays the type of conflict that the author wishes to explore, the relationship between intellect and action, self-control and power.

  Louw’s characterization of the three male protagonists

  This brings us to the three male protagonists as portrayed by Louw. We have to do with three levels of characterization: the historic personages as they really were, about whose true natures we can merely speculate, Tacitus’ (and Suetonius’) constructs of these personages and Louw’s imaginative reconstruction, based more or less loosely on his reading of the ancient authors.

  Both Louw’s Tiberius and his Germanicus exhibit an historic awareness impossible of access to the real, historic personages, and also unlikely in Tacitus’ Tiberius and improbable in his Germanicus. Tiberius’ awareness in the sixth scene of the inevitability of acceding to a system tainted by the corruption of absolutism and his drunken complicity with the unavoidable are plausible when considered in the light of the hints given by Tacitus about his reluctance to take power (Ann. 1.6-10). So, too, is Suetonius’ portrait of a man haunted: Tiberius’ two historically-attested withdrawals from the seat of power, first during Augustus’ lifetime, when he spent some years on the island of Rhodes, apparently studying philosophy but perhaps fleeing the shackles of an unhappy marriage with Augustus’ daughter Julia, and then, during his own imperial career, to the island of Capri whence he ruled by imperial missives to the Senate.

  Louw’s Germanicus initially appears unaware of the forces involved in the exercise of power: both the inevitability of corruption through its absolute exercise and the potential of the masses to force a ruler to act against his better instincts. In the pivotal sixth scene Tiberius spells out to his adopted son that withdrawal is impossible: if the younger man were to retire to a private life, he would become the notional leader of every rebellious faction within the empire. There is no way to withdraw, and there is no means to rule well, to remain true to a conception of purity and clarity:

  Where all are drunk, to stay stone sober still ...

  There lies the madness.

  Scene 6

  Note: From here onward, words or lines quoted in the Introduction are referenced by means of scene numbering only: use the ‘search’ facility to find the context of each within this text.

  So Louw’s Tiberius chooses drunken acquiescence; his Germanicus bows to a new inevitability: notwithstanding his desire for clarity and purity, he is part of the system. The only escape lies in death. He becomes a willing victim. He remains the representative of light and order but cannot combat the powers of darkness and chaos. Yet Louw’s Germanicus, the seeker after clarity, the man of light who must fight against the chaos around him and Louw’s swart Piso (‘black Piso’), the harker-back to a lost republican system, cannot simply be judged as protagonist and antagonist, good against evil and light against darkness. Piso stands for another type of simplicity and clarity and Germanicus, too, carries the seeds of darkness within himself.

  Louw has built up a character for Piso from mere hints given by Tacitus. It may be that his characterization of Cneius Piso[1] as republican leans in part on the staunchly independent Lucius Calpurnius Piso of Annales 2.32-5. This Lucius showed spirit in denouncing official malfeasance in the courts, threatening to withdraw from the corruption of public life, in prosecuting a friend of Livia Augusta in the face of opposition from Tiberius and in insisting that the Senate did not require the presence of the emperor in order to transact its business (cf. Syme 1970: 51-5).

  Mendell’s article showing Piso as one of the representatives of libertas may well have influenced Louw. But Louw’s Piso is essentially a construct: ‘black Piso’, the representative of darkness, whose initial friendship with Germanicus is portrayed in warmer terms than the ancient Roman practice of amicitia (‘friendship,’ often no more than a temporary political alliance) might have warranted. Amicitiam renuntiare (‘renouncing friendship’) could often mean no more than a severing of political ties. When the historical Germanicus did so (Ann. 2.70), he was creating a political chasm between himself, the representative of the emperor, and Piso as a recalcitrant subject. Louw does, however, build up a plausible picture of Piso as a simple-minded military man whose views of black and white can admit no shades of grey, while at the same time allowing for the possibility of another interpretation, that Plancina was Livia’s instrument and that Piso became a murderer only by default, when he became aware of both his hero’s frailty and his wife’s treachery. The final scene of quasi-reconciliation is historically unlikely, but artistically satisfactory. Piso, too, is the victim of a changing era; he, too, was doomed not to do otherwise than he did.

