'I was born in Belgium, I'm Belgian. / But Belgium was never born in me.' So writes Leonard Nolens in 'Place and Date', which captures a mood of political and social disillusionment amid a generation of Dutch-speaking Belgians. And throughout this selection we encounter a poet engaged with the question of national identity.
Frequently the poet moves into that risky terrain, the firstperson plural, in which he speaks as and for a generation of Flemings, embodying an attitude towards artistic and political commitment that he considers its defining mark. 'We curled up dejectedly in the spare wheel of May sixtyeight', he writes in the selection's central sequence 'Breach'.
Nolens' poetry is haunted by giants of twentieth-century European lyricism, by Rilke, Valéry, Neruda, Mandelstam and Celan, with whom he has arguably more affinity than with much poetry from the Dutch-language canon.
'I was born in Belgium, I'm Belgian. / But Belgium was never born in me.' So writes Leonard Nolens in 'Place and Date', which captures a mood of political and social disillusionment amid a generation of Dutch-speaking Belgians. And throughout this selection we encounter a poet engaged with the question of national identity.
Frequently the poet moves into that risky terrain, the firstperson plural, in which he speaks as and for a generation of Flemings, embodying an attitude towards artistic and political commitment that he considers its defining mark. 'We curled up dejectedly in the spare wheel of May sixtyeight', he writes in the selection's central sequence 'Breach'.
Nolens' poetry is haunted by giants of twentieth-century European lyricism, by Rilke, Valéry, Neruda, Mandelstam and Celan, with whom he has arguably more affinity than with much poetry from the Dutch-language canon.
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
'I was born in Belgium, I'm Belgian. / But Belgium was never born in me.' So writes Leonard Nolens in 'Place and Date', which captures a mood of political and social disillusionment amid a generation of Dutch-speaking Belgians. And throughout this selection we encounter a poet engaged with the question of national identity.
Frequently the poet moves into that risky terrain, the firstperson plural, in which he speaks as and for a generation of Flemings, embodying an attitude towards artistic and political commitment that he considers its defining mark. 'We curled up dejectedly in the spare wheel of May sixtyeight', he writes in the selection's central sequence 'Breach'.
Nolens' poetry is haunted by giants of twentieth-century European lyricism, by Rilke, Valéry, Neruda, Mandelstam and Celan, with whom he has arguably more affinity than with much poetry from the Dutch-language canon.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781784105754 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 04/05/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 429 KB |
About the Author
Paul Vincent studied at Cambridge and Amsterdam, and after teaching Dutch at the University of London for over twenty years became a full-time translator in 1989. Since then he has published a wide variety of translated poetry, non-fiction and fiction, including work by Achterberg, Claus, Couperus, Mulisch and Van den Brink. He was awarded the Vondel Prize and jointly awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. He is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Dutch at UCL.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
FROM: TWO FORMS OF SILENCE (1975)
FROM Sung to Exhaustion and Dated
I'm no longer a son or a seer.
My parents I know only
as a semanteme looked up by chance.
The places where they lie together
out of the wind, north-eastwards from my hand I have marked on this map in red
like a dreamer who never sets out.
I'm no longer a man or a lover.
The metastasis of the first word
has infected it all, the limp sex
lies rolled up somewhere in the dusty folds
of my voice, the tears came
seldom, welled up as a natural urge
for which there's no room.
I'm no longer a poet or a figment
of what once kept us apart.
The metaphors I've built around us
collapse like an uninhabitable room
in which my eyes and my fists fall open
in the clarity of the last day.
Not to be able to write another poem off the cuff.
Not a poem like a person with its hand on its heart, a man who stands, exists in the crowd, understands the crowd, means, yes means with his heart in his hand what he says.
Not to be able to write another poem except with a hundred fingers at once increasing hand over hand in ineffability.
Not a poem save with a mouth that is sung tight in a mouth in a mouth in a mouth.
Not a poem save with an eye that every second changes its face.
