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.

A famous Lars Gustafsson

This poem is very well known. There exists an English translation on the Internet, but to my mind it wanders too far from the original. Here is my suggestion:


Världens tystnad före Bach

Det måste ha funnits en värld före
Triosonatan i D, en värld före a-mollpartitan,
men hur var den världen?
Ett Europa av stora tomma rum utan genklang
överallt ovetande instrument,
där Musikalisches Opfer och Wohltemperiertes Klavier
aldrig hade gått över en klaviatur.
Ödsligt belägna kyrkor
där aldrig Påskpassionens sopranstämma
i hjälplös kärlek slingrat sig kring flöjtens
mildare rörelser,
stora milda landskap
där bara gamla vedhuggare hörs med sina yxor
det friska ljudet av starka hundar om vintern
och – som en klocka – skridskor som biter i glanskis;
svalorna som svirrar i sommarluften
snäckan som barnet lyssnar till
och ingenstans Bach ingenstans Bach
världens skridskotystnad före Bach



The silence of the world before Bach

There must have existed a world before
the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor Partita,
but what was that world like?
A Europe of large unresonating spaces
everywhere unknowing instruments,
where Musikalisches Opfer and Wohltemperiertes Klavier
had never passed over a keyboard.
Lonely remote churches
where the soprano voice of the Easter Passion
had never in helpless love twined itself round
the gentler movements of the flute,
gentle expanses of landscape
where only old woodcutters are heard with their axes
the healthy sound of strong dogs in winter
and – like a bell – skates biting into glassy ice;
the swallows swirling in the summer air
the shell that the child listens to
and nowhere Bach nowhere Bach
skating silence of the world before Bach

Poem by the Swedish writer Lars Gustafsson

Aristotle and the crayfish

We went to buy angling-worms

in a shop clearly intended for this purpose.

And we found what we were looking for;

fat, squirming angling-worms,

a kind the fish here seem to prefer.

But in the middle of this room a large old-fashioned earthenware jar

blue, round and full of young crayfish.

And my young son was inconsolable

at having to leave these wonderful creatures.

We bought two, and released them

in our clean, glass-clear aquarium,

where the goldfish moved slowly and solemnly

like old poets in a distinguished academy. And see,

a great darkness descended upon all things:

here expressions of opinion and discussions took place

beyond our comprehension; only seaweed

that floated up to the surface bore witness to

the contention that here was secretly taking place.

On the third day the aquarium cleared once more.

And became as before. But no crayfish

were visible. We decided they now

were living like hermits, in greater wisdom,

a life far removed from the general public

down below the sand beds.

So it continued for a long time, until one day

I opened my Aristotle

and found a very small crayfish corpse

flat as a plant in a herbarium

precisely in the short section where the Philosopher

talks about memory and recollecting

the past. And this chapter

one of the best things

ever written about memory,

will now for ever be associated

with an odour not easy to forget,

one of a slightly rotten crayfish.

A poem from the cycle by the Dutch poet C.O. Jellema, based on the novella 'Lenz' by Georg Büchner

‘DEN 20. JÄNNER GING LENZ DURCHS GEBIRG’

6.

To be a bird in thought no dared intention,

while in the wood he held his left arm tight

when it would start to flap. His only right

As guest, his duty: proffering attention.

He proffered. Was the profferer. Surprised

at what he gave: his soul. In shady places

it lay like snow, maid, mother, outlined traces

of who had hosted it – a guest likewise.

If it soon melts, he thought, plants will start growing,

like me, the blossom, pollination, pledges

of fruit that with a crack will open wide.

He saw himself then as the inner edges

of many silences – not beyond knowing.

The birds stayed on the outside in the sky.