To Leiden: Translating and Re-envisioning Nescio

As of late I have found myself experimenting with the writings of a Dutch author of the early twentieth century.

Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh (1882-1961) was a bit of a bohemian in the late 1890s. He had artistic friends, compatriots who painted landscapes and portraits as well as wrote poems about pleasant girls they couldn't kiss or understand. Some of them dreamed of translating Dante; they had an affinity for German literature. Some even entertained ideas of being good 'socialists' one day.

They also worked in cramped offices as clerks, working with men who were married and established and earning more. Men who worshiped the time tables and ledgers and the accounts.

So to compensate, Grönloh and his friends took long walks along the canals and dikes of Holland. The greater freedom they felt was under the Dutch skies along the Zuiderzee. They talked, they planned. They believed in God, in a greater power only because the world was so beautiful and how else could it be explained? They loved the sea and the sun's dappling rays upon its restless surface. To be able to paint that or write about such beauty seemed impossible. These jongens or young men belonged to a wonderful but vulnerable age.

Philip Blom, a Viennese researcher calls the time before World War One the 'Vertigo Years'. And when thinking of that time, it too seems almost impossible it ever happened. Yes, it was another world then. There was an adventurous spirit within the culture landscape of Europe. In Russia, it was the Silver Age of literature and art. France was Fin de Siecle. In Vienna, there was Jungenstil and the Secession Movement. In Munich, Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider) was about to emerge and more.  Throughout the rest of Europe a Neo-Romanticism mixed with Symbolism and the writings of Freud and Nietzsche were spurning creative minds to reconsider the world around them.

The Netherlands weren't untouched. Louis Couperus, an older contemporary of Grönloh was obviously influenced by psychology and the works of Ibsen, Tolstoy and Flaubert. Couperus wanted to show the world that the Dutch were capable of great works of literature and was even a bit too honest in his depiction. Perhaps Grönloh didn't want Couperus' fame and when he finally wrote his most famous pieces between 1911 and 1918, he published under the pseudonym, Nescio, Latin for 'I don't know'. The two writers differ in that Couperus would be likened to Zola or Balzac while Nescio embodied the era's restlessness with a yearning touch. 

For me, this yearning touch I feel is addictive. 

And this is where I enter in. My experimenting is purely artistic and at times, recreational. With some of my Dutch knowledge I have been rendering some of the prose passages in 'Little Titans' (or Titaanjes) into verse. I have referenced another translation for guidance as the Dutch language has changed more than the English in the last hundred years and some phrases, expressions and verbs are a bit different and difficult to interpret when using a modern Dutch-English dictionary.

I have also been giving the pieces titles.

Here is one of my favourites, the original Dutch prose 're-structured' in verse form followed by my interpretation/translation.

Or my re-envisioning.

Naar Leiden

´t Was in December

Ik stond achter op de tram, heelemaal achter op

De tram reed maar door ´t land en stond

            Stil

            en reed weer, uren durrde ´t

            de landen lagen

            eindeloos

En de lucht werd hoe langer hoe blauwer

En de

            Zon

            scheen

            alsof er

            bloemen moesten groeien uit de

boerenkinkels

En de roode daken in dorpen en de zwarte boomen

En de

            akkers

            veel met

            riet

            gedeckt

            hadden het lekker warm,

En de duinen stonden, in de zon met hun bloote hoofd

En de

            Straatweg lag door

            wit

En pijnlijk in ´t

            Licht

En kon de zon niet verdragen

En de ruiten van de

Dorpslantaanrns

Flikkerden

Ook zij verdroegen met moeite ´t

felle

licht

Maar ik werd hoe lange hoe konden

En zoo long als de

            Zon

            Scheen

reed de tram...