I waited and none of you came.
I was silent as if murdered,
but even a corpse is an eloquent proof of our feverish lot.
No one was waiting for me.
For years I shouted you out like pain, like bad food, like music.
I was your numeral, naming at times,
a trembling hand that leafs through your mouths,
I became silence, silence that falls between wars, underwear and glasses, falls between you and me.
I have danced for everyone, almightily still almost in the drum of my skin.
But no one struck,
struck up and made me sound.
I remain the child that's born each morning grumbling after your wrangling in clammy sheets and a careless alphabet.
I, Poet, carilloneur with the out-of-date fingering in the churning of the hands suspended as a divining rod, weathervane, crowing mene tekel in instalments of my body that has danced up against death –
nailed to the sky,
powdered with Great Bear, ram seed, earth wind,
I live in the hectic brain of this century like a lost lobe, a mental fault,
a deceptive expression of the eternal now.
Right through the cobwebs of tricky politics and fermenting cultures I make the conceited horoscope, selfish at night within exciting belts of speech unbuckled.
I am your dropped stitch,
your internal bruising after the genuflection to mammoth mammon and Nirwana nowhere.
I am the manhole of silence.
FROM: LEGACY
FROM Paul Celan
Today autumn comes and eats out of your hand.
Travel-weary it drapes itself,
too late, a cruel friend,
over you. Its hair tousled and its limbs wind and slowly gold shamelessly begin the marriage you've awaited so long.
Now it eats out of your hand.
It eats the hand that your voice once dated to infinity, eats, eats your eye that saw deeper, deeper than the current of the Seine,
of time.
Autumn, it eats itself away in you.
What's left is the garb of icy lace and snow in which your voice shrouds itself, cries wounded and preserved, deeper than the current of the Seine,
of time.
Invented nothing. Nothing.
Only your voice broadcast, your breath vertically mapped,
your words alibis to calm silences.
Said yourself to pieces.
Your land a bushel of ground,
some snatches of crooning, verbs, produced with a time-resistant tongue,
with artificial light, hard spit, strong as the rock ...
Gave air to the released flame –
trace that confirms your absence.
Washed away.
Scream sediment.
Heart no longer subject to high and low tide.
Hunger sicked up as a surfeit.
A long voice your life, long fall,
a cadence painfully studied like a diver draws his body and gives it to greedily drinking water, drunk on eternity –
upstream through the streets always your steps conflicting with light,
untangling light in your word your own glittering spun in a slummy quarter of the world.
And yourself custodially released like a spider guards, inhabits its splendid trace, lives on choking after its death, and singing cobweb that is ravelled from mouth to mouth,
a ritual for heretics.
You could go nowhere without the dull sound of porcelain with which you were addressed reopening the wound of the alphabet reduced to nine letters of your name, your name the unwanted beginning of each poem.
That name was not Celan.
That name was Jew, Jew, a word palmed off on you like a birthmark,
a long-drawn-out curse,
a flight into the provisional book from which your brothers came,
Job and Jeremiah and Isaiah.
It's you who read me, light years hence your knees pulled up against this autumn, against this poem.
Your lips fill up with loss.
Your head, heavy impossible thing,
has rolled from your elbow behind the twilight, overexposed your heart as soon as your cry lost its mouth.
At last you've been indiscreet.
In Memoriam Matris
This hundred-year-old house neither the swearing nor this eternal house can take pity on your grimaces.
This house, oh the calvary, the room intended for guests,
the room, you, the room you whom I now enter, no no no, oh you stink my girl,
my girl my flower,
my rotting flower,
my flower my flower.
And no one keeps your gift intact, stops this giving, again
(the first scream)
and again you gave us away and exposed us to the season that colours surging mirrors over your face cancer, this moaning that says you beyond the stone under which you lie blurred.
I still have to learn you.
The book you've become takes up all my years and my eyes.
You make me see black.
In vain I follow the pagination from the tomb to the fraction that counted us out from woman to man.
