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Matildie Thom Wium

‘My country, my dry, forsaken country’: On exile in Arnold van Wyk's, NP van Wyk Louw's and Ovid's Tristia

Matildie Thom Wium is a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of the Free State. She is currently working on a doctorate on the music of Arnold van Wyk.

Abstract

In 1972, when Arnold van Wyk chose the title, Tristia, for a set he had compiled from three of his earlier piano pieces, which he planned to augment with three new ones, this title carried two significant prior layers of meaning: Ovid’s set of elegiac poems written in exile from Rome to Tomis from AD 8 to 12, and the Afrikaans poet, NP van Wyk Louw’s 1962 volume, Tristia, en ander verse, voorspele en vlugte, written while he was professor at the Gemeentelijke Universiteit van Amsterdam.

In this article, I explore the way in which the discourse of exile in the two poetic precursors can be used as a hermeneutic tool for this specific Arnold van Wyk work. In particular, I interpret Van Wyk Louw’s Tristia as a pivot between the works of Ovid and Arnold van Wyk, since Van Wyk Louw problematises the concept of exile by his post-colonial awareness. On the one hand, Van Wyk Louw turns the idea of exile on its head by identifying with Europe as being ‘home’, and seeing Africa as the ‘place of barbarism’. However, on the other hand, he maintains a strong, albeit problematic identification with South Africa, implying that the post-colonial Western artist could actually never be at home anywhere.

Except in art, that is. In this article I offer the hypothesis that for the post-colonial Western artist, the European art tradition becomes a kind of substitute for home; a locus of identity, safety and belonging.

Opsomming

Toe Arnold van Wyk in 1972 die titel, Tristia, gekies het vir ʼn groep klavierstukke saamgestel uit drie van sy vroeëre komposisies, wat hy wou uitbrei met drie nuwe komposisies, het hierdie titel die betekeniskonnotasies van twee belangrike voorlopers gedra: Ovidius se stel elegiese gedigte, geskryf tussen 8 en 12 nC in Tomis, waarheen hy verban is uit Rome, en die Afrikaanse digter, NP van Wyk Louw se bundel, Tristia, en ander verse, voorspele en vlugte (1962), geskryf terwyl hy professor was by die Gemeentelijke Universiteit van Amsterdam.

In hierdie artikel ondersoek ek hoe die diskoers van ontheemding in die twee digkuns-voorlopers gebruik kan word as ʼn hermeneutiese instrument vir hierdie spesifieke Arnold van Wyk-werk. In die besonder interpreteer ek Van Wyk Louw se Tristia as ʼn spil tussen die werke van Ovidius en Arnold van Wyk omdat Van Wyk Louw die konsep van ontheemding met sy koloniale bewussyn problematiseer. Aan die een kant keer Van Wyk Louw die idee van ontheemding op sy kop deurdat hy met Europa as ‘die huis’ identifiseer en Afrika sien as die ‘plek van barbarisme’. Aan die ander kant behou hy egter ʼn sterk, hoewel problematiese identifisering met Suid-Afrika en sodoende impliseer hy dat die post-koloniale Westerse kunstenaar nooit op enige plek werklik tuis kan wees nie.

Behalwe in kuns. In hierdie artikel stel ek voor dat die Europese kunstradisie vir die post-koloniale Westerse kunstenaar ʼn soort plaasvervangende tuiste kan word; ʼn lokus van identiteit, veiligheid en behorendheid.

In 1972, Arnold van Wyk compiled three of his earlier piano works into a new set intended for his own performance, which he planned to complement with three new pieces. Characteristic of his compositional activity during the last decade of his life, the new pieces were never finished, despite extensive sketching, and he performed the original three movements (entitled ‘Rondo desolato’, ‘Ostinato’ and ‘Berceuse’) as a set in 1972 and in 1983. They were published posthumously by the Arnold van Wyk Trust in 1984.

