Sobriquet 40.2

The following post was originally published on 3/2/08.

Since I am still feeling quite ill, I won't write very much tonight. I did continue reading "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," though, which I have been enjoying. So far, the only qualm--if one could even call it that--I find I have with the novella is that it does not really sound like it had been written in the late eighteenth century. This is, of course, a relatively minor objection. After all, given the text's internal claim to have been translated from Afrikaans to English during the modern age, the English into which the fictional Coetzee translates the original text would not be noticeably dated or anachronistic. Still, the text itself feels a bit too contemporary, a bit too aware of the postcolonial discourse it would inevitably become a part of two centuries after it was written.

For tomorrow: More of the same.