I still have to read me.
FROM: INCANTATION (1977)
FROM Proteus
Belief
At home at table I've seen forests move, heard estates and people change names.
In that round number on the tongue lay the power to change villages in a trice.
In those secrets I was gradually initiated.
Gold was denied me.
And that denial I cash in here and transfer it to many.
I've lived hidden and quiet as a running tab in the hands of the landlord.
And in gossip and melons I was proscribed by the grocer.
Did they know I was being traded over the counter?
And with that growing silence my longing grew to go poste-restante in every town,to teach all proletarians to play the piano and usurp the name of the king.
I want all his winged adjutants to make love to their gruff recruits.
I want the queen to yield her sex to the errand boy.
Let us take another turn,
Let that earth rotate on the tip of your tongue and snap it up,
Just trip over your tongue in towns and commonplaces.
Let us swop laments and scarcity for magnanimous Dutch:
We are no longer that dissolution of factors and family and the Lower House,
We are no longer the eternal deficit in the balance of payments of speech.
For I believe in this book,
I believe in the book that comes to blows with its reader,
The book that like an old clock is a day ahead of the hand that absent-mindedly wound it.
I believe in the book that strips us leaf by leaf and leaves nothing in us but growth principles.
I believe in the book that makes us thin with pain.
I believe in the book that makes us fat with hunger.
No one has yet spoken his short breath,
No one has yet turned his burning joints outward,
No one has yet rewritten his wild rhythms as ritual.
I believe in this book as in the present non-existent.
New Land
Each day breakfast with incantations and much sun at table.
And thick newspapers like a lucid theorem For workdays shorter than a cry of lust.
Lunch never comes to an end.
We speak smoothly to each other as if we were drinking And in my hand your head, heavy as a holdall.
Everyone's forever calling on us.
Playfully the body is exchanged.
We give our seed to old women and passers-by ...
... New Land, wait for us until we're cured,
Wait, lost lanes full of petal shades, wait until our burning soles lose themselves in you,
Waiting, my park declared dead with all your portamento of countless green and quails,
Wait, luminous ponds full of gurnard and eager mortals,
Wait, breakfast with fruitful conversations,
With paradise grains in our charred hands And with the garish colours of the dawn And with our solid sex like alms under the table And with wise friends and girlfriends, talking of fucking,
And with those devilish snatches of memory of a right family,
Wait, telluric laugh, caught deep in the nut's cheek, wait Till they come to redeem you, wait Till we're cured.
FROM: ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD. A FORM OF POETICS (1979)
FROM Anonymous
Undercurrent
I've no powerful feeling for life, chest puffed out.
I've no splendid emotional life to lavish Or sick spots which are supposed to make my self more popular With weepy people and the public purse.
I'm not an intellectual who always waffles With someone else's lukewarm chops, has never saved up a few words In his own blood and spit.
But I do have a good and strong character.
I have an earthy character in which the sowing breath Of another can take root and blossoms Up to my throat that is warm and moist with love For the word and its soundless mental leap.
Thus not I but everything in my hands gains its face.
I'm a maternal undercurrent and make world of everything.
Tuesday Morning 12 October 1978, Six-thirty in De Pelikaan
My pub is emptying. The city's filling up.
I see suits and overalls leaving their homes.
I don't get what will and what wheel Possesses you every day to drive those difficult machines With a childlike hand
And add up all those figures with a dreamy look.
And you, my resting, my rusting poet friends,
Calvinists have gagged and unmanned your throats,
You don't talk, no, you just toss something off,
You wind up most sublime mechanisms With an educated right hand – it's right in every way!
Yet it's not right at all, your heart.
My tongue is caught between the hands at half past six.
I can see my death sitting peering in the hubbub Of smart stains on floor tiles or a skinned lower lip,
In this descent of my voice soon sleeping lost Among empty bottles and the soft arm of one absent,
This red pencil rolled away in unwritten letters.