1. Exile and Ovid’s Tristia

The title that Van Wyk chose to encompass the three extant movements and the three planned ones was Tristia, a title conceived by the Roman poet Ovid for the five volumes of elegiac poetry he wrote during AD 8 to 12, while he was in exile in Tomis – a distant outpost of the Roman Empire in modern-day Romania. The word is translated as ‘sadnesses’ or ‘lamentations’ by Peter Green, editor of the 1994 Penguin edition of these works.

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The purpose of Ovid’s Tristia is ostensibly to secure a recall from exile. He petitions Augustus personally to that end in the second book, and in other poems, he asks his wife and friends to plead his case in Rome. These personal epistles are set off with descriptions of the unfavourable conditions in Tomis – notably the weather and the barbarian inhabitants of the city. However, recent scholarship has become more sensitive to the ironic note of the poems, in that they were not real letters but literary creations. There has even been an (indignantly received) hypothesis that Ovid was not really relegated at all, but invented his entire exile as a poetic exercise (Green 1994, xvii). More significant for my present purpose than the extent to which the content of the poems is to be taken as straightforward autobiography, is Jo-Marie Claassen’s observation that ‘[Ovid] has created the myth of exile, and with it the genre of the poetic exilic autobiography’. She argues this point as follows, highlighting themes to which I will return later on in this paper:

‘Our heroic exile displays the propensities of all mythical heroes, standing alone in a mythical world where malevolent nature conspires with a relentlessly angry god to persecute him. The hero is comforted and sustained by an all-powerful goddess, his Muse. This is essentially a literary approach. For Ovid the poet, literature was life. In the poetry of exile, this fusion is shown at its most complete’ (Claassen 2008, 39).

2. Exile and NP van Wyk Louw’s Tristia

An equally important forbear to Van Wyk’s Tristia was the volume of poetry by the Afrikaans poet, N P van Wyk Louw, written between 1950 and 1957, while he was lecturing at the Gemeentelijke Universiteit van Amsterdam, and which was published in 1962. Van Wyk Louw undoubtedly had one of the finest poetic voices yet to speak in Afrikaans, and his Tristia represents an important reinvention of that voice – in style as much as in subject matter.

After Ovid, Van Wyk Louw’s Tristia takes up the theme of exile, but this theme probematised by Van Wyk Louw’s post-colonial awareness. According to Helize van Vuuren (1989, 9), ‘the poems centre around two spaces: the European and the South African. But the European dominates to such an extent that one can speak of a Eurocentrism. Tristia is a volume that breathes the socio-cultural atmosphere of Europe ... In contrast, the South African space is portrayed as scant in culture, poor, dry’. She then quotes a quatrain from the poem, H. Petrus (St. Peter), to illustrate:

My land, my dor, verlate land:íets wens olywe groei in jou:dat alles klein, Latyns, gaan word,en kalk-wit kerkies bou. (Van Wyk Louw 1962.)

My land, my drab, deserted land:oh, that olives grew in you,

that all could shrink to Latin sizeand sprout small chalk-white churches too. (Translated by J. M. Claassen.)

Van Wyk Louw’s Eurocentrism therefore turns the concept of exile on its head by identifying with Europe as ‘home’, as the cultural centre, and South Africa as the culturally impoverished place of exile, analogous to Ovid’s Tomis:

Non hic librorum, per quos inuiter alarque, copia: pro libris arcus et arma sonant. Nullus in hac terra, recitem si carmina, cuius intellecturis auribus utar, adest. (Ovid, Tristia III.14.37-40)

Here there’s no wealth of books, for my nurture and stimulation: instead, the twang of bowstrings, the rattle of arms.No person in this place, should I recite my poems, on whom I could count for a comprehending ear. (Translated by Peter Green.)

Yet, on the other hand, Van Wyk Louw maintains a strong identification with South Africa, drawing most of his imagery from the South African landscape, even if the ubiquitous literary intertexts are all European (Van Vuuren 1989, 119). The problem with South Africa being the locus of Van Wyk Louw’s identity, is voiced in Poem XVII:

Ek haat en ek het lief: ek weet nie hoe nie.O my land, o my land, jy is ek.Ek ken jou en ek haat jou soos ek my haat.Ek het jou lief soos ek my soms lief durf hê. (Van Wyk Louw 1962.)

