Showing posts with label Waldo Rojas-Serrano. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Waldo Rojas-Serrano. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Chilean Miners
When Copiapó Valley miner, Florencio Ávalos broke surface from the penance of his underground dungeon, the collapsed San José copper-gold mine, ten minutes after midnight, Chilean time, everyone cheered and applauded. I couldn't help myself. From another hemisphere, another time zone, I too clapped and cried for The 33.
Los treinta y tres—a fortuitous number in Latin American history—the equivalent of freedom—the 33 liberators of Uruguay, Jesus's age, and his 33 miracles. But this is indeed a story of miracles. Though I suspect Roger Ebert would take umbrage over my fast and loose use of the word miracle or milagro. Mea culpea. And he's right. But I love the sound of miracle in Spanish. Let's just say it was a miracle of technology and tenacious know-how.
I don't have TV & it blows my mind that I can watch in real time this Chilean rescue mission. Amidst a covey of balloons against a backdrop of inkdark lapis Chilean sky, a tinabulation of church bells and the braying of zuzuzuelas, or Genesis alarms, on CNN, they're saying their minds are blown… All our minds are blown. And it's a full-blown media circus—imagine 2-3000 media hounds at full bay. Though the media is literally being held at bay some 300 feet from the emerging miners, I can hear fragments of nasal American English twang rising over the din. Izzat Larry King?
The first miner to be rescued, "Florencio Ávalos came back to us on the 13th day of the 10th month of the 10th year of the decade —which adds up to 33," President
Sebastián Piñera said. It's also the numerical equivalent of AMEN: 1+13+5+14=33.
Saturday, June 15, 2002
On Writing & Dreams
Have you ever had the experience of making mental notes to say this or that to someone, something terribly important (or at least half-way intelligible) and in their presence, despite best intentions, you turn featherbrained on yourself, betrayed by a cheesecloth-that-stands-for memory/mind: whatever thoughts you had, driven clean out of your head, only to re-emerge at the oddest hours—say, at 5 AM, in a strange flat (and country) not your own—even the cats have deserted you because your tossing and turning like a crazed narwhal reminds them of the bilious sea, and water is not their favorite subject, unless fish are involved.
(As the actress Tallulah Bankhead said, I nevah drink the watah, dahling, fish fhuck in it. By the time it reached the sanitized public, it was "piss" versus "fuck". As if piss were preferable to fucking. Tell me why San Francisco society was not ready for that Anglo-Saxon word. My first and only opera I attended, there she was in a peacock sequined gown, Tallulah brandishing a cigarette holder longer than her arm, speaking in a sotto voice that carried across the marble lobby and into the streets. Fresh from the hills, I was wide-eyed in amazement, but that’s another story.)
This mental indulgence exacerbated by bad cramps tempered with aspirin, cognac—one gets these images of wheels spinning in the muddied ruts in the backroads of the mind, ends up having entire one-sided conversations that never actually reach their intended victims. I’m a lousy correspondent—either dead silence for years, or a series of volumous ramblings like this one. Nocturnal epistolic documents, personal essays produced under duress by the obsessive urge to write. An unwillingness to let go.
Ah, one could say, self-indulgence is a fine thing, as long as it goes no farther than the page but essays demand an audience, that’s the other half of the Faustian pact. The monks had it right: indulgences. These, my indulgences—not poems (too self-absorbed and convoluted), but poet’s work.
Practice for scholarly glosses in the margins of what may later become a poem (if one is lucky).
I like Brodsky’s attitude on writing and the personal essay: A man of my occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking. He elaborates that a writer is caught up by the relentless centrifugal nature of language. . . . where . . . ambivalence and open-endedness as the essence of [the poets’] endeavor.
This of verbal excess began in earnest when I had a Ukrainian boyfriend. Suffice to say, in 1989 letters rarely reached their intended destination, the KGB (or NKVD or NVKD—they were forever changing their acronym every decade or so, but not their technique, their headquarters, the Lubiyanka, cold solemn stone fortress/oubliette in the krasnaya heart of Moscow) working overtime to intercept love letters complicated by poetry between the sheets of Soviets and Americans.
So we wrote everything in a gonzo journalistic fashion, in triplicate, mailing one copy, sending the others via “couriers.” (Yes, our mail was opened.) I met many Russian couriers traveling to the USA, I received mail postmarked from all the cities of the free world, or got late night calls from homesick Russian friends of friends wanting to talk with someone—anyone who'd been there—a sort of sympathetic magic. The friends system was amazingly good.
Luckily, there were many Russian delegations traveling back and forth because of the efforts of people like William Mandel, a NPR radio commentator, Armand Hammer, the baking soda king, and the stuffed toy animal king, Henry Daiken. They all were couriers for me, they allowed me to stay in touch, to communicate with my Soviet lover—who now lives in New York and shared afternoon coffees with Josip Brodsky—who gave his Nobel money away to struggling Russians.
Strange offerings I received from people I didn't even know from Mother Russia—pre-revolutionary peasant dresses, coral & amber necklaces, USSR army watches, belts and pins. The Russians sent things of value to the west to raise valuta to buy an airline ticket out, or to pay for delivering packets and letters.
Once I flew back from St. Petersburg smuggling out dozens of letters, lacy silver spoons and tea glass holders, and more US currency than I arrived with, I was afraid I would get caught red-handed, so to speak. A counter-counter-revolutionary of sorts, I said No when they handed me an old icon. Ironically, I’d smuggled in as much money from Russians working in California for their families to live on; a thousand dollars was worth more than a year’s salary in Russia.
I chased elusive dreams to distant countries specifically because they were off limits, I purposefully slept with the enemy because in 5th grade I learned of a mythical Russia with troikas in the snow, in love with horses, I couldn’t let go of the image, and little did I know it was somehow tied to the frozen canals of Holland—Hans Brinker’s mythical silver skates—
I lived in St. Petersburg one winter, small patches of ice-free water beneath the bridges relentlessly patrolled by the ducks who knew: to let go of the open pond was to die. Friends are everything in Russia; without them survival is impossible. On the Field of Mars I stood overlooking the converted palaces, children sledding down the steps, and really, it was no different than here in Amsterdam.
Only later I learned Tzar Peter modeled St. Petersburg after this city we now inhabit. That inhabits us and our writing. Czaar Peterstraat and the birth of the Russian Navy. Amsterdam was his window to the west.
Of course, I’d be sentenced to spend time here looking out these windows, letting go of the myths, only to reinvent them in the poem. I perversely learn history through the back door, as a traveler in search of some elusive mystery. For what reason? Why do we write, and who for?
I need that reassurance of the personal conviction as testimonial. For poetry makes us whores— it is a relentless, unforgiving mistress. I’ve found myself in unusual circumstances for the sake of poetry. I’m merely the scribe.
And this Celtic insensibility—of course I skirt the issues, isn’t that Celtic nature, the Gordian knot? The muse comes in strange forms I no longer question. And so dawn nudges the trams into play, here, as in Russia, still I can’t sleep, but soon oblivion will find me like all the rest.
The cats are semi colons at the foot of my bed: I dream of people before I meet them. Crazy? A good Cartesian response to the unmeasurable. I know craziness second-hand, my mother’s indulgements influenced by the drug-induced ’60s & ’70s.
