This early composition (Breyten bid vir homself) perfectly captures Breytenbach’s irreverent tone, as it deliberately parodies a poem by the renowned Afrikaans poet N. P. van Wyk Louw, Ignatius Prays for His Order (Ignatius bid vir sy orde). Speaking on behalf of privileged, white South Africa, Breytenbach transforms the unselfish prayer of St. Ignatius into a selfish protest against pain to highlight the moral failure of apartheid.

Breyten Prays for Himself comprises nearly 30 unrhymed lines of varying length, divided unequally into four stanzas. In the first stanza, the speaker demonstrates that pleasure can exist separate from pain by observing that “a flower has no teeth” (l. 3). Although he pays tribute to death in the second stanza, he indicates his preference for life by asking God to grant him good health.

The bizarre similes that Breytenbach employs here to describe the vigor of youth point to his own debt to French surrealism. There is a hint of remorse in the third stanza when the speaker begs God to pardon “our mouths our bowels our brains” (l. 8), as if he regrets not raising his voice out of cowardice and ignorance. Even so, he remains determined to eliminate this nagging sense of guilt so that he can enjoy the sensuous pleasures of life without reservation.

The fourth stanza makes clear that the speaker would prefer God to visit pain upon others rather than himself. He welcomes the sacrifice of those “taken into custody” (l. 15) and persecuted by various means, cataloged here in a long list of passive participial adjectives printed separately on the page. But at the same time, the speaker denies his own complicity in the crimes committed against these people. As he says, “we never give Pain or complain” (l. 29). The ironic stance that underlies Breyten Prays for Himself comes fully into focus in these words.

Although this poem was included in Breytenbach’s first collection of Afrikaans poetry, Die Ysterkoei Moet Sweet (The Iron Cow Must Sweat), it did not appear in English before the release of And Death White as Words (1978). The original translation by Denis Hirson for this volume remains the standard one. It was published most recently in The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry (1996), edited by J. D. McClatchy.

Bibliography

Breytenbach, Breyten. And Death White as Words: An Anthology of the Poetry of Breyten Breytenbach. Edited by A. J. Coetzee, Rex Collings, 1978.

McClatchy, J. D., editor. The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry. Vintage, 1996.

Categories: British Literature, Literature

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