Splinters in distant boats
It’s our century
It remains our youth
No better way to
waste it
than surrounded by fingers of grass,
lightning bolts in snow-covered
gardens
Norm
No other expectation—
No assault
No shadow of an offence
The revulsion resounds
up to the last
desecrated song
Imbalance as the norm
Swimming or flying
In nature
with its splotches and rags
Rehearsal
I wish I was dead.
Like forty-five per cent
of Belgians
I have no one
“Because you never invested
in love, sweetie”
I begin
Continue
Sodium thiopental
There, you’re almost unconscious
Then pancuronium bromide
Your lungs fail
Then potassium chloride
And your heart stops
I’ll never remember all that
Eris
There is sorrow’s rubbish
art’s obscene charter
always somewhere always elsewhere.
There is Eris who wanders
on blood-stained feet
searching the thirsty grass
for the bodies of my friends.
When you see her it’s too late.
Die while you, like always,
are saying your hellos.
For Hugo by CEES NOOTEBOOM
An Address Delivered Beside his Coffin at the Farewell Ceremony
Bourla Theatre, Antwerp, 29 March 2008
“Des chênes qu’on abat,” said Malraux on De Gaulle’s death. He was like an oak that has been felled. Suddenly there’s an opening in the forest, a place where light can penetrate and feed new growth. But first there’s a long period of nothing, a large hole, with weirdly shaped roots perhaps, raised up and clawing at the light, as if searching for life. We’re all familiar with such places. Walking through a dark forest, you suddenly come across a strip of clear, filtered light. You can still recall the shape of the enormous tree that stood there, you feel the forest’s phantom pain and your own — something that has always existed is gone. Many friends must have experienced it the same way. Hugo as one of the dead, that was new to us. We’d known him in so many guises and in so many settings, but dead, no, not that. It’s hard to get used to. We still find it difficult to believe. We hear his name constantly around us, in private conversations and broadcast on radio programs and TV talk shows. If there was a platonic listening post floating through space somewhere, it would be continually picking up those sounds, the U, the O, the AU. Hugo Claus. And if we think of all those voices together, making those sounds at the same time, we hear a deafening hurricane with the vowels and consonants of his name, a high-pitched whistling and a gale-force growl, something that takes your breath away, just as those who knew in advance of the day and the hour last week could not breathe on that day and at that hour.
And now? It’s still confusing. That bright spot in the forest, the place where the tree that should have been allowed to stand forever has disap-peared, fills slowly with images — fleeting and clear, melancholy and cheerful. Hugo bowing awkwardly at his umpteenth premiere, Hugo with his voice from the old days reading “Even Now” in an auditorium deep in the provinces, Hugo impatient and restless in a museum in Basel or Venice, but you know that he sees more than you, Hugo asleep next to you in the cinema, Hugo lazing on the couch while on TV the one hundred riders of the Tour de France work themselves into a lather racing up the Tourmalet. Followed by that other Hugo, the Hugo of the last years, the last weeks. Fragile, alert. It was like he was walking on mirrors, and because of that it was partly as if we had to learn how to walk again as well. Because how do you walk in the presence of death? How do you obey the unspoken commandment to avoid sentimentality, the question that is not allowed to be spoken out loud, how do you act at a court you are visiting for the first time, where an invisible guest we haven’t met before joins us at the table, our friend’s new friend, with whom he has a prior engagement? Had someone written our roles without writing them down? And had they made it so that it was impossible for us to act because everything was uncompromisingly real in a way that the theatre can never be real? We didn’t have any lines, how did we know our lines? Ceremonies of farewell, that I see as a gift he has given me for the time I have left, the clink of glasses, quiet conversations about the world that will retain its validity for a little while yet, laughter and song, and through it all that one unmistakable voice, recognizable always and everywhere, with the accent nobody could pin down because it, like the words he spoke in it, was an emissary from such an individual universe that we, the others, could have an inkling of it, but no more than that. No one could come all too close, his work was both an entrance and a barrier, the almost endless mass of words with the equally endless number of ways of combining them in sonnets or novels, dialogues or quatrains, ghazals, film scripts and deliberately lame haikus, litanies and novellas that rose like a rampart around the inner core of his being, which for me lies concealed in his most beautiful line about himself: “a happy man surprised by doubt.”