En op´t laatst stond er een lijk op de tra te staren

In de malle groote

Koude

Zon

die vlamde alsof  de revolutie

moest begininnen,

alsof ze in Amsterdam bezig waren de kantoren

af te breken

En die geen vonkje leven in

M´n koude voete en

Dooie

Beenen kon brengen

En de

            Zon werd steeds

Grouter

En

Kouder

            En

            In werd steeds

Kouden

            En bleef

Even groot

En de blauwe lucht keek vreeselijk

            Ernstig

´Wat moest ik toch op die tram?´

...

Ja, ´t is een lange rit van Hillegom

            naar Leiden

En de

Dag is kort       in December.

To Leiden

It was in December

I stood in the back of the tram, all the way back

The tram just rode through the country

            Stopping

            riding on, hours passing

            the landscape lay 

            endless

           

And up there, in the sky, it became blue and bluer

And the

            Son

            shone

            as if

            flowers could spontaneously grow out of the

Country lads

And the red roofs in the villages and the black trees

And the

            Fields

            decked

            out

            with reeds

            had it so nice and warm

And the dunes out under the sky, bare headed

Yet the

            Lone road stood out

            pale

And pained by the

            light

           

It couldn’t endure the sun

And the glazed panes of the

Village lanterns 

flickering

They couldn’t endure the

bright

light as well

And I was getting colder, colder

And it was so long, with the tram

            Riding

            As long

As the sun.

.

And at last, there was a corpse on the tram staring

into the cheery goodness

of that cold

Sun

Flaring as if inciting the revolution

to finally begin

As if those working in their Amsterdam offices

Decided to just abandon everything

And still, it couldn’t spare a spark

For my cold feet, to

Bring

Life back to my dead legs.

And the

            Sun was still

Getting bigger

            And

Colder

            And

            I would always

Be cold

            And always

The same

And then the sky looked down blue and disappointed

            Asking in solemn earnest

‘What are you doing on that tram?’

...

Yes - it´s a long ride from Hillegom

            To Leiden

            And the

days are short              in December.

All My Little Words or a Reflective Vocabulary

"Not for all the tea in China,

Not if I can sing like a bird

Not for all North Carolina

Not for all my little words"

- Magnetic Fields

It is English, not Esperanto that is gaining ground as the next Latin. Or is this a mild understatement? Should I perhaps suggest that English is stronger than Latin, the former having gone further than the latter language with the advent of technology and world travel? 

And yet English, how similar to Latin, both having gleaned from other languages. For instance, without Greek, Latin wouldn't have had the strengths nor the extensive vocabulary. English without the French influence would be far more similar to modern day Frisian.

And travel. Without the Roman Empire, without the conquest of the various caesars and their Roman legions, so too Latin wouldn't have reached both the shores of the Atlantic and the Black and Red Seas, nor the northern climes of Great Britain and the desolate deserts of Africa.

The same too with English. Without the combined economic business muscle of the United States, Britain and the (former) Common Wealth countries, it wouldn't have the universal appeal it has garnered today. Even with China and India leading the world in terms of population and, may I dare say, innovation in some fields, schools throughout Asia are desperate for English teachers. 

I meet many people who say they love English and I have learned to love it as well. It is like your hometown, you have to travel away from it to appreciate it. You begin to see the sights that travelers see and with new eyes, recognize how special they are.

So, too, with words. After traveling to Europe in 2012, I came home to truly think about words. Before the trip, I didn't regard my mother tongue as especially beautiful. I always through French, Spanish and Italians as the romantic contenders for the loveliest of languages. But while away, I had spoken in other languages, a bit of Dutch and a great deal of German. I had also studied Russian before my trip. I began to take note of words, their musical sound, their meanings, associations and even revelations and started to collect them as a means of further appreciation, reflection and wonder.  

In English, for instance, I have always loved 'diaphanous'. I picked this one up in high school. I had a wonderful Grade 12 and OAC teacher of English and every morning she put a poem or a stanza or often a simple quote on the blackboard. Along with my mother, a fellow writer and editor, Mrs.F. too helped forge a passion for language and rhetoric. It is through her I became acquainted with the word for 'delicately hazy' and 'nearly translucent'.

