The author and the translator acknowledge the direct and indirect use in the voices of the characters—sometimes with acknowledgment, sometimes not—of textual material from Afrikaans and other (farm) novels as well as poems, in translation, of amongst others Elisabeth Eybers and Wilna Stockenström. In the Prologue and Epilogue there are amongst others quotations from poems by Philip Larkin: ‘Cut Grass,’ ‘Arrivals, Departures,’ ‘Having grown up in shade of Church and State,’ ‘Many famous feet have trod’ and ‘As a war in years of peace’(Collected Poems, 1988, The Marvell Press, Faber and Faber, London), and from a poem by Louis Macneice titled ‘Snow.’ In the body of the novel there are phrases from Thomas Elyot, Shakespeare, John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Danish poem at the end, ‘Natteregn,’ is by Nis Petersen (1897–1943), set to music in 1971 by Jørgen Jersild as part of the song cycle ‘Tre romantiske korsange.’