All one horse: Fictions and images - Softcover

Breytenbach, Breyten

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0947046240 ISBN 13: 9780947046248

Publisher: Taurus, 1990

Synopsis

It is impossible to stop our ears against the excruciating power of what Breytenbach has to say.” Nadine Gordimer

Obviously the greatest Afrikaner poet of this generation. . . . No one elevated the Boer language to such pure beauty and no one wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime as its exiled poet Breyten Breytenbach.” The New Yorker

All One Horse is a moving and haunting journey through Breyten Breytenbach’s kaleidoscopic imagination. His surreal and psychically charged paintings converse with his philosophical and lyrical prose pieces. The title is a nod to Chuang Tzu, and the writings are infused with glimmers of Eastern thought (as well as glimmers of the other worlds Breytenbach has inhabited).

An outspoken human rights activist, Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and painter (his paintings and drawings have been exhibited around the world). After years of exile in France, in 1975 he was apprehended during a clandestine trip to South Africa, accused of terrorism for his anti-apartheid activities, and spent seven years in prison. He received the Alan Paton Non-Fiction Award for Return to Paradise in 1994 and the Hertzog Prize for poetry in 1999 and 2007.

About this title

About the Author:

Outspoken human rights activist Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and painter. After years of exile in France, in 1975 he was apprehended during a clandestine trip to South Africa, convicted for terrorism for his anti-apartheid activities, and imprisoned for seven years. He received the Alan Paton Prize in 1994 the Herzog Prize for poetry in 1999.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

In the beginning there is God. Or Creative Principle. If we take it that there must be a start and a stop, then there should be some entity to begin with or who/which can make the beginning begin? But we are not there yet so there can be no if. If comes later. Let’s start all over again.
In the beginning there is the Word. (This is plagiarism.) Who writes the Word? Ah! Read for Word a synonym for creative act. You have to leave room for assumptions. If you don’t leave room nothing can be created, not even Nothing. If you leave room for synonyms you have a splitting of cells, procreation, multiplication, a filling of the Void. Where the Void comes from? It is in the nature of the Void neither to come nor to go. And I don’t know who you are. Not yet. Don’t leave the room!
(But if I am it must be because you are, my brother. And since there’s a consciousness conscious of its being in the act of searching for synonyms, it must be an I. If the looking is written down it must emanate from a First

About this edition

• Publisher: Taurus
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0947046240
• ISBN 13: 9780947046248
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 125