Then there is 'gleaming' and 'twilight' ('gloaming', as well, another word for 'dusk'), 'azure' (the latter having roots in Middle French) and 'ineluctable' which is a poetic way of saying 'unavoidable' or 'inescapable.' The word has always struck me as sad and when I looked furthered into its Latin roots, ēluctā (rī) means to 'surmount, to force a way out or over'. I now imagine the 'in'-prefix as a chain having broken the spirit of the word, that it is no longer free. 

Then there is 'elude' and 'elusive', obviously related. As with 'diaphanous', I feel the two words have a 'surreptitious' quality, that they escape from our lips like near silent-thieves.  

From 'elude', I make the jump into French, loving the word 'étude' and 'nocturne'. The former is a gentler word than our English 'study'. It brings up pleasant memories of classical guitar lessons, works by Fernando Sor and J.S. Bach and of course, first hearing Frederich Chopin. The same, too, with 'Nocturne'. We have 'nocturnal' but normally you don't think of musical pieces and paintings (ie. Whistler's works), only owls and wolves hunting at night.  

I also like the French word 'flâneur' made popular by the 19th century poet, Charles Baudelaire. The term is often blankly associated with our English 'stroller'. Then and, as of late, it has accumulated other connotations such as 'lounger' and 'loafer' and even 'dandy' to some extent. But I like the more philosophical aspects to the word. While taking art history courses in university, our professor described his own youthful wanderings in Paris, reading the French poets of the mid and late-19th century, breathing in the cultural atmosphere of the Left Bank and Montmartre. He himself had been a 'flâneur', both a part and apart from the crowds surrounding him. The word, for me, suggests detachment. One can belong to the moment and yet regard it as passing and inconsequential. As Rilke wrote, 'be ahead all parting'. The 'flâneur' embodies such a notion. 

Other French words and borrowings include silhouette, Arabesque, chanteuse, danseur and rêve, the latter adding a tender if not restless dimension to 'dream'. The hard 'r' in 'rêver' reminds me that even when we are asleep, we are still awake in ourselves. I often think of the word 'revive' and how when we dream, we are re-introduced, or born again into our unconscious self.

In German, I like 'traurig' (sad) just as much as 'tristesse'. The 'tr' sound either followed by 'ow' and 'gk' in German or the second 't' and long 'ess' in French add more substance to an emotion that is more than just 'sad'.

I also like 'Sehnsuch' ('yearning' and yes, also 'aspiration' and 'desire') and 'versuch' (try, attempt) which both suggest immanent 'search' and 'trial'. The poems of Rilke offer up to the reader the emotional underpinnings of 'sechnsucht'. It is a word that transcends mere 'longing' and implies the spiritual. 

Then there is the German word 'Nebel' (fog) which is reminiscent of 'nebulous' in English. I also prefer 'sleep' in Deutsche, 'schlafen', with its cheerful 'schl' beginning and 'fen' ending that is both amiable and like the sound a sleeper makes deep in R.E.M.

'Love' is a 'lovely' word in English and I also enjoy its many translations: Liebe (German), liefde (Dutch), amour (French), amore (Italian) and Láska (Czech). I especially appreciate the way you say 'I love you' in Dutch, Ik hou van jou (Ik how van yow) and in Russian, Я люблю тебя (Ya l-yoo-bloo teb-ya). 

I should mention my Opa as well. Though I didn't necessarily learn Dutch from him nor my father, only picking out the odd words (and curses), I did garner an appreciation for the language. There is in Dutch the untranslatable 'gezellig' (kghe-zell-ik) which brings together concepts of 'coziness', 'familial comfort' and 'joyful conversation'. While touring The Netherlands, I learned this very gentle and tenderly complex term. 

