[Blishen is an English writer and editor. In the following excerpt from a review of The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain, he praises the original Zulu versions of Kunene's poetry, but states that the English translations lack emotional impact.]

One longs to be able to read and understand [The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain] in the original: some of the songs are printed in Gikuyu in an appendix, and it is easy to see what verbal music has been lost. As it has in Mazisi Kunene's translations of his own poems from the Zulu. I have heard Kunene reading Zulu poetry, and have never encountered anything like it—or half as wonderfully orchestral. In English these poems—so many shot through with the grief of a people robbed, together with a determination to hang on to the inner forms of what has been outwardly stolen—are clearly no more than murmuring hints of the originals. In English, too much sounds merely grand. In his introduction, Kunene accompanies an account of the essentially public character of Zulu poetry with a scornful attack on those African poets who, writing in English, invite judgment as contributors to a European tradition. He seems to think that they are choosing "the temporary attractions of cheap popularity," though God knows, in that tradition few poets are popular, cheaply or otherwise. The irony is that, in this field, the Zulu has preserved what the European has lost—a true breadth of audience. But it's another confusion on the critical scene: that the use of English is so general and yet, for the most understandable of reasons, so widely attacked. Let the eye merely run down a page of Zulu or Gikuyu, and the anger and grief will be understood.