I hate and I love: I don’t know how.O my country, o my country: you are me.I know you and I hate you as I hate me.I love you as I sometimes dare to love me. (Translated by M Thom Wium.)

3. Arnold van Wyk as colonial exile

The psychological conflict between two spaces that both represent ‘home’, and therefore neither constitutes ‘home’ in a straightforward way, resulting in a perpetual disconnectedness, is something that many colonial or post-colonial artists in the European tradition find incapacitating. It was keenly felt by Arnold van Wyk as part of the first generation of Afrikaans composers of ‘serious’ Western art music in South Africa. Van Wyk’s colonial dislocation and its effects on his compositional voice were theorised convincingly by Stephanus Muller in 2008, in an article in The Musical Times. I would like to illustrate this dislocation by means of two quotations.

The first is from a letter that Howard Ferguson wrote to Gerald Finzi on 4 November 1944. Ferguson had met Van Wyk in 1941 in London and would become a life-

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long friend. Evidently, Finzi had written to ask if he could stay with Ferguson for a prolonged period, and Ferguson answered as follows (Ferguson and Hurd (eds.) 2001, 240):

‘I’ve talked over the housing-question with Pu [Ferguson’s housekeeper], but not very helpfully I’m afraid. The difficulty as far as we are concerned is this: during the past two and a half years we’ve made rather a point of telling Nols [Arnold Van Wyk] that he can come up here whenever he wants, as we felt he needed an anchorage of some sort. He has taken us at our word about this, and generally comes up three or even four nights a week. If he had any other anchorage I would not hesitate to say that we couldn’t have him for a couple of months; but he hasn’t; and failing something of the sort, I’d always be frightened of a repetition of that occasion when I only just appeared in time to prevent him doing away with himself. As you know, he’s not a very firmly balanced person, and to take away this queer sort of support might, I think, be a very risky thing to do. Anyway, it’s a risk I don’t feel I can take.’

The metaphor of a lack of ‘anchorage’ is sadly echoed in a letter written two weeks after Van Wyk’s return to South Africa from England, in which he complains to Freda Baron: ‘I’m not happy; I feel uprooted and strange’ (Muller 2008, 70). Muller comments that ‘the metaphor is telling for a composer whose sense of belonging was always deferred to the place where he was not’, adding that this dilemma ‘could well be theorised as the most debilitating condition of the colonial composer’ (Muller 2008, 70).

4. Interpreting three Tristia sets

What light could Arnold van Wyk’s two poetic precursors shed on his Tristia? Firstly, I understand Van Wyk Louw’s work as constituting a pivot between those works of Ovid and Van Wyk, since Van Wyk Louw articulates the distress of the colonial/post-colonial European artist from which Van Wyk also suffered demonstrably. Secondly, one could point to many similarities of thematic content among the three works, such as estrangement or loss of companionship between humans, or the fear of and longing for death, or the equation of exile and death, or politics and art as different loci of power. (In Van Wyk’s case, these instances of thematic content appear in subtexts revealed by the sketch documents.) For this paper I chose to focus on two such common threads, namely the image of the winter landscape and the idea of art as a dominant locus of identity and belonging in exile.

4.1 The winter landscape

The winter landscape is one of the most pervasive images in Ovid’s exilic poetry. Whole poems are devoted to descriptions of the endlessly freezing weather, in contrast to Rome’s mild climate. The fact that Ovid exaggerated the perpetual cold, as research has shown (Green 1994, xxiv),

detracts nothing from the point that he had used the cold, inhospitable landscape as a poetic image for the desolation he felt in his exile situation:

Proxima sideribus tellus Erymanthidos Vrsae me tenet, adstricto terra perusta gelu. Bosporos et Tanais superant Scythiaeque paludes uix satis et noti nomina pauca loci. ulterius nihil est nisi non habitabile frigus. Heu quam uicina est ultima terra mihi! (Ovid, Tristia III.iv.47-52.)