  Louw shows Piso as loyal to the republican ideal. This loyalty is initially shared by Louw’s Germanicus. This agrees with the general critical interpretation of Tacitus’ portrayal of the two men. Louw’s portrayal helps to explain Tacitus’ Piso as both defender of libertas, and as tool in the hands of Tiberius. Their gradual disaffection is satisfactorily accounted for by Louw’s interpretation of the two characters. Germanicus intellectualizes his disagreement with the excesses that imperial rule inevitably leads to, and he becomes more and more passive, resigned to participation in the chaos that imperial rule brings to many lives. The soldierly Piso wants a return to greater simplicity, to an order where every Roman had a fixed role and was bound by obligation to both his peers and his superiors. Neither understands the other’s point of view. Louw’s Germanicus is an intellectual, whose own historical awareness leads to inactivity, even though he knows that this inactivity will lead directly to his death (he refuses to try to root out the forces working against him). Ironically, in the end it is inaction by Piso, when he passively looks on while his wife and Germanicus’ physician administer the poison, that causes the prince’s death.

  Perhaps the best interpretation is that Louw’s two characters together represent the tortured man that is the Tiberius portrayed by Tacitus and Suetonius. Tiberius was an upright and efficient soldier, son of a staunch republican, who once sought to withdraw to a simpler life of study but was doomed to a grudging adoption into a system of which he did not approve, as we may deduce from Tacitus’ representation of his unwilling acceptance of the imperial role that was thrust upon him (Ann. 1.11, 12). His second and final withdrawal from the seat – but not the wielding – of power followed after the events with which Louw’s drama closes. This play, when read together with Jonson’s, gives us the ‘Tragedy of Tiberius’ which Mendell (1935) discerned within Ann. 1-8. A detailed comparison between Louw and Jonson in their depiction of Tiberius is not called-for here but, to the extent that they agree, we may consider both true to the elements common to Tacitus and Suetonius in their portrayal of the emperor. These elements do not occur in the Roman historian Velleius Paterculus, whose portrait of his former commanding officer Tiberius is far more sympathetic.

  The women

  Louw’s three main female protagonists are similarly matched, each as foil to one of the male figures, but in the end also creating a composite. The fourth woman, the German captive Thusnelda, has only a minor role: to serve, together with the tortured slave Clemens, as ‘the voice of prophecy’ against Roman power hunger. She also illuminates aspects of the three Roman women’s characters. Livia maltreats her, Agrippina is kind. In Scene Five, when Livia forces Plancina to stand next to Thusnelda, the Roman woman is indicated as being physically of small stature, with the implication, too, of a moral lack.

&nbs
p; Agrippina, as the strong and loyal wife whose support made Germanicus’ hold on power possible, can be seen as a type, also representing what is best in Livia, the ‘good mother’ planning to promote the career of her son. Plancina, the purveyor of poison, whose loyalty to Livia is greater than to her husband’s republican idealism, is a younger edition of Livia die ou apie (‘the old monkey’, Scene Four), ready to do whatever is vile for the sake of unspecified gain. Significantly, in the scenes where Agrippina and Livia converse with their respective male counterparts, a dimension of each male character is highlighted, but Plancina and Piso, while attending the Nabataean banquet together, hardly exchange a word. Piso only indirectly defends his wife against Agrippina’s accusation of poisoning, and then remains silent (Scene Six), whereas Plancina appears as another opponent of her husband in her spirited defence of the imperial reputation. Here Plancina sees herself as the representative of both Tiberius and Livia, when she viciously berates Agrippina:

  She hurts the majesty of Caesar when

  she talks about his mother – so;

  you know you must go back to Rome again!

  Scene 6

  After this, she does not reappear. In the two final scenes, Piso attests to his willingness to repudiate her, stressing at the end of the play that he would have been willing to sacrifice her life to stop the course of the poison, if only Germanicus had acceded to his attempts to rally him to the republican cause – and thereby to be true to the ‘greatness’ within him (Scene Eight). Neither Plancina nor Livia caused the hero’s death. It was Piso’s love, which had turned to hatred, because Germanicus had chosen to remain mundane:

  You do not know how much you brought me low

  when you rejected greatness – when you ... chose tameness.

  Scene 8

  Louw’s Livia is a rather contentious figure. It is generally accepted that Tacitus uses female characters who overstep the bounds of their accepted spheres to illustrate what he saw as the worst aspects of the new imperial system. He frequently hints that Livia was privy to all manner of plots, largely to enhance the career of her beloved eldest son Tiberius. Louw’s portrayal of her verges on caricature: he manages to convey an impression of soured age, close to senile dementia. This is historically unsatisfactory, given that Livia enjoyed some years of power as ‘Julia Augusta’ after her adoption into the Julian clan on her husband’s death, virtually ruling together with her son, until her death in 29 AD. Yet in the context of the drama such a portrayal of the empress is poetically satisfactory, illustrating one more facet of the corrupting influence of power, which curdles in Livia, as in Lady Macbeth, all normal womanly instincts of love and compassion. The only love she evinces is for her son Tiberius, whom she also fears and even seems, paradoxically, to hate. Louw’s Livia embodies to an evil extent the sentiments that Tacitus ascribes to our Agrippina’s daughter, the younger Agrippina, who, when told that she was doomed to be hated by her son, the later emperor Nero, replied ‘Let him hate me, as long as he also rules’.

