Mother Africa

Notes

This small poem is deceptively simple. Its succinct, almost dry, statements convey enormously rich ideas about Africa. Our task was to retain the delicate understatement of the original.

As you'll see, we followed Andre's literal version exactly for the first stanza - which made life easy! And we did little to the second stanza, other than adding the idea of mother Africa 'delivering' diamonds, which seemed rather apt. The trickiest stanza was number three as, in the original, there's a great deal of ambiguity about what exactly the land is doing with, or to, the elders. We tried to convey this ambiguity by using the verbs 'met' and then 'keep': the latter giving the sense of 'holding on to' and 'preserving'.