One poem from '1001 POEMS' by the Danish writer Klaus Høeck

        beneath every so

nata is the sound of a

        second sonata

        that never saw birth - a wild

        mirror-image so

nata full of secret moon

light full of calcium and

        of pain a more beau

        tiful sonata

        perhaps than the one

that you heard played on the keys

        of reality

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

Forunderligt at sige

Forunderligt at sige

og sært at tænke på,

at kongen til Guds rige

i stalden fødes må,

at himlens lys og ære,

det levende Guds ord,

skal husvild blandt os være,

som armods søn på jord!

Selv spurven har sin rede,

kan bygge dér og bo,

en svale ej tør lede

om nattely og ro.

De vilde dyr i hule

har hver sin egen vrå, -

skal sig min frelser skjule

i fremmed stald på strå?

Nej, kom, jeg vil oplukke

mit hjerte, sjæl og sind,

ja bede, synge, sukke:

Kom, Jesus, kom herind!

Det er ej fremmed bolig,

du den har dyre købt!

Her skal du hvile rolig

i kærligheden svøbt.

It is a wondrous story

It is a wondrous story

and strange if pondered deep

that God’s realm’s future glory

must in a manger sleep,

that heaven’s light and splendour,

the living word for sure,

shall homeless ’mongst us wander

as poorest of the poor!

A nest has e’en the sparrow

where it can built a home,

nor needs the fleeting swallow

for night-time shelter roam.

The beasts need know no anguish,

in caves there’s rest in store,-

Shall then my Saviour languish

upon some stable’s straw?

No, come, I will throw open

my heart, my soul and mind,

yes, sing, sigh, prayers have spoken,

Come, Jesus, come and find!

It is no unknown chamber,

you bought it with your blood!

Here will you sweetly slumber

in love now swathed for good.

A highly relevant poem by the Danish poet Jens August Schade

Snow

So, we got snow after all,

and there I was thinking we wouldn’t get any snow,

and it really looks as if we’re in for a right load of snow,

and not go on eternally thinking about snow without it coming.

The air too has snow in it,

it’s almost laden with snow,

perhaps there’s heavy snowfall far off,

that you can sort of feel inside you

without directly knowing it,

but that comes so that you can see it.

I’ve been hoping for snow all the time,

it’s funny even so that it came.

Yes, there it lies now –

look how white it is,

I’m really bloody pleased about it,

I’ve probably been thinking all the time that it would come.

And then all of a sudden there it is –

it’s funny even so that it comes like that

without you doing anything to make it come,

I haven’t plucked it out of the air,

it’s sort of come by itself.

(1934)

Poem by the Dutch writer Frank Koenegracht

On the far side

                                        In memoriam H.F.

On the far side, by the ruff of reeds

beneath the lovely blue sky

in the target

the arrow is motionless. But after a while

it quivers, tugs itself free,

speeds fixedly poised back across the river,

brakes hard and resumes its position on the bow

beside your steady eye.

Poem by the Dutch writer Jean-Pierre Rawie

Uplifted

If it was swans I cannot know for certain,

whose thousand wingbeats late that autumn night

lay round about the house and sang their flight,

subsiding only with dawn’s lifted curtain.

Throughout the day I walked as one elected,

as if I had been brushed by angels’ wings.

How many sleepless nights have there been since

when not one single wingbeat was detected?

Uplifted thus but once, there’s every reason

to let the sun again now call the tune:

the waxing and the waning of the moon,

the coming and the passing of the seasons.

First verse of the 'Solstice Song' by the Danish writer Johannes V. Jensen

Solstice song

Our sun has now grown cold,

we are in winter’s hold

the days are waning.

        Now, past the deepest night,

        our hope burns bright –

        yes, hope burns bright,

        for now the sun will right,

now light will soon return, the days again are gaining.

For the whole poem, go to 16.12.09

Another Lars Gustafsson poem

PLACENTA

Detta oformliga, loberade organ,

som utstötes efter födelsen.