Over the last few days I re-read two of his novellas, The Last Bed and A Sleepwalk. The man who could be so light-hearted when playing, who could beam when, with a lethal clang from a distant position, he neutralized the metal ball you had positioned so dangerously in a game of pétanque, who could tell obscene stories about actresses with the verve of a Venetian courtier and laugh when revealing the trump he’d saved for the last trick, displays in The Last Bed a dark universe of victims and punishment, of fear, suppressed lust and bloody violence, of mankind’s abject pettiness and cruelty, a satanic vision that ends with destruction and death, in which, like Dante, the poet leads you around a layer of hell. Something else is happening in A Sleepwalk, a book like a prophesy, in which the writing gives you an insight into the landscape he saw before him in 2000, a horror of forgotten faces, former loves, a guessing game of words lost in each other. And once more he demonstrates his mastery, because showing the drama of broken tools requires brilliant and subtle control over words and sentences. Knowing that you are describing your own fate, you must dare to penetrate deep into the territory of your future misery and humiliation to write for yourself and others about the tragedy that awaits you. And so you say eclipses instead of ellipsis, you no longer know that the woman standing before you was once the woman you wanted above all else, you describe the battlefield and tell yourself that you will leave it before the last weapon has been knocked out of your hands, and then you live on for seven years like a king in his final days, say goodbye to your wife and friends and do what you had resolved to do, knowing that the small-minded want to drag you back to this earthly hell, claiming that enduring it will earn you heavenly paradise. You turned that eternal lie on its head as only you could.
The first time I saw you, you were young and I was even younger, the last time you were old, but the youth you had been still shone through the old master, his smile and mischief were still intact. Today, sad and celebrating, I say goodbye to those two men and all the other men in between. Dear friend, fare well. I only ask one thing: make sure to haunt us.
Translator’s Acknowledgments
The selection and translation of these poems was an enjoyable but daunting task and I am very grateful for the generous help provided by a number of people who have built up their knowledge of Claus and his poetry over years, if not decades, of specialization and study. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Georges Wildemeersch and Dirk van de Geest for making space in their busy schedules and would also like to thank Victor Schiferli and Patrick Peeters for their time and advice, Tom van de Voorde for his encouragement and
for reading a draft of the translation and comparing it to the original, and P.C. Evans and Rokus Hofstede for help with particular poems.
I selected the poems from the almost 1,500 pages of Claus’s two-volume collected poems and tried to choose representative works from all periods of his extremely diverse poetic oeuvre, not limiting myself to his most famous poems, but also including examples of his latter work, poems from the erotic series Morning, You (first published as loose pink cards in a purple velvet box) and Knittelvers from Almanac.
While researching the work, I read, browsed and consulted quite a lot of secondary literature, most importantly books and essays by Paul Claes, Dirk de Geest and Georges Wildemeersch and articles and essays by J.M. Coetzee, Bart Eeckhout, Frank Lekens, Kristel Markoen and Patrick Peeters. I also referred to many existing translations, specifically French translations by Marnix Vincent and Maddy Buysse, Franco Paris’s Italian translation, Maria Csollány’s German, and English translations by J.M. Coetzee, John Irons, Peter Brown & Peter Nijmeijer, and Paul Claes, Christine D’haen, Theo Hermans & Yann Lovelock. My fellow translators’ interpretations and solutions often helped me to discover new depths in the original poems and find new possibilities for my own translations. Similarities between my translations and the existing English translations are inevitable, not just because the best translation of a word or phrase is sometimes the most obvious one, but also because Claus sometimes refers back to English sources in direct and indirect quotes.
David Colmer
Amsterdam, Septembert 2013
Table of Contents
from Registration [1948] For the Poet Antonin Artaud
from Without Due Process [1950] I
III
from The Joyous and Unforeseen Week [1950] 1
4
from Bounds [1955] Home
from A House Between Night and Morning [1953] Exercises
Gistel By Bruges
A Rendezvous
I Write You Down
Behind Bars
An Angry Man
Caligula
from Tancredo Infrasonic [1952] Las Hurdes
West Flanders
Bye
from The Oostakker Poems [1955] Bitter tastes
The Singer
The Mother
A Father
A Virgin
A Woman
The Catchword: House
from A Painted Rider [1961] N.Y
Chicago
Travelling
Uxmal
She
The Sphinx Speaks
The Panama Canal
Message to the Population [1962] ~ ~ ~
from Peripheral Poems to L’Inferno , Canto XIII [1962] 1
from An Eye for an Eye [1963] 1 Him
2 Her
4 Him
5 Her
9 Her
22 Him
from The Sign of the Hamster [1963] ~ ~ ~
from Lord Wildboar [1970] Lord Wildboar
His Prayers
from Hearsay [1970] Anthropology
In Flanders Fields
Memorial Statue in West Flanders
A Bed In Bruges
The Farmers
The Rubens Room in the Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts
1965
Home
In Memory of Ferdi
Female Friend
Early December
Diary Pages
from Morning, You [1971] ~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
from Figurative [1973] Five Polaroids of Jesus Christ
Ulysses
A Kind of Goodbye
Introibo
Hecate Speaks
from Almanac [1982] 1
5
12
20
22
24
31
74
100
110
from Shards Montale’s “Little Testament”
from Alibi [1985] Halloween
Even Now I
II
III
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
Envoi
from Sonnets [1986] I
III
XIII
XIV
from The Traces [1993] The Traces
Poet
Ten Ways of Looking at P.B. Shelley
Lumumba
Italo Calvino
Brother
from Cruel Happiness [1999] What to Speak About
Interview
from In Case of Emergency [2004] Horizon
Our Century
Norm
Rehearsal
Eris
For Hugo by CEES NOOTEBOOM
Translator’s Acknowledgments