  Historicity of the drama

  Don Fowler (1999: 278), writing about literary closure, quotes the American historian Hayden White on the narratological choices any historiographer must make to present a sequence of events in a manner that allows of their meaningful interpretation. White stresses that the same material can lend itself to emplotment in any one of a variety of genres. Louw’s Germanicus illustrates the truth of White’s observation: we are confronted by the choice of a creative and imaginative poet (Louw) to propound a timeless human problem within a specific historical framework as it was set out by another creative master of language (Tacitus), but with a radical change of genre.

  Louw’s historical sense emerges in his interpretative reading of the facts at Tacitus’ disposal in a more consistent and possibly more satisfactory way than that of his ancient predecessor. Louw has contracted and conflated the action of the years 16 to 19 AD, in which Tacitus narrates the further quasi-rebellious actions of Piso, but he does not continue with Piso’s trial and subsequent suicide, as related by Tacitus (Ann. 3.7-19.2).

  In an article (1996:148) I argued that Louw’s ‘greatest contribution to a rounded picture of the affair is his recreation of the tangled intrigues of Livia and Tiberius and his projection of a Plancina disaffected from her republican husband Piso at a much earlier stage than Tacitus allows for’. I tried there to show that Louw’s historical sense may be read from his ‘consistent and satisfactory interpretative reading of the facts at Tacitus’ disposal’. These facts were independently corroborated by the discovery in Spain (ancient Baetica) during the eighties of the twentieth century of inscribed bronze plates bearing a Senatusconsultum de Pisone patre (‘Decision by the Senate about the elder Piso’). Louw’s portrayal, as intelligent guesswork, seems to be supported by the new insights offered by this document.

  The description in the Senatusconsultum of Piso’s conduct largely concurs with Ann. 2.55, 57 and 69-70. That Germanicus himself associated his end with Piso’s machinations receives due emphasis as the ground for a formal renuntiatio amicitiae (‘renunciation of friendship,’ featured by Louw in the last scene of the drama). Piso’s lack of discipline, amounting to civil war, after the death of Germanicus, is given as another count in the Senatusconsultum. Worse, his exhibition of unalloyed joy after the death of the prince (as also related by Tacitus, Ann. 2.75.2-77) is indicted, and Piso’s accusation of Germanicus (relayed to Tiberius after the death of the prince) is listed as evidence of wrong-doing on the part of its author. His death at his own hand was seen as ‘robbing the Senate of its just revenge’. About Plancina: the document admits that there had been serious charges against her, but that ‘in acknowledgement of Livia Augusta’s great service to the state in producing her great son Tiberius’, all charges were to be dropped against her favourite, without further specification of reasons. This stark relaying of an obviously tendentious decision suggests tremendous tension within the Senate, possibly even differences of opinion, about simply remitting accusations against Plancina.

  The tone of the Senatusconsultum (but not all the information it conveys on this point) agrees very well with Tacitus’ account. The exoneration of Plancina from all blame and its implication of a profound division between husband and wife is the major difference between the Senatusconsultum and Tacitus’ narrative of the events of October AD 19. That Tacitus was tendentious in his presentation of the imperial family is generally accepted, perhaps also of the other persons that feature in his narrative. Tacitus implies (Ann. 2 69-70) that Piso and Plancina were both involved in Germanicus’ death: Plancina outdid her husband’s transports of joy at the death of the prince, and she chose at that time to put off the mourning she had been wearing for a sister, to change into festive garments. Tacitus’ account of the trial shows that Piso’s defence could not refute charges against him of bribery of the troops and insurrection against his commander Germanicus, but that the charge of poison remained unsubstantiated. According to Tacitus, Plancina remained loyal to Piso until it became clear that he could in no way save himself, after which she conducted a separate – and more successful – defence. Tacitus hints strongly that Piso did have an injunction from Tiberius to do away with Germanicus, but admits that he cannot substantiate the assertion, stressing the obvious embarrassment with which Tiberius cited his mother’s entreaties as the ground for Plancina’s defence.

