Breyten Bretenback of South Africa published his first volume of poetry 1964. Through six subsequent volumes of verse, as well as a collection of short stories and a short experimental novel, he has won wide acclaim as the most important living poet of the Afrikaans language, combining in his work such divergent stimuli as the Surrealism and Neo-Realism of modern Spanish and south-American poetry; African influences through the work of Senghor and Aimée and the poetry of Black Consciousness in the U.S.A.; and notably, the long tradition of Zen, of which he has been an adherent for many years. The particular polarities of his work (Africa and Europe, White and Black, birth and death, assertive creativity and inevitable decay, love and destruction, tenderness and violence…) have been enhanced by his time in exile in Paris. This condition was force3d on him through his marriage to a Vietnamese girl who was branded as "Colored" and hence not socially acceptable in terms of South Africa’s rigid racialistic legislation. His unrelenting crusade for human dignity and against apartheid won him wide international recognition but inevitably increased his private agonies. And in 1975, determined to express his convictions in other than esthetic terms (he is also highly regarded as a painter) he returned to South Africa in disguise where he was arrested and tried on several counts under the so-called "Terrorism Act". In November 1975 he was sentenced to 9 years’ imprisonment and all efforts to appeal against the sentence (whose harshness shocked even his Prosecutor) were quashed by the courts. Our translator is André Brink, South African man of letters, and that country’s most important novelist in the Afrikaans language.