from r2c update, my little website for Dutch poetry
in new english translations . . .
When I see a photo like “Snow Tables”, the first thing
that comes to mind other than the form and the nearly
black and white quality of the image, is its starkness.
Picnic tables, yes, but now in the middle of winter. There are
no happy people about, no one engaged in Sunday conversations,
or children playing, no one busily preparing food.
There is simply the flat, bare surface of the wood, with on
top a cold sweep of wind-driven snow.
Time and Space. Just as a photograph is always a kind
of window on time and space, so, too, is frequently a poem.
That is why titles are so very important, because they instantly
set the tone, as it were, or draw a frame of a very
subtle kind around a time and place. But whereas we have
come to expect a one-to-one kind of direct relationship between
the photograph and what it represents—that one particular scene
was only fully there at that moment and is now gone forever—
a poem can conjure up many different times and
spaces all at once.
Indeed, this need to orient ourselves in time and space is a
kind of perennial theme of poetry, albeit largely implicit,
existing silently on the periphery, as it were. We all know that
to be without orientation, to be lost, is a very disturbing
experience. Even worse, no doubt, is losing someone else.
But the 10 poems I’ve brought together here in new English
translations are not simply about losing something or someone.
They are more than this, in a way, because they are all about
finding something—a place, a time in the rhythms of the
natural year (Gellings), a belovèd lost to death (Achterberg),
a land one has been forced to leave behind (Marsman), or
even finding a kind of ecstatic happiness in the ordinary dull
gray of Dutch city life (J. C. Bloem in his classic
“Dapperstreet”).
The sequence ends with a charming miniature of Gerrit
Achterberg’s, Blackbird. (This is the European Blackbird (Turdus spp.),
master musician, and closelyrelated to the North American Robins).
In a culture that measures time down to the fraction of a nanosecond
and can no longer go into the wilderness without GPS hardware in its
backpacks, we are in that magical middle realm of everyday
life arguably quite lost. At least, one can gather that our poets,
Dutch or otherwise, are working hard to find their bearings. Perhaps
the blackbird can help. After all, he does seem to know exactly when
and where to sing.
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I’m often asked what ‘r2c’ stands for: it’s just the code/
working title of a book of Dutch poetry I hope to get
together someday soon called, Slow R-ivers, Straight R-oads,
Deep C-lay.
This particular page is at:
http://www.cs-music.com/features/snowtables.html
Follow my NEW DUTCH POETRY miniblog at:
twitter.com/#r2c_dutchpoetry