Includes abstract.

This MA thesis is divided into three parts. 1) A Preface, which concerns the act of writing this work, with a reflections on the attendant difficulties regarding editing and editorial distance. A placement of the poetry in relation to "South African writing", and to late 20th century poetry. A brief elucidation of the poems' preoccupations and concems. 2) Two Essays, entitled "Dear Warlock-Williams: Why of Course: The Lonely Larkin" and 'William Empson : His Modem Escape". The first concerns Philip Larkin's uncanny ability to create a beauty out of irony, isolation, and desolation, his achievement of transcendence from entrapment. The second essay deals with William Empson's unique poetic position: a truly modem one. The essays puts forward the idea that Empson's poetry can be regarded as a struggle between a wish for escape and a need to engage with an horrendous "objective" reality. In other words, his struggle is between poetry and plain speaking; between art and science. 3) The Poems, which form a group of forty written throughout 1997/8. They have been thoroughly edited several times over, in close consultation with Assoc. Prof. Stephen Watson of the Department of English.

Featherstream is a romantic suspense novel set at the southernmost tip of Africa during the Second World War. Returning to her father's farm at Cape Agulhas for the university holidays, Anna van der Vliet stumbles on a clandestine operation to provision enemy U-boats. Her dilemma of whether to betray family or country is further complicated when she falls in love with German naval commander Thomas von Eisenheim. Anna goes on to uncover a plot by Nazi Germany and the right-wing Ossewabrandwag organisation to blow up the Union's parliament buildings and install a pro-German Afrikaner government. The novel's landscape ranges from the remote fynbos plains of Agulhas in the Southern Cape, through the Moravian hamlet of Elim to Cape Town. Based on extensive historical research, it explores the deep ideological tensions in South Africa between supporters of the pro-war government of General Jan Smuts and Doctor Daniel Malan's Purified National Party, which were mirrored in communities and families across South Africa. The driving force of the story is a young woman's struggle to reconcile divided loyalties and emerge from the emotional stranglehold of her overbearing father.

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Kyne is an outsider: a white, Danish girl, living in a country where the majority are blacks and the few whites are English. Her sentiments of belonging and integration are lost when her family's farms are taken away by the dictatorship government in 2004. The country, Zimbabwe, spirals out of control: murder, starvation and chaos becomes the way of life. Kyne and her family are left with nothing. Kyne travels back in time to the bizarre life of her childhood on their farm in Rhodesia during the war in the 1970s. It is a nostalgic yet often horrifying return to her past as she uncovers the strange, sometimes idyllic lifestyle that was once a very normal way of life to her. The story unfolds in a landscape that is both harsh yet beckoning. Kyne confronts her relationships with all those around her beginning with her Danish parents who are determined to continue farming in a land which they call home, even if war threatens their lives. The reader meets Pencil the Cook who allows Kyne into the silent calm of his kitchen, his family, and the secret, adult world in which Kyne will learn of the terrifying reality of war. She describes the workers on the farm who are pulled between loyalty to their employer and to the blacks who seek independence from white rule. Finally, she describes the other white families nearby who are attacked, tortured and killed for attempting to the only way of life they have ever known.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / The objective of this dissertation is to provide a critical examination of poetry translation, using as a framework the notion that translation of poetry is comparable to an act of murder or homicide. Constructs pertaining to detective fiction are used as a basis to expose critical theories and commentary on poetry translation, which validate the comparison, taking into account the integrity of the poetic text, the context in which it exists, and the identity (constructed or real) of the poet. Four published translations, by different authors, into English of Anna Akhmatova’s poem Posledniy tost (‘The Last Toast’) are analysed in detail to demonstrate the validity of the argument and to attempt to review and quantify the loss of a poem’s essential and vital qualities as a result of translation.

This thesis takes as its subject the various public roles and representations of writers, using Said's 1993 Reith lectures on the subject of the intellectual as a starting point. The main questions raised are how writers, in various political and historical contexts, have functioned as public intellectuals, and how they have negotiated the tensions between their various private and public commitments and responsibilities, whether artistic, social, or political. To gain insight into these issues, this thesis turns to the essays, memoirs and lectures of Jean-Paul Sartre, Nadine Gordimer, Pablo Neruda and Gao Xingjian.