Varken mor eller barn, neutralt,

på samma sätt som det innersta tomrummet

inne i den riktiga sömnlöslheten

är en helt och hållet neutral plats.

Det finns alltid något

som är mellan de vanliga tillstånden,

varken det ena eller det andra.

Till detta Mellan

känner jag en skev vänskap,

en släktskap till och med.

Det har den verkliga världens

stora tomma, uppriktiga ansikte.

PLACENTA

This formless, lobated organ

that is expelled after birth.

Neither mother nor child, neutral,

in the same way the innermost void

within true insomnia

is a completely neutral place.

There always exists something

that is between usual states,

neither the one nor the other.

Towards this Between

I feel a wry friendship,

a kinship even.

It has the real world’s

large vacant, candid face.

It has been drawn to my attention that there already exists a fine translation of this poem by Christopher Middleton. You can find it here. I deliberately avoid looking at other translations before attempting my own. I am convinced that any great work of poetry/music is open to many different interpretations. As long as no mistakes of interpretation are involved, it is my conviction that it is enriching to see/listen to as many versions as possible.

A poem by the Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff

THE CLOUDS

I still wore boy’s clothes and lay side by side

Outstretched with mother in the heath’s warm lair;

Above us shifting clouds were drifting by

And mother asked me what I saw up there.

And I cried: Scandinavia, and: swans,

A lady, and: a shepherd with his sheep –

The wonders were made word and drifted on,

But I saw mother, smiling, start to weep.

Then came the time I kept the earth in sight,

Although up in the sky the clouds were rife;

I did not seek to try to catch in flight

The strange thing’s shadow as it grazed my life.

- Now on the heath my lad lies next to me

And points out what in new clouds he can spy;

I’m crying now, for far off I can see

The distant clouds that made my mother cry -

A poem by the Dutch poet Anneke Brassinga

Drift ice

The shining mist already outlines shadows.

We pull up the water right to our chins

like sheets, so ripplingly cool and fresh-starched,

we come to be bedded together, forever entwined

in the gauze of times past, when peacefully

no word we gave to what binds us, sleep

of unmoored reason, towards dreamed-up monsters.

A little-known Swedish poet this time - Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe (1893-1942)

End of the summer holidays

This was the time our pockets all hung low

with fall-clipped fruit now smeared with streaks of clay.

This was the time the garden candles’ glow

lit up the crayfish dish with quivering ray.

It almost felt too cold to take a swim,

and cobwebs draped themselves round scrub and fern.

When too the last hay had been taken in,

the sky was chill and clear, the wind quite stern.

These were the days when grudgingly one weighed

each hour till summer’s quota had been filled.

This was the time when every hour displayed

an inner force that was to be distilled.

And yet at times one left all play behind

sought out a hill where it was good to lie

and with a ten-year-old’s dark-musing mind

observe the swallows’ flight and clouds file by.

One evening, with the wooden houses burnished

a glowing crimson by the sun, one left –

holding the farewell gift that summer furnished,

a bag of Astrakhans, clasped to one’s chest.

One rode off to the station, tearful-eyed,

while crickets, drunk with joy, still chirped and squealed

their final summer notes on every side

from what were empty, cattle-trampled fields.

'Stenkista' - a poem by Lars Gustafsson

Stone caisson

At a funeral

I met, for the second time in my life,

Uncle Sune.

He had a wonderfully heavy head

one of those heads

you know you would appreciate

holding in your hands and turning thoughtfully

even as a hosed-down cranium.

What are you up to now? my uncle said.

And I, caught in the middle of a rainy summer:

Building a stone caisson by the shore of Hörende lake.

(Which on that day was perfectly true

I’d actually been working on

it for weeks, to avoid doing something else.)

My uncle, with that heavy head,

looked up with fresh interest.

Really nothing else

than an old crofter from Småland:

‘Laying down a caisson. Heavy work that.’

***

I later realised that such knowledge was unusual

Most people are completely ignorant

when it comes to stone caissons.