  Louw’s portrayal of the role of each of the protagonists makes sense of these details. His historical interpretation of the events narrated by Tacitus accords well with the Senatusconsultum, a genuine historical source: his rendering is consistent with the exoneration of Plancina that it spells out. Louw’s picture of gradual disaffection between his Piso and Germanicus helps to give greater consistency and to smooth out the discrepancies inherent in Tacitus’ problematic portrayal of a Piso as both defender of libertas and instrument of Tiberius. Similarly, Louw’s Germanicus is something more than the popular but problematic prince tha
t emerges from a first, cursory reading of Annales 1 and 2. Louw’s portrait of an intellectual, doomed by his own historical awareness to inactivity, is not wholly Tacitean, but gains in credibility when Germanicus’ known dedication to the arts is remembered (including his poetic reworking of Aratus’ treatise on astronomy).

  On Translating Louw’s Afrikaans

  On theories of translation

  Translating a modern text in a still-spoken language into another spoken language is not so very different from translating ancient ‘dead’ languages, the more common practice of classicists the world over. The same issues of translation apply – literal versus Chomskyan ‘deep’ meaning and word-for-word equivalence versus dynamic equivalence. Translating poetry is even more complex: should the exact metrical pattern be maintained, or another metre be found as suitable vehicle? Pope’s rhyming heroic couplets made of Homer’s Iliad something other than the original. Although Pope himself averred that he was striving to maintain the ‘Rapture and Fire’ of the original, Troy became Pope’s Troy, not Homer’s, his Achilles or Agamemnon should be wearing powdered wigs, not Bronze Age Greek armour. Another decision a translator must take relates to the measure of ‘strangeness’ a translation may reflect: to what degree should the translator strive for the Afrikaans to shine through the English (rather in the manner of Herman Charles Bosman’s English narratives of simple Afrikaner life), or should she strive to make the translation stand on its own as an independent literary work?

  There are many theories of translation, not all fully formulated, nor even realised, by their proponents and practitioners. Fashions in translation theory may also be traced. Broadly speaking we have to do with two almost opposing trends: the first has adequacy, that is, equivalence to the source text, as criterion. The other trend, also termed ‘journalistic criticism,’ is less concerned with literalness, and more with the fluency and naturalness of a translation.

  In the broader field of translation theory, which can almost not be separated from its practice, there is at present some movement away from Eugene Nida’s influential views on the ‘science of translation’ of the sixties of the twentieth century, which allowed for either ‘formal equivalence’ or ‘dynamic equivalence’. Nida’s preference was for the latter, which would acculturate a translated text into the context of the target language, in order to maintain efficiency of communication, and would elicit both comprehension of intent and equivalence of response.[2] France (2000: 4, 5) cites the French scholar Meschonnic as Nida’s chief opponent.[3] His concern was for the ‘dignity of translation’ to be enhanced through a conscious distantiation between the original and the translation, a retention of a certain ‘foreignness’ in the new text in the target language. Meschonnic’s view seems at present to be gaining ground.

  With these considerations also comes the issue of originality. Translation from English to Latin was termed ‘prose composition’ by nineteenth century schoolmasters and their successors. All translation, at its best, is exactly that: the composition of something new. I have spoken above of Louw’s palpable awareness of the literary tradition. Louw himself emphasised that tradition has always been the literary norm, but in discussing originality, also in the reworking of traditional material, he differentiated between imitatio and aemulatio. In a poem titled ‘Ars poetica’ from his Tristia (1962: 34-5), Louw seems to suggest that only ideas, not literary forms, may be emulated:

  Uit die gevormde literatuur

  Is nooit weer poësie te maak nie

  Uit die ongevormde wél.

  From well-formed literature

  No-one can remake poetry as before

  Only from the unformed.

  (my translation).

  The poem goes on to suggest that it is possible to vary a theme, but not to ‘play’ with it, nor even to abuse it, nor to stand ‘in the shoes of the great ones of the past’. It ends with the idea (p. 35) that we have an injunction to recreate ‘the creation of the god’ (lower case, implying either literary masters of the past, or their inspiration) in words that are both ‘truth and sign’ (waarheid en teken). For Louw, such words need to be imbedded in a ‘purity of form’ that strips away all but the essentials (Van Wyk 2004: 77-8). Schutte (1996: 127) indicates that, to Louw, translation was an important element in the creation of a national literature, but that, for Louw, the question to ask of a work, whether a translation or an imitation, is not ‘Is it new?’ but, ‘Is it good?’ For Louw, that is the essence of originality. This is not very far from the ancients’ concept of originality as lying chiefly in the creative re-use of matter taken from a predecessor. This approach is also akin to the ‘journalistic criticism’ cited above as one of the methods of practising translation criticism.

