11/14/25
Fri,
19:30

in ehrbarer balance
An evening with Antjie Krog

Reading
Talk
← / →

© Brenda Veldtmann

Antjie Krog (born in 1952 in Kroonstad, Union of South Africa) is a poet and journalist. While she often writes her articles and essays in English, the language of her poetry is Afrikaans. She made her debut at the age of seventeen and is now regarded as the most important poet writing in Afrikaans.

In her early years, Krog’s work was still shaped by classical influences, but over the decades she developed a confidently experimental approach: she broke open syntax from within while simultaneously enriching the language with numerous neologisms. Critics have often described this distinctive tone in her poetry, with admiration, as “Antjiekaans.”

As a decidedly political writer and thinker, Krog has always been conscious of the fact that her first language is the language of the oppressors („in one´s fought-for language“, as she once put it). This ambivalence runs through her entire body of work. From it grew her conviction that there is a duty to political engagement. Krog has long examined South Africa’s apartheid history with a critical eye and later accompanied, as a journalist, the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Some of the victims’ testimonies before the Commission found their way into her poems and into her widely acclaimed book Country of My Skull. Many of her texts revolve around the themes of guilt and forgiveness. In the cycle Frau Justitia mit verbundenen augen she laments the „defect of moral imagination“ and asks later in the poem: „how does one live in honourable balance?“

Another major theme in Krog’s work is the exploration of the body, aging, and desire. She writes about the heart and its „stirrup of ice“, about „the indulgence and the final sound of love“. Her sensuous language captures even the faintest „griffelgeluidje van wimpers“. Some texts are merciless records of aging: they speak of dwindling estrogen and of a body that „loosening at the seams“. Her poems confront not only the frailty of her own body but also that of a beloved, desired other (one poem is both a love poem to a man and to all the men he once was, in every stage of his life). Krog herself calls this a struggle „the vocabulary of old age“. In yet other poems, she writes of days surrendered to sadness, when houses turn their backsides to the rain „like a warm cow“.

On this evening, Antjie Krog will read from earlier works as well as from poems newly translated for this occasion from her most recent collection plunder (2022), which received the Helgaard Steyn Award for Literature — one of South Africa’s most prestigious literary prizes.

The event will be interpreted in English and German.
With the kind support of ECHOO Conference Interpreting

Reading & Conversation: Antjie Krog
Moderation: Marie Luise Knott