The world, the text and the author: Coetzee and untranslatability

Abstract

This essay analyses Coetzee’s success as a world literary author, from two distinct angles. The first stems from his non-European ‘southern’ position (and self-positioning) as a South African and then Australian writer with South American links, and his subscription to an ‘imaginary of the South’. The second looks beyond the colonial indebtedness to Europe, focusing instead on some of the ‘minor’ European cultures to which the oeuvre refers, and then on the ways in which it evokes Asia. As will be seen, Coetzee’s work from the very start acknowledges the pivotal role of Asia in the formation of Western identity.

Keywords:

• J. M. Coetzee
• world literature
• transnational writing
• geopolitics
• marginality
• Western identity
• Global South
• untranslatability

Notes

1. To date, most notably J. C. Kannemeyer’s (2012) J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing; more recently David Attwell’s (2015) J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time.

2. It is notable that the only Coetzee text Walkowitz discusses in any detail is Diary of a Bad Year.

3. Coetzee also produced a libretto (undated) based on In the Heart of the Country. Entitled ‘Lament from the Heart of the Country: For Soprano and Chamber Ensemble’, it consists of 10 parts, alternately spoken (‘recitative’) and sung (‘aria’).

4. Coetzee and Lens are planning to produce two further operas together. The first will be an adaptation of an earlier novel, Elizabeth Costello, entitled Costello: This Body that I Am. The world premiere is scheduled for 2016.

5. For a perspicacious analysis of this Coetzee–Costello agon, see Wicomb (2009).

6. This plot, or a version of it, was shorn of its ethnic overtones and carried over to Diary of a Bad Year, in the form of the ‘plot against Señor C’ engineered by Alan, Anya’s Scottish lover.

7. The old slur that ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees’, derived from exoticist, orientalist conceptions of Spain, has been displaced by the geopolitical realities of the country’s ‘political, economic, and cultural subordination to modern Europe’ (Iarocci, 2006: 20). Spain might therefore be seen as a ‘minor major’ culture, exerting regional influence but excluded from the Group of Eight (G8) highly industrialised nations.

8. Hermann Wittenberg and Kate Highman (2015) have traced the connections between Barbarians and the early twentieth-century travelogues of Sven Hedin; David Attwell (2015: 104–28) has discussed the importance of the Chinese setting in helping Coetzee break from realism.

9. In Coetzee’s essay it isn’t clear if he is speaking about correspondence with Zhenjia Cheng, who translated Barbarians into Chinese in (2002b), or Min Wen, who produced an alternative Chinese translation in (2004b).