  Let us consider what Van Wyk Louw has done in this drama, in the light of his own view, sketched above, of the correct use of literary influences from the past. His rendering of Tacitus’ dramatic Latin narrative prose into an Afrikaans verse drama is not a ‘translation’ in the usual sense. It is also a far cry from the prose – or verse – composition of Victorian schoolboys.

  Louw embarked upon an act of supreme creativity involving two conscious acts of transmutation: first he had to plumb the full implications of Tacitus’ concise and sometimes cryptic Latin, and rethink these in his native tongue. It is probable that Louw actually consulted the original Latin texts for his creation of the drama, as he was fluent in Latin.[4] He had read Annales 5 for his degree and it is probable that he would have had the complete work to hand. He himself admitted in a radio interview that he had spent some time (apparently from November 1941 to February 1943) in preparatory research and intensive reading of various sources, ‘Tacitus, Suetonius and others,’ with whose works he had in any case long been familiar (Steyn 1998: 403-5). Then he had to re-visualise historiography into a poetic drama, with all the constraints that movement from a readerly to an essentially oral medium would entail, while bearing in mind a target audience that was not necessarily familiar with any aspects of Roman history. This was not mere translation, but re-creation in a new generic format, and in new words, that is, with new ‘truths and signs’. In the conceptualisation of White, as cited by Fowler (2000), Tacitus and Louw have variously emplotted the same sequence of events, each thereby making these events comprehensible, but capable of varied interpretations.

  My translation represents a third leap of language (but not of emplotment). My aim was both to make the world of classical scholarship aware of Louw’s tour-de-force in metamorphosing historiography into drama, and to convey something of the beauty of Louw’s mastery of language to an Anglophone public. My translation aims to be no more than as-near-as-possibly faithful imitation. For this, I had to explore the intricate nuances of Louw’s concise, sometimes cryptic, Afrikaans, and rethink these in my mother tongue. Not only was I required to rethink his words, but I had to obey the constraints of Louw’s metric pattern and, with that, face the problem of differences in prosody between Afrikaans and English verse forms.

  Holman and Boase-Beier (1999: 1-17), discussing literary translation, argue that constraint is precisely what leads to creativity in the practice of the translator’s art, particularly in the translation of poetry. They define (p. 14) the role of the translator as ‘[having] changed from that of a faithful reproducer to an inventive interventionist’. This is the essence of translation as aemulatio, rather than imitatio, Louw’s terms. What I tried to do, was perhaps closer to imitatio, but still working within constraints, still requiring inventiveness.

  Of importance, too, is the so-called ‘third code’ that lies between the source language and the target language. This code is one of the constraints that operate in translation. It seems to indicate a striving toward ‘normalization’, or homogeneity of language, in translated works. This tendency toward linguistic middle ground results from an awareness in translators that their texts will meet other expectations than will original texts. Such mediocrity of language is precisely what I
sought to avoid in my translation. I want my readers to react to my text as they would have reacted to Louw’s, had they been able to understand Afrikaans. This aim added to the constraints that, I think, challenged my creativity. What follows below is an exposition of the main types of problem, that is, the major constraints, with which I was faced, and my attempts to meet these creatively.

  Common Germanic words

  To translate irregular blank verse from a Germanic language into a related Germanic-derived language that has strong overtones of its other, Romance, origins, brings problems on various levels. The fact that English and Afrikaans have so many Germanic characteristics in common was surprisingly problematic. Words deriving from the same root would naturally occur to the translator to express similar ideas, but these roots in some cases have undergone a semantic shift, so that exact equivalence of form does not result in exact equivalence of meaning. For example wit (white) I have rendered as ‘candid’ with ‘senators’ (Scene One), and as ‘pale’ with ‘ranks’ (Scene Eight). The emotional ‘feel’ of the English word ‘mean’ is not the same as the Afrikaans gemeen, for which in Scene Seven I used ‘vicious’. Wild (‘wild’) in: so klein, so wild is more exactly rendered by ‘scared’, so tiny, so scared (Scene Three). Also in Scene Three ‘reckless’ is the best translation for wild, but a few pages on the exact Germanic equivalent ‘more wild’ works best for the Afrikaans wilder.

  Prosody and metre

  The term ‘prosody’ refers to the manner in which a particular language fits into a set metrical pattern. It offered the most knotty problems. Although a five-beat metrical patterning can be followed in both English and Afrikaans, the nature of each language and the word-stress in each are such that words simply fit into such a metre in different ways. This is because the stress patterns even of etymologically related words differ in the two languages. The plurals of virtually similar words are formed differently. Afrikaans often adds an additional syllable (the schwa, ‘-ĕ’) for the plural, whereas the most common English plural signifier (‘-s’) does not change the length of a word, hence legioene vs. legions, gode vs. gods. I often added ‘filler’ syllables, hierdie and daardie becoming this here, that there.

