“PHARAOH’S SJAMBOK”

Abstract

This essay brings into a single focus two phenomena of the first half of the 20th century: the globalization of certain South African words; and the emigration of some of its major poets. The interest is then to track the use—or, conversely, significant non‐use—of these words in the work of those same writers. Attention is given first to the resonance of sjambok in Roy Campbell’s “Vespers on the Nile”. Trek is then examined for its burgeoning extension of meaning in a wide range of English contexts; for its dramatic appearance in a poem by Wilfred Owen (much quoted by Campbell); and for its variously negative and positive charges in the tribal polemics of the white South African state. F.T. Prince is adduced as the revealing counter‐example of a poet who is not known for his use of specifically South African words and in whose work the only exception to that rule is a little‐known horticultural word that has never migrated. The essay ends with some reflections upon the falling out of use of most of the old words lovingly connoting the landscape of pre‐industrial South Africa—and its obverse: namely, the long life assured to another (newer, utterly loveless) word from that territory: apartheid.

Keywords:

• lexicon
• Roy Campbell
• F.T. Prince
• sjambok
• trek
• apartheid

Notes

1 Louis MacNeice, “The Habits”, The Burning Perch [1963] (London: Faber, 2001) 31. The relevant passage reads: “they were dressed / In pinstripe trousers and carried / A cheque book, a passport, and a sjambok; / The master said it was all for the best.”

2 “The centuries have heard that plaint persist” (line 13) takes us back to the rhythm and the sense of the line “No hungry generations tread thee down” in John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”. For the reference to the cropping of thistles, see Henry Vaughan, “The Ass”, The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L.C. Martin (London: Oxford UP, 1957) 519. In Apuleius’ The Golden Ass the hero Lucius’ epiphany—prelude to his metamorphosis back from ass to man—occurs at moonrise on the shores of the Mediterranean, after which he is converted to worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Moreover, Campbell’s overarching figure of periphrasis might be understood as a formal correlative of metamorphosis as a “plot” motif; circumlocution is after all a species of (verbal or stylistic) transformation. Biblical references to the ass are, of course, legion; Chapter 21 of the Gospel according to Matthew is a case in point.

3 The Dictionary of South African English lists about 30 compounds of this kind.

4 See “Modern Poetry and Contemporary History”, Collected Works 176–78.

5 P.V. Pistorius, No Further Trek (Johannesburg: Central News Agency, 1957); Sheila Patterson, Last Trek: A Study of the Boer People and Afrikaner Nation (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957).

6 See the opening couplet of “The Pioneers: A Veld Eclogue” from Adamastor (1930), in Collected Poems 22; the line “The long Castilian Veld” in “After the Horse Fair” from Mithraic Emblems (1936), in Collected Poems 137; and (passim) “Anatomy of the Veld”, a previously unpublished poem in Vol. I of the Collected Works.