At the start of the 1300s, Dante Alighieri made a decision that scandalized the literary establishment of his time.
He chose to write in Italian (specifically the Tuscan dialect of the Florentine region), and not in Latin, which was the language of scholarship, the church, and of anyone who wanted to be taken seriously at the time. Italian was the language of the street, the market, the argument overheard through a window. Dante looked at that living, breathing, imperfect language and decided it was the one worth writing in.
The result was one of the greatest works of literature ever produced: The Divine Comedy. Written in the wrong language, by someone who knew exactly what he was doing. I think about that choice a lot. And then, almost immediately, I also think about Mrs H.S. Ball's Original Recipe Chutney.
Bear with me.
The story of Mrs Ball's begins in 1852, with a woman named Sarah Adkins making chutney in Fort Jackson, near King William's Town. The recipe was good enough to sell commercially, she just had the misfortune of calling it "Mrs Henry Adkins Senior, Colonial Chutney Manufacturer".
The recipe later passed to her daughter Amelia, who became Mrs Ball when she married a man named Herbert Saddleton Ball. Amelia started selling it at church bazaars during the First World War. By 1918 she was moving 24 bottles a day. Her husband Herbert carried bottles by train to Cape Town to sell and on one of those trips met a businessman named Fred Metter, who saw what they had, changed the name, and scaled the whole operation up.
Amelia died in 1962, at 97. The business had long since outgrown her kitchen. It now makes 8,000 bottles a day. Same recipe Sarah Adkins started in 1852. Completely different fate.
Mrs Ball's Chutney doesn't communicate through branding. It communicates through collective memory. There is not a South African kitchen table of a certain generation that has not had one on it. It was there at the braai, next to the eggs, and consumed directly from the bottle with a teaspoon at an hour that cannot be defended.
This is what Dante was reaching for. Not the chutney specifically, but the idea that the things already on the table, already in the mouth, already known without introduction, carry a kind of authority that no amount of Latin could manufacture. The Divine Comedy was written for the reader in the street. Mrs Ball's was made for the table in the South African kitchen. Neither waited for permission. Both became canonical in their respective ways.
Some South African literature understands this concept instinctively. The writers who have looked at this country and found the words for it, in Afrikaans, in Xhosa, in Zulu, or something in between, are doing something Dante would recognise. Choosing
the living language. Writing for the reader in front of them, not the critic behind them. Using the words already in the room.
And yet most of us default to English. Not because it's wrong, it isn't wrong. English is a generous, flexible and accommodating language and I am using it right now without apology, but in some ways it's the Latin of our time. The language we reach for when we want to be understood, rather than the language we reach for when we want to be true.
None of this is an argument against translation, quite the opposite. The translator is the person who believes most fiercely that something in one language is worth carrying into another. That the living language on the other side deserves the original at full strength. Dante needed translators too. So does every writer who ever chose the vernacular over the safe option. The work of translation is the work of saying: this matters enough to be shared.
What Dante asks and what Mrs Ball's chutney asks, is whether the language you actually think in, dream in, argue in, reach for when something hits a little too hard, whether that language might also be one worth reading in.
And perhaps writing in.
So here is my question for you this week, stripped of theory:
Are you reading in your mother tongue? Why?
And if you’re not, why not?
I am curious for your views: info@thestorystation.co.za
PS: If nothing else, I hope this changes how you look at your pantry.