A couple years ago, Hannah van Binsbergen – who is the youngest ever winner of the VSB Poetry Prize (the most prestigious prize for a Dutch poetry collection) – asked me to translate a few of her poems for the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam. I think Hannah and I both understand (and embrace) that sometimes language just needs to be weird, and in such instances translation needs to resist the normativizing urge that can slide in alongside the imperative to communicate in a different language. Because there wasn’t a lot of time to complete these translations, I asked Lodewijk Verduin, Dutch literature scholar and regular fiction reviewer for the Groene Amsterdammer, to co-translate. Lodewijk was also, at the time, Hannah’s housemate. Hopefully, with our combined forces, we were able to convey the brilliantly nuanced, sometimes dark, sometimes hilarious (and often both) tone of Hannah’s poems.

“Forecasts of Julia and Sylvia”

“Where It Blooms and Abounds Blooming”

“Tale in Three Parties”

“From the Point That Was Made Already”

“But Undoubtedly”

“From the Shore That I’ve Made”

TALE IN THREE PARTIES

All of this is strictly personal. Don’t listen to this story. Everything is personal.     He crosses an open square, hands halfheartedly behind his head. He looks out the window, events from the near future are nothing compared to this. In the midst of the festivities, it couldn’t be worse than this: I can’t speak of it now. I can’t talk about it with you. All of this is personal, don’t write it down, and tell it only to your designated confidante. I really want to go with you. In the midst of the festivities a hole appeared that I can’t describe any differently. I’ll make sure that what I roused then will keep him from sleeping for years, notwithstanding the effects over which I have no control. This was the first party.     Baudelaire would have wanted it like this, he is my own sweet lord. I say this, but cover your ears. All of us piled onto a twin mattress in the attic has no future. Get these people out of here, I don’t like it here anymore. Personality is knowing better than another where you stop. Starting something from that is character. Establish a friendship with someone from the past. For heaven’s sake, play something frivolous, this is a party, you know, we are your friends. You will never be alone again, and everyone will understand you. You’re fairly well armed for us here. These people don’t need to see any of this. Wrong. These people are your friends. Get these people out of here. I fight and fight: very discretely asking IS THIS REALLY HOW IT IS? Living protected between peers. Greeting no one on the stairs, you get far too involved. Hell could break loose again and before you know it you’ve lost all of your money again. Is this really how it is, is this really how it is? We’re just like you, it’s okay. I know where they’re going, but it’s okay. Everything here is strictly confidential, you don’t have to tell anyone who you are. Heroism turns the horizon into a smile. You can see all of this from the attic window nowadays. This was the second. You know I can write this only because everyone was drunk then. They are so crazy about you, they like you. I’d rather you be warm than naked. Count on an inexplicable recovery. I actually drink this all the time. The asphalt feels like an old love, but it may not kiss my cheek, I fight and fight, and if there’s one thing I hate – Know that a time will come when we can let these old backyards be what they are.  You do know that there are some rivers you’d better not follow, you don’t want to know where they’re going, but it’s okay. You’ll know when it’s time, and that moment too will be a party.

Over the past year I’ve been translating the poetry of Dutch writer Maarten van der Graaff. In addition to two poetry collections, Vluchtautogedicten (Atlas Contact, 2014) and Dood werk (Atlas Contact, 2015), he’s also written a well-received novel, Wormen en engelen (Atlas Contact, 2017). He’s a rare poet that brings his politics into his work ethic and in his advocacy of other poets. 

A few of those translated poems are up on the Versopolis website: http://www.versopolis.com/poet/177/maarten-van-de-graaff

LIST WITH PUBLIC DISCLOSURES

Fuck the avant-garde, I say with Cathy Park Hong.

I make public that I want to stay in bed

because everything around me is making me crazy.

I make public that I walked in South Holland’s polders

and dreamt that I was overgrown by life forms

older than man, my loneliness or yours.

My fascism is that I don’t know how to write

about community.

I make public that Cathy Park Hong called out poetry’s segregation

and that now I don’t know how to write.

That I report, right here.

I make public that it is 2015:

once again I long for a tone-deaf plant life,

but this is also impotence.

Fuck the avant-garde, I say with Cathy Park Hong

and wait for the clenching of my teeth.

It is 2015, and I make public

that my teeth clench.

Nadia de Vries' debut collection opens with the standard disclaimers: "These poems are a work of fiction.The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination". Yet what arises from the author’s imagination is a world of reclaimed fairy tales, a “technological sublime,” the fine arts rendered into the dark arts, and girlhood engineered as a contagion, insinuating itself into the sickly heart of the patriarchy to launch its fatal attack. 

Dark Hour is a countdown in verse, to that moment when the author’s imagination reveals itself as our new reality, and during which we learn to fine-cut poetry into pocket knives and poison. May your fears become abundant like girls.

In 1592 the Japanese invaded Korea (then Joseon), initiating the Imjin War. My mother is a direct descendent of an admiral who is known as the great hero of this war. But when I was in Korea this past summer I became really interested in another figure of resistance named Non-gae. Non-gae, due to Joseon society’s various restrictive rules against women, went from being the daughter of a well-educated man to a concubine to a “kisaeng” (an enslaved class of women in Korea that served as courtesan-artists). After the Japanese military invaded and massacred Non-gae’s town, Jinju, the soldiers decided to throw a big party and demanded that local “kisaeng” entertain them. During this party Non-gae lured the man in charge of these Japanese soldiers, a general named Rokusuke, to a cliff along a river. There, she embraced him, clutched her hands together with irremovable rings, and jumped into the water, drowning both of them.

Why am I writing about this today, here? I guess, on an obvious level, because I’m thinking about how resistance comes in many forms, not the obvious ones the state offers to us. And I’m thinking about how what we often celebrate as a victory is often, on some level, still predicated on tragedy. Non-gae sacrificed herself on behalf of a state that enslaved her. Her weapon was her chains. Does that make her even more heroic – or that much more abject?

And for weeks I had promised myself I would give myself the day after grading a full day of writing poetry, but instead I translated this poem about Non-gae that most Koreans have read in high school. Somehow that seemed like a better thing to do.

Byeon Yeong-ro (1898-1961)

NONGAE

Divine rage is deeper than religion, and ignited passion is stronger than love.

O! Above those waves bluer than bean flowers flows that heart redder than poppies.

Those lovely eyebrows were lifted high, and those lips like inside a pomegranate were pressed against Death!

O! Above those waves bluer than bean flowers flows that heart redder than poppies.

As that river water flows continuously blue, your flower-like spirit continues to redden.

In an intricately threaded sequence called “Ratiocination,” Stephanie Anderson refers to “Writing the backward-fracking self,” and certainly her poems can be read as a series of prompts, procedures and performances precisely demonstrating this “backward-fracking” of identity and subjectivity. Here, the practices of archaeology and extraction retrieve a deeply interconnected, reunified understanding of speaker, object and landscape, rather than deepening the trenches drawn between us. We shouldn’t limit ourselves by assuming any of these poems’ speakers are even human; what we know instead is that they move steadily between different climates, seasons and media; they have chosen the form of poetry; they are animated by repetition; and whether or not we recognize them from elsewhere or before, we only see now that, all along, they have been offering us solace in the face of violence. Ultimately, as Anderson writes in “Remembering in Third Person,” “Look what we have / established: / It is possible to have / a conversation with / a stranger.”