FILTER, December 24, 2024
by Ton Naaijkens
“An English Lucebert”
Lucebert, The Collected Poems. Volume 4. A Bilingual Dutch/English Edition. Translated by Diane Butterman. København & Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2024. ISBN 9780940650060
These days it is impossible to remove Lucebert from our collective literary consciousness. You bump into him at every turn. A mere sample from the autumn: Liesje Schreuders reexamined his 'love letter to our tortured bride indonesia' (De Groene, 11th September) and received comments on her views; on 15th September Ton den Boon published his Lucebert, de nar en zijn dubbelganger (Lucebert, the fool and his lookalike. Publishing house De Weideblik); a month before that Jan Oegema contemplated anew his earlier Lucebert studies in Keizersdrama: Lucebert opnieuw (Keizer's Drama: Lucebert Revisited. Published by Boom); finally Jos Joosten wrote, on 1st October at some length in a facebook post, about Bertus Aafjes and the consequences of his Lucebert tirade of 1953. In three of the four cases the focus was upon Lucebert's political position, more specifically the 'wrong' choices made during the war. In that respect it was Joosten's post that was paticularly enlightening because he challenged the widely held view of the past by asserting that when Aafjes wrote, 'I get the feeling that the SS has marched into Dutch poetry' we can now perhaps reassess his claim. Den Boon was the only one who did not engage in ideological matters. He concentrated on a different, more lighthearted Lucebert trait, that of the fool, an important persona in many of his texts. Clearly the hundredth anniversary of Lucebert's birth had to be celebrated and we may safely conclude that he still has readers who are eager to ventilate their views. However, on this occasion they all constitute relative sidetracks.
Indeed, I would like to pause to contemplate a very special Lucebert reader who produced the most staggering publication of the past autumn. I am referring to the fourth volume of the Lucebert's poems. The translator is Diane Butterman (also responsible for the three previous volumes). In other words, she has translated all of his poems which is no mean feat. Similarly, the publication thereof -- by Douglas Messerli's Green Integer (with the slogan 'Pataphysics and Pedantry') -- may equally be termed no mean achievement. In Green Integer's international poetry list Lucebert appears alongside such literary giants as Adonis, Paul Celan, Atilla József, Friederike Mayröcker, Rainer Maria Rilke and Tomas Tranströmer, also together with Maurice Gilliams whose 'collected poems' once appeared under the title The Bottle at Sea which was translated and produced by Marian de Vooght (2006). Piet Gerbrandy wrote the introduction for the recent volume of Lucebert's Collected Poems in which he introduces the poet to an international public, draws attention to the useful annotation at the back of the book and makes a great compliment about the translation work by stating that the translator highlights aspects of Lucebert's Dutch that may otherwise escape the notice of many Dutch language speakers. In her acknowledgements the translator herself looks back with 'nostalgia' on the fifteen years devoted to this 'demanding work'. One can imagine it. Four volumes! In lucid wording she sketches, once again, in this closing 4th volume the specific problems attached to translating such poetry: its extremely associative character ('which means that context can be submerged and meaning obscured'); the virtual lack of punctuation; the need to first identify and unravel compounded phrases before they can be translated. She furthermore points to how Lucebert's work has musical leanings. Where there is rhyme there is a degree of musicality. However, this predominantly pertains to the music in the poetry's sound structure, the assonance and the sonority of the frequent waterfalls of association.
Is the English-speaking world familiar with Lucebert? I look in the renowned and extensive anthology compiled by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (Poems for the Millennium, 1998). It contains two poems to his name (translated by Peter Nijmeijer). Diane Butterman translated everything -- she thus had no escape when up against the solid wall of untranslatability. From time to time the explanations underscore that: 'The word vertrek in the poem's title [in 'vertrek in de tijd', translated as 'poem departing over time', tn] can mean "room" or ''depart''. In view of the poem's nostalgic stance the latter interpretation was chosen.' (1) In fact the whole annotation supplied for this poem is useful, even for the Dutch reader, as Gerbrandy intimated, for who is to know that boenen 'polish' and baard 'beard' refer to two individuals and to two buildings in Bergen in the province of North Holland? (2)
Just take, for instance, the likes of a poem such as 'herman gorter on a first of may in the eighties' to appreciate the huge gap that needs to be bridged by a translator for an American reader or any other reader in the English-speaking world to even begin to grasp what the poem is all about. The first of May gives a degree of context but one cannot automatically attribute workers' pride to the first name that crops up, the name Gorter which probably does not ring a bell. The fact that the man mentioned in the first line has 'a bald west frisian head' also has to be taken at face value (though it remains tenuous: there could be someone else on the scene). It is interesting to observe that in the reasoning given above no translation issues occur. Gorter, a first of May, a bald West Frisian head: it is all credible. This narrative poem goes on to zoom in on that head. It is said to jut out above a fur collar which, so rumour has it, once belonged to the Tsar:
in the photo a bald west frisian head
a pharaoh's head gone astray in the marshy delta
jutting out above a fur collar about which people then
whispered: that was once the tsar's collar
because upon lenin's orders and in the party's
interest it was thought that our poet pottered
about here in crown jewels but the way he stares out
over us and above everything so yearningly is never how
a shady dealer would look forward to eternity’s future (3)
An American reader can now deduce that the poem is about a poet, a certain Gorter who must have had a distinctive head, who had communist sympathies and who may or may not have rummaged about in the clothes that the Romanovs were forced to abandon in the Soviet Union.
In the Butterman edition you are helped out in a further couple of ways. With minor interventions of a syntactic nature she manages to ensure that the virtual lack of punctuation is less acutely felt in English than in Dutch. What is more, at the end of the book additional information is provided about this poem so that the reader can at least conclude that in the case of Gorter 'May' is no incidental or casual reference. You realize from the translation work that the poem has been very closely read -- and undoubtedly also read aloud -- and from the annotation that much background reading has also been done. It was evidently an enormous task and credit must also go to the response group, all of whom must likewise have had a whole Lucebert library near at hand. All further Gorter implications in the poem in question can easily be identified (such as his Menschheit, 'the labourers crowd around the trough of knowledge', 'the day opens up like a golden rose' and The School of Poetry). So it is that the discerning reader is given sufficient background information to augment his reading experience. In fact he can extend that experience to all of Lucebert's poems: four imposing volumes in English in which what is especially noticeable is just how illuminating these translations can be -- a top achievement by Diane Butterman.
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1. The translation is also dear to me because of the Paul Celan 'niemandsroos' reference made by Lucebert. Diane Butterman opted for John Feltsiner's 'no-one's-rose' translation.
2. The art collector Piet Boendermaker (1877-1947) and the former director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, C.W.H. Baard. The building is the Boendermaker Gallery, opened by Baard in 1928, later home of Lucebert and his family and known as the Boendermakerhof. To a certain extent the English translation is stripped of what one might term insider allusions to take on more generalized significance.
3. It is thus useful for Dutch readers to simultaneously have at their disposal at least the opening lines of the source poem: 'op de foto een kale westfriese kop / een in de moerasdelta verdwaald faraohoofd / boven een bontkraagje waarvan men toen / fluisterde: dat was eens het kraagje van de tsaar / omdat in opdracht van lenin en ten behoeve / van de partij onze dichter hier zou scharrelen / in kroonjuwelen maar zoals hij staart over / ons en alles uit zo hunkerend kijkt nooit / een sjacheraar uit naar de toekomst der eeuwigheid'.
