Hugo Claus: 'Het graf van Pernath'

 

PERNATH’S GRAVE

 

 

With snapped trouser legs? Sagging,

as if, tipsy, you had chanced to slip on a sheet of ice?

As if you’d flipped before your last dance?

 

Still nodding away with those twisted limbs?

No. I want you like a stone, I want you intact

before your eyes broke, wreck -

 

That repeated fall,

that multiple dying, that late disintegration, -

 

there lay then with his very last laugh,

with the lips of a dying lamb

behind the recalcitrant and mat glass

what once was PERNATH –

 

 

Ah, on waking: our wishes, calendar jokes

battlefield theories about you when

you were still there, balding, cackling.

 

You sometimes go to bed: like a fridge,

humming, cooing, a curse.

 

You:  far from longing

         far from betrayal

         far from decline..

 

We:   sometimes in dreams just as sharp and beautiful

         and deaf and dim as you.

 

You, with your thirst

and your manifold doubt,

you, lucid horror that derides our whining,

you, who now no longer waver

in the days that no longer contort you.

 

 

Too late. Too late. Yesterday when he still danced

has become a cautious today

in which this lament sits complaining

about crippled days

with something of his inhibited locomotion.

 

Clarity he deemed deception, and rightly so,

and it was likewise his right not to accept

that we licked so greedily at the trough of heaven and earth.

Now still.

 

The military ranks of his infinitives

and imperatives

it is as naked as the fall of a man

in a stairwell.

 

Too late. Too late. This transparent today,

these verses that are ashamed

in the face of his unclear nudity

it exists, it exists

at times on the beat, at times by the grace

of his clumsy rhetoric.

 

 

Women found you womanish

(ah, until they had taken you in

and the courtier became a lover!)

 

Touched by the itch of love

by the mildew of love,

you sometimes wanted to preserve the stillness,

to preserve the beginning of love, thick ear.

 

You never got the hang of it.

Just like all of us, you waltzed

between the first communion and the scaffold,

between loathing and adoration.

 

 

Why I, peevish, aggrieved,

sit spinning stanzas on your body?

 

Because it seems I get a grip on you.

While wishing most to hush up the body of PERNATH

 

that on the edge of its grave

gave no answer

 

nor does tonight to the question vexing me,

whether he before he left me

was or was not left-handed.

 

 

The page commands.

The page commanded. No selection, though exchangeable terms &

articulations until something arose as

itself, an unrecognisable territory.

 

Itself:   the vaulting of a cellar full of shavings,

            sheep, stuttering, stammering.

 

No world, no dialectic, no food, no children but

itself: stroboscope, larynx, music

once in a while, disguised and packed as itself,

its predicate:

knight and wife and soldier and prelate.

 

Heave nothing up, heave nothing out the net.

The cords are the law and the language here,

not the sea, not the sea-weed.

 

His misconceptions roamed and strayed

among tales, sayings, tittle-tattle, unknown magnitudes,

and so he said: ‘You see a hundred gardens.’

 

Then he invented

a legend for those who did not know him,

a testament for those who do.

 

His most fiendish invention was

the adoration of joy,

as when he said: ‘You see a hundred gardens.’

 

 

Often his urge was greater than the knowledge of his urge.

sewn up as he was in a bag full of words.

Simplified dream phases and sophisms

he ordered into a syndrome

and trusted in series of credulous prayers

fit for a feast.

 

But whoever reads him cannot renounce

the other beast. Which sobbed

while it frankly bore its stigmata.

 

There was no thought which a child could not comprehend

until his idiom fractured grammar

and his largo reached the deafest ear,

his, sometimes ours.

 

What is true and what not

we have also agreed on in series of idiotically

incredulous habits. As too his verse and his grave,

as a habit, as a chilling word in retrospect.

 

 

Your colour: gold and black and gold;

Your taste: almonds, the bitter ones;

Your tone: Wohltemperiert, yes, notwithstanding:

Your sign: a dark moon.

 

A outpouring in a corset of iron.

Playing patience until dawn.

Fairy tales of an only child that

was at home in lies as in its own clothes.

 

(Oh, how we lied together!)

