St. Teresa van Avila: sentrale figuur in die werk van Cussons en Van Wyk Louw

Abstract

A central poem in Van Wyk Louw’s Tristia (1962), is “H. Teresa van Avila flap uit” (literally translated: “Saint Teresa of Avila talks too much/babbles uncontrollably”. This article illustrates how intertextual reading helped to clarify the poem. Teresa of Avila’s The way of perfection (a translation of the Spanish work El Camino de la Perfección, 1573) is the intertext of the Van Wyk Louw poem. In the last section of the article it is shown how the figure of St. Teresa of Avila is central not only to Van Wyk Louw’s Tristia (1962), but also to the oeuvre of Sheila Cussons, which underlines a strong intertextuality between these two Afrikaans oeuvres.