J. Bernlef: 'Alles teruggevonden/ niets bewaard' (1982)

EVERYTHING RECOVERED/NOTHING PRESERVED

Alles teruggevonden/ niets bewaard (1982)

J. Bernlef

On 11 July 1897, three Swedes took off from the island Danskön west of Spitsbergen in their balloon Örnen (‘The Eagle’). They were in search of the North Pole. With them they had a Swedish flag with which to mark precisely this theoretical point of the globe. The interest shown in their undertaking was considerable, also outside their own country.

The names of the three men were: Salomon August Andrée, Kurt Fraenkel and Nils Strindberg. A study of the historical material would seem to indicate that Andrée and Strindberg had serious doubts about just how manoeuvrable and airtight the balloon, manufactured in France, actually was. They set out even so. A year earlier, a previous attempt had had to be abandoned, due to the lack of a favourable wind. The enormous public interest and the financial support of such eminent figures as Alfred No- bel and the Swedish king, however, turned into a matter of honour what in advance and by its very nature was doomed to be a fate- ful undertaking.

The lack of manoeuvrability was obvious soon after the start. So much ballast had to be jettisoned that the balloon rose too high. Within 65 hours, it had become so top-heavy as the result of freezing rain that they were forced to make a landing.

On 14 July, they began to trek through a drifting landscape of ice-floes, ending up on 5 October 1897 on the small island of Vitön (‘White Island’, pronounced: veet-ern) east of Spitsbergen. Shortly after arriving on the island the members of the expedition perished.

Not until 1930 were their as remains discovered by a Danish group of scientists. Among the objects left behind was a case with negatives that Nils Strindberg had taken with a self-designed camera. A number of these could be developed; the others seemed to be of too inferior quality. In 1979, however, it proved possible to develop some more of the photos. Because of this, the Andrée expedition was briefly - and probably for the last time - once more a matter of public interest.

Microscopic analysis of the pieces of polar bear meat found on Vitön, combined with notes in the discovered journals kept by the members of the expedition, had a number of years previously revealed the cause of their death. From eating con- taminated bear meat the members of the expedition had become infected with trichinosis, a gradual but fatal disease caused by a type of worm that rapidly multiplies in the intestinal canal, from where it perforates the muscular tissue of the victim.

The objects found on Vitön in 1930, as well as a reconstruction of the balloon, are on show at the Andrée museum in Gränna, the birthplace of the balloonist.