They think you’re talking about sarcophagi,

huge coffins of stone*, neatly plinthed up

in old wearisome cathedrals,

repositories for no longer actual

rulers or insane princes

who we have no need of here.

Nordic Familybook, second edition,

naturally has plenty of information as always.

The caisson consists of a joined-together box

of sturdy timber that is towed out

to the fresh water spot you want for it.

A quay. A bridge. Wood does not rot under water.

It is then finally sunk with heavy stones,

providing the abutment you were looking for.

In a cruelly changing world.

Many old quays and bridges in Sweden,

the wise book from 1904 says,

still rest on this type of foundation.

***

I’m still busy filling mine

with all kinds of heavy stones.

When I was very young

I did not really exist anywhere.

Now, with all these heavy stones on board,

with more coming every year, dead friends,

dead relations, dead expectations,

not to mention the great blocks of what’s unfinished

that will soon start to be dimly visible above the surface

everything is pretty much fixed.

(‘Laying down a caisson. Heavy work that.’)

But this caisson and I

are not exactly the same thing.

I laid it where it lies,

as the saying is,

‘with the intention of avoiding discovery.’

(* The Swedish word ‘kista’ also means ‘coffin’)

Poem written by the Dutch poet Hans Tentije about a painting by Rembrandt

Rembrandt van Rijn – Portrait of Dr. Ephraim Bueno

ON VLOOYENBURG

‘So much has remained unwritten, so much too

that is impossible to describe because it stays

hidden to everyone for ever,’ he thinks

having shut the outer door behind him and placed

his one foot on the bottom step

in the shrouded ground-floor flat

he feels how his heart skips a beat and the blood

drains from his cheeks, catching

his breath for that one moment

just then there was, with the glittering brocades of sky

above the Leprozengracht, the loveliest part

of Vlooyenburg surely, his island in the Amstel, as never

so sharply before the feeling of being

both stranger and resident –

the cuff round the wrist of his hand

with which he grips the banisters and the collar

a flecked white, the darkness almost

swallows up the black of his top hat

still he stays motionless, his gentle, melancholy

eyes glisten as those of one who’s seen all the

pain and all sorrow of the world but nonetheless

is fond of life and gains consolation from

the ancient scriptures, from the psalms –

‘…light, yes, would dying seem to me if I knew

myself to be immortal…’

Poem by the Dutch poet Alfred Schaffer

Impasse

Seeking diversion in trifles is what keeps you going.

Practising scales. Loving someone endlessly. But,

what a letdown man is, infatuated, a slave of his organiser

and should he not fancy something, he breaks off the connection.

You smell how I decay, although I am not there, you’re lying, so I

imagine, staring enraptured at a monitor, at the first evidence

of life on Mars, there something innocent moves, something

that has a chance of success and without shifting your gaze

you grasp my hand – which is not there, hurrying to scribble

all this down, somewhere where I embark on pilgrimages

to buildings in high locations, completed long before Christ.

My hawser has snapped, I cannot heave myself on land.

When the city’s buzz soon dies away, I should see more with

these night-glasses. To make quite certain. But there’s nothing more.

A poem by the little-known Dutch poet P.A. de Génestet (1829–1861)

BOUTADE*

Oh land of filth and fog, of vile rain chill and stinging,

A sodden fetid plot of vapours dank and damp,

A vast expanse of mire and blocked roads clogged and clinging,

Brimful of gamps and gout, of toothache and of cramp!

Oh dreary mushy swamp, oh farmyard of galoshes,

With marsh frogs, dredgers, cobblers, mud gods overrun,

With every shape and size of duck that therein sploshes,

Receive this autumn dirge from your besnotted son!

To mud your claggy climate makes my blood set slowly;

Song, hunger, joy and peace are all withheld from me.

Pull your galoshes on, ancestral ground most holy,

You – not at my request – once wrested from the sea.

*A boutade is a sudden emotional outburst.