Includes bibliographical references. / We decided to go to Samarkand. Why Samarkand? No-one was certain, but it sounded exotic, and that was good enough for the four of us. We packed up our lives in London, bought a hardy vehicle, learnt some Russian, obtained letters of invitation from ministries of the interior, and set off. Along the way we ran into some trouble: treason in Croatia; psychosis in Serbia; sedition in Azerbaijan; starvation on the Caspian. And we weren’t even in Central Asia yet. We still had to negotiate desert roads and traverse the Pamir Highway, second-highest in the world. Before reaching Samarkand we’d have lost ten kilogrammes each, seen a hundred busts of Lenin and been harried by a thousand officious border guards and ex-KGB policemen. We discovered a region that is as beautiful as it is mystifying. Stranded ideologically between the Kremlin and the Koran, Central Asia is a baffling league of rival states. Held together loosely by the accident of geography and a common hatred for Russia, the alliance goes no further than that. Turkmen oil and gas merchants, Uzbek nationalists, Kyrgyz mountain folk and Tajik peasants all live in close and unfriendly proximity. Stalin pencilled in their borders on a whim, and with the fall of communism in 1989, many were left stranded, minorities under foreign rule. This is the world of Robert Byron, Colin Thubron, Fitzroy MacLean and Marco Polo; the Samarkand of Omar Khayyam, Timur the Lame, Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan; the fantasy of Christopher Marlowe, Edgar Allan Poe, Wole Soyinka and James Elroy Flecker. We wanted to see the land and its people through their eyes, but also through our own. Our journey took us through a land of extremes: over the snowy peaks of the Hindu Kush and through the parched Karakum Desert; across the ancient Amu- and Syr-Darya Rivers, known in the West as the Oxus and Jaxaertes; and ultimately to our destination – the great Silk Road capitals of Bukhara and Samarkand. The last, sad caravanserai had made their final journeys from the turquoise gates many years ago. What would the cities be like now? When the journey was over, and I’d experienced the road to Samarkand for myself, I put my version of it in writing. By Hotter Winds captures the exhilaration and tedium of travel and the shared experience of a journey by car. At the same time it offers narrow glimpses into the history of the faded Silk Road, its cities and its people.

"When does a language die?" This question leads to the central, overarching theme explored in the novel. The protagonist is a naive twenty-something who runs a boutique advertising agency in the bustling heart of Cape Town. As a published author he has a passion for Afrikaans literature but he knows that due to the socio-economic climate of the current postapartheid South Africa, making a career out of his passion, is futile. It is this reality that is investigated in the text, posing a secondary question: Can a passionate, gifted individual follow his or her artistic ambitions in South Africa's current socio-economic environment? The story unfolds with a car crash that leaves the protagonist paralyzed and dying in the middle of nowhere. With this scene, the protagonist becomes a metaphor for the Afrikaans language - a language paralyzed by its historical baggage, dying in the middle of nowhere (the southern tip of Africa). The protagonist also represents the passionate, young artists and writers who naively dream of achieving artistic success and saving the language. A young girl stumbles upon the lead character in this deserted landscape (almost as one would stumble upon a new piece of literature). The girl's father is "out of town", and therefore can't help. So, she tries to save him herself, giving him nourishment and accompaniment. The missing father figure, or more specifically, the missing leader figure, is also fundamental to the theme. It intensifies the concept that the burden is upon the younger generation to save themselves, their language and their culture. The plot of the novel drives this theme. The protagonist is given the chance to save himself, his family and his language - everything he holds dear - by an opportunity created by a business tycoon. This character is depicted as the quintessential leader figure. He has the desire to create a long-lasting legacy by saving the language and he has the financial means to see it through. He briefs the protagonist as well as other agencies to conceptualize a marketing campaign that will ensure the survival of the Afrikaans language for generations to come. In the final chapter, the protagonist dies, not being able to save himself, his family, or his language. The young girl that discovered him, now buries him with his notebook (which is filled with his literary writings sporadically featured throughout the text). The metaphor is thus that as he (the young, passionate writer) dies, the language dies. The theme's crescendo is reached in the final three sentences of the novel, where it is professed that the Afrikaans language will not die some unforeseeable time in the future, but that the language is in fact already dead. And there is nothing the passionate, naive young artists can do to save it. By dying, the protagonist himself becomes the concept of his marketing campaign. He becomes the billboard, the advertisement (Die Advertensie), for a language that cannot be saved.