Then, my grandmother spent her free time wandered about the house muttering Cromwell; the Anglo Saxons & Jutes. The sassanach, she spat. When I was a child, I thought they were swearwords. I knew they were bad, very bad, that I mustn’t forget my history. And so when I recognize “kin” so far from home, I am overwhelmed. There’s a word for it: anim chara (soul/heart friend).
I don’t want to “make” precognitive dreams come true. Once I went to great lengths to try to change them. To my horror, the circumlocutions were also part of the dreaming cycle. If anything, I err in being too passive, waiting for them to unfold, & then wonder what the (fuck the) significance is. It’s not like a storyline, it’s a series of isolated moments, that upon waking, I sometimes mistakenly string them together into a narrative thus confusing the picture.
Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine:
people live in one another’s shadows.
I didn’t get a chance to tell you I dreamed I had to memorise 5 lines in Welsh—it was all a jumble of sounds, with no images to hang onto. I no sooner got one line down when it forced out the one preceding it, and so on through the night. I can’t even begin to pronounce the Welsh, I barely know the rules of Irish. I awoke with the cadence.
Pay attention to the rhythms. Teachers come in the most surprising forms. Poetry is a two-way mirror. The inside looking out. The outside looking in. You have to be ready to reassemble the pieces, wrote David Meltzer.
Once Vins and I went to Louven in Belgium where he went to University to study philosophy. Wandering the city, we stumbled upon an arch with Old Irish enscribed on the lintel. To my surprise, I was able to decipher it. . . perhaps one of the few visitors able to do so in the past several hundred years. A college founded by Irish monks in the so-called Dark Ages. And here we are, archaic sentinels from a culture (and languages) on the verge of extinction for nearly as many centuries. And we’ve so rudely taken a long time dyin’ at that.
How does one come to terms with: Cenedl heb raith; cenedl heb galon (a nation without a language; a nation without a heart).
I prefer phrases like Tá grá agam ort or Yr wyf yn du garu to the names of war.
Glamour, corrupted from grammar, this rough magic by which we strike. It’s in the blood. The dark, threatening sky. Again.
As I watched the stairs, I remembered subject/ object/ verb, but not the details—like inside vs. outside. I got to WH Smith bookstore 10 minutes early, I went downstairs 5 or 10 after 3, but didn’t think to go outside, and there he was out there all the time standing in the rain. I sat in the bay window, the rain falling, thinking Paul had gone home first, and got caught up in something. The story of star crossed lovers stood up by a miscommunication, the clock kept chiming the quarter hours with a vengeance.
What I recall of Ted Hughes’ animal poems in Thought Fox, I liked very much—especially the one about the horses. I need recommendations to “get” a particular poet. Maybe it’s because I’ve never “gotten” his voice in the small bits of anthologised poetry I’ve read in Norton, etc.
Of course, at the time (early 1980s), feminists were blaming him for Sylvia’s death. . . I was still new to poetry. So much to learn. . . In context to Ted’s poems, Heaney’s seemed a bit flat, but I was already familiar with many of the poems.
Some poems take their own time coming in.
© Maureen Hurley 2002. A shorter version/ variation of this piece, Anim Chara, takes the form of the epistilary letter—actually a confluence of two posts to Walo Rojas, Chilean poet, and to Paul Evans, Welsh poet and translator. The original piece dates back to 1996 when I was living in Amsterdam, after participating in the Poetry International festival. Amsterdam is very much a dreamlike city. For years, I repeatedly dreamed of the canals of Amsterdam, long before I ever went there. It was already part of my dream psyche, only I always thought the shining city of light was San Francisco with weird mantle clock houses. I was shocked to recognize the place of my dreams in Amsterdam.
(As the actress Tallulah Bankhead said, I nevah drink the watah, dahling, fish fhuck in it. By the time it reached the sanitized public, it was "piss" versus "fuck". As if piss were preferable to fucking. Tell me why San Francisco society was not ready for that Anglo-Saxon word. My first and only opera I attended, there she was in a peacock sequined gown, Tallulah brandishing a cigarette holder longer than her arm, speaking in a sotto voice that carried across the marble lobby and into the streets. Fresh from the hills, I was wide-eyed in amazement, but that’s another story.)
This mental indulgence exacerbated by bad cramps tempered with aspirin, cognac—one gets these images of wheels spinning in the muddied ruts in the backroads of the mind, ends up having entire one-sided conversations that never actually reach their intended victims. I’m a lousy correspondent—either dead silence for years, or a series of volumous ramblings like this one. Nocturnal epistolic documents, personal essays produced under duress by the obsessive urge to write. An unwillingness to let go.
Ah, one could say, self-indulgence is a fine thing, as long as it goes no farther than the page but essays demand an audience, that’s the other half of the Faustian pact. The monks had it right: indulgences. These, my indulgences—not poems (too self-absorbed and convoluted), but poet’s work.
Practice for scholarly glosses in the margins of what may later become a poem (if one is lucky).
I like Brodsky’s attitude on writing and the personal essay: A man of my occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking. He elaborates that a writer is caught up by the relentless centrifugal nature of language. . . . where . . . ambivalence and open-endedness as the essence of [the poets’] endeavor.
This of verbal excess began in earnest when I had a Ukrainian boyfriend. Suffice to say, in 1989 letters rarely reached their intended destination, the KGB (or NKVD or NVKD—they were forever changing their acronym every decade or so, but not their technique, their headquarters, the Lubiyanka, cold solemn stone fortress/oubliette in the krasnaya heart of Moscow) working overtime to intercept love letters complicated by poetry between the sheets of Soviets and Americans.
So we wrote everything in a gonzo journalistic fashion, in triplicate, mailing one copy, sending the others via “couriers.” (Yes, our mail was opened.) I met many Russian couriers traveling to the USA, I received mail postmarked from all the cities of the free world, or got late night calls from homesick Russian friends of friends wanting to talk with someone—anyone who'd been there—a sort of sympathetic magic. The friends system was amazingly good.
Luckily, there were many Russian delegations traveling back and forth because of the efforts of people like William Mandel, a NPR radio commentator, Armand Hammer, the baking soda king, and the stuffed toy animal king, Henry Daiken. They all were couriers for me, they allowed me to stay in touch, to communicate with my Soviet lover—who now lives in New York and shared afternoon coffees with Josip Brodsky—who gave his Nobel money away to struggling Russians.
Strange offerings I received from people I didn't even know from Mother Russia—pre-revolutionary peasant dresses, coral & amber necklaces, USSR army watches, belts and pins. The Russians sent things of value to the west to raise valuta to buy an airline ticket out, or to pay for delivering packets and letters.
Once I flew back from St. Petersburg smuggling out dozens of letters, lacy silver spoons and tea glass holders, and more US currency than I arrived with, I was afraid I would get caught red-handed, so to speak. A counter-counter-revolutionary of sorts, I said No when they handed me an old icon. Ironically, I’d smuggled in as much money from Russians working in California for their families to live on; a thousand dollars was worth more than a year’s salary in Russia.
I chased elusive dreams to distant countries specifically because they were off limits, I purposefully slept with the enemy because in 5th grade I learned of a mythical Russia with troikas in the snow, in love with horses, I couldn’t let go of the image, and little did I know it was somehow tied to the frozen canals of Holland—Hans Brinker’s mythical silver skates—
I lived in St. Petersburg one winter, small patches of ice-free water beneath the bridges relentlessly patrolled by the ducks who knew: to let go of the open pond was to die. Friends are everything in Russia; without them survival is impossible. On the Field of Mars I stood overlooking the converted palaces, children sledding down the steps, and really, it was no different than here in Amsterdam.