A region that neighbours the polar constellations imprisons me now, land seared by crimping frost.To the north lie Bosporus, Don, the Scythian marshes, a scatter of names in an all-but-unknown waste:Beyond that, nothing but frozen, uninhabitable tundra – Alas, how close I stand to the world’s end! (Translated by Peter Green.)

Again, Van Wyk Louw seems to pick up on Ovid’s image and make it more complex. In the monumental ‘Groot Ode’ (Great Ode), cold and ice are positive images of an unspoiled beauty, connected with the ice ages during which primitive art flourished (Van Vuuren 1989 88-89), in contrast to Amsterdam as a ‘burning city’ in which modern humans are portrayed as partaking of a mass production culture with no awareness of spiritual values. In ‘Jy’t weggegaan’ (You went away) as well, the winter landscape is depicted with Romantic imagery in the first stanza. (Here a comparison with the description of South Africa as ‘dry’ and ‘deserted’ springs to mind.) And yet, the second stanza creates a disconsolate atmosphere in the ‘wintry afternoon’:

Jy’t weggegaan en jy bewoonʼn silwer herberg in die sneeujou vensters kyk nog elke nagmet drie blink oë na die plein

die plein is boom en wind en boomen wind en winden wintermiddag voer daar iemanddie meeue krummels teen die wind (Van Wyk Louw 1962.)

You went away and your abodeis now a silver dwelling in the snowand every night your windows watchthe plain with three bright shining eyes

the plain is tree and wind and treeand wind and windand in the wintry afternoon there’s someone feedingcrumbs to gulls against the wind. (Translated by M Thom Wium.)

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For Arnold van Wyk, the image of the winter landscape and its possibilities as a sound image, especially on the piano, was something that fascinated him throughout his career. In this regard, he stands closer to the Ovidian connotations of that landscape, choosing texts and subtexts connecting winter and cold to desolation and isolation. As a first example I consider the opening of the song “Winternag” (Winter Night) from the 1953 song cycle, Van Liefde en Verlatenheid (Of Love and Forsakenness). Example 1 shows bar 1–12 of the piece, a setting of a celebrated text by Eugène Marais, which uses the cold imagery of the winter night to melancholy and dejected effect:

O koud is die windjieen skraal.En blink in die dofligen kaalso wyd as die Heer se genade,lê die velde in sterlig en skade.En hoog teen die rande,

versprei in die brandeis die grassaad aan roere soos winkende hande.

O treurig die wysie op die ooswind se maat,

soos die lied van ʼn meisiein haar liefde verlaat!In elk’ grashalm se voublink ʼn druppel van douen vinnig verbleek dittot ryp in die kou. (Eugène Marais.)

O cold is the slight windand sere.And gleaming in the dim lightand bareas vast as the mercy of Godlie the plains in starlight and shade.And high on the ridgesamong the burnt patchesthe seed grass is stirringlike beckoning fingers.

O tune grief-ladenon the east wind’s pulselike the song of a maidenwhose lover proves false.In each grass blade’s folda dew drop gleams bold,but quickly it bleaches to frost in the cold! (Translated by Guy Butler.)

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Example 1: Van Liefde en Verlatenheid, "Winternag", bar 1–12

The characteristics of Van Wyk’s setting would later become a kind of signature for pieces with a related content, as we shall see. They include the use of octave doubling in the high register of the piano with una corda, the theme which outlines a major and a minor third and, later in the song (see Example 2, which shows bar 36–48), the use of trills in the high register of the piano.

