The Sublime Song of a Maybe: Selected Poems E-Book

Arjen Duinker

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: Visible Poets
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Seitenzahl: 108

Beschreibung

"These poems come right up to the reader, go through his pockets, check the seams and hems of his personality, his essence, his baggage, amiably but determinedly shaking him down.""A very lyrical poet." Remco Ekkers.Introduction by Jeffrey Wainwright.Translated by Willem Groenewgen.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Leseprobe

THE SUBLIME SONG

OF A MAYBE

HET SUBLIEME LIED VAN EEN MISSCHIEN

Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden, Lancs OL14 6DA

Poems © Arjen Duinker 2002 and Meulenhoff Publishers bv

Translation © Willem Groenewegen 2002

Introduction © Jeffrey Wainwright 2002

Design by Tony Ward

Printed by Lightning Source

ISBN (pbk) 978 1 900072 77 7

ISBN (ebk) 978 1 908376 56 5

Poems in this book are taken from the following collections first published by J.M Meulenhoff bv, Amsterdam: Rode oever (Red Shore) 1988; Losse gedichten (Loose Poems) 1990; De gevelreiniger en anderen (The Gable-cleaner and Others)1994; Het uur van de droom (The Dreaming Hour) 1996; Ook al is het niet zo (Even if it isn’t so) 1998; and De geschiedenis van een opsomming (The History of an Enumeration) 2000.

The Publishers acknowledge financial assistance from The Arts Council of England

Arc Publications: Visible Poets Series, No. 8

Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier

Arjen Duinker

The Sublime

Song

of a Maybe

HET SUBLIEME LIED VAN EEN MISSCHIE

~

Translated by Willem Groenewegen

Introduced by Jeffrey Wainwright

2002

CONTENTS

Translator’s Preface

Introduction

from RODE OEVER / RED SHORE

De wind heeft een blauwe staart

The wind has a blue tail

from LOSSE GEDICHTEN / LOOSE POEMS

Als jij me abstracties geeft

If you give me abstractions

Laat mij de regen met de goede hoeveelheid druppels!

Let me have the rain with the right amount of droplets!

Het gestamp van de voeten zwijgt

The stamping of feet falls silent

Alle hoeken zijn naakt

All corners are naked

Nooit eerder zag ik een symbool

Never before did I see a symbol

De rivier die langs mijn huis stroomt is vrolijk

The river that runs past my house is cheerful

Aan de ene kant staat het ding

On the one hand is the thing

Waar zijn mijn tranen, waar zijn ze?

Where are my tears, where are they?

from DE GEVELREINIGER EN ANDEREN / THE GABLE-CLEANER AND OTHERS

De hagedis

The lizard

Proef op de som

Put to the test

Slaapliedje

Lullaby

Glinstering op doortocht

Glittering passage

Gistfabriek

Yeast factory

Onbekende grootheid

Unknown quantity

De Gevelreiniger

The gable-cleaner

from HET UUR VAN DE DROOM / THE DREAMING HOUR

Gedicht voor een kameel

Poem for a camel

Miniatuur voor Désirée

Miniature for Désirée

Filon en ik

Filon and me

from OOK AL IS HET NIET ZO / EVEN IF IT ISN’T SO

Zibes en ik

Zibes and me

Poëzie door een wereld door een poëzie

Poetry through a world through a poetry

Romantiseren

Romanticising

Terugtocht

Return journey

Sprookje

Fairy tale

Manvarier en ik

Manvarier and me

Oud en nieuw

Old and new

from DE GESCHIEDENIS VAN EEN OPSOMMING / THE HISTORY OF AN ENUMERATION

Stuk of wat mensen

A number of people

Samba

Samba

Quinta das esmoutadas, voor Ema

Quinta das esmoutadas, for Ema

Voor Yang Lian (1)

For Yang Lian (1)

Bij ‘La camera da letto’

At ‘La camera da letto’

Voor Yang Lian (2)

For Yang Lian (2)

