GREYTON, South Africa—The "Iliad" has been translated into dozens of languages, including more than 70 versions in English, over the past four centuries, by scholars, poets and even a British prime minister. Only one has the word "braai," South African for barbecue.
The new translation is the work of Richard Whitaker, a retired classics professor who felt South Africa's multiracial argot had something new to say about Homer's 3,000 year-old-tale of valor and revenge. For a decade—the length of the Trojan War—he went on an odyssey translating Homer's ancient Greek into South African English, a peculiar patois born from the tongue of bygone British colonizers mixing with a half-dozen African languages.
"Southern African English has a register all its own now," says the trim 61-year-old professor emeritus. "It deserves some recognition."
The 'Iliad:' South African Style
Not that everyone agreed. Mr. Whitaker got a cold reception from South Africa's university presses, four of which declined to publish his "Iliad." They didn't respond to requests for comment. And the professor's previous forays into popular literature haven't met with much commercial success. In his spare time he has written three novels. One imagines that James Joyce immigrated to South Africa in 1908 and opened a movie theater. Another features a Don Quixote-like dreamer on a voter-education drive ahead of South Africa's first free election in 1994. The third is about a professor living in a small town. All are unpublished.
"I don't think I'm a very good novelist," he confesses.
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But Mr. Whitaker's hopes for the Southern African "Iliad" are slightly higher. At a personal cost of almost $3,500, he says he has published 300 copies. He has sold 90 so far for about $23.50 each. More important, he says, he wants his "Iliad" to be taken seriously by scholars and enjoyed by average South Africans. And in this epic endeavor, he has made progress.
Rhodes University, near the Indian Ocean coast, will assign the 528-page tome to students beginning next year. The University of KwaZulu-Natal, in Durban, will prescribe excerpts of it, too. Prof. Whitaker's longtime home, the University of Cape Town, will also assign it to the next batch of students that take up the "Iliad."
"As usual I think you will encounter a lot of indifference," says Roman Roth, a classics lecturer at the university, lamenting the universal plight of the college professor. "But I think there will be a lot of positive reactions, too."
The book pays tribute to a version of English that has evolved at the bottom of the African continent into something all its own. English, Zulu, Afrikaans and other languages have mixed in South Africa for centuries, going back to the collision of colonizers and African tribes at the Cape of Good Hope.
Afrikaans itself is an amalgam, based mainly on the Dutch of 17th-century immigrants but borrowing from Portuguese, Malay and African languages as well. Afrikaans was the lingua franca of the white-minority government under apartheid, the system of racial oppression enforced by a white-minority government before multiracial democracy was introduced in 1994.
Authorities' zeal for segregation extended to languages, which they sought to keep separate and pure. That meant separate news channels for English, Afrikaans and other African languages, and even versions of imported American shows dubbed into these tongues as well. The fall of apartheid allowed South Africa's different languages to come together in a pop-culture Babel.
The most prominent example is South Africa's national anthem, a medley of an African freedom hymn and the apartheid-era anthem. There are lyrics in Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans and English. Making it through the song without stumbling is a badge of honor. Then there are television shows like "Isidingo," a soap opera about a fictional gold mine and corporate strivers in Johannesburg. The weekday drama features characters who slide effortlessly between English and South Africa's 10 other official languages. English subtitles assist the uninitiated; the actors are on their own.
"Half of the time when an actor is saying something to me in Sesotho I haven't the foggiest idea what they're saying," says Linda Sokhulu, an English and Zulu speaker who plays a polyglot mining engineer on the show.
Even straightforward words can mean something else in South African English. "Robots" are traffic lights. "Geysers" are water heaters. "Just now" means later; "now now" means right now.
"My students are always puzzled when I point out these words are actually not in dictionaries in England," says Rajend Mesthrie, a linguistics professor at the University of Cape Town and the author of books including "Eish, but is it English? Celebrating the South African Variety" and a dictionary of the English spoken by South Africa's ethnic Indian community. That 260-page digest defines "bunny chow" as a popular fast-food dish of curry served in a hollowed-out loaf of bread, and "mooked" as slang for drunk or high.
Still, some South African students are self-conscious of writing how they speak. "I'm scared of using local terms," says Rolf Rhodes, 24-year-old classics major at the University of Cape Town and an aspiring novelist. "I don't know if that would appeal to anyone outside of South Africa. I want to write to a wider audience than that."
Mr. Whitaker isn't deterred by suggestions the audience for his translation might be limited. Indeed, he says he wants to tackle the "Odyssey" next, hopefully in less than the 10 years it took Odysseus to get home from Troy. "Having the practice of having gone through the Homeric world in Southern African terms already, it should save some time," he says.
He is hawking "The Iliad of Homer: A Southern African Translation" through a website (Southernafricaniliad.com); at a recent reading at a Cape Town bookstore; and at an afternoon adult-education course at his old university over five days in January and February, South Africa's summer holidays.
"I would like them to read the book in advance," Mr. Whitaker ventures. "But since there is no compulsion at all, some will, some will read it in the course of the lectures, some won't read it at all."
By the time he finishes the course, and sells a few dozen more copies, Mr. Whitaker hopes Homer's odyssey will resonate with South Africans in a way that reading about it in formal English—or even the original Greek—might not.
So in his telling, the Greeks leave their "kraals" (Afrikaans for homestead, via Portuguese) for war against the Trojans, where their champion, Achilles, decimates many "impis" (Zulu for regiment) with his "assegai" (a traditional spear) before defeating Hector, the great hero of Troy. And after a hard-fought battle, the Greeks don't grill their beef and mutton—they "braai" it.