“Die taal asyn aan die lippe”: ’n oorsig van Breyten Breytenbach se poësie-oeuvre

Abstract

In a letter to friends and acquaintances dated September 2002 Breyten Breytenbach declared his final leave-taking of South Africa and Afrikaans, and a refusal to write in his mother tongue any longer. This has brought about the conundrum of Afrikaans’s finest living poet still writing and producing privately, but not discontinuing publishing in Afrikaans (his last collection of poetry was Papierblom [Paper Flower] in 1998). A critical-historical overview is offered of the estranged poet’s oeuvre (1964-2002). The leitmotif of language, encompassing poetical comments on Afrikaans, is traced throughout the poetical oeuvre. The essay aims to explore these statements so as to reveal the poet’s changing attitude towards the language and its speakers, and traces the development over forty years of the poet’s complicated love-hate relationship with Afrikaans (the language he writes in) and theAfrikaans community (his readership).