Marlene Van Niekerk

In this cahier, Marlene van Niekerk tells the story of pale, anxious creative writing student Kasper Olwagen and his strange encounter with the phenomenon of translation in the person of the Swan Whisperer. Through gathered letters and recordings, Van Niekerk recounts Olwagen's discovery of a vagrant who, without uttering anything intelligible, summons swans from Amsterdam's canals.The Swan Whisperer probes at the relationship between language and living, translation and writing, stories and truth. From an obsession with words to an obsession with dismantling them, Van Niekerk explores what stirs humans to translate. A story of doubles, cadence and swan whisperings, this cahier delves into the playfulness of sound in the Afrikaans language, and the necessity for listening in all translation.

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