step into the museum in Gränna

sweating and on tiptoe because of the heat

Why try to break open something that

belongs to a distant past? I know quite well

And yet. Here’s a hatchet. There’s

A photo of the ice. Write so as

To drive in a wedge, make a tiny breath hole

through which past oxygen may hiss

And spout to form a present kiss

so that I feel you’re alive - here

Every museum has some chink

Framed in an oval setting: Fraenkel, Strindberg

and Andrée in Florman’s photo atelier in Stockholm

Expenses arranged, the balloon now

ready to ascend from the close of a century

Where a will seemed to be a way, a dream

high-flown that froze into a petrified statue

This the pose of Fraenkel and Andrée too

as if everything’s past, consigned to history

Not so Nils Strindberg, no not he

he is five and twenty and in love, his gaze

is still quite visible, is fixed on her

on Anna Charlier, his delicate fiancée

The stares of his moustached colleagues remain clouded in sepia

Half a year later it was all over

in 1930 their three corpses were found on Vitön

Salomon August Andrée, you knew all along

yet dragged even so the two others along in your fall

To Gränna to this your own private museum

in the mid-20th century, on a fine sunny day

You knew in advance and in the name of

progress, of the king and Nobel

We will not return to this country

where undreamt-of machines have now got to the point

Of regulating all aspects of life

for ever like the cogwheels of your watch the time

All arms were pointing upwards, all faces radiated not

Fear or Hope, simply belief in the Future

Almost everything’s still, nothing completely moves

That which they undertook was from the start quite

senseless and for that reason maybe preserved

To get to the very centre of the pole

whose sole existence is on maps

Only 65 hours and they were heavier than air

were forced to land upon the frozen water

There stands Andrée peering for land legs wide

apart while beneath his feet everything moves

They set off on their sleds or so at least they thought

in actual fact though they stood still

Posing for posterity they had in fact been cut adrift

They set their course westwards and they

drifted off to the east

They set their course eastwards and they

drifted all the while further to the west

And if the sun broke through the mist

Fraenkel reached for his sextant

Sought the sun’s altitude and

stuck his hand out: this way

Right to the end he measured on

fixing positions, all that mattered

Now was the meticulous registration

of impending doom

Figures and data form the frame of their swansong

Just as the seeing of your own face can

only ever be caught in a mirror

I view in photographs the things they looked at

as the ice began to form fissures and cracked

Powder snow whirled itself into skintight veils

dense fog encased them like some great bell-jar

Their voices reeled hollow and hoarse all around them

and they were completely alone on the floe

A seagull defiantly screeched, where were

they drifting, what were they feeling

I want to live through it, all whiteness removed,

want to look through them on this paper

Here they vanish yet whiter than me once more out of sight

They perished on Vitön, Fraenkel

and Andrée, side by side in their tent

With an aluminium cup, a primus

some roubles, dollars, an empty bottle

33 years later (a reconstruction) they still lie there

snowed-in and huddled close together

The primus is ready for use

for a scalding-hot mug of coffee or tea

But every gesture’s completely gone

I stare at a photo of a heap of stones

Nils Strindberg’s grave, the tent 35 metres away

80 years or so ago, now hangs behind glass

I think of his finger and then of the shutter

From the blackness of 82 Kodak years

they gradually emerge from the developer

Here Andrée and Frænkel are pulling their own sleds

behind them leans and lurks the millpond sea

And are the murky flecks just flakes of snow

or ingrained particles from years of winter?

The stare of the curator shows surprise,

why I should want to know, that difference

He holds the negative to the light

that fades into a positive at once

Miniscule perforations through which this light

here and on Vitön fell and falls on 82 long years

On two men and on a sled

on their balloon ‘The Eagle’ that

gently sways in the museum garden

Where everything was white and bright

every one of the photos came out

Always the same one really

two men just searching for landscape

Here Fraenkel burrows intently

with his shoe in the snow

Andrée with kepi and stick a bit behind

stares still as leader at the lens

He surely knew (not Strindberg though

with steady camera) how limitless

Their hopeless hike was, one

that plotted on a map’s a web

A fabric where a blind spot sits

Many last ones. This the photographer

Nils Strindberg, 25 years old, yet

Here quite unrecognisable

even down to the moustache

Two ropes connecting him to the sled

it too now housed in the Andrée museum

He prods the snow with obvious caution

in search of fissures in the ice

The final time light was to strike him

upright - he was to be the first one

Blizzarding out in his own camera

Of Fraenkel himself we have nothing

but figures and data, their position on the ice

Was he devoid of imagination? For sure.

Andrée writes in detail of his complainings

He was only a child of his time, the

slave of wind and weather with data

That were to offer protection against his thoughts

of home, against his tears and his pain

Which he refused even to mention

lacking any form of valid and convincing proof

He died stiff on time's stroke as a figure

The last one was Andrée: without date

handwriting quite illegible

Five lines, made up of sixty-one words

with the last word unfinished

I turn back the pages: we are full of hope

plenty of provisions, sturdy shoes

Somewhat further towards the end: bad sign

no polar bears sighted for days

And then the very last page

that ultimate and never finished word

Staring into the surrounding white

Everything preserved, everything recovered

the sled, the prickers and the ship’s biscuits

Boat, tent, their diaries, their shoes

and here too on a pedestal even the plate camera

Thirty instants of bitter-filled whiteness

frugally framed and hung as exhibits

We amble over floors that are creaking

I add up the bones of your hand

A bumblebee inspects the curtains

you want to know this country’s names

While the curator’s voice drones on

about their stranding on Vitön

Everything recovered - nothing preserved

I place you by the colourful balloon

in the summer garden (a birdsong chorus)

Quite still I say and take you

take a polaroid (a birdsong chorus)

Quite still till I’m ready and look

how you show against the balloon (a birdsong chorus)

I look at your breasts, at your inquisitive

toes in all that succulent grass (a birdsong chorus)

And I see behind your dress the scars

the hair that I know (a birdsong chorus)

Well, did it come out? Oh yes, just look!