 

And oh, your violent death-rattle mumble

at the easy sign minus.

 

So often blinded,

so often overslept.

 

Sentry that we left in the lurch

stiff with cold in a forest full of rhyme,

in the muggy bushes.

 

(You eclipsed much, as did we all,

but you, you have eclipsed right up into your rigor mortis)

 

 

Clerks will compare the end of your consulate

with the death of another poet.

You did not like him. The light of ANDREUS was too light for you,

and he was more believing than his despair

and he got drunk on half a small glass of Johnnie Walker.

 

For months ANDREUS has lain on his own bier

in the room, his light room.

Then he said to his wife. ‘Go to sleep.

I have to do this alone.’ And died that night

with closed hands.

 

Clerks will compare and consider,

as if counsel is called for, choosing

whether you swathe yourself in the shroud of a doll

that still weighs the pros and cons till the room

of the light slams,

or that you fall down with that scorching radar,

with that burst of flame in your head.

 

Clerks, remember in your church full of bones

these two corpses of the Dutch language

with the same little prayer, since for both of them

the bed was a stair to the lightest white

and the stair the most naked of beds.

 

 

Your many appearances and emblems

are now as translucent as glass.

 

Timid at roulette,

striking dumb in all languages,

 

a born deserter, you made common cause

with common women,

 

severe uncomplaining servant in the fort,

far from good and better,

 

astronaut packed in polythene

including your gnashing teeth,

 

scornful as a stark naked

peevish Holy Ghost,

 

what you were, your mask

and your helmet and your plumes and your party clothes

 

has not congealed into the beastly white wax

that we revere

in your bed of mud and grass.

 

 

The dead Leo and the dead Cancer in ascendant

have now become a third person, he, singular.

 

‘Been a wireless operator

been a secretary

been very free in the army’

 

‘Nothing is true, nothing is pure’

(unless now, gone

in the inaccessible hour: you)

 

I have been, I have been.

In the dry, dull summer.

 

Both of us changed truth

according to whether we were judge or accused.

We have the same first name,

the saint of April the First,

day of fools and bad jokes.

 

I have been.

Against the wooden floor. In that damned summer.

 

So the dawn sinks into day,

and he sinks in the plural of the words

in which he believed.

 

 

Saw you lately, next to me,

deformed, fractured in a mirror

that was carried through the street,

with six dust-covered feet underneath.

 

Saw you lately, bending forward staring

at a wooden horse on the beach,

with useless wheels,

warped by the sand.

 

Didn’t hear you.

 

It is difficult to learn to hear

your silence. So close by

is forsaking

and getting sozzled.

 

- I did not heard you that much when you were alive

and now you mostly wake me at nights

when I think of myself thinking of you

and of the almost silence of you.

 

The monotonous sea. Whinnying.

Drip in the cistern.

The cry of a child or a cat.

The silence of your loss I invent.

 

 

I also propose this evening like MALLARMÉ at the grave of GAUTIER

an insane toast to the void,

in the artificial fire of our métier.

 

Your grave contains all of you.

Your dust is the only answer

to the fire of the mortal sun.

 

Lost in the gardens of this planet

I further honour the calm disaster of this earth

i.a. because I can still hear your ravings

about crystal and diamond and decay and rain.

 

Your shadow still obscures

(for how much longer?) my narrow belief in for and against,

for example, for the tide

and the time of your life on earth,

and against the furious wind of words

that you did not speak.

 

 

What can a person do who is plagued at night

months later by the residue of your dying?

(To kill time, they call it.)

 

Choose Bordeaux rather than vin du pays from the Grand Bazar?

Put on Albinoni? Pretend to be

what you did? The needle trembles, the wine has gone stale.

 

Read your goody-goody, decrepit, acid couplets?

I want to, I do so, but, but

with every hour you become a darker dead man, PERNATH,

 

and you sprinkle more sand in my eyes

with mourning, trust and compassion.

 

Loss and shame were your tight gowns

and loneliness was the female finery

within your ramshackle figures of speech.

 

I read you and your vexation, your melancholy,

defencelessly and hideously adequately

transmuted into semantic treachery,

 

pale into the untrustworthy hours.

Into the morning. Then your desolate singsong

swirls past my cheek and is gone.

 

 

(‘obsequies’)

 

When this final life has died

infinite life is utterly dissolved,

by child nor crow identified

and no one ever once absolved.

 

You smashed to pieces your own throne

when falling into the cold ground,

reckless, spotless and wan

you drained away from your own wounds.

 

They closed your hazel eyes now you’d expired

against the mutilating sun

and still at last and stiff and tired

by your own shadow you were overcome.

 

VONDEL’s convinced that what as spray

has been dispersed on earth it seems

will be made whole on God’s Glorious Day

VONDEL wished to dream of dreams.

 

The union of All in One?

You knew, an exiled man at every move,

that here below of rest there’s none

nor any homeland up above.

 

With your distracted compass in your hand

you foundered in the agony of death

so long, so long, till after your own dust and

ashes in barren regions with no breath

 

of thought, where there’s no evil and no good

in times when recollection’s banned

your memory was drained of all its blood

in the grass of a plastic pastureland.

 

You put up with sufficient humility.

In earthly mists you lost your way awhile.

You were obsessed with law and the futility

of human faults that cramp our style.

 

Was your breath intercepted by a god?

Your being no balm may defy.

From every god of pain your lot

that’s self-defined, your best part, can still fly.

 

I crown you, my friend, my corpse most dear,

against the still-living blocks of stone

that wade through all the mire that with a sneer

forms ever-greater heaps around your bones.

 

Many longstanding loves of mine

I’ve freed myself of without further ado.

I cherish your fall and your decline

as if I’d found a love anew.

 

The belief in your soul’s immortality

I wish to maim and to benumb.

My hope and belief’s the eventuality

that falling through my arms you would succumb.

 

 

I’ve just seen your name in the paper.

According to the Talmud there are three things

that weaken a man:

fear, sin and travel.

 

Your anxious beauty was frozen in photos

and films, or - quite literally -

devoured by the worms and the dust.

 

Please forgive our sinful prayers in this respect.

We, later mortals, cannot manage without

a song, and what do we sing? - ‘Have mercy upon us.’

 

And travel? You said: ‘I, mate, have seen Poland.’

(A mountain of shoes and teeth.)

 

Paper is patient. Yet, when I just now saw the letters

of your name in print, carelessly

like the other letters of your leprous songs,

this weakness seemed to me to be despicably splendid.

 

 

(Here and there)

 

Here: the subdued song of sorrow

         human dread of light

         the system’s good conscience

         daily provision of customers

 

Here: walking over the corpses beneath the paving stones

         bewildered by so much inexhaustible generation

         eager for happiness

 

Here: yawning for the end

         with a rustling of preferential votes

         breathless fanfares, ordered pleasures

 

Here: incense and flag-waving

         about something Flemish like the IJzer pilgrimage

         or something strong like iron-man Eddy Merckx

 

Here: the voices of poets as the weather forecast,

         lisping and timorous, corny anecdotes

 

Here: the stuffiest room in the house of the world

         children in quarantine

         that moulder into pictures of their models

 

Here is where I live, here I have known you,

Filipino among the albinos,

mercenary of some other power

in the drizzle of the night of the children of clay,

 

here you have warned me,

my diplomat without manners,

of meaningless screwing, of premature subsiding.

 

‘Nothing can grow out of something which in itself comprises

nothingness.

So are our boundaries, so do our fruits abound.

Everything that receives and conceives seed must be of one and the same seed’

And this seed is the darkness, HUGUES, is the darkness

of you, skin and all, there.

 

 

So, then. That was that. Suddenly even

without you it is a quarter to nine.

 

You, seduced,

you, surprised

by the darkness of time.

 

(You also embraced stupid men too much

thick ear).

 

Now day in day out

I pretend to reject

what I had gladly granted you

in virtue and vice, what is called: the autumn of life

before

travelling, and travelling indoors, the scythe swishes.

 

You are ahead of me. Therefore you are the overture

that keeps on playing,

that keeps on choking in the dust,

by that window pane, in that stairwell.

Original text can be found in the paperback 'Ik schrijf je neer' (pp. 133-53)