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Example 2: Van Liefde en Verlatenheid, "Winternag", bar 36–48

My next example is taken from the second piece of Arnold van Wyk’s Tristia, called “Ostinato”. Of the three pieces in the set, this one has the most explicit connection with the winter landscape image. Van Wyk used a theme he had composed for the incidental music to Jean Anouilh’s play, Becket, in 1963, to accompany the following stage indication –

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The set is completely removed. Nothing remains but the cyclorama around the bare stage. A vast, arid plain, lashed by the wind (Anouilh 1960, 108).

– in which one could arguably hear an echo of Ovid:

orbis in extremi iaceo desertus harenis, fert ubi perpetuas obruta terra niues.Non ager hic pomum, non dulces educat uuas, non salices ripa, robora monte uirent.Neue fretum laudes terra magis, aequora semper uentorum rabie solibus orba tument.Quocumque aspicias, campi cultore carentes uastaque quae nemo uindicat arua iacent. (Ovid, Ex Ponto I.iii.49-56.)

But I lie at the world’s end, in a lonely wasteland, its topsoil overlaid with perpetual snow:No fruitful orchards here, no clustering vineyards, no riverside willow-trees, no mountain oaks.The sea’s as bad as the land, its waters ever heaving, gale-whipped, under a sunless sky.Wherever you look, the same flat uncultivated landscape, huge vistas of empty steppe. (Ex P. I.3.49, translated by Peter Green.)

When adapting the theme from Becket for a solo piano piece to be included in Tristia, Van Wyk considered the title, ‘Paesaggio d’inverno’ (Winter landscape), and twice uses the performance indication ‘senza calore’ (without warmth). Figure 1 shows the first sketch for the adaptation (Van Wyk Collection 349, Special Collections, JS Gericke Library, Stellenbosch University, 7.11. A1:44).

In the play, the moment described above is a prelude to the last confrontation between the two protagonists, King Henry and Becket, in which the complex breakdown of their friendship will become evident. The two characters both refer to the cold which, in a way, becomes an expression of their estrangement:

‘How cold it was on that bare plain at La Ferté-Bernard, the last time we two met! It’s funny, it’s always been cold, in our story. Save at the beginning when we were friends’ (Anouilh 1960, 12).

Example 3 is a transcription of Figure 1. The sparse, high texture and melancholy atmosphere resemble the opening of “Winter Night” (Example 1), as do the una corda marking and the pedal point doubled at the octave.

Figure 1: First sketch for "Ostinato"

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Example 3: Transcription of Figure 1

The eventual form of the piece (the published version – see Example 4 for the opening) retains the high register and the abundance of tritones (derived from the theme), but clothed in a more active, frenetic texture, perhaps inspired by the phrase, ‘lashed by the wind’, the trills remind you of those heard in ‘Winter Night’, (see Example 2).

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Example 4: Tristia, 'Ostinato'. bar 1–4

As a last example I would like to use an extract from ‘Rondo desolato’. This was the piece around which the Tristia set was constructed, and the first to be finished. Although for solo piano, it was composed as a setting of the Mediaeval Dutch poem, ‘Egidius, waer bestu bleven?’ (possibly by Jan Moritoen, 1355-1416), which laments the death of a friend. (The inception of the piece as a vocal setting of this poem can be deduced from the sketches in the Van Wyk Collection housed in the Documentation Centre for Music in Stellenbosch.) The poem is in rondeau form, and the piano piece follows its refrain-verse structure closely. Example 5 shows the last of the refrains with the text restored to the melody according to the early sketches for this piece in the Van Wyk Collection, some of which show the same music conceptualised as a song, and some of which include the text with the solo piano music as ‘lyrics’.

Example 5: Tristia, 'Rondo desolato', bar 56–69

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The words of the refrain are as follows:

Egidius, waer bestu bleven?Mi lanct na di, gheselle mijn!Du coors die doot, du liets mi tleven.

Egidius, where have you gone?I miss you, my friend.You chose death, you left me life.(Translated by M Thom Wium after Komrij 1994, 231-232.)

