…Ja, but that isn’t why I’m writing this time. You asked about Dick. You’re worrying about him?—man! But he’s got a poetry scholarship from a Texas University and he’s lecturing the Texans about letters and life too in Suid Afrika, South Africa to you (forgive the hostility), and his poems are read, so they tell me, wherever the English read poetry. He’s fine, man, but I thought I’d tell you about Johannes Potgieter, remember him? Remember the young poet, The Young Poet? He was around that winter you were here. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten those big melting brown eyes and those dimples. About ten years ago (ja, time flies) he got a type of unofficial grace-gift of a job at St.___ University on the strength of those poems of his, and—God—they were good. Not that you or any other English-speaking domkop will ever know, because they don’t translate out of Afrikaans. Remember me telling you and everyone else (give me credit for that at least; I give the devil his due, when he’s a poet) what a poet he was,  how blerry good he was—but several people tried to translate Hans’s poems, including me, and failed. Right. Goed. Meanwhile a third of the world’s population—or is it a fifth, or to put it another way, X5Y59 million people—speak English (and it’s increasing by six births a minute) but one million people speak Afrikaans, and though I say it in a whisper, man, only a fraction of them can read it, I mean to read it. But Hans is still a great poet. Right.

     He wasn’t all that happy about being a sort of unofficial laureate at that university. It’s no secret some poets don’t make laureates. At the end of seven months he produced a book of poems which had the whole God-fearing place sweating and sniffing out heresy of all kinds, sin, sex, liberalism, brother love, and so forth and so on; but of course in a civilised country (I say this under my breath, or I’ll get the sack from my university, and I’ve got four daughters these days, had you forgotten?) no one would see anything in them but good poetry. Which is how Hans saw them, poor innocent soul. He was surprised at what people saw in them, and he was all upset. He didn’t like being called all those names, and the good country boys from their fine farms and the smart town boys from their big houses all started looking sideways, making remarks, and our Hans, he was reduced to pap, because he’s not a fighter, Hans; he was never a taker of positions on the side of justice, freedom, and the rest, for tell you the truth, I don’t think he ever got round to defining them. Goed. He resigned, in what might be called a dignified silence, but his friends knew it was just plain cowardice or, if you like, incomprehension about what the fuss was over, and he went to live in Blagspruit in the Orange Free, where his Tantie Gertrude had a house. He helped her in her store. Ja, that’s what he did. What did we all say to this? Well, what do you think? The inner soul of the artist (et cetera) knows what is best, and he probably needed the Orange Free and his Auntie’s store for his development. Well, something like that. To tell the truth, we didn’t say much; he simply dropped out. And time passed. Ja. Then they made me editor of Onwards, and thinking about our indigenous poets, I remembered Johannes Potgieter, and wrote “What about a poem from you?”—feeling bad because when I counted up the years, it was eight since I’d even thought of him, even counting those times when one says drunk at dawn: Remember Hans? Now, there was a poet…