After a back-racking day in the garden, this translation of a poem by the Dutch writer Ida Gerhardt

GEORGICA

Labor improbus

I am a gardener, nothing more,

with earth and muck bespattered sore;

I stretch up tall, I bend down low

I tightly clasp my spade and hoe.

I weed, observe my deepest law

when planting seedlings frail and raw:

I bend down low, I stretch up tall.

A gardener am I, that is all.

I go home stiffly in the shade,

pain racks both groin and shoulder blade.

I still keep watch when rest I may.

My land, my land: brief is the day.

Prepare for me a wedge of ground,

forget where I lie safe and sound.

Past trouble, need and pain must be

a garden strewn with stars for me.

To see the original poem, go to here

Poem from the new bilingual anthology '100 Danish Poems' by the Danish writer Otto Gelsted

 

September

The stooks of corn stand shaggy and heavy

like a drove of mighty oxen.

Cows graze

down by the shore

and lie far away

like a band over the hill.

The air is bright and clear.

Blackberries line the roadside!

And in the depths of the wood

the white ink caps glisten

like wax candles in the dark.

Earth and sea brim with fruitfulness.

In the gardens the dull thud

of falling gravensteins,

exploding with juice against the ground.

Large salmon, seeking up-river

run into the fisherman’s net.

The oats are gathered in,

and the harvest mouse young,

no bigger than a fingernail,

red, hairless and with blue spots for eyes,

are raked out of their nest in the corn.

The spiders are in flight,

like a moon-bridge over the fields

there is sun, reflected in their web.

Massive white clouds

sail across the world.

The days slip past,

and the mills are now still.

The earth spins into the dark,

and the Plough swings forward

over black, soughing trees.

To go to meet winter

like a field full of seed –

To enter the night

like a sky whose blue soil

is full of glittering stars –

to die like a day in September

replete with life and light!

For a list of the authors and poems in the anthology, go to here. 

Another poem by the Dutch poet Martin Reints

Back to the beginning

In the midst of the present

that dwells in its day-to-dayness

to leave memory step by step in the lurch

to leave yourself behind among all those things

that are being worn down there

that with their wearing down allow day-to-dayness to exist

in the strange rhythm within which bookcases full of books

and offices full of office furniture

change into clouds of dust

into hot desert sand that shimmers in mirages

into wild rivers and into new housing estates

because it can’t be otherwise and because it happens to be so

to forget at ever-increasing speed:

what was it again?

and so to return to the beginning of thought

which actually isn’t yet thought itself.

To see a dossier of Reints poems plus interview on this poem, go to here

Poem by the Swedish poet Lennart Sjögren

Who doesn’t dream

I saw a rat cross the road

it had a human face

it was a small rat

smaller than my shoe.

It asked me the direction of the place

where it could die in peace.

What was I to answer such a question

that was so like my own.

I tried half a biblical quotation:

go to the place where the dead bury

their dead – maybe it lies in the west.

But that didn’t help at all

and when I changed it to:

go to the place where the unborn

meet those still alive – maybe it lies in the east,

and inquire whether a death can be obtained

there at a reasonable price

it had already disappeared.

And who doesn’t dream of a quiet death –

the sooner the better one says

but does not mean anything by it.

Whether there was frost that morning

or summer – I can’t recall

but the dreams stood in queues along the road

not wholly unlike wingless upright birds.

Translation of a beautifully crafted poem by the Dutch writer Ida Gerhardt

GARDEN OF EPICURUS

Our choice of ally was frugality.

As willing instrument, the mind controls

the body, being used to that proud role;

pure bread, pure water nourish equally.

Our choice of ally was frugality.

Enclosed within the cycle of the hours,

what’s offered us by thought that freely scours

finds order and repose in stringency.

Our choice of ally was frugality.

We work in silence and with patience strive;

the day is like a honey-sated hive

and in our garden we would friendship see.

Our choice of ally was frugality, -

and hour on hour its gift is our sure gain,

we ripen as the fruits do, as does grain

in good life, to the good death that shall be.

To see the original poem, go to here

A poem by the Dutch writer Jean-Pierre Rawie

DEATHBED

My Father’s dying; as I hold his hand,

I feel the bones protruding through his skin.

I search for words – speech has deserted him,

each breath is laboured in this final stand.

So I plump pillows, smooth the crumpled spread

at which a clutching hand now feebly grasps;

remain his child, though centuries should pass,

and as his child am ever in his debt.

The selfsame path we follow one by one,

the selfsame yardstick every time applies;

I sit here on the bed in which he lies

as he beside his father once sat down:

soon he’ll be gone and will have never known

how helplessly I’ve loved him as his son.

For other Rawie translations, go to here and here 

Two poems by the Dutch writer Dèr Mouw

AQUARIUM

In merest scrap of ocean, greenish, dim,

the creature drifts, transparent, like some ghost;

through wall of glass the human spirit, lost

to itself, takes the enormous wonder in,

how, flimsy with translucence, the small soul

that burns within each organ without trace,

now makes the slight wing, fine as woven lace,

of the alien glass bird beat with wavelike roll.

