Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 52, Issue 1, 2014

This article explores the role that the Netherlands play in the transnational movement of Afrikaans authors. Because of the historical ties between the Netherlands and South Africa and the similarities between the languages Dutch and Afrikaans, Afrikaans authors and their texts often gain an audience in the Netherlands. This article posits the idea that the interaction between the Dutch and the Afrikaans literary systems form part of a ‘minor transnationalism’ (Lionnet & Shih 2005) of a specific kind: the ‘vertical movement’ of texts from a marginal literature (Afrikaans literature) to a literature placed in the European, metropolitan ‘centre’ that does not necessarily occupy an important place in that centre (Dutch literature). The article focuses on the literary careers of five Afrikaans authors who have a high profile both in the Netherlands and the larger, international world, namely André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, Etienne van Heerden, Antjie Krog and Marlene van Niekerk. It attempts to discern whether exposure in the Netherlands led to exposure in the larger world. Several factors are taken into account: the position of Afrikaans literature in South Africa, the role of translation, the impact of genre, the influence of Western intellectual discourses and the importance of political acuity.

By means of a comparative corpus study, this paper investigates the rise of new adjectives and adverbs from nominal compound members through a process of ‘debonding’. This is ‘a composite change whereby a bound morpheme in a specific linguistic context becomes a free morpheme’ (Norde 2009, p. 186). It can be illustrated by the adjectival and adverbial uses of the Dutch compound member reuze (een reuzenstap; reuzeleuk; het was reuze; het is reuze meegevallen). It will be argued that debonding is subject to a series of language-specific factors, in particular the degree of compound cohesion and the complexity of adjective inflection. These factors predict that debonding will be more common in French and English than in German and Dutch. However, debonding still occurs in the latter. This can be accounted for by an interaction of multiple processes. Finally, a specific case study of the Dutch word top will indicate how and which different processes interact in the rise of its adjectival uses.

Silvio Pellico’s prison memoirs, Le mie prigioni (1832), and his moral lessons for the youth, Dei doveri degli uomini (1834), are mainly remembered for their implicit political influence as an inspiration for the Italian Risorgimento and for the intimate description of the most difficult years in Pellico’s life. However, the religious dimension of both books and the description of the rediscovery of the Catholic faith were considered more important by Pellico himself. This article puts this religious aspect centre stage. It analyses the reception of the Dutch translations of these works within the cultural and religious debates that took place in the confessionally divided Netherlands of the nineteenth-century. A national-liberal interpretation can be identified alongside more Orthodox-Protestant and Catholic ones, each emphasising aspects in Pellico’s work that could fit their specific cultural agendas. This polemic confirms that nineteenth-century literary debates in the Netherlands were more influenced by ideology than aesthetics. The debate around Le mie prigioni and Dei doveri faded away around 1840 without a clear conclusion in favour of a specific interpretation. Two new translations of Le mie prigioni followed in 1896 and 1906 but they did not provoke much discussion, not even in Catholic periodicals, although they were the work of Catholic translators. After 1906, Pellico – and certainly his religious message – mostly disappeared from the cultural horizon of the general public. By then, he had already been included in a Dutch Catholic canon.

This paper addresses the question why two eminent representatives of the history of civilization, Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) and André Jolles (1874-1946), in 1933 broke off an inspiring friendship that had lasted for more than thirty-five years. Some historians assume that in 1933 Huizinga rejected Jolles as a friend because of the latter’s membership of the NSDAP. I argue, however, that this was not the reason and that – inadvertently – a third person caused their separation.