LEESKRING
2019

HD video, 28 minutes.

Filmed in September 2018, in Cape Town, South Africa. The video is the documentation of a book club, in which I act as organizer and moderator. The other participants are Afrikaans-speaking South Africans. We discuss the short story ‘Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass’ by Bruno Schulz (1892-1942). Out of Schulz’ production, only two collections of short stories exist today. He spent his entire life in the little town of Drohobych, today a part of the Ukraine, at the time of Schulz’ birth a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in the interwar years a part of Poland. Bruno Schulz has never been translated into Afrikaans, and to me, an important part of this long-term project was that I first study the language, then translate the 30-page short story myself into Afrikaans. My translation was far from perfect. Nevertheless, some of the most interesting things we discussed were those things that seem to “shine through” in this chaos of language, translation, epoch, cultural and historical context.