  One can maintain metrical patterning, even where prosody differs. Metre is dictated by the number of ‘beats’ (stressed syllables) in a verse. Louw largely keeps to a five-beat verse pattern, such as: miskien ’n kern, klein, byna onsigbaar, which I made: perhaps a kernel, small, nearly invisible (Scene Seven). It was impossible here to reproduce the additional effect of k-alliteration. Throughout I tried to maintain Louw’s metric pattern of stressed syllables, as in: O gode, hou hul daar!, that becomes: Ye gods, pray keep them there! (Scene One). In the same scene Is dit teater hier? Moet ons applous gee?, became: Is this a theatre? And do you want applause? The number of unstressed syllables may vary greatly and does not, in fact, affect the lilt of the verse. Prosodic problems were solved by inserting more (sometimes fewer) unstressed syllables in a loose approximation of the metric feel of the original, but keeping to the same number of stressed syllables per line. Occasionally Louw’s lines are shortened to four or even three beats, as in the example, O gode, hou hul daar! or What d’you hear around the fires? (Scene One) for Wat hoor jy by die vure? Six beats work equally well: That’s all that great Rome will offer you, old greybeard (again in One), for Dis àl wat die groot Ryk jou gee, ou gryskop.

  Density of Louw’s poetry

  Louw’s poetic Afrikaans is so concise that the common wisdom of South African translators, that it takes more words so say something in Afrikaans than in English, seldom applies. This naturally requires a condensation of the English that gives a very satisfactory poetic density, but can sometimes sound forced. The following example is from Scene Three:

  sy vlote is gebreek teen vreemde strande

  en duine, teen somber kape uitgespoel

  waar voëls draai wat geen mens ken, neste maak

  van stink doodsbeendere, en nagtelik skree

  – ek hoor hul in my kop nog – bo die skuim

  en die wit rots van Brittanje, die geheime;

  ná elke trugslag kom hy heersender:

  dit moet ’n god wees wat hom gryp en lei!

  his fleets lay broken on those foreign strands

  and dunes, washed up on sombre capes

  watched over by birds that no man knows, nesting yet

  on dead men’s reeking bones, and nightly screeching

  – I hear them shrilling in my head – above the foam

  and the white rock of Britain, that secret place;

  above each downfall he rises stronger:

  for sure a god raised him and leads him still!

  Density can be achieved by various means. In the passage quoted, there is an almost total dearth of ‘grammatical items’ such as articles and prepositions in favour of highly charged ‘content words’ or ‘lexical items’. More difficult was the concise thought-pattern and elliptic wording of Die kruisdood is verskriklik; en dis mense (literally: ‘the cross-death is terrible, and it’s people’). Expansion, for both metre and sense, brought: The cross is dreadful; and people suffer so (Scene Five).

  Occasionally, however, the Afrikaans is considerably longer than its English equivalent. ‘Filler words’ are needed, for example, ‘at all’ in I’m not a king of kings at all (Scene Seven) for Ek is geen koning van die konings nie.

  Word order, sentence structure and punctuation

  Using an exactly equivalent (‘Germanic’) word order in sentence structures would in most cases have resulted in understandable English, but would have sounded vaguely ‘Shakespearean’. English syntax has over the centuries moved away from its Germanic origins. The dense and staccato four-syllabic So sterf ek nie! (‘So die I not!’) became the more natural-sounding six-syllabic I will not die like that! (Scene Three). It still has a three-beat prosody, but is now an iambic line. Five-syllabic Ken ek hulle nie! works better as the five-syllabic Don’t I just know ’em! (Scene One) rather than its four-syllabic ‘Germanic’ equivalent Know I them not! Occasionally an exact overlap of word order, meaning and prosody gives happy relief to the translator. The rather prosaic Maar wat hy sê, is waar works on all levels as But what he says, is true (also in Scene One).

  Louw’s idiosyncratic punctuation mostly worked. He sometimes uses upper case where Afrikaans convention prescribes lower case. Thusnelda and the Nabataean king address Germanicus as ‘U’ (‘You’). I have chosen to ignore this, but have retained his capital after a dash, as in Scene Seven, Louw’s p. 91, lines 6 to 8, where a three-line interpolation is indicated with dashes and the next line begins a contrasting thought with upper case Maar (‘But’). I retained Louw’s lower case where sentences seem to run on in spite of pauses in meaning, as in Scene One:

  It’s twenty winters

  that I have borne like this until the winter

  came and sat upon my head: just see my hands –

  gnarled roots; and see my back – it’s been tanned with blows.