I should like to be yours, the people's And pull the day like a sack over my head.
FROM HOMAGE (1981)
Prologue
I've nothing more. I'm nothing more.
My book is a mess from the start.
And I who wanted to make reality.
I want to wake at last from your social graces of me.
I want to recover at last from my ancient history in you.
But my existence has been confiscated.
My tongue grows old. I'm on my way.
And there's nothing to get closer to.
I'm still a separate manifestation of you.
And I still have a body of my own since you.
I want my personal story.
But I have no secret. I am a secret.
And I who wanted to make reality.
All this said with the leather hand.
FROM: HOMAGE TO THE WORD
1
You're already included in my start.
In you I began, in your ever-changing forms I was half given, your elusive essence Is written in my body for a lifetime.
You don't leave me. You never leave me in peace.
In you I find my freedom, my compulsion.
You are the restless place where I don't yet exist.
You are the hour that must fill all my cracks With thinking singing, the most impractical being.
You are the sign plaited into my guts And you're what I must become, one day a perfect likeness.
You're the trip that forbids me the trip, the hunger That eats me and may satisfy me. You are.
You are and you are not. You bring me to light If you want. And to your capriciousness, your structures And strictures I'm committed and consigned.
But I can't visit you, name you, possess you.
What I mean today I always owe to you.
You keep me upright above all nights in those cycles Of gullible creature, of world becoming useless.
You say, I just have all and nothing in common with you.
I bear you in my head and don't know you.
You bear me in your womb and wait for my appearance.
Perhaps I'll be a still-born child.
FROM: SOMEONE ELSE WROTE OUR LOVE DOWN BEFORE
Iowa City 2
Here it's night. With you it's day. I look at you.
I hear desire trying out its weird instruments Beneath a moon of ivory. I hear a very old sobbing Of the air as our letters cross noiselessly Above the splashing blue, the sparkling deep that I know From your eyes, my sweet, for with you it's day, for good.
When I dream of you painfully soft patches Run through my body. When I write to you I go all hard Down there, a sing-song thinking opens and goes on In my chest, I grow high, broad, a fragrant tree Of sleepless music, my sweet, for with you it's light For good. I go to the window. I see myself looking at you.
FROM: VERTIGO (1983)
FROM Exile
Traitor
With exorbitant muddy feet, the conservative-minded blush Of a bourgeois past in the countryside,
With hysterical hunger for study I came for sun, for sense,
For outrageous beauty among the city folk.
With cheek, with ethical sense from the Christian school,
With a heathen need for myself, with a holy thirst For musical metaphysics that, crystal clear, determine my place Among the people and the four elements, so I came For bread, for birth and death among the city folk.
I moved into a flat in the lonely bustle Of a street without end. In pubs and libraries I sought and found the friends with whom I shared myself,
My money, my insomnia and my green poems.
We put our books in a pile, with young earnestness And egotism we sat in state like princes among princes At that high, strong, self-made table of the word.
But one of us wanted to be king and went.
Narcissus
It's so hard to love The things you make –
You look with endearment at a hand Full of chaff and corn And you bake your bread wrongly;
You weld with tinkering eyes,
With a heart full of active emotion Two left-hand sides together.
Yes, it's difficult, just difficult And beautiful to touch yourself, today And also finally, it is difficult And beautiful to regain yourself tomorrow In the things that you make.
Sometimes you'd accept a death in return.
Slave Girl
My reality speaks seven languages And often has little or nothing to say.
It lives like someone waiting to convert And not knowing to whom or what.
My reality has a strong feeling For light that is not there.
My reality has lots of knowledge Of things that escape it daily.
Absence is its most natural heart.
My reality is a black slave girl At the feet of invisible masters.
Week
Like a beast I go round sniffing at my days.
I turn around them wagging my tail, snuffle them, I root them up Sniffing with my hot, steaming snout of inquisitive dog.
I eat some. I piss on them. I toss them aside.