Only later I learned Tzar Peter modeled St. Petersburg after this city we now inhabit. That inhabits us and our writing. Czaar Peterstraat and the birth of the Russian Navy. Amsterdam was his window to the west.
Of course, I’d be sentenced to spend time here looking out these windows, letting go of the myths, only to reinvent them in the poem. I perversely learn history through the back door, as a traveler in search of some elusive mystery. For what reason? Why do we write, and who for?
I need that reassurance of the personal conviction as testimonial. For poetry makes us whores— it is a relentless, unforgiving mistress. I’ve found myself in unusual circumstances for the sake of poetry. I’m merely the scribe.
And this Celtic insensibility—of course I skirt the issues, isn’t that Celtic nature, the Gordian knot? The muse comes in strange forms I no longer question. And so dawn nudges the trams into play, here, as in Russia, still I can’t sleep, but soon oblivion will find me like all the rest.
The cats are semi colons at the foot of my bed: I dream of people before I meet them. Crazy? A good Cartesian response to the unmeasurable. I know craziness second-hand, my mother’s indulgements influenced by the drug-induced ’60s & ’70s.
Then, my grandmother spent her free time wandered about the house muttering Cromwell; the Anglo Saxons & Jutes. The sassanach, she spat. When I was a child, I thought they were swearwords. I knew they were bad, very bad, that I mustn’t forget my history. And so when I recognize “kin” so far from home, I am overwhelmed. There’s a word for it: anim chara (soul/heart friend).
I don’t want to “make” precognitive dreams come true. Once I went to great lengths to try to change them. To my horror, the circumlocutions were also part of the dreaming cycle. If anything, I err in being too passive, waiting for them to unfold, & then wonder what the (fuck the) significance is. It’s not like a storyline, it’s a series of isolated moments, that upon waking, I sometimes mistakenly string them together into a narrative thus confusing the picture.
Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine:
people live in one another’s shadows.
I didn’t get a chance to tell you I dreamed I had to memorise 5 lines in Welsh—it was all a jumble of sounds, with no images to hang onto. I no sooner got one line down when it forced out the one preceding it, and so on through the night. I can’t even begin to pronounce the Welsh, I barely know the rules of Irish. I awoke with the cadence.
Pay attention to the rhythms. Teachers come in the most surprising forms. Poetry is a two-way mirror. The inside looking out. The outside looking in. You have to be ready to reassemble the pieces, wrote David Meltzer.
Once Vins and I went to Louven in Belgium where he went to University to study philosophy. Wandering the city, we stumbled upon an arch with Old Irish enscribed on the lintel. To my surprise, I was able to decipher it. . . perhaps one of the few visitors able to do so in the past several hundred years. A college founded by Irish monks in the so-called Dark Ages. And here we are, archaic sentinels from a culture (and languages) on the verge of extinction for nearly as many centuries. And we’ve so rudely taken a long time dyin’ at that.
How does one come to terms with: Cenedl heb raith; cenedl heb galon (a nation without a language; a nation without a heart).
I prefer phrases like Tá grá agam ort or Yr wyf yn du garu to the names of war.
Glamour, corrupted from grammar, this rough magic by which we strike. It’s in the blood. The dark, threatening sky. Again.
As I watched the stairs, I remembered subject/ object/ verb, but not the details—like inside vs. outside. I got to WH Smith bookstore 10 minutes early, I went downstairs 5 or 10 after 3, but didn’t think to go outside, and there he was out there all the time standing in the rain. I sat in the bay window, the rain falling, thinking Paul had gone home first, and got caught up in something. The story of star crossed lovers stood up by a miscommunication, the clock kept chiming the quarter hours with a vengeance.
What I recall of Ted Hughes’ animal poems in Thought Fox, I liked very much—especially the one about the horses. I need recommendations to “get” a particular poet. Maybe it’s because I’ve never “gotten” his voice in the small bits of anthologised poetry I’ve read in Norton, etc.
Of course, at the time (early 1980s), feminists were blaming him for Sylvia’s death. . . I was still new to poetry. So much to learn. . . In context to Ted’s poems, Heaney’s seemed a bit flat, but I was already familiar with many of the poems.
Some poems take their own time coming in.
© Maureen Hurley 2002. A shorter version/ variation of this piece, Anim Chara, takes the form of the epistilary letter—actually a confluence of two posts to Walo Rojas, Chilean poet, and to Paul Evans, Welsh poet and translator. The original piece dates back to 1996 when I was living in Amsterdam, after participating in the Poetry International festival. Amsterdam is very much a dreamlike city. For years, I repeatedly dreamed of the canals of Amsterdam, long before I ever went there. It was already part of my dream psyche, only I always thought the shining city of light was San Francisco with weird mantle clock houses. I was shocked to recognize the place of my dreams in Amsterdam.
Wednesday, September 3, 1997
Anim Chara
The cats formed semi-colons at the foot of my bed: intensity overwhelms those who don’t understand the Celtic temperament. As if it were my fault, I dream of people before I meet them. A good Cartesian response to the unmeasurable.
I know craziness second-hand, my mother’s indulgements—influenced by the drug-induced ’60s & ’70s. Then, my grandmother also spent her free time wandered about the house muttering curses to Cromwell, the Anglo Saxons & Jutes. The sassanach, she spat.
When I was a child, I thought they were swear words. I knew they were bad, very bad, that I mustn’t forget my history. Who we are, where we came from. And when I recognize “kin” so far from home, I am overwhelmed. It’s a rare and pleasurable thing to meet like-minded souls.
At 20, I knew I was different than others. . . I‘ve learned that the doors of perception don’t open for everyone: if so, forgive my trespass. There’s an Irish word for it: anim chara (soul/heart friend).
To sleep, to dream. . . Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine: people live in one another’s shadows. I dreamed I had to memorize 5 lines in Welsh—it was all a jumble of sounds, with no images to hang onto. I no sooner got one line down, when it forced out the one preceding it, and so on through the night. I can’t even begin to pronounce Welsh, I barely know the rules of Irish. I awoke with the cadence of another language in my head. Perhaps this is the Welsh poet Paul Evan’s parting gift to me. Pay attention to the rhythms. Teachers come in the most surprising forms.
Once Vins van Neervan and I went to Leuven in Belgium where he went to University to study philosophy. Wandering Marika's city, we stumbled upon an arch with Old Irish enscribed on the lintel.
To my surprise, I was able to decipher it. . . perhaps one of the few visitors able to do so in the past several hundred years. We found the gates to a college founded by Irish monks in the so-called Dark Ages. And here we are, archaic sentinels from a culture (and languages) on the verge of extinction for nearly as many centuries. And we’ve so rudely taken a long time dyin’ at that.
The Celts are going, the Celts are going at last. Hurrah! Soon a Celt on the streets of Dublin will be as rare as seeing an Indian on the streets of Manhattan.—British Government, ca. 1847.
In my family, we eat sodabread with tea, croon Irish songs when the uisge beatha gets the better of us: Oh the praties they grow small. . .