  Louw often, sometimes inexplicably, omits a period at the end of what appears as a completed thought. Where a second character interrupts a speaker, such an omission is dramatically effective and I have retained this idiosyncracy, as also with the omission of all punctuation after stage directions. Both types of omission occur in the following:

  GERMANICUS

  Still half amused

  Marcus, shut up. Stand back. The wine is talking now

  MARCUS

  Does not hear him; louder

  Who is your Caesar? Is it Tiberius?

  That drunkard lolling round in Rome?

  Scene 3

  Louw’s idiosyncratic vocabulary

  Louw’s idiosyncratic use of words, deliberate archaisms and occasional neologisms call for interpretative reading. For example Louw’s trugslag (in the eight-line passage quoted above, 7th line), for normal Afrikaans terugslag, became ‘downfall’, and in the same line heersender (literally ‘ruling-e
r’) became ‘stronger’. The emphatic reduplicative superlative in van die aller- aller- allerfynstes (‘thrice-exceedingly fine people’) became of the high, and higher, highest ranks. An idiosyncratic use of kram (‘staple’, which is by definition shaped like a hoop) in moet kram-wees (‘must be hooped’) translates into arcs across (both examples from Scene Five). The unusual pylerig (‘arrow-ish’) had to be expanded into bristling with darts. Louw’s Jy sukkel met die a-b-jab uses an almost totally unfamiliar old Germanic term, jab. I varied the familiar a-b-c, to You struggle with the a-b-z, which works, whether one says British ‘zed’ or American ‘zee’ (both examples from Scene Seven).

  A variety of registers

  Louw’s characters speak in a variety of registers. A particular word-order is idiomatic in a certain non-standard Afrikaans, for example Blaas òp die vuur, occurring twice on the first page. Op can be either a preposition (‘on’) or an adverb (‘up’). Stress on ò makes it an adverb. Standard Afrikaans word order puts it at the end of the sentence: Blaas die vuur op, but this has far less emotional impact. The soldiers are cold and angry and they are stoking the fires of rebellion. I chose to interpret the first òp as a preposition: the first soldier merely asks his mate to ‘blow on the fire to make it flame up’. When the more rebellious third soldier repeats it, adding blaas goed!, I translated less literally, implying rebellion. The extended line became: Stir up the embers, stir up well! (Scene One)

  The vernacular kjent for kind (child) in the mouth of an old soldier was impossible to duplicate idiomatically. The verse reads: Sò praat ’n kjent van groot Agrippa net (also One) with the literal English equivalent being something to the effect: ‘So speaks a chee-ild of great Agrippa just’. I toyed with: Thus speaks a child from great Agrippa’s loins, but the register was wrong. It finally became: This is a child that great Agrippa bred!

  Rhetorical and poetic devices

  Louw’s use of zeugma was easier to translate. In the first scene our rebellious third soldier avers that the double-dealing Senate at Rome speaks in two languages. A fourth soldier answers him: En jy praat drie: Latyn, en groot, en sot. This becomes And you talk three: Latin, and big, and rot (Scene One).

  Poetic devices were a wonderful challenge. The alliterative onomatopoeia in Dis vreemde pap wat in die potte prut was easily rendered as: It’s a strange porridge a-plopping in the pots. Emphatic stress Hom laat jy staan!) translates into: Him you mustn’t touch! (both examples also from Scene One). More difficult was the linked word play in: Want ‘sien’ is nie begryp, nie ‘gryp’, verstaan nie. My word-chain links the three abstract nouns differently, but tries to respect the spirit of Louw’s idiom: For ‘see’ is not foresee, not ‘grasp’, not understand (Scene Eight).

  Perhaps the most difficult are idiomatic expressions that make no sense when rendered literally, as in the following extensive example (also One) for which I first give a literal translation (below):

  Hy’s nog nie moeg van klaas-wees! Elke dag

  wil hy nog die sersant se rottang vreet,

  vyf oulap – en sy klere, wapens, tent

  en vroumensvleis daarmee betaal Ons nie!

  He’s not yet tired of being Claus. Every day

  he still wants to guzzle the sergeant’s Malacca cane

  five old rags – and his clothes, weapons, tent

  and womanfolk’s flesh pay with that. We not!

  Klaas (German Claus), an abbreviation for Nicholas, is a labourer, as opposed to baas, ‘boss’. An oulap, meaning ‘penny’, is the Afrikaans equivalent of the Latin pannus, ‘a rag’ (from which the word penny is derived), and a rottang is literally a cane, but in English it is associated with schoolboys or dandies, not soldiers. Vroumensvleis is a vulgarism for a prostitute. A literal translation would make no sense at all, hence my:

  He’s not yet sick of daily kicks and blows.