The three refrains, the text of which clearly portrays the speaker’s loneliness and grief at the loss of his friend, are set to music that share many characteristics with the ‘winter landscape music’. The second is even marked ‘senza calore’. For the same purpose (i.e. achieving a white, cold tone), the last refrain (see Example 5) is marked to be played by the left hand only. Like the other examples, it has a very sparse and high texture and is marked ‘una corda’ and pianissimo. It plays with the same major/minor third alternation as ‘Winter Night’ and has the same minor sixth pedal point above the tonic that we heard in the first sketch for the ‘Ostinato’, with which it also shares its G sharp minor key.

In the examples I have used, the image of the winter landscape, with an associated sonority on the piano, emerges as a significant recurring theme throughout Van Wyk’s oeuvre. Analogous to the way in which this image became a motif for exile in Ovid’s imagination, in Van Wyk’s works it repeatedly expresses desolation, sadness, and loss – especially in the context of human relationships.

4.2 Art as home

The other concept that I would like to trace through the three Tristia sets, is that of art as a dominant locus of identity and belonging in exile.

The Ovidian concept of art is expressed as a relationship with the Muses. Because his work, Ars Amatoria (Art of Love), formed part of the charge on which he was banished, he sees his poetry as one reason for his sad fate. In Tristia, he articulates an ambiguous relationship with the Muses: they are his curse and consolation, the cause and cure of his exile, since his flights of imagination expressed in poetry are also the only means of escape from his exile and of maintaining his sanity. I quote a number of lines from the fourth book by way of illustration:

me quoque Musa levat Ponti loca iussa petentem: sola comes nostrae perstitit illa fugae;sola nec insidias, nec Sinti militis ensem, nec mare nec ventos barbariamque timet.scit quoque, cum perii, quis me deceperit error, et culpam in facto, non scelus, esse meo,scilicet hoc ipso nunc aequa, quod obfuit ante, cum mecum iuncti criminis acta rea est.non equidem vellem, quoniam nocitura fuerunt, Pieridum sacris inposuisse manum.

sed nunc quid faciam? vis me tenet ipsa sacrorum, et carmen demens carmine laesus amo. (Ovid, Tristia IV.i.19-30.)

I too have been cheered by the Muse en route to my appointed Black Sea abode: she was the only truesteadfast companion I had then, she alone feared no ambush, no barbarous swordsman, neither sea nor wind.She knows what error it was undid me at my downfall – that there was fault in my case, but no crime.That, surely, is why she’s fair to me now – the damage she did me before, co-indicted on a joint charge.If I’d known the harm I’d suffer from her and her sisters I’d never have set my hand to their holy game – but what to do now? I’m hooked. Creative inspiration has got me. Though verse-ruined, I’m mad enoughto love verse still. (Translated by Peter Green.)

Jo-Marie Claassen, while exploring an illuminating comparison between Ovid and exiled South African poet, Breyten Breytenbach, observes that, for both these poets, their art becomes a more real self-identification than their agonising physical reality (Claassen 2008, 193-196).

The double-sided sword of art also holds true for N P van Wyk Louw. In his Tristia, he struggles with his poetic self-image as a prophet or “druid”, a member of a small community who guards humanity’s intellectual and spiritual goods. This role necessarily turns him into an outsider, and yet it is precisely this role that allows him to find meaning in life. In the ‘Groot Ode’ (Great Ode), he conveys this idea as follows, embedding it into the winter landscape leitmotif:

Ons sal skanse bou, óns: die Gees:die Warende rondom ons aarde:ons sal nóóit toegesneeu word. (Van Wyk Louw 1962.)

We shall build barricades, we: the Spirit:the Wanderers around our earth:we shall never be snowed under. (Translated by M Thom Wium.)

In the Egidiuslied, Arnold van Wyk’s intertext in the first piece of his Tristia, the speaker in the poem is faced with the near impossible task of finding meaning in the remainder of his life without the companionship of the deceased friend, and he too, cites art as something which should provide that meaning:

Nu bidt voor mi, ic moet noch snevenende in de weerelt liden pijn.Verware mijn stede di beneven:ic moet noch zinghen een liedekijn.