The Dutch also have 'slappe lach' which describes the kind of laughter you have where you just can't stop laughing. A laughter where you almost stop breathing, it hurts in your gut and you literally 'slap' your knee. Google translates it rather blandly into 'giggle' (as if describing the Big Bang as a 'sneeze') but it is more than just chuckling to yourself. 

Then there is the word 'aardig' which is rendered into the innocuous English 'nice'. I myself have always had a problem with 'nice' and when you look at the word's history it has meant everything from 'stupid, foolish' to 'extravagant' to 'elegant' to 'slothful', 'luxurious', 'unmanly' and 'thin'. Jane Austen once wrote in a letter to a friend, "You scold me so much in a nice long letter... which I have received from you." It's truly hard to say if she was being kind or sarcastic or perhaps guarded in her meaning of the word. But as for the Dutch, it is associated with 'aarde' (earth) and 'aard' (nature). So if you describe someone as 'aardig' in Dutch, you are saying they are earthy, or 'salt of the earth'. (I also think of aardbei - 'strawberry' in Dutch).

Then there are the Slavic words. My mother's side is Eastern European, a mixture of Ukrainian and yes, Russian. Some of these words, like 'gezellig' are nearly impossible to translate without using a paragraph to pin down a meaning. For instance, there is 'тоска' (toská). I will hereby provide Vladimir Nabokov's explanation as he is the master in describing the word:

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” (Source: introduction to Happy Moscow, Platanov)

If one Googles 'toska' multiple pages and even Tumblr sites will be made available all dedicated to describing or illustrating the word's complexity. Perhaps there is such a public devotion to the word is because it best explains if not adamantly describes the moods and emotions of some of the greatest Russian novels, stories, plays and poems. If you read Ivan Turgenev, let alone the lesser known Andrei Platanov or Ivan Bunin, the verses of Anna Akhmatova you will experience 'toska'.

Not as a popular but intriguing is Стиоб (stee-ob) which means 'an approach to life that takes no person or words serious' (source: Russians: The People Behind the Power - Gregory Feifer). Like the 'flâneur', the word suggests a mindset of detachment and even stoicism. Our English equivalent would be 'water off a duck's back'.  

Growing up, I heard also a lot of Polish from the neighborhood kids. Like Russian and Ukrainian, I continually find it to be a beautiful language. Though, when reflecting on my early teen years, I cannot recall any single Polish word as I was too often bewildered and bewitched by the beauty of a few of its speakers, namely Marzena, her sister Anna or their friend, Dominika. Their words were a means to look into their eyes, that when they spoke to each other in their native tongue, I could listen and watch them. And yes, be lost.

Yet a Polish word I came across recently fits my life perfectly and my mindset: 'pokój' (pah-kwee). It means both 'room' and 'peace'. As a reader and a quiet soul, I have often associated these two things in English. If there is a religion I uphold it is the one of a placid interior, a place to think, write and read and research. My room has always been my chapel or cathedral, sacred, sacrosanct. I believe like the philosopher and mathematician Pascal, that 'all human evil comes from a single cause: man's inability to sit alone in his room' (source, Pensées). 

One must ineluctably still leave one's room. One has to go out into the world, find friends, have a good slaape lach and be in the realm of the gezellig and aardig. We are drawn out by our sehnsucht and yet we experience toska at times. Yet the 'room' is a place where one is settled, it is the place of return, of sleep (schlafen), dreaming (rêve). 

Along with Pascal's maxim, I too adhere to the Russian saying that 'visiting friends is good, but home is better.'

Pokój is better still. 

The Poems I Have Carried (With a Translation of 'Du im voraus' by Rainer Maria Rilke)

In my late teens, I discovered T.S.Eliot's 'The Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock'' Perhaps it was less a discovery and more of an inevitable introduction. My mother was taking a first-year English course at the university. She had just moved out of the family house, finding an apartment on a street that shared her name, Elizabeth. 