  He still goes sucking at the sergeant’s whip,

  Five cents or so – and then his clothes and weapons, tent

  and juicy tarts are paid. But that’s not us!

  The very next line translates easily, and virtually word for word, both idiom and word rhythms coinciding neatly: Is ons nie van die trots ou heersersras? becomes Are we not of a proud old ruling race?.

  Diminutives (signalled by the suffix -tjie) are as frequent in Afrikaans as in Latin, and sometimes are used to denote appreciation or contempt. English expresses these feelings differently, hence my first two examples, both from Scene One: bruin Romeinse seuntjies becomes nice brown Roman boys, and elke riddertjie kan méér bied is translated as and any stupid knight can offer more. Occasionally ‘small’ will do, as in: just one big marsh, reeds and small white frogs for: die een moeras, riet en wit paddatjies. Also in Scene One, a word like speletjies for ‘games’ actually no longer has any diminutive force and its inherent diminution could be ignored, but for metric reasons a filler was needed. Hence watter speletjies! became ye gods, what games! Diminutives of adverbs are almost untranslatable: ‘fyntjies’ (= ‘small-y fine’) occurs twice on the same page in this scene. I quote one example:

  Sal die Ryk

  van wit hand tot wit hand fyntjies gegee word

  in die senaat, soos ’n klein dobbelsteen?

  Will the Empire

  pass from one white hand delicately to the next

  in the senate, like half a pair of dice?

  The phrase half a pair of dice, in this passage is an extreme example of the kind of latitude I occasionally allowed myself. The phrase serves as the semantic and metrical equivalent of klein dobbelsteen (‘small gambling stone’), which is Louw’s own idiosyncratic rendering of the more common diminutive, dobbelsteentjie (‘a die’), here without the ‘-tjie’. Metrics required the line to be filled with ‘empty’ syllables. Modern English vernacular usage prefers the plural ‘dice’, even when only one ‘die’ is meant. My compromise tries to accommodate all these disparate issues.

  Most difficult were cases where the Afrikaans is ambiguous: die rotsige Petra wat geen Caesars ken can mean either that the Nabataean city knows no Caesars or that the Caesars do not know the city. Three lines later we find the key. The king of the Nabataeans wants Germanicus to describe his city to Tiberius, who is unfamiliar with the area, hence the earlier line should be rendered: the rugged Petra that no Caesars have seen (Scene Seven). The accusative-and-infinitive construction is frequent in Afrikaans, and, like its Latin counterpart, lends itself to ambiguity. In the example, Hoe’t ek jou leer vertrou? Naby die wynkan? potential ambiguity is heightened by the fact that the Afrikaans leer can mean either ‘teach’ or ‘learn’. The context does not make it clear whether Piso is asking an underling to what degree he (Piso) had learned to trust the officer, or in what manner he had taught the officer to trust him. The context suggests most strongly that Piso is reminding the officer of his past experience of his superior’s trustworthiness. Hence I have rendered the verse: How did I teach you my trustworthiness? Next to a wine jug? (Scene Two).

  Conclusion

  These, then, were some of the constraints around or through which I had to work. I experienced the truth of the aphorism that constraint leads to creativity, whether in an original work or in a translation. I certainly found the exercise of translation challenging, even exhilarating. I have seldom felt so disappointed when reaching the end of a self-imposed task as when I started on the last scene. Throughout Louw’s reworking of Tacitus’ story-line, his colouring of the basic history of Germanicus Caesar was easily transposed. Louw is at his best in the great monologues that dominate the various debates between the main protagonists. His often non-standard Afrikaans has a grand eloquence that sweeps the reader or listener along in a torrent of densely-argued meaning. If I have in some measure succeeded in letting the richness and subtlety of Louw’s Afrikaans shine through my English renditions, and if by this means a masterpiece has been made accessible to a world-wide readership, I shall have achieved my aim.

  Notes

  1. The name is more co
mmonly spelled ‘Cnaeus’, but Louw’s spelling is retained in the translation.

  2. Eugene A. Nida, Towards a science of translating with special reference to the principles and procedures involved in Bible translation, Leiden, 1964: 1982, quoted by France 2000:5.

  3. H. Meschonnic, Pour la poétique II, Paris 1973, quoted by France 2000: 4. For an exhaustive bibliography on translation theory, see France 2000: 114-23.

  4. In a personal communication, his son Peter told me (February 2007) that his father had on occasion on his travels in Italy, chatted in Latin with a priest whom he met, as his Italian was inadequate for a proper conversation.