Recept om een geur te maken voor Nuno Júdice

Recipe for making a scent for Nuno Júdice

Verslag van een scheidsrechter – inleiding

A referee’s report – introduction

La Lanterna

La Lanterna

Biographical Notes

SERIES EDITOR’S NOTE

There is a prevailing view of translated poetry, especially in England, which maintains that it should read as though it had originally been written in English. The books in the ‘Visible Poets’ series aim to challenge that view. They assume that the reader of poetry is by definition someone who wants to experience the strange, the unusual, the new, the foreign, someone who delights in the stretching and distortion of language which makes any poetry, translated or not, alive and distinctive. The translators of the poets in this series aim not to hide but to reveal the original, to make it visible and, in so doing, to render visible the translator’s task, too. The reader is invited not only to experience the unique fusion of the creative talents of poet and translator embodied in the English poems in these collections, but also to speculate on the processes of their creation and so to gain a deeper understanding and enjoyment of both original and translated poems.

Jean Boase-Beier

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

‘All words are naked’: on translating Arjen Duinker

Duinker belongs, however reluctantly, to a generation of poets who, towards the end of the 1980s, wanted to breathe new life and humour into the poetic line. Many of them chose the tone and content of the surprise of immediate experience unmitigated by profound ponderings or reflection. None of the poets concerned has been as consistent in this approach through the years as Arjen Duinker. His sense of immediacy may be concrete, abstract; it may be of, or out of, this world:

The wind has a blue tail

Water has a blue tail

And fire has a blue tail

(from: ‘The wind has a blue tail’)

There goes the gable-cleaner

Alone on his bike,

Not understood with his notions.

(from: ‘The gable-cleaner’)

In this immediacy, most received notions of what is poetic fall by the wayside. Duinker’s poetry builds strong images. Yet these images nearly always remain immediate, without resorting to heightened poetic effect. It is with this immediacy, urgency if you will, in mind, that I translated this work. It offered me a chance to approach translation from a new angle.

Close to the station,

In a portico, Noel the journalist waited,

Who has a great memory for commonplaces.

He gave a stern look and said ‘The rain saddens me.

Please, think up something cheerful!’

(from: ‘Yeast Factory’)

Translating the work of poet Arjen Duinker was for me an act of letting go. Letting go of the constant question of meaning, letting go of the translator’s tendency towards a rejection of unmitigated translation into the target language and thus letting go of literalism.

Time and again Duinker is asked by literary critics and interviewers what his poetry means and invariably the poet then replies that that question is to him irrelevant. As a translator, I too was looking for meaning to convey. Yet, as I found out while reading Duinker’s poetry, his work does not allow analysis along the lines of traditional views of poetic form and meaning.

For there are few traits according to which one might classify Duinker’s work as poetry. This has been pointed out by critics as well as fellow poets. He seems to have little truck with poetic form. The only form that these poems perhaps have is one that is self-contained. Although the poems often have a narrative, there is hardly any rhyme or poetic diction, one cannot deduce a clear form of metre. So, if this poetry looks and sounds fairly prosaic and seems to share few common features with what is deemed to be ‘poetic’, then what is it that makes this work poetry?

Ninye bún,

Ninye bún is a phrase

In one of hundreds of Papua languages.

Ninye bún, I could turn the pages for days,

Days of climbing and descending and creeping

In that one valley, the book by the name of Ninye bún,

(from: ‘Poetry through a world through a poetry’)

One reason is apparent: that, generally speaking, this work addresses language itself. He is not a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, although there are most certainly turns of phrase the poet would and would not use. What I mean to say is: most of Duinker’s poetry re-imagines, re-invents, what the relations are between the signifier and the signified, what a word is and what it stands for. One way in which he ‘upsets’ this relation, is achieved by using the technique of the list – the title of his latest volume bears this out, The History of An Enumeration.

‘What’s your name?’

‘William Carlos Williams, or maybe also

Attila József, or Frédéric Pacéré Titinga, or Alberto Caeiro,’

Mr Crooked spoke clearly,

‘I’m not really sure.

Kenneth Rexroth, Leung Ping-kwan,

Rafael Alberti, Homero Aridjis,

César Vallejo, Mzee Haji, Attilio Bertolucci, Vasko Popa,

Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo, I don’t rightly know.’

(from: ‘A referee’s report – introduction’)

Here and in former volumes, Duinker lists words, names, and so on that at first seem oddly joined, ill at ease in each other’s company. Only when one is willing to let go of the meaning that words convey in the contexts we see them in, can one begin to understand why this is poetic language at play, that these lists can be seen as metaphoric:

So the world appeared,

That concrete wilderness.

Apartment, stab of pain, dog,

Atmosphere, rock, urge, generation,

Dragonfly, desert, milk, theory,

Blended and unfounded orange.

(from: ‘Put to the test’)

How do concrete items of evidence like apartment and dog relate to abstractions like atmosphere and theory? By drawing up an inventory of words that bear no immediate relation to each other, Duinker builds new relations. By being apposite these lists become metaphors, in the above case for ‘the world’. The name-game in ‘A referee’s report – introduction’ is even more abstract: they are anybody and everybody all at once, metaphors for ‘name’.

If one is not allowed to look for the meaning of a poem, one assumes that the poem is meaningless, as perhaps in Dadaism. Yet I would wish to argue that the meaning of Duinker’s poetry lies between the words at play, confronted by and working with each other. Also, the consecutive words in the enumerations are not arbitrary. On quite a few occasions I tried to substitute one word for another, mostly for poetic reasons, only to be found out by the poet and subsequently told to stick to the original. In Duinker’s work “all words are naked” (‘X’, Loose Poems), what you read is what you get, and so in translation they must remain themselves.

What use is there, therefore, in adopting a viewpoint shared by many translators: the strategy of changing the original poem while translating for the better understanding of this work by readers in the target language, in this case English? What better way to ensure that the words spoken in the original poem can play as freely – are as naked – in translation as in the original, as through a (near) literal translation? For most publishers this is taboo, for they argue that as the work was a poem in the original language, so the translator must change the poem into the target language in such a way that the translation is also considered a poem in the target language. This is perfectly reasonable when one is dealing with a poetry that is deemed ‘poetic’ in form and metre by a vast majority of its readers. Yet when a poetry lacks this support, then why change, why adapt this poetry to the poetic palate of the target reader? I could refer you back to Jean Boase-Beier’s preface to the series concerning the ‘visibility’ of certain poetry; it is precisely for reasons of visibility that I have adopted an almost literal translation. I have made changes so that the translation reads as naturally as the Dutch original, where the Dutch intends natural word-order. Where it doesn’t, I have retained the peculiarity of the Dutch structure:

Whose turn is it

To accumulate the embarrassments,

To contribute the vengefulness,

To gratify the surplus with a vector?

(from: ‘Lullaby’)

Number 1 has the cheeks

That make the days bearable

With their distrust, and number 2

Puts a piebald and peculiar kidney in

For the distribution of wealth,

(from: ‘A number of people’)

A poem I deliberately did not translate was ‘De steen bloeit’ (‘The flowering stone’) from Duinker’s collection Het uur van de droom (‘The dreaming hour’), which has been translated into some two hundred and twenty languages already, in a worldwide project organised by a Dutch literary foundation. Unfortunately, the internet site where these translations were posted from 1998 now seems to be down. This is a shame, because not only did it list translations in standard English, but also in some British dialects and many foreign – some quite obscure – tongues. Let us hope it will reappear from the depths of the world wide web one day.

All in all, translating Arjen Duinker was a fascinating experience and I owe my gratitude to the poet for his ceaseless energy and correspondence, to Erik Menkveld for introducing me to the poet, the editor Jean Boase-Beier for her encouraging and inspiring comments and to all at Arc for their hard work and enthusiasm in producing this book. Lastly, I wish to dedicate my translations in this book to the memory of James Brockway, my coach and mentor in the art of poetic translation.

Willem Groenewegen

INTRODUCTION