Afrikaans Poems with English Translations

This new anthology of Afrikaans poems accompanied by their English translations is an extended and revised edition of Afrikaans Poems with English Translations, edited by A.P. Grové and C.J.D. Harvey and originally published in 1962. Grové and Harvey’s anthology gained a certain prominence in its time on which this anthology aims to build. It will also be a continuation of a specific tradition in Afrikaans literature, namely to collate the best and at the same time the most representative poems in an anthology. The aim with this edition was to produce a concise and compact anthology of a hundred of the best poems in Afrikaans; as a result of the near impossibility of such a task the editors ended up including a hundred and thirteen poems.

This selection will provide the reader with a window on Afrikaans poetry and give some impression of the vibrancy of Afrikaans literature as a whole: it is a literature thematically and structurally grounded in Africa, but at the same time in a variety of international literatures and poetic traditions.