It was really my mother who presented the poem to me and I read the poem over and over again, the afternoons I went to see her in the summer or in the autumn evenings after school. I recall the leaves from the oak outside her window falling against the pane in the early dusk. It was her great anthology of English literature with the Constable painting on the cover. It was the first poem that awakened me to poetry. In school, whatever we read before was a means to a passing grade. In this book, I had found the first true relic of myself, a kind of first key. 

Sure, there were other poems by Browning, Whitman, and Tennyson but for someone in his teens, I felt that Eliot's poem was like a calling or perhaps, a reflection. It seemed to take on a kind of burden, that the narrator was encumbered by his own missteps and hesitation and inability to fully express himself with others, whether with his loved one or those he sat down to tea with. Yet he could relate to the nameless reader. 

I seemed to live in this poem and felt the October described, the sawdust restaurants, the evenings, seeing the arms with shawls, the women coming and going, the quiet, sepia streets that billowed. 

And also in that volume, a year later, I found Lord Byron's 'When We Two Parted' I would come back to that poem time and time again as I would Eliot's. Instead of a grander epic, only a handful of stanzas and the Great Romantic had managed to tell a tragic tell through suggestion and supposition. Who were these two who had parted and why? Well, it somehow didn't matter because the parting and the seeing each other were just as painful.

I reread the poem after breaking up with a girlfriend. I hadn't loved her tragically and soulfully but I felt our separation had a solemn meaning to it. I didn't know what to expect from her at the beginning of our relationship and the ending itself was anti-climatic. And yet I felt in some way I had let her down or not given any of it a chance, that my mind had rushed past any possibility because there was not enough for me. Or was it really, I didn't allow the 'enough' to build? I turned to Byron's poem for sympathy.

Then, when I got into wine, I had to find my Arthur Rimbaud again. 'The Drunken Boat' is the only poem I know so far that can capture the sense and wonder of inebriation, to feel you have been farther than you have been sober, that whatever thoughts you've had, they are untethered, wilder and limitless while inebriated. There is a sense of the countless in the poem, that things go on, that the horizon is just a 'word' and a 'misrepresentation' of what is. It also suggests the melancholy associated with too much wine and too much of a night. The narrator seems to recognize by poem's end that the careless and easy, godlike curiosity of childhood is richer than the one of a drunk. I feel, after every reading that the poet peaked at nineteen years of age because he knew all poetry and the poets who wrote were just offshoots of ego, that nothing could quite compare with the focused and seemingly vast imagination of childhood, that growing old, to quote Rilke, "has served no purpose."

Yet still, poetry is the lost imagination of childhood in adult life. A philosophy professor once said you are not too old to have a second childhood. Of course, this professor had three Ph.Ds and three divorces. So either he reverted to the childlike because he couldn't grow-up or because he couldn't handle anything else. 

Still, I find myself quoting him now and then, believing every time I embark on another poem, I am somehow still a child, finger painting this time with words. 

Other poems I've loved include the little known ''Black Marigolds'. Like with all great works of literature, they find you, no matter how esoteric or different. I discovered this poem at the end of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, a mere few stanzas.

The original was written in Sanskrit by the 11th century Kasmir poet, Bilhana Kavi. Caurapañcāśikā or The Love thief is an epic poem some fifty stanzas long, a loving tribute to the woman Bilhana had an affair with. Considering his love was a princess and the father a tyrannical man, the author was imprisoned and given a death sentence. Fortunately or perhaps not, there is no real certainty whether the execution was carried out.  One story goes the king was so moved by the poem, he lifted the sentence. Another, that was he infuriated still and sent the poet to his immanent death. Like with Schroeder's cat, both possibilities play out in the mind of the well-reader.

Yet, whereas Eliot, Byron and Rimbaud are household names in the households of people familiar with the greats, the author of 'Black Marigolds' shares his talent with perhaps his most tender of translators, E. Powys Mathers. I have read other renditions but Mathers wins me over. It is the repetition of the words 'even now', his version of the Sanskrit 'adyapi' which suggest memory or looking back.

