Uys Krige

Mattheus Uys Krige (4 February 1910 – 10 August 1987) was a South African writer of novels, short stories, poems and plays in both Afrikaans and English. He was born in Bontebokskloof (near Swellendam) in the Cape Province and educated at the University of Stellenbosch.

From 1931 to 1935 he lived in France and Spain, acquiring fluency in both languages. Whilst in France he played rugby for a club in Toulon, was a swimming coach on the Côte d'Azur, wrote poems and penned free-lance articles for the Afrikaans press. He returned to South Africa in 1935 and began a writing career as a reporter for the Rand Daily Mail. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War he campaigned passionately for the Republican forces, writing the Hymn of the Fascist Bombers in 1937, which elicited vehement condemnations from the pro-Nazi Nationalists and the South African Catholic Church. During World War II he was a war correspondent with the South African Army in North Africa. Captured at Tobruk in 1941, he was sent to Italy, spending two years in a prisoner of war camp from which he escaped to return to South Africa after learning to master Italian. After the National Party gained power in 1948 Krige actively opposed the moves of the new apartheid government to disenfranchise Coloured voters.

Krige is counted among the so-called Dertigers ("writers of the thirties"). He co-edited The Penguin Book of South African Verse (1968) with Jack Cope. He translated many of the works of Shakespeare into Afrikaans. He also translated works by Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Lope de Vega and Juan Ramón Jiménez from Spanish, works by Baudelaire, François Villon, Jacques Prévert, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Éluard from French, and the poems of Salvatore Quasimodo and Giuseppe Ungaretti from Italian. His electrifying encounter with Latin American poetry whilst in Cairo during World War II also led him to translate the poetry of Jacinto Fombona-Pachano, Jose Ramon Heredia, Vicente Huidobro, Jorge Carrera Andrade, Nicolas Guillen, Cesar Vallejo, Jorge de Lima and Manual Bandeira from Spanish and Portuguese. Krige's literary talent combined with his passion for modern French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese literary output made him the principal mediator of Romance literature into Afrikaans in the twentieth century and had a considerable subsequent influence on South African writing.

Uys Krige died near Hermanus in the Cape Province in 1987, aged 77. In 1994, Uys' granddaughter, Lida Orffer was murdered with her family at their home in Stellenbosch.

A collection of letters written by Uys Krige was published by Hemel & See Boeke in 2010 under the title "Briewe van Uys Krige uit Frankryk en Spanje".