Jig

In the process of translating La Fontaine's fable 'Gout and Spider' into Afrikaans, Jan Steyn found himself questioning how gout has been named, moralised, pictured, and explained, and what a translator might learn from those histories. Jig is the result: part literary history, part memoir, part meditation on translation. Moving between medicine and metaphor, it revisits writers who have lent gout its voice - Hippocrates, Lucian, Petrarch, Benjamin Franklin, Dickens - while following the condition's afterlives in Afrikaner culture. Throughout, Steyn returns to translation's balancing act of loss and restitution as a way of thinking about illness, inheritance, and the stories bodies tell. Accompanying and dialoguing with his text are photographs by eminent New Zealand artist Anne Noble: images that evoke hidden roots and routes, networks of communication, and that serve as ghostly counterpoints to gout's crystals and protrusions.