Carel de Haseth vertaald in het Engels
Carel de Haseth’s novella Slave and Master (Katibu di Shon), written in the Creole language Papiamentu, dramatizes the August 17, 1795 slave revolt on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao. The story is told through an alternating series of dramatic monologues by two key characters: Luis, a slave, and a leader of the revolt; and Shon Welmu, his childhood friend and white heir to the slave plantation. The exposition begins shortly after the revolt has been crushed, as Luis awaits his brutal execution, and it ends with his preemptive suicide. The theme is the acceptance of the inevitability of emancipation. Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean: Carel de Haseth’s Slave and Master (Katibu di Shon) is suitable for courses on Caribbean literature and postcolonial literature and will be of great interest to readers of fiction in general. Because of the striking ease with which students with a modest competency in Romance languages can make out Papiamentu, we have issued this bilingual, facing-pages edition of the text to lend it more usability in classroom situations.
Olga E. Rojer is Associate Professor of German Studies at American University in Washington, D.C. She is author of Exile in Argentina: 1933–1945 (Peter Lang, 1989) and co-editor and translator of Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean: Cola Debrot’s My Black Sister and Boeli van Leeuwen’s A Stranger on Earth (Peter Lang, 2007) with Joseph O. Aimone.
Joseph O. Aimone is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston Downtown. His collaborative translations with Olga E. Rojer of Dutch and Papiamentu literature from the Dutch Caribbean have been published widely. He has also published poetry and literary criticism.