Your turn!

Listen, the chorus...

Come towards me through the grass, straight through

the moist grass still full of summer, come

In the failing light around Andrée’s balloon

Steen Steensen Blicher: 'Præludium'

Prelude

The time approaches for me to part!

Now winter's voice is compelling;

A bird of passage I know my heart

In other climes has its dwelling.

I have long known that I cannot stay;

This does not cause any grieving,

So free from care as I wend my way

I sing at times before leaving.

I should at times have perhaps sung more –

Or should perhaps have sung better;

But dark days crowded oft to the fore,

And gales my feathers did scatter.

In God's fair world I would fain have tried

To spread my wings out in freedom;

But I'm imprisoned on every side

And can't escape from my thralldom.

From lofty skies I would have fain have tried

To blithely sing and not fretted;

But for my shelter and food must bide

A jailbird poor and indebted.

At times I make the consoling choice

To let my gaze outward wander:

And sometimes send my poor mournful voice

Through prison bars yearning yonder.

Then listen, traveller, to this song;

To pass this way please endeavour!

It might, God knows, not last very long

Before this voice fades for ever.

This coming evening, I can foretell,

May see my prison bars breaking;

For I will sing now a fond farewell,

Perhaps my final leave-taking.

Anneke Brassinga: 'Hoog Veluws lied'

Veluwe Canticle

Wee creature swims

in the Gietense Flessen.

A sea of gold stems that

keep blue sea secret.

Floating in fluid glass

between heaven and hollow,

cool-softly stroked,

no human near.

Redhead in upper realms:

small water without end.

Small man

in one vast span.

To see the original Dutch poem, go to here.

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer - another sonnet

Sonnet for a new decade

in which nostalgia threatens

The twenties’ decade was the Roaring Twenties.

One danced the Charleston at the gangsters’ ball.

A future gleamed, nostalgia – above all

Lili Marleen with endlessly long panties.

The false stab-in-the-back-myth then gave birth

to longing for authoritarian rule.

To Rome marched fresh-washed hordes, their faces cruel.

One practised for the holocaust on earth.

For this new century I have been born

a century too soon. Excitedly I wait

to see what I may come to witness here.

The pub’s nostalgics I hear loudly warn,

their shrill cries their fat guts yet more dilate.

A brand-new age may cause some pain, I fear.

Paul van Ostaijen: 'Vers'

Verse

To P.B. Baeyens

All joy’s sheer lightness: incompactible. A word’s

never as light as it should be when heard;

wings that are spread wide-open, quivering in the air,

though at no distance from the houses,

fanning open, in a broader flight,

and disappearing without trace. But joy remains

present there, although no trace is sensed.

Joy can’t be scooped up in your hand like water

that for a moment would run in that dry hand

making a wondrously quenching hollow of it

and quite as unseizable as a woman’s lips that stroke,

feathers from you-know-not-where, down on your eyelids, –

I’ve often run till out of breath, to make those feathers airborne. –

It can’t be positioned, is the nature of the things themselves.

A lark, it must be somewhere,

which it is, quite by nature: the metallic droplets

fall nowhere.

And yet it seems all’s impregnated by

this intangible coitus in the sky.

That part of the roof the sun’s lying on

rises up rebaptised and joyous into the light;

that behind which the shadow rests no less.

Nowhere compacted, not where the sun is, nor shadow either.

You cannot go home to just gather joy there,

joy you must feel as something you bathe in;

you are yourself a part of joy

and through the other parts your course runs, as they through you,

precisely so as to make this movement unseizable immeasurable:

the spark of a short-circuiting, yet surpassed.

June 1917

C.O. Jellema: 'Het waait er altijd'

ALWAYS BLOWING

On such a terp, we said, right close

to such an ancient little church,

we too perhaps – and pointed out

the symbols to each other: butterfly.

hourglass, as a ring round names

the serpent biting its own tail.

It was a day in spring, flowers

already dotting the grass,

the reassuring droning of a tractor

from the field, there was

much wind.