Monday reeks of the classic Sunday consternation Of footballer's grief and tiresome piano lessons in D major,
Of existential whiffs of sperm, quizz questions and meringue.
Tuesday's already tiring, Tuesday begs for the strength To foreswear this saintly life of a wastrel,
To serve someone with the breathtaking aspirations of the upstart.
Wednesday hates the hot smell of sweets of its public parks.
Mittwoch wants grown-up afternoons full of planetary culture.
Wednesday fathers bequeath sharp intellects to their idiotic family.
Thursday goes gloomily to the whores, sticks His pathetic thing into the personalities of merciful women.
Thursday goes early to bed to shorten its conscious hours.
Friday sits with friends on terraces downtown Or writes home for money, for comfort, for the sake of writing, for nothing.
Friday evening, fish among the hours, parties or hangs itself.
Saturday is room to once again creatively wash out your navel,
To count your coins under the wet skirt of moved mothers.
Saturday is me, or out of boredom makes a few more kids.
Exile
It is not something, it is not someone Who yesterday left you perhaps.
It is not something or someone who abandoned you to your fate here today.
It is life itself, this light With its so insubstantial face.
It is the right placelessness Of your body put on a stool here.
It is the sky, a flight of clouds On the retina of a blind man, it is Endless this lasting for want Of breath divided into measures and times.
It is life itself, this trembling That has you, this weaving that you are.
It is life itself that today Leaves you alone with your specific gravity.
It is today with dreadful weather and human flesh An eternal flu of the soul, your beast.
It is nothing but life itself that has here Consigned you to your fate today.
FROM: EXODUS. PROFILE OF UTOPIA
L*
Fate's lottery brought us slowly together.
Passion was a school for patience,
A flame in the dreaming knot of the tongue.
You slept in your name until I came and said it.
What then began is still beginning, the journey –
Till suddenly fate's lottery pulled us apart.
We're alone now, but each other's.
L**
You're the only one who's eavesdropped on my life in concrete time, within earshot, in the halfway house.
There we separate in the mornings to think up stories during the day that bring us together in the evenings by the blue kitchen fire.
The silent bustle of the light that passed into us is calmly reduced to silence with cooking and talking.
The round table is the right word to sit at and eat of each other so that you grow in me and I in you.
The night is clear as the short orgasm that we have slowly learned together over the years.
Afterwards we separate gain to devise each other for the evening and night.
So our days are made of useful loneliness.
Excerpted from "An English Anthology"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Leonard Nolens.
Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
from Two Forms of Silence (1975),
from Sung to Exhaustion and Dated,
from Legacy,
from PAUL CELAN,
IN MEMORIAM MATRIS,
from Incantation (1977),
from Proteus,
from All the Time in the World. A Form of Poetics (1979),
from Anonymous,
from Homage (1981),
Prologue,
from Homage to the Word,
from Someone Else Wrote Our Love Down Before,
from Vertigo (1983),
from Exile,
from: Exodus. Profile of Utopia,
from The Dreamed Figure (1986),
from The Enduring Departure,
from Travel Expenses,
from A Natural Street,
From Birth Certificate (1988),
from Tributary,
from Times,
from Love's Declarations (1990),
from Melancholy,
from Love's Declarations,
from Honey and Ash (1994),
from Etiquette,
from Night Vision,
from And Vanish in Moderation (1996),
from Children,
from Self-Portraits and Diary Poems,
from Alice,
from Passer-By (1999),
from Always Tomorrow was the Journey,
from Ways of Life (2001),
from Kicking Foetus,
from Ex-Directory,
from Spy Hole,
from Breach (2007),
from I – Flesh in Uniform is Fully Automatic,
from III – We Were the Silent Ones after May 1945,
from IV – How Does My City Look When I Dream It?,
from V – It Is a Splendid Book,
from Desertology (2008),
from Desertology,
from Tell the Children We're No Good (2011),
from Tell the Children We're No Good,
from Blind Date,
from Motto,
Translator's Note,
Copyright,