Exceptional Excerpts: Isak Dinesen

Sharing excerpts is a way to honor another artist and their muse, like leaving an offering at an altar. This is my little altar in the blogosphere, and today's excerpt is from Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa. English was not her first language, nor was it for the people writing to her. What she treasured in the letters was not their eloquence, nor even the happenings themselves, but the trouble that was taken to set them to paper, and the essence of personality that was imparted as a gift.

"The letters from my old servants in Africa would come in, unpredictably making their appearance in my Danish existence, strange, moving documents, although not much to look at. I wondered what would have made my correspondents feel just at that moment the necessity of walking fifteen or twenty miles to Nairobi in order to send off these messages to me. At times they were dirges or elegies, at other times factual reports or even chroniques scandaleuses.

Two or three such epistles might follow quickly upon one another, then there might be many months in which the old continent was dumb.

But once a year at least I would be certain to get news of all my people.

From the time when I left Africa until the outbreak of the Second World War, every year before Christmas I sent out a small amount of money to my old firm of solicitors, Messrs. W.C. Hunter and Company, of Nairobi. They would always be able to get Farah's address, for he had his home and family in the Somali village of the town, even when he himself was away trading horses from Abyssinia or following some great white hunter on his safaris, and Farah would look up and collect his old staff. Thus in the white-washed Nairobi office my household was gathered together once more, each member of it was handed my Christmas present and was told to deliver in return, for my information, a short report on how he was and on what had happened to him in the course of a year. The bulletin, probably very slowly drawn from him, was put down by the clerk of the office in sober English and was easy to read, but had no voice to it.

But my people, inspired by what to them might seem an actual, renewed meeting with me-- for the African has a capacity for disregarding distances of space and time-- on leaving the solicitor's quarters laid their way round by the post-office, looked up the Indian professional letter-writer in his stall there and had this learned man set down for them a second message to me. In such a way the letter, first translated in the mind of the sender from his native Kikuyu tongue into the lingua franca of Swahili, had later passed through the dark Indian mind of the scribe, before it was finally set down, as I read it, in his unorthodox English. Yet in this shape it bore a truer likeness to its author than the official, conventional note, so that as I contemplated the slanting lines on the thin yellow paper, I for a moment was brought face to face with him."