Lightly those things are said as long

as you can speak, can look at me so doing

with that familiar face of yours, but

now that I write it down, search for a word

not made flesh, that did not dwell among us,

for when all that’s left

to me is to think of your voice,

to imagine your face:

what is it calls itself lasting,

what omits itself anywhere;

for when that whole

idea of idyll

goes underground,

what then,

on such a terp, in

it bloweth where it listeth

and thou hearest the sound thereof

but canst not tell whence it cometh

that eternal

wind?

Adam Oehlenschläger: 'Guldhornene'

The Gold Horns

They peer in pages

of ancient sages,

on opened barrows

their gaze now narrows,

on shield and sword in

each castle ruin,

on runestone boulders

midst bones now moldered.

Old deeds exciting

cast spells if bidden;

but earth keeps hidden 

the ancient writing.

Their gaze unseeing,

Thoughts wild and fleeing

In mists they’re groping.

“You days of glory

lost well past hoping!

when the North shone clearly

with heaven here nearly,

may we glimpse your story!”

Clouds are rushing,

Night is hushing,

Barrows sighing

Roses shying.

The heavens’ highest ceiling

pealing!

The high ones transfigured

are teeming, are teeming,

daubed red for war’s rigours,

their eyes starlike gleaming.

“You who reel and are blind

will find

a relic of bygone year

that will come and disappear!

Its sides full golden

the stamp will be wearing

of times most olden.

Its lesson’s for sharing.

With reverent bearing

our gift you repay us

Of beauties the fairest,

a maid

will this treasure discover!”

They sing and pass over.

The airborne sounds fade.

Black Rimfaxe, fawning

his mouth flecked with lather,

plunges into the ocean.

Gates of the morning

are ope’d by day’s father:

Skinfaxe in motion

with fire seems to leaven

the arch of the heavens.

The birds are all singing.

Dewdrops give showers

To petals of flowers

That breezes are swinging.

And with graceful lilt 

a maiden now dances

with violet-garlands

away to the field.

Her rosy cheeks bright,

Her hands lily-white.

Light as a deer

With spirit so clear

she floats sweetly smiling;

Love-thoughts beguiling

her mind in a tumble

she stumbles!

and sees as she gazes 

golden blazes,

and blushes and shivers

and lifts with a quiver,

amazed at the sight,

from the earth’s black hold

with hands snow-white

the crimson gold.

A peal of

distant thunder!

The North’s

in total wonder

With crowds soon forming

now seething, now swarming

they dig without measure

for yet more treasure.

But no more gold!

Their hope was mistaken.

They see but black mould

from which they’ve been taken.

A century dies!!

O’er summits the cry

again is sounding.

With force astounding

Storm’s floodgates break.

O’er Norway’s peaks

to Denmark’s vales

in lofty halls

once more they gather

the ancient fathers.

“For the precious few

who our gift well knew

who no earthly chains bind

but whose souls rise up

to eternity’s top

who sense what is high

in Nature’s eye

who adoringly learn

divine rays to find,

in suns, violets – in all,

the great and the small

who thirsting still burn

for the Life of Life,

who – oh great spirit

of ancient times! –

see your divine gaze

on its sacred sides,

for them is our stay!

A son of nature,

an unknown creature,

but strong and tall

as his fathers withal,

is tilling his soil,

we will honour his toil –

he’ll once more uncover!”

They sing and pass over.

Black Rimfaxe, fawning

his mouth flecked with lather,

plunges into the ocean.

Gates of the morning

are ope’d by day’s father:

Skinfaxe in motion

with fire seems to leaven

the arch of the heavens.

By woodland brow

The oxen heave

the heavy plough

and furrows cleave.

The plough seems to freeze,

and a shiver is heard

to pass through the trees.

Flocks of birds

cease to call

Holy silence

consecrates all.

The ringing of old

of ancient gold.

Gleaming pair from days of yore

in later ages dazzling.

Strangly they came as before,

on crimson sides so puzzling.

Sacred mystery enshrouds

ancient runes and signs.

A holy aura trembles round

these miracles from outside time.

Honour them, for fate can falter

soon maybe no more they’ll rove.

May Christ’s blood on God’s high altar

fill them, as did blood the grove.

You see gleam as the whole story,

not what’s venerable and high!

Only show their outer glory

to a dull indifferent eye.

Skies grow dark, the storms awaken!

Certain hour, your word is law.

What they gave has been retaken. 

What was sacred is no more.