Conceptualising “verd(r)inging” [supersessory-suppressionary-thingification] as a form of BADaptation: oral tradition, epistemic violence, and the interaction between G.R. von Wielligh’s Bushman Stories (1919-1921) and Wendy Maartens’s San-Child Reads the

Abstract

In this article I conceptualise “verd(r)inging” as a form of BADaptation, scaffolded by three interpretations of “verd(r)inging”: first as supersession whereby an adaptation replaces an original urtext, second as suppression whereby the adaption commits epistemic violence towards a text, a linguistic community and a worldview, and third as thingification where the adaptation takes part in a process of worlding that turns a text into a form of capital. This conceptualisation is explored through a close reading of a recent collection of Afrikaans children’s stories, Sankind lees die wind (2024), by Wendy Maartens based on Gideon Retief von Wielligh’s four-part Boesman-Stories (1919-1921), a collection of 19th century |xam folklore. I investigate the ways in which both the original folkloric texts and Von Wielligh’s paratextual positioning of those texts have been “verd(r)ing”-ed through Maartens’s adaptation, specifically in the domains of the collection’s audience, the use of sources, and the phenomenon of animal speech within |xam folklore.