Eugene Marais
Eugène Nielen Marais (
9 January,
1871 â€"
29 March,
1936) was a
South African
lawyer,
naturalist,
poet and
writer |
Eugene Marais â€" writer, lawyer and naturalist |
Marais ('Ma-RARE'; second part rhymes with chair) was born near
Pretoria. He attended school in Pretoria,
Boshof and
Paarl and much of his early education was in English, as were his earliest poems. He matriculated at the age of sixteen . After leaving school he worked in Pretoria as a legal clerk and then as a journalist before becoming owner (at the tender age of nineteen) of a newspaper called
Land en Volk (lit. Land and (the Afrikaner) People). He involved himself deeply in local politics. His health was poor and he suffered from insomnia; to deal with the latter problem he began taking opiates. (Some claim that his use of drugs was influenced by the philosophy of
de Quincey. Be that as it may, Marais eventually became an addict). He married
Aletta Beyers but she died eight days after childbirth from puerperal fever only a year later. In 1897 -still in his mid twenties- he went to
London to read medicine and law. (He qualified as an advocate). When the
Boer War broke out in 1899, he was put on parole as an enemy alien in London. During the latter part of the war he joined a German expedition that sought to ship ammunition and medicines to the Boer Commandos via
Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique). However, he was struck down in this tropical area by fever and before the supplies could be delivered to the Boers the war ended.
From 1907 he studied nature in the
Waterberg ("Water mountain"), an area of wilderness north of Pretoria. He wrote in his native
Afrikaans about the animals he observed. His studies of
termites led him to the conclusion that the colony should be considered as a single organism. Although Marais could not have known it, he was anticipating some of the ideas of
Richard Dawkins. He also observed
baboons at length and he was the father of the scientific study of the behavior of primates. Because Marais refused to translate his works into English, they remained almost unknown outside of southern Africa, which is the only place in the world where Afrikaans is spoken to any degree.
His book "Die siel van die mier" (lit. "The soul of the ant" but usually given in English as the "Soul of the White Ant") was plagiarized by
Nobel laureate
Maurice Maeterlinck, who published "The Life of the White Ant" in 1926, falsely claiming many of Marais' revolutionary ideas as his own. Maeterlinck was able to do this because he was
Flemish and therefore understood
Dutch, from which Afrikaans was derived. Maeterlinck was as a consequence one of the few people in Europe who had read Marais' original texts. Marais took legal action against Maeterlinck but gained little satisfaction. Marais had by now for some time been an
opium addict and suffered from melancholy, insomnia, depression and feelings of isolation. The theft of his ideas weighed heavily on his mind and some say this caused his final demise. He committed suicide in 1936 by placing a shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. This occurred on the farm
Pelindaba, belonging to his friend, Gustav S. Preller. For those who are familiar with the dark moods of certain of Marais' poems there is a black irony here; in the local native language, Pelindaba means "the end of the business"....
Marais' work as a naturalist, although by no means trivial, is held to be of less importance than his contributions as an artist. He is amongst the greatest of the
Afrikaner poets and remains one of the most popular, although his output was not large. Opperman described him as the first professional Afrikaner poet; Marais believed that craft was as important as inspiration for poetry. Along with J.H.H. de Waal and G.S. Preller, he was a leading light in the Second Afrikaans (language) Movement in the period immediately after the Second Boer War, which ended in 1902. Some of his finest poems deal with the wonders of life and nature but he also wrote about inexorable Death. He was a religious man and in certain of his works (e.g. "Job") the influence of the Bible is obvious. Although an Afrikaner patriot, Marais was sympathetic to the cultural values of the black tribal peoples of the Transvaal; this is seen in poems such as "Die dans van die reën" (The dance of the rain). The following translation of Marais' "Wintersnag" is by J. W. Marchant:
"Winter's Night"O the small wind is frigid and spare
and bright in the dim light and bare
as wide as God's merciful boon
the
veld lies in starlight and gloom
and on the high lands
spread through burnt bands
the grass-seed, astir, is like beckoning hands.
O East-wind gives mournful measure to song
Like the lilt of a lovelorn lass whose been wronged
In every grass fold
bright dewdrop takes hold
and promptly pales to frost in the cold!
The progenitors of the Marais name in the region were Charles and Claude Marais from the Paris region of France. The Marais name has retained its original French spelling in South Africa.
# Opperman, D.J. Undated but probably 1962. Senior verseboek. Nasionale Boekhandel Bpk, Kaapstad. Negende druk, 185pp# Schirmer, P. 1980. The concise illustrated South African encyclopedia. Central News Agency, Johannesburg. First edition, about 212pp.
# Ces Francais Qui Ont Fait L'Afrique Du Sud. Translation: The French People Who Made South Africa.
Bernard Lugan. January 1996. ISBN 2841000869'* The Soul of the White Ant, 1937, First published as
Die Siel van die Mier in 1925, in Afrikaans
* The Soul of the Ape , 1919, Published posthumously in 1969.
*
Eugene Marais the Poet Some key poems by Eugene Marais (in Afrikaans)
*
Encounter South Africa Article
*
The Soul of the White Ant online
*
sahistory.org.za Entry on Eugene Marais
*
Works of Eugene Marais Full text of some works by Eugene Marais.
