About the translator
Deryck Uys was born in 1926, in the small town of Aliwal North in what is now the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Later the family moved to Germiston where he attended Mrs Trollop’s School, in which all pupils, from grades 3 to 7, were taught in the same classroom. Mrs Trollop inspired a love of English literature in many of her pupils by reading aloud to them from great works.
With the outbreak of the Second World War his father was called up for service. Deryck moved to Pretoria Boys High for a year and then on to Parktown Boys’ High where he was taught by the legendary Tufty Potter, who once sent him to the headmaster, B.A. Logie, for four whacks of the cane as he did not like the way he recited a poem! This engendered great respect for both Tufty and poetry.
He finished his schooling at Potchefstroom Boys’ High under the tutelage of a remarkable English Master, Chimpie McGregor. He was also inspired by his Afrikaans teacher, Oom Jerry Smith, who introduced the class to the poetry of Eugene Marais.
A highlight of his years at the school was his 50-page essay on the subject of the Ballad, which won him the prestigious Hope Essay Prize in 1942. He used the prize money to buy the complete works of Shakespeare and several volumes of poetry.
Aged 19, while serving legal articles, he passed his attorney’s admission examinations. However, ill-health delayed his admission to the legal profession for some years.
From 1948 to 1952 he worked on a gold mine and assisted on tobacco farms in what was then Southern Rhodesia. Living alone on a tobacco farm in the Zambezi Valley meant that he could, for the first time, devour at leisure the classics of English and Afrikaans literature, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, William Shakespeare, the English romantic poets and the Afrikaans works of Eugene Marais and Jan F. Cilliers. During this time, he began translating Afrikaans poetry into English.
In the 1950s, Uys attended an Afrikaans production of Hamlet and was struck by the immediacy of the language. It was at this point that he decided he wanted “Afrikaans people to appreciate English poetry and English people to appreciate Afrikaans poetry”.
He practiced as an attorney-notary and conveyancer for 55 years and during this time he wrote and published his book The Secrets of Making Your Will (1988). For many years he lectured at UNISA and UCT and was influential in the computerisation of the South African legal profession. He is an honorary member of the SA Law Society.
Uys, whose first language is English, says if he hadn’t been “struck blind” virtually overnight, he would never have begun his translations. Having always been fascinated by Omar Khayyam and having learnt the poem off by heart whilst on the tobacco farms, he published his first major translation, Die Rubaiyat van Omar Khayyam (Deryck Uys Translations, 2014).
Uys also translated the poetic extracts (by writers like Dr Dolf van Niekerk and Jan F. Cilliers) that form the legends for Tom Burgers’ second book, Karoo Pastoraal (Cedar Rand Press, 2010), which is “a ballad of word and image”. Burgers decided to publish his photographic essay in both English and Afrikaans, because of Deryck’s capabilities: “I saw his translation of Jan F, Cilliers’ poem, ‘Die Vlakte’, and that was it. Deryck has the poetic rhythm and an awareness of what the poet really felt” (Hathaway 25).
According to Uys, “Translating poetry, including the blank verse of the Shakespeare plays, is vastly different from translating prose. The translator has to be a poet. The translations have to stand alone, as works of art in their own right. The poet paints pictures for the inward eye, and composes music for the inner ear.”
In three years, Uys translated the entire works of Shakespeare, including the Sonnets, into Afrikaans. He did this using a 7X magnifying glass, reading only three letters at a time.
*This biographical note is indebted to information supplied by Deryck Uys’s niece, Sue Anderson, and the article “Bilingual Balladeers” by Debbie Hathaway (Private Edition 12, p.25).