The entire poem is worth a read and it always difficult to find one stanza to isolate, to suggest as the true pinnacle or quintessential moment. It is like life: beautiful moments that cannot be remembered without the others. So yes, cannot extract a single part of the work that doesn't move me. And yes, fifty stanzas, surprisingly there is not one weak link in the chain.  

In Spanish, I love Lorca's "Horseman's Song" or 'Rider's Song' a quiet and tragic poem about a man doomed. We know nothing of his future or his past, we know what he knows and that he feels his death is coming soon. He is on his way to the Andalusian city of Córdoba but his arrival is uncertain. It is spare and perfect.

So too is Pablo Neruda's''Tonight I can write the saddest lines'. Without a doubt, one of the strongest poems about loss in that it doesn't attempt to be anything more than a simple testament. The poet remembers the bare things, his language is direct and gentle. It doesn't try to offer up allegories and metaphors, it doesn't try to challenge the reader with similes and strained references to other poems or works of literature. It is just one person saying that they have loved and that love is no longer there. 

And then perhaps my favourite poem, one I have rendered here is by the German Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. To call him German, it would seem to limit him. He was born in what we would now be the Czech Republic. He lived throughout Europe and yes, he wrote in German but his ideas have the universal to them. Whereas Heine, Eichendorff, Morike and a host of other German authors embody their German and regional culture, Rilke transcends the local. He is not affixed to one place like Prague or Munich. In this he is like Hölderlin or Goethe, a poet that crosses borders and looks to the timeless and eternal. He shares with these two poets and humanity in general this affinity with the search for the divine. 

In one sense you could call him a metaphysical poem, in other, he is a Neo-Romantic like Stefan George but labels aside, there is yearning to the majority of his work and 'yearning' (sehnsucht) doesn't belong to one period in time or literature. One could attempt to analyze Rilke by looking at his life, donning the Freudian-cap. Perhaps there was no satisfaction in his life. Perhaps his marriage wasn't fulfilling but as Rilke once noted, one 'must live the question' and 'change one's life.' So all attempts to determine Rilke truly negate him.

Here is my translation, one I continue to work on, never quite feeling, just like the poem itself, it is complete.

Du im voraus

verlorne Geliebte, Nimmergekommene,
nicht weiß ich, welche Töne dir lieb sind.
Nicht mehr versuch ich, dich, wenn das Kommende wogt,
zu erkennen. Alle die großen
Bildern in mir, im Fernen erfahrene Landschaft,
Städte und Türme und Brücken und un-
vermutete Wendung der Wege
und das Gewaltige jener von Göttern
einst durchwachsenen Länder:
steigt zur Bedeutung in mir
deiner, Entgehende, an.

Ach, die Gärten bist du,
ach, ich sah sie mit solcher
Hoffnung. Ein offenes Fenster
im Landhaus—, und du tratest beinahe
mir nachdenklich heran. Gassen fand ich,—
du warst sie gerade gegangen,
und die spiegel manchmal der Läden der Händler
waren noch schwindlich von dir und gaben erschrocken
mein zu plötzliches Bild.—Wer weiß, ob derselbe
Vogel nicht hinklang durch uns
gestern, einzeln, im Abend?

You, just beyond,

lost beloved, never to arrive

I’m not even sure which songs will please you.

I’ve stopped looking for you in the coming

Wave of the next moment. Yet these great

Images in me - ever widening the landscape,

Cities, towers, bridges  

Unsuspecting turns in the path

And the lands forever trembling

With their intermingling gods -

All of it rising up against me and this meaning:

You, my eluding one.  

Ah, you are the gardens

I’ve seen with such

Longing. An open window

In the country house – and you nearly

Stepped out, pensively, just for me. Streets I found

You had seamlessly passed,

And sometimes the mirrors in the merchant shops,

Still joyously spinning from your reflection became startled

With mine, so unexpected. – Who knows whether the

Same bird sang through us

Yesterday, entirely alone, in the evening.