Andries Gerhardus Visser (1 March 1878– 10 June 1929) was a well-known early Afrikaans

Afrikaans

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language, spoken natively in South Africa and Namibia. It is a daughter language of Dutch, originating in its 17th century dialects, collectively referred to as Cape Dutch .Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch; see , , , , , .Afrikaans was historically called Cape...

 poet.

Biography

Visser was born on the farm Zaaifontein in the Fraserburg

Fraserburg

Fraserburg is a town in the Karoo region of South Africa's Northern Cape province.It was established in 1851 on the farm Rietfontein, and named after the Scottish immigrant Reverend Colin Fraser, and a church elder G.J. Meyburgh. Prior to the town establishment the earliest known inhabitants of the...

 district of South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

. An intense drought drove his parents from their farm in Carnarvon and he was born in a tent in the farmyard, under the shadow of a pear tree. He attended school in Daljosafat at the same time as two other notable writers, Totius

Totius

Totius was the pen name of the Afrikaner poet Jacob Daniël du Toit .-Life:...

 and D.F. Malherbe.

He received teacher's training at Normaal College in Cape Town

Cape Town

Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...

 en studied medicine in Edinburgh

Edinburgh

Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...

, Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 from 1901 to 1906. He worked as a doctor in Carnarvon (1907–1909), Steytlerville (1909–1916) and Heidelberg

Heidelberg, Gauteng

Heidelberg is a town with 70,707 inhabitants in the Gauteng province of South Africa at the foot of the Suikerbosrand next to the N3 highway, which connects Johannesburg and Durban.- History :...

 (1916–1929). He became close friends with the poet Eugene Marais

Eugene Marais

Eugène Nielen Marais was a South African lawyer, naturalist, poet and writer.- His early years, before and during the Boer War :Marais was born in Pretoria, the thirteenth and last child of his parents, Jan Christiaan Nielen Marais and Catharina Helena Cornelia van Niekerk...

 while in Heidelberg.

He married twice; in 1913 with Lettie Conradie, who died in 1920, and again in 1927 with Marie de Villiers. He died on the 10th of June 1929.

Literary career

Visser was already published at eighteen in Ons Kleintji. His work is not regarded as part of the Eerste Taalbeweging, rather as the part of the poetry from the period until 1930.

He twice won the prestigious Hertzog Prize

Hertzog Prize

The Hertzog Prize or is an annual award given to Afrikaans-language writers by the South African Academy for the Sciences and Arts , formerly the South African Academy for Language, Literature and Arts...

for literature, for both his first and second anthologies.

His verse is notably simple and musical, making use of traditional verse forms such as the rondeel, intertextual references and techniques such as the switching of idioms, epigrams and spellings.