The early Cape Hottentots

[p. 169]

Translator's note.

The Latin text of Grevenbroek's letter on the Hottentots is now transcribed and printed for the first time. It is a well-written MS in a large hand and rarely offers any difficulty to the reader. I have slightly modernized the punctuation. I have curbed the lavish and erratic use cf capitals. I have silently corrected many small slips. In other cases I have preferred to reveal my corrections, using round brackets to enclose letters added by me, and square brackets to indicate letters I would have removed. Very rarely I have had recourse to a footnote in elucidation of the text. But the text still retains many faults and obscurities most of which are probably to be ascribed to Grevenbroek himself and not to the unknown person who made the copy of it we possess.

For the Latin of Grevenbroek is not a satisfactory medium. It is dictionary Latin, laboriously compiled by a man of poor taste and inaccurate though very likely wide scholarship. It is full of tags from Virgil, Horace, Lucretius and others. The alleged elegance of the Latinity consists largely of curiosities of diction culled from Plautus, Cato, the Natural History of Pliny, Varro on the Latin Language and any other available store-house of archaic and unfamiliar words. A peculiarly distressing feature of the style is the accumulation of masses of synonyms which add nothing to the narrative but confusion. Furthermore the sentences are often shapeless and endless, lumbering along from clause to clause till they seem to drop from exhaustion rather than to reach any intended goal.

In my translation I have permitted myself a few archaisms in order to keep some of the flavour of the original. I have kept very close to the sense of the Latin, as it was essential to lose nothing of the information that may be extracted from his pages. But I have also laboured to make my version readable, and if I have succeeded in this Grevenbroek owes me a debt that nobody will ever owe to Grevenbroek.

At the same time I should like to say that to translate Grevenbroek has been a labour of love. In spite of his infelicitous, pedantic, helpless style, the man reveals so much both of his own curious personality and of the Cape society of his day, that a readable Grevenbroek, if I could make it, seemed to me a possession that many beside the anthropologist would be glad to have. For Grevenbroek is

[p. 170]

a character. If he repels by his perpetual insistence on his own unmerited and unspecified grievances, he attracts by his honest indignation at the abuses of the time and by his charming, if absurdly expressed, enthusiasm for the Cape and its native inhabitants. He really had something to say that lay very close to his heart; and for that reason it has been a delight to disencumber his thought from the clumsy toils of his laborious Latin eloquence.

One other translation of Grevenbroek exists, that made in Dutch by Dr. J.W.G. van Oordt and printed in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Tydschrift for January and February 1886. This was reprinted in 1932 in vol. xxxvi of the publications of the Linschoten-Vereeniging (Reizen in Zuid-Afrika in de Hollandse Tijd, uitgegeven door Dr. E.C. Godée-Molsbergen. Vierde Deel). Dr. van Oordt omitted some few portions of the original, notably a page or two dealing with initiation ceremonies. This edition then comprises not only the first English translation, but the first complete translation in any language, as well as the first transcription and publication of the Latin text.

My version was made in complete independence of the Dutch. On comparing them subsequently I was glad to find how closely Dr. van Oordt and I agreed in our general interpretation of the sense of this difficult author. Two sentences of mine embody corrections which the reading of his version led me to adopt. I have also acknowledged suggestions of Dr. van Oordt's once or twice in footnotes.

B.F.