So drifts my verse in me, a part of God;

and something that both rhyme and reason mocks

hides in ingenious translucency;

and he who reads this, for one moment, feels

quivering, beyond his I’s constraining shield,

the mystery of his eternity.

*************************************

Dull mauve and purple-grey the western skies.

I’m walking still through frost-encrusted grass,

and hear on the canal close by the harsh

thin scrape of skates on hollow-tinkling ice:

and on the frozen glass it feels as though,

circling, floating, swerving with artful skill,

bent from the waist, I rise and fall at will:

my back feels as if skating made it flow.

I hope who thus can feel my verses glide –

alone, in pairs, or rows that stretch out wide,

rolling on pulse and rhyme of prime Dutch steel –

that he the wind that bore me can hear playing,

and in my words the marvellous broad swaying

and sliding of his spirits too may feel.

A quite extraordinary poet! The crunching of the lines is even more pronounced in the original.

Time to repost this poem by the new Nobel Prize winner for literature, the Swede Tomas Tranströmer

Carillon

Madame despises her guests for wanting to stay at

        her seedy hotel.

I have a corner room on the first floor: an awful bed,

        a bulb hanging from the ceiling.

Oddly enough heavy hangings where a quarter of a million

        invisible mites are on the march.

Outside a pedestrian street goes past

with strolling tourists, fleet-footed schoolchildren, men

        dressed for work leading rattling bikes.

Those who think they make the world spin round and those who

        think they are helplessly spun round in the world’s grasp.

A street all of us take – where does it eventually lead us?

The only window in the room looks out over something else:

        The Wild Square,

a fermenting field, a huge trembling surface, sometimes full

        of people and sometimes deserted.

Everything I have within me materialises there – all my fears,

        all my hopes.

All the unthinkable that will even so occur.

I have low shores, if death rises eight inches or more

        I will be inundated.

I am Maximilian. The year is 1488. I am being held a prisoner

        here in Bruges

        because my enemies are at a loss –

        they are evil idealists and what they have done in the backyard

        of horrors I cannot describe, cannot transform blood

        into ink.

I am also the man in overalls pushing his rattling

        bike further down the street.

I am also the person who is visible, the tourist who walks and

        then stops, walks and then stops

letting his gaze wander over the pale moon-burnt faces and

        heaving material of the old paintings.

Nobody decides where I shall go, least of all myself,

        and yet each step is taken as it must be.

To walk around in the fossil wars where everyone’s invulnerable

        because everyone is dead!

The dusty masses of leaves, the walls with their

        openings, the garden paths where petrified tears

        crunch under heels...

Unexpectedly as if I had walked into a trip-wire the

        carillon starts up in the anonymous tower.

Carillon! The sack splits at its seams and

        the notes spill out across Flanders.

Carillon! The cooing iron, hymn and pop-song of the

        bells, all in one, and written quivering in the air.

With shaky hand the doctor wrote a prescription that no one can

        decipher though the handwriting is recognised...

Over roof and square, over grass and switch

Over living and dead their notes now roam.

Christ and Antichrist – which is which?

The bells will finally fly us home.

They have fallen silent.

I am back in my hotel room: the bed, the lamp,

        the hangings. Strange sounds can be heard here, the cellar

        is dragging itself up the stairs.

I lie on the bed, my arms outstretched.

I am an anchor that has dug down deep and

        that holds on

the huge shadow that is floating up there

the great unknown that I am a part of and that is certainly

        more important than I am.

Outside the pedestrian street goes past, the street where my

        footsteps die away as does what’s written, my preface to

        silence, my inverted, heretical hymn.

Bob Dylan poems by the Danish poet Klaus Høeck

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Bob Dylan, there he stands in the sp

Otlight on the stage of my mind

Behind a nebula of cannabis

Dense vapours and tobacco smoke. Alread

Y an archetype in my own lost youth’s mytho

Logy. With his white shepherd’s h

At there he stands on the wide scree

N of memory in the cinema of my heart.

Bob Dylan, there he stands in black cl

Othes against a background of the

Blood-red stripes in the Stars an

D Stripes playing his harrowingl

Y lovely, his deadly beautifu

L music. A modern troub
Adour, close to the middle of the twentieth ce

Ntury, close to sorrow’s young springs.

For all the poems as a pdf file, go to here

A poem from the 'Songs of Isolde' collection by the Dutch poet P.C. Boutens

MY love is nought to me but golden,

I to him silver sheen!:

Whene’er he sings ‘Isolde’

His voice is shroudlike gleam.

No song I know so lunar-bright

As his projected shaft of light!

Those who by day may share his image

Can but extol

My bird’s gold-gleaming plumage,

To none though does his heart unfold.

In colour-faded twilight-hall

Sings but to me my nightingale...

How can that treasure-hoard of

Songs be kept till the evening-hour –

As I poor yearning loyally store, a

Wealth of sadness held as dower?

Must then release come from my kiss

For that bright spring of tearful bliss?

So does the native-golden

Sun give light to all the days,

Yet its closed eyes keep hidden

Its fondest gentle gaze,

And unseen murmurs all night long

Out to the moon that silver song.