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Now pray for me, I must still toiland endure the pain of this world.Save a place for me next to you:as for me, I still have a song to sing here. (Translated by M Thom Wium after Komrij 1994, 231-232)

Yet for Arnold van Wyk, perhaps more so than for NP van Wyk Louw, the Muse would always give less than she demanded in return: the very same aesthetic that, for Van Wyk, provided a means of self-expression, beauty and meaning, was also an aesthetic that would isolate him. Stephanus Muller theorises this concept in terms of a double dislocation of place and time:

‘It was inevitable and something of a tragedy that laying claim to an anachronistic aesthetic [the aesthetic of Beethoven, Chopin and Schubert] would result not in happiness but in the kind of emotional struggle metaphorically reminiscent of his place of birth. Inevitable because the place and time he so desperately wanted to connect with was also the place and time of the alienated and struggling artist. A tragedy because the suspension of his belonging to the place and time in which he physically lived and worked undercut all possibility of a strong sense of creative identity. (Muller 2008, 62.)

Following on from Claassen’s reflection on art as the overriding way of self-identification for artists in exile, I am suggesting that, in settler culture – broadly viewed here as extending Western culture into former colonial spheres – Western art becomes a substitute for home, the primary source of existential groundedness.

5. ‘Home’ and ‘exile’ revisited

In closing, I would like briefly to revisit the notions of ‘home’ and ‘exile’, as they specifically relate to NP van Wyk Louw and Arnold van Wyk. I am aware of the imperative to resist a facile sublimation of the concept of exile for, as Edward Said reminds us in his ‘Reflections on Exile’ (2000), the vast numbers of displaced persons in the present age confront us with the sombre reality of that which we would celebrate as a constitutive characteristic of post-modern culture and art. Especially in the face of apartheid and all who suffered exile because of it, I hesitate to portray Van Wyk Louw and Van Wyk as somehow ‘just as much in exile’ as artists for whom it was actually and physically impossible to stay in the country. The differences are obvious.

What I am endeavouring to do in this paper, is to point to the debilitating effects of post-colonial cultural isolation for those to whom Africa was once a destination – effects exacerbated by apartheid. The extent to which Arnold van Wyk’s music acutely reminds us of this suffering, referencing an emotional register traceable to Ovid, I would argue, challenges any meta-narrative of exile that confines the word to narrow historical and political uses.

Bibliography

Anouilh, J. 1960. Becket, or the honor of God. New York: New American Library.

Claassen, J. M. 2008. Ovid revisited: The poet in exile. London: Duckworth.

Ferguson, H. and M. Hurd, eds. 2001. Letters of Gerald Finzi and Howard Ferguson. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.

Green, P. 1994. Introduction. In Ovid: The poems of exile, ed. P Green. London: Penguin.

Komrij, G. 1994. De Nederlandse poëzie van de twaalfde tot en met de zestiende eeuw in duizend en enige bladzijden. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.

Muller, S. 2008. Arnold van Wyk’s hard, stony, flinty path, or making things beautiful in apartheid South Africa. In The Musical Times, Vol. 149, No. 1905, 61-78.

Ovid. 1994. The poems of exile. London: Penguin.

Said, E. 2000. Reflections on Exile. In Reflections on Exile and other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Van Vuuren, H. 1989. Tristia in Perspektief. Cape Town: Vlaeberg.

Van Wyk, A. 1956. Van liefde en verlatenheid. Cape Town: Boosey & Co. Ltd.

Van Wyk, A. 1984. Tristia. Stellenbosch: Arnold van Wyk Trust.

Van Wyk Louw, NP. 1962. Tristia, en ander verse, voorspele en vlugte, 1950-1957. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau.

Van Wyk, A. Sketch for ‘Ostinato’ from ‘Tristia’. Van Wyk Collection, 349. Special Collections. Stellenbosch University: JS Gericke Library, 7.11. A1:44.