My grandmother, Jennie (Sínead) Walsh Reilly, never let us forget our history: 1 to 4.5 million dead from the Famine Years. We managed to hold onto our farms: the Walshes, and Sullivans of Bantry—at Coomb an n-Or; Gort na Sgrena; the Reillys and Duffys of Long Kesh, Fioragh and Drogheda on my grandfather’s side.
They came to America in 1919 and 1904, respectively. They were active in the Gaelic League, my grandfather was one of the movers and shakers of the Knights of the Red Branch in San Francisco, the IRA gunrunning story I’ve told before.
When Lord Russell said: the famine is good, teach ’em a lesson, the Choctaw Indian nation collected something to the tune of $212 for food; they sent us maize. Too late. Coffin ships to America. Slavers to the Barbados. From the Celtic Fringe to the Celtic diaspora. All those children sold in slavery: this is why so many Blacks have Irish surnames, blue eyes and freckles.
They say there was enough food in Ireland to feed 20 million. Instead we fed the British with our bones. Their sheep replaced us. But we survived. Sínn Fein: Ourselves, alone, she said, Never forget. Use their language against them, she said.
This, my inheritance. Slainte Gael macushla mo chroidhe. During the famine years, ships filled with Irish cattle and grain sailed for Britain while we died with grass stains on our teeth. Béal na blát: from the mouth of flowers. I am allergic to both corn and potatoes (as well as hazelnuts—the kernel of knowledge).
My father’s history I know very little of: Joseph Hurley from County Cork. There’s a Rebel Cork connection, but my paternal grandmother, Viola Heaney was born in San Francisco. Something about Lace Curtain Irish, that may be a rumor, but I have a sideboard of heavy Irish crystal.
Odd that I might be distantly related to Séamus Heaney. . . At Poetry International in 1993, I told him of this connection, he laughed, called me coozin, giving me a big smacker. We sang Irish songs, lifted our glasses high.
I told him of my grandfather’s IRA connections, I was surprised to learn he knew of my grandfather’s friend Liam Mellows. And of course, Parnell. All this fragmented history, my grandmother literally cursing Cromwell till her dying day.
Something struck me about our having a racial lack of confidence—rang a bell: my grandmother said similar words to that effect. The fighting underdog. I wish I knew more about our Welsh connections, other than Strongbow, and the Norman Invasion: Hibernius ipsis Hiberniores.
My grandmother maintained we got the name Walsh because we came from Wales—what, 1000 years ago? A bit distant. My great-grandfather Michael Walsh raised fast horses, drove cattle between bonfires at Lúgnasadh to ensure fertility. Ironically Walsh/Welsh means foreigner in the Germanic, wealas. An Anglo Saxon appellation?
One of Alexander of Macedonia’s generals during negotiation of a peace treaty, queried a Celtic chieftain: What do Celts fear most? The Gaul replied in formal address: That the sky should fall upon our heads.
Slogan: sluagh garim, a Celtic battle cry, furor is to blood-summon. How does one come to terms with: Cenedl heb raith; cenedl heb galon (a nation without a language; a nation without a heart). I prefer phrases like Tá grá agam ort or Yr wyf yn du garu to the names of war. Glamour, corrupted from grammar, this rough magic by which we strike. It’s in the blood. The dark, threatening sky. Again.
My anim is Maureen/Little Mairi/Mara/Maura (bitter herbs or small rebellion) not the more common Muire (mother of God). I prefer my crib-Irish: she of the sea.
Mor could be translated as great, or muir/ sea, depending on the fada. The Mórríghan is great goddess of the sea. Rí is royalty. The shapechanger war goddess Morrigu isn’t exactly milquetoast, there are others I’d prefer to emulate. At least she doesn’t lie.
© 1997? Maureen Hurley (Originally a letter poem to the Chilean poet Waldo Rojas Serreno)
Friday, July 12, 1996
Amsterdam journal: train to Vlissingen 7/12
12 July
Finally I am on the 11 AM slow train to Vlissingen. I missed the 10 AM express train because my rail active pass fell out of my pocket. I had already taking the tram to the train station and then had to walk back, retracing my steps. The rail pass was in the toilet, having fallen out of my pocket. I knew it couldn't be in the street. Small grace.
But I'm terribly grumpy having missed the 10 AM train. Now I'll get into Vlissingen around 1:30 PM. I'm annoyed because the Vlissingen train ticket is 40 guilders. And I've wasted several hours already. I was planning to stay half the day at Wim Hofman”s, but luckily, during the height of summer, daylight lasts until 10:30 PM at night.
A business man in the next seat is permanently attached to his cell phone. I'm having visions of snatching it from him and stomping on it after he receives his fourth call in as many minutes. I can't blame my period for my vexation, perhaps I can blame my circadian rhythms. I was up until 6:30 AM the day before, and then sleeping until 1 PM, and then I was up at 8 AM today. Certainly, I'm a bit out of sorts.
Unfortunately I know what the problem is, I'm preoccupied with a certain Welsh poet who is 13 years my junior, and I'm trying to hold onto my attachment to Waldo, to keep from getting involved. If I'm this preoccupied, is he? Is this a mutual attraction? Or I am I completely out of my mind?
How come I never fall madly in love in the states and only on the road? Aside from the obvious usual fear of commitment, what else is different about me that I attract men outside of my own world? Also, poetry is my world, whether I'm in the Netherlands, or in California. I'm also uneasy about the fact that I seem to fall only for poets. Of course, I only hang out with poets, so that could explain some of it.
Amsterdam Journal: wrong dream 7/12
Being attracted to both Chilean poet Waldo Rojas and to Welsh poet Paul Evans is not a mutually exclusive process. I'm just not used to it. No sooner did I say goodbye to Waldo, did I meet Paul, with only two days respite in between. I met Paul at my reading at the Hotel Winston on Monday, the 24th. Charles McGeehan knows him, and I wouldn't even have come across his work, had I not gone to the reading, even though I”m collecting poems for the Mother Earth News issue.
But to meet the man first had a significant impact upon me. Each time I see Paul, it gets harder and harder to put him out of my mind. There is a moment frozen in memory where as he drank the orange juice offered, the long summer light illuminating his face, and we really looked into each other's eyes for an unguarded moment. I remember the green flecks among the brown, and his eyes, so like my own.
And I began to realize as we talked, he too was in my dreams before I came to the Netherlands. Only I mistook him for my brother. I kept thinking it was odd that my brother had a full head of hair and that there was such a sexual undercurrent. Not very comfortable. Ewww. I never been interested in my brother ever. And I couldn't seem to banish that element from the dream.
There's just enough age difference between Paul and I to keep a safe distance, to borrow a term, we”re good mates. My brother and I are closer in age, growing up. I put the man in the dream to be about age 28 and Paul is 30.
It was at the Hotel Winston Kingdom last Monday night, that the pieces began to fall into place. Our host and emcee Jacek Nichs introduced us. I need to look up the dream now but I do remember having a row with him in the dream about love, and he was chewing me out because I turned him down. And I was confused and devastated thinking it was my brother which didn't help I'm sure.
But then I wondered how does the identity process come upon in the waking world? What made me decide he was my brother in the dream? The way he looked? During the dream who was he? Did I use brother as a placeholder for whom I didn't know?
When I told Paul that he was in my dreams before I had met him, he didn't seem particularly alarmed saying that his mother and sisters were into the occult. He grew up with an Ouija board and séances.
I said this had nothing to do with the occult, I dream of the future. Precognition. It's an Irish trait, I don't particularly like it, it makes me uneasy, but that doesn't stop the dreams from happening. I told him I also dream of catastrophic events before they happen. The Challenger explosion, the Bijlmer plane wreck etc.
He laughed and said just don't tell me that I'm going to die, or something awful like that. I replied, no it has nothing it was nothing awful. I just don't remember the details. Now I'll have to look up the dream. Not wanting to give away anything in case I might sway or force the dream, I let it play out.
As he reached for his bag and leather jacket hanging from the closet door I passed close by him, marveling at his height. I never realized it before. That growing awareness of the other. Didn't give him ideas sitting on my bed like that? I was trying to act nonchalant sitting cross-legged as we typed up poems.
With both Paul and Waldo I am so at ease. Why can't I find someone like that in the states? I know that both are observing me constantly but I don't mind. Paul comments again that I'm hyperactive. I say coffee makes me even more so, I'm self-conscious about it, saying I'm trying to control it. I wonder what poems will come of it? If any?
Thursday, July 11, 1996
Amsterdam Journal: La Diaspora poets
La Diaspora poets and exiled expatriates.
Today I met with Colombian poet, Annabel Torres at the Café Français. I am collecting poems in translation for our Poets in Exile issue for Herman Berlandt.
I had trouble with waking up as Vins came over about 12 AM and didn't leave until 6 AM. Earlier I had fixed dinner for Paul Evans and had some wine. And he's on painkillers for an extracted wisdom teeth and can't drink. He did have one small glass however.
With Vins drinking coffee, I decided on some wine, but it wasn't until the last glass, that he joined me, and we got pretty snookered talking of philosophy and dialectical models. If a butterfly flapping its wings over Mexico causes a storm in China, you damn well better kill the butterfly, glibs Vins.
We tease and punt, catching up on three years, a long absence. It's odd how we can't stop talking. Beneath it all, we are truly friends. I propose to him that we make a bilingual poetry book to use his translations.
Annabel Torres says that translators get paid 80 guilders an hour, and they're only allowed to work 40 minutes at a time. And she said the simultaneous translation with two other people is the hardest kind of translation to do. And I thought of my stint translating for Waldo and Robert, I thought my head was going to explode.
People say Vins' translations of my poems are very good and this pleases him. He gets little feedback from the world. Especially with these translations. Sometimes I think he would like to do more of it. We got in a good visit. Cause and effect equals synthesis. And something on dialectics.
Earlier I was floating on air, grinning away because of Waldo's postcard, running errands because Paul was going to be here at 6 PM. Paul brought a huge whipped cream cake with fruit. I don't think anyone's ever done that for me, brought me a cake. And we had dinner, salad, couscous and steak. Moving the table around until it suited us. I think we're looking more and more into each other's eyes, and I find his presence hard to shake after he leaves.
Unfortunately I have no control when I dream of him, and here I am trying to be like an older sister, because he's only 30, and I'm 43. I think nothing of being a man 13 years my senior. But the other way around is a whole 'nother paradigm. It's a bit more ticklish and we're such an ageist society. I keep telling myself there's nothing going on, like with Waldo. Yeah, right. Or, I'm just imagining things. A fertile, overactive imagination.
Come to find out it wasn't quite so. There's a bit of a titillation going on. I'm feeling torn, entertaining two men in rapid succession like that, but Waldo's married, and gone, so the letters and flirtation are for the long-term memory banks. We will see where it goes, if anywhere. We're mates, Paul calls me a good bloke, I call him dude.
And with Paul, ach! the model is similar. We see each other every two or three days. I'm to go to his place on Saturday. Nothing untoward happens, or will it. We went for a long walk after dinner to Ouderkirk aan de Amstel, a village tower on the Amstel River, near Amstelveen, talking about everything under the sun. Especially the Celtic stuff.
Paul tells me how to pronounce Welsh words, and reads me his poem in a low voice, lounging on the bed. We are frozen in time. I just wanted to lie down with him, so easily seduced by love poems.
I typed up one poem on the computer for the upcoming exile issue. And he had to go to Jacek Nichs's birthday party at 10, but stayed until 11 PM anyway. I suppose I could've gone with him, but I really wasn't up for it, and didn't know if that would be pushing my luck. Sleep is not overrated.
Today I met with Colombian poet, Annabel Torres at the Café Français. I am collecting poems in translation for our Poets in Exile issue for Herman Berlandt.
I had trouble with waking up as Vins came over about 12 AM and didn't leave until 6 AM. Earlier I had fixed dinner for Paul Evans and had some wine. And he's on painkillers for an extracted wisdom teeth and can't drink. He did have one small glass however.
With Vins drinking coffee, I decided on some wine, but it wasn't until the last glass, that he joined me, and we got pretty snookered talking of philosophy and dialectical models. If a butterfly flapping its wings over Mexico causes a storm in China, you damn well better kill the butterfly, glibs Vins.
We tease and punt, catching up on three years, a long absence. It's odd how we can't stop talking. Beneath it all, we are truly friends. I propose to him that we make a bilingual poetry book to use his translations.
Annabel Torres says that translators get paid 80 guilders an hour, and they're only allowed to work 40 minutes at a time. And she said the simultaneous translation with two other people is the hardest kind of translation to do. And I thought of my stint translating for Waldo and Robert, I thought my head was going to explode.
People say Vins' translations of my poems are very good and this pleases him. He gets little feedback from the world. Especially with these translations. Sometimes I think he would like to do more of it. We got in a good visit. Cause and effect equals synthesis. And something on dialectics.
Earlier I was floating on air, grinning away because of Waldo's postcard, running errands because Paul was going to be here at 6 PM. Paul brought a huge whipped cream cake with fruit. I don't think anyone's ever done that for me, brought me a cake. And we had dinner, salad, couscous and steak. Moving the table around until it suited us. I think we're looking more and more into each other's eyes, and I find his presence hard to shake after he leaves.
Unfortunately I have no control when I dream of him, and here I am trying to be like an older sister, because he's only 30, and I'm 43. I think nothing of being a man 13 years my senior. But the other way around is a whole 'nother paradigm. It's a bit more ticklish and we're such an ageist society. I keep telling myself there's nothing going on, like with Waldo. Yeah, right. Or, I'm just imagining things. A fertile, overactive imagination.
Come to find out it wasn't quite so. There's a bit of a titillation going on. I'm feeling torn, entertaining two men in rapid succession like that, but Waldo's married, and gone, so the letters and flirtation are for the long-term memory banks. We will see where it goes, if anywhere. We're mates, Paul calls me a good bloke, I call him dude.
And with Paul, ach! the model is similar. We see each other every two or three days. I'm to go to his place on Saturday. Nothing untoward happens, or will it. We went for a long walk after dinner to Ouderkirk aan de Amstel, a village tower on the Amstel River, near Amstelveen, talking about everything under the sun. Especially the Celtic stuff.
Paul tells me how to pronounce Welsh words, and reads me his poem in a low voice, lounging on the bed. We are frozen in time. I just wanted to lie down with him, so easily seduced by love poems.
I typed up one poem on the computer for the upcoming exile issue. And he had to go to Jacek Nichs's birthday party at 10, but stayed until 11 PM anyway. I suppose I could've gone with him, but I really wasn't up for it, and didn't know if that would be pushing my luck. Sleep is not overrated.
Amsterdam Journal: postcard from Waldo 7/11
July 11
Finally I received a card from Waldo and it takes some time for me to decode the written Spanish. He wrote (in Spanish):
I was very happy to receive your letter. You need time to consult the dictionary, but now with the visual contact of your writing, the magic of the words, the written words exist. I was glad to know you and I can figure it out. The moments we had together, they were few, but very intense. I will write more later, but for now, a large kiss from Paris.
Tenderly,
Waldo
I have never been to Paris. Perhaps this is as close as I'll ever get to the City of Light.
Waldo Rojas-Serrano (drawing)
Tuesday, July 9, 1996
Amsterdam Journal: Poetry International recap 7/9
Tuesday, July 9,
Small memories are flooding the morning's writing, Waldo Rojas and I waltzed to calliope music in the streets of Schoenhaven while Jules Deelder, the Night Mayor of Rotterdam, Simon Vinkenoog and the venerable Judith Hertzberg applaud, both they, and Miroslav Holub shower thin Dutch dimes down upon us like wedding rice, from the stone steps. We collect enough for a beer or two.
I curtsied, saying in my broadest Irish accent, Oh thank you kind sir. Simon, who is Holland's last hippie, asked me to remember him to Larry Ferlinghetti. Is City Lights still there? He asks. Of course, I laugh. I will give him your regards.
June 22
At dinner, I sat across from Seamus Heaney, telling them about my grandfather and Liam Mellows, whom he knew of. Seamus told me a story of going to a Catholic school in northern Ireland, making a Protestant reference. I queried, how did you wind up in a Catholic school? Because I'm Catholic, he replied, once more cracking the cap on the whiskey bottle.
I told Seamus of my grandfather's gun-running and of Eamonn De Valera and Liam Mellows visiting us. He said, You've got a rare bit of history there. And urged me to write it down.
Waldo, who was seated beside me, was silent. Of course, Seamus and I were speaking in English. Sometimes I translated, but I was often neglectful. Georges Lory, Breyten Breytenbach's translator, a cultural attaché who lives in Ghent, sat across from Waldo but they spoke a little, only having French in common. And when they spoke, I was excluded. We had not one common tongue at the table. There's gotta a poem embedded in that thought.
Waldo left early to go upstairs, and I let him go ahead, busy talking with Seamus whom I hadn't seen in over three years and then only briefly.
At Poetry International I started to follow Waldo who had asked me to join him, but he was so distant. Already I could feel him pulling away. I saw him at the credit phone, I could tell by his stance that he was calling his wife, shedding the adulterer's skin. I stopped, hesitated, and doubled back, and grabbed an after dinner coffee with Mairi, Seamus's wife. Letting him go.
I looked over the room of poets, saying my goodbyes too, and what an extraordinary two weeks it has been. This crazy tribe that I belong to. Geert van Istendael (whose real name is at least five names long) and I had a mini Celtic caucus. He is a wild Belgian Celt. By the coffee pot we concluded that the Celtic nation was alive and well and partying in this room.
I let Waldo finish his call, and then followed him up to the Klein Hall, the hospitality room. Many poets were already saying their last goodbyes. And after the final reading of our work, translating Breyten Breytenbach, we gathered in the hallowed room, a cathedral of sorts, where we all had worked so hard, as if afraid to break the spell, though there was a band, and a party in the foyer waiting for us.
Waldo left me alone in the room, and went dancing, probably with Mariolijn, the translator. She seemed quite attached to him on several occasions, perhaps caring more for him, than he did for her. I don't think they were lovers in the past. But one never knows. Not my worry.
We roasted our host, and Poetry International founder Martin Mooij on his retirement etc., toasting the end of an era.
South African poet Dynana Kukama, from Botswana, dragged me onto the table-top to do a Xhosan song that she taught me, I learned it during a drunken evening, a few nights previously. We sang it, replete with the accompanying clicks, and tribal dance movements.A floorshow.
Siya nibonga okuba nathi (2x)
ni phumile makhaya nazoba nathi (2x)
na hlala nathi (to sit)
na xoxa nathi (to talk)
na blega nathi (to love)
na dhlala nathi (to play)
Siya nibonga okuba nathi (2x with a different melody line)
Thank you for what we have
you have left home with us
stay with us
talk to us
love us
play with us
Thank you for what we have
I'm not very good at Bantu click languages (Setswana, or Xhosa - Tswana), it's an interesting trick of the tongue to be able breathe out, sing, and click in the back of the throat, without drowning in saliva, but it was a gift to Martin and we had a good time.
Afterwards people came up to me saying, You have such a lovely voice. You could have another career singing. Or, I didn't know you could move your body like that, such wild dancing. Waldo missed it all, of course.
And I spent the rest of my time talking with Seamus. I gave him a copy of my Poem for Sarah along with some artwork of mine. And he gave me three resounding kisses goodbye in the European fashion. And then one extra big smacker on the lips—for a fellow countryman. Calls me cousin (my grandmother was a Heaney), and says goodbye.
I talked with Mexican poet, Homero Aradjis who brought me up to date on El Grupo de los Cien, The Group of 100, an organization and ecological organization that he had founded. I told him I had seen his name in the SF Chronicle a few months back in connection to logging and the destruction of the monarch butterfly habitat.
Homero said that is very frustrated because he can't seem to get much news coverage. He said that NBC, or CBS and came over and taped him, four hours worth of coverage, and then didn't use any of the footage. His program was bumped US news, something in Iowa.
We brainstormed a bit and I said to catch the US media's attention, you've got to make it relevant to the US, like tying to the butterfly trees of Bolinas. I also mentioned a friend of mine, John Knox, and Earth Island Institute, whom he also knew.
Homero felt that the US media was afraid to report on Mexican ecological issues, and of course, he's completely blacklisted, media-wise in Mexico. We talked about the dangers involved. He said, Sometimes I fear for my life, but I have to believe in the purity of the animals I am trying to protect. The energy of the whales and the butterflies. I offer cosmic energy to protect him to reinstill energy for the cause.
I told Homero I used several of his poems (the Canadian translations), in the classroom to talk about extinction, and unanswerable questions. I also used Neruda's questions. Homero, who is half Greek, said his last name was from the Arabic, his mother is Mexican, his father fled from Tyre, so he is an oddysey of many worlds and epochs.
Eventually Waldo returned, saying, Let's go. But I wanted to dance, and he wanted to walk me home. I knew we weren't to spend the night together as I had hoped, we both had to pack, but I wish he was a bit more out of control. That he'd just let go.
Waldo grumbled that he wasn't into ecology, not like what Homero is doing. I don't think he likes Homero very much. I asked him if he didn't care about ecology, or the extinction of species, etc. He said, No it wasn't that, it was the politics. I said that I admired Homero, and the work he's doing, and if not him, then who? How? What is our real job as poets?
Nota bene: All my conversations with Waldo are in Spanish, so this is a paraphrased translation. It wasn't quite a tiff, but it was a disagreement that fell away when we got to my room. I gave him a souvenir T-shirt, Alcatraz Sleep Team, or something like that.
And he began kissing me on the bed. When he fell back among the pillows with glasses skewed, shirt awry, he looked so defenceless. I realized it was all a façade. I took them from him, and he was helpless before me. I touched him, asking if he wanted me. Si, he said weakly, and we stripped off our clothes, turned off the light, and proceeded to squeak the springs on the narrow twin bed.
Waldo was wildly holding me, grabbing my hair, grunting my name, Mau-rin, Mau-rin, Mau-rin. I burst into tears, realizing that he was trying so hard to be civilized about it all. we had unleashed more than what we had bargained for. He wanted no long drawn out goodbye scenes, but he got it anyway. I wasn't about to be cheated of that.
Waldo is one of those rare man who can get it up a second time, replete with a second orgasm. We were on round two, when poor Herman Berlandt banged on the door, wanting to go to bed (we were roommates). It was more like a comedy of errors, we were caught inflagrante delicto, madly scrambling for our clothes, grabbing all the wrong ones by mistake. Tossing them to each other, And I kept saying, Give us five minutes! Give us five minutes! As poor old Herman grumbled in the hallway.
I answered the door with as much dignity as I could, with my sweater inside out and backwards, wearing little more than it, and my jeans, I couldn't find my underwear. Herman shuffled off to bed grumbling. It was a long night for him. Being stuck out in the corridor while we dallied didn't help.
As I walked Waldo to the elevator, I couldn't believe how calm and dignified he seemed, as if nothing untoward had happened when I opened the door, while I looked fully the part of a wild ravaged woman, my hair was a frothy Medusine mantle of passionate embraces. Does he do this sort of thing often?
Waldo stepped into the elevator facing me, and repeated, No tears, no goodbyes. The mirrored walls of the elevator reflected my face, and my tragic response, so that I could see myself simultaneously as he saw me. For once, I was wildly beautiful, standing barefoot in that hotel hall, with a crushed tuberose dangling from my ear, in the gardenia-scented night.
And Waldo was carefully stepping back into his Parisian mode. I was the wild Celt who stirred his blood one midsummer's eve, but now it was time to leave.Rejoin the world. He did leave me his address. And I did write it down. But I never expected to hear from him again.
Apparently Waldo called at Charles McGeehan's flat a few days ago, now the shoe on the other foot. He leaves his wife in Paris to sneak off and call his lover who waits for him in Amsterdam. But I never received that message that he called me until afterwards. I wonder how he and Charles got on over the phone? Waldo's spoken English is almost nonexistent. And I'm not sure Charles even speaks French. Dutch, yes.
I send my second letter to Waldo yesterday with my new address and number. So far, though Charles gave him my new number, there was no call. Every time the phone downstairs rings, I think it's him. But the upstairs phone remains deathly silent. By tomorrow, or rather today, he should have received my letter. Then round two begins—meaning where do we go from here? Or is there nothing more? Did the calliope music stop?
I am stirring up his life a bit, I think. Perhaps he has gotten too comfortable in his bourgeois existence, teaching the history of history at the Sorbonne. A man dressed in varying shades of grey. In a sense, I'm from his world, the New World, even if he left it in 1973. Waldo is a French citizen having lived in Paris nearly 25 years. That's nearly half of his life, but he still calls himself Chilean.
I had to simultaneously translate a conversationfrom Robert Dorsman (Breyten Breytenbach's translator), to Waldo. Luckily, I knew enough about Waldo to fill in the missing gaps. It was funny, because while I was being Waldo's ad hoc translator, he waited expectantly, trusting me to unlock the veiled the prison of language, as did Robert. Their combined energy focused their attention on me like a laser, as if I possessed a rare thing—with my poor Spanish. I got so nervous, I became tongue-tied. But we were among friends. Not like with Dmitri Prigov.
Several times I had explained and translated something that was said in English to Waldo, but that was in private. This was different, a public forum. I literally was the only other Spanish-speaking person in the entire room.
Of course, they could've used French with another person as an intermediary, so communication wasn't impossible. But I thrived in that moment, I was a linguistic bridge between two people. How many times has it been done for me, the gift of translation? It's not easy to do. And when you get out of synch, you wind up speaking the wrong language to both parties.
More than once, I caught Breyten looking appraisingly over at us, perhaps listening in. At that point. I no longer felt like an imposter, I was truly one of the group and I belong here.
Earlier Waldo and I were at the magazine table, and I was trying to explain something to him, intent on my language skills, how our bodies, and faces move differently in other idioms. When we speak Spanish, we move closer into the circle. In English we are at arms-length. At this point, it was obvious to all, there was more than between us than a passing flirtation.
Breyten's publisher, Francis Galloway, from Durban, came over, and said, You two look like a French painting. And then I wondered how we looked to the others in the room, carrying out a clandestine relationship in a language that only we understood. Is Waldo's wife French? Did I awaken the younger man from South America, and not the Parisian sophistocate?
He says I am O'Brien, Rojas-Serrano, I am Basque, I am Spanish, I am Mapuche Lincoyán, Aracuña (a tribal leader?). He is Chilean, born in in Concepción,
Waldo's father, a university professor, was executed, while he was in Paris giving a reading. The military coup of September 11, 1973 forced him into exile. He never returned to his homeland, and now his mother is dead. What else was there to do but to flee the country of his birth? In this, the Irish blood in him, and the Spanish blood, returned home to Europe, but what of the Indio? In Paris?
Have I, with my wild irish blood, pierced his heart, that poor weakened heart? Every day he lives on the other side of his heart attack, rescued from death, he's not exactly on borrowed time, but has a revitalized awareness of time, who he is, and where he is going.
One of the few things he said to me in English was, I don't care about money. In contrast to what? Reviewing his life? Or a general statement. And applecart I disrupted? I wonder if he will write of me. Or remember me. He gives me a signed copy of his book, Poesía continua. Yes, it does.
Another dream fragment comes resurfacing as I write these lines, I dreamed about my writing these very same lines, and analyzing his character etc. or having another chance to compare himself to my study of him. There is always more to come, contrary to what we might think. And I remember telling him of the dreams, and he asked, How can you tell the dreams and reality apart? Perhaps the dream is real and reality is just the dream.
In Neruda's Book of Questions, the first page I opened to was:
42
Who was she who made love to you
in your dream, while you slept?
Where do the things in dreams go?
Do they pass to the dreams of others?
And does the father who lives in your dreams
die again when you awaken?
In dreams, do plants blossom
and their solemn fruit ripening?
Quien era aquella que te amo
en el sueño, cuando dormias?
Donde van las cosas del sueño?
Se van al sueno de los otros?
Y el padre que vive en los sueños
vuelve a morir cuando despiertas?
Florecen las plantas del sueño
y maduran sus graves frutos?
tr. William O'Daly, 1991
Copper Canyon Press
And I still haven't written about Breyten Breytenbach, and his praise for me, and my work. I didn't know Afrikaans, so I transliterated his work, and he said it was more spot on, that what the eminent translators, including Miroslav Holub, and Edoardo Sanguineti, came up with, how, when he hugged me goodbye, I blushed like a schoolgirl.
Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove and I were definitely on the outskirts of that eminent circle, as none of us speak Afrikaans. So we coffee-klatched it a bit. However, I was determined to get something and treated it like a CPITS writing assignment, Juan Felipe Herrera once gave me making fake translations of Rilke. Francis Galloway, of Van Schaik Publishers, South Africa, wanted to use my translations in an upcoming collection of Breytenbach's.
Nor have I recorded Zein al-Abidine Fouad's extraordinary story working among the outcast women of Egypt who worked in the garbage pits, and how he brought guerilla theater to them, and changed a society. I was so caught up in living in within the moment, I never got a chance to record the event itself. My plate was so full so to speak. Perhaps photos will help to jog my memory, later, and give me reason to write about the many poets I met.
I also have a cryptic note about Irish short story writer, Seán Ó Faoláin, who died in 1991, and Homero Aradjis, I don't know what it means. Forever lost. Perhaps Seamus was urging me to read his work about the Easter Uprising. Or perhaps Homero was telling me to look up something. As it turns out Waldo was friends with Raúl Ruiz, Ken Bullock's friend. Small world. He and Ruiz were part of La Cofradía de los Caballeros Antiguo in Chile.
There's always that feeling of life slipping away, out from under you. No matter what you choose to record, or not record it at all. Fleeting memories, not important in and of themselves, a collection of disparate lives during a a brief moment in time. Poetry was our timeline.
This was a June 22 journal entry that was later transcribed, hence the jumbled format. I may untangle it later.
7/9/96
added and revised for clarity
Small memories are flooding the morning's writing, Waldo Rojas and I waltzed to calliope music in the streets of Schoenhaven while Jules Deelder, the Night Mayor of Rotterdam, Simon Vinkenoog and the venerable Judith Hertzberg applaud, both they, and Miroslav Holub shower thin Dutch dimes down upon us like wedding rice, from the stone steps. We collect enough for a beer or two.
I curtsied, saying in my broadest Irish accent, Oh thank you kind sir. Simon, who is Holland's last hippie, asked me to remember him to Larry Ferlinghetti. Is City Lights still there? He asks. Of course, I laugh. I will give him your regards.
June 22
At dinner, I sat across from Seamus Heaney, telling them about my grandfather and Liam Mellows, whom he knew of. Seamus told me a story of going to a Catholic school in northern Ireland, making a Protestant reference. I queried, how did you wind up in a Catholic school? Because I'm Catholic, he replied, once more cracking the cap on the whiskey bottle.
I told Seamus of my grandfather's gun-running and of Eamonn De Valera and Liam Mellows visiting us. He said, You've got a rare bit of history there. And urged me to write it down.
Waldo, who was seated beside me, was silent. Of course, Seamus and I were speaking in English. Sometimes I translated, but I was often neglectful. Georges Lory, Breyten Breytenbach's translator, a cultural attaché who lives in Ghent, sat across from Waldo but they spoke a little, only having French in common. And when they spoke, I was excluded. We had not one common tongue at the table. There's gotta a poem embedded in that thought.
Waldo left early to go upstairs, and I let him go ahead, busy talking with Seamus whom I hadn't seen in over three years and then only briefly.
At Poetry International I started to follow Waldo who had asked me to join him, but he was so distant. Already I could feel him pulling away. I saw him at the credit phone, I could tell by his stance that he was calling his wife, shedding the adulterer's skin. I stopped, hesitated, and doubled back, and grabbed an after dinner coffee with Mairi, Seamus's wife. Letting him go.
I looked over the room of poets, saying my goodbyes too, and what an extraordinary two weeks it has been. This crazy tribe that I belong to. Geert van Istendael (whose real name is at least five names long) and I had a mini Celtic caucus. He is a wild Belgian Celt. By the coffee pot we concluded that the Celtic nation was alive and well and partying in this room.
I let Waldo finish his call, and then followed him up to the Klein Hall, the hospitality room. Many poets were already saying their last goodbyes. And after the final reading of our work, translating Breyten Breytenbach, we gathered in the hallowed room, a cathedral of sorts, where we all had worked so hard, as if afraid to break the spell, though there was a band, and a party in the foyer waiting for us.
Waldo left me alone in the room, and went dancing, probably with Mariolijn, the translator. She seemed quite attached to him on several occasions, perhaps caring more for him, than he did for her. I don't think they were lovers in the past. But one never knows. Not my worry.
We roasted our host, and Poetry International founder Martin Mooij on his retirement etc., toasting the end of an era.
South African poet Dynana Kukama, from Botswana, dragged me onto the table-top to do a Xhosan song that she taught me, I learned it during a drunken evening, a few nights previously. We sang it, replete with the accompanying clicks, and tribal dance movements.A floorshow.
Siya nibonga okuba nathi (2x)
ni phumile makhaya nazoba nathi (2x)
na hlala nathi (to sit)
na xoxa nathi (to talk)
na blega nathi (to love)
na dhlala nathi (to play)
Siya nibonga okuba nathi (2x with a different melody line)
Thank you for what we have
you have left home with us
stay with us
talk to us
love us
play with us
Thank you for what we have
I'm not very good at Bantu click languages (Setswana, or Xhosa - Tswana), it's an interesting trick of the tongue to be able breathe out, sing, and click in the back of the throat, without drowning in saliva, but it was a gift to Martin and we had a good time.
Afterwards people came up to me saying, You have such a lovely voice. You could have another career singing. Or, I didn't know you could move your body like that, such wild dancing. Waldo missed it all, of course.
And I spent the rest of my time talking with Seamus. I gave him a copy of my Poem for Sarah along with some artwork of mine. And he gave me three resounding kisses goodbye in the European fashion. And then one extra big smacker on the lips—for a fellow countryman. Calls me cousin (my grandmother was a Heaney), and says goodbye.
I talked with Mexican poet, Homero Aradjis who brought me up to date on El Grupo de los Cien, The Group of 100, an organization and ecological organization that he had founded. I told him I had seen his name in the SF Chronicle a few months back in connection to logging and the destruction of the monarch butterfly habitat.
Homero said that is very frustrated because he can't seem to get much news coverage. He said that NBC, or CBS and came over and taped him, four hours worth of coverage, and then didn't use any of the footage. His program was bumped US news, something in Iowa.
We brainstormed a bit and I said to catch the US media's attention, you've got to make it relevant to the US, like tying to the butterfly trees of Bolinas. I also mentioned a friend of mine, John Knox, and Earth Island Institute, whom he also knew.
Homero felt that the US media was afraid to report on Mexican ecological issues, and of course, he's completely blacklisted, media-wise in Mexico. We talked about the dangers involved. He said, Sometimes I fear for my life, but I have to believe in the purity of the animals I am trying to protect. The energy of the whales and the butterflies. I offer cosmic energy to protect him to reinstill energy for the cause.
I told Homero I used several of his poems (the Canadian translations), in the classroom to talk about extinction, and unanswerable questions. I also used Neruda's questions. Homero, who is half Greek, said his last name was from the Arabic, his mother is Mexican, his father fled from Tyre, so he is an oddysey of many worlds and epochs.
Eventually Waldo returned, saying, Let's go. But I wanted to dance, and he wanted to walk me home. I knew we weren't to spend the night together as I had hoped, we both had to pack, but I wish he was a bit more out of control. That he'd just let go.
Waldo grumbled that he wasn't into ecology, not like what Homero is doing. I don't think he likes Homero very much. I asked him if he didn't care about ecology, or the extinction of species, etc. He said, No it wasn't that, it was the politics. I said that I admired Homero, and the work he's doing, and if not him, then who? How? What is our real job as poets?
Nota bene: All my conversations with Waldo are in Spanish, so this is a paraphrased translation. It wasn't quite a tiff, but it was a disagreement that fell away when we got to my room. I gave him a souvenir T-shirt, Alcatraz Sleep Team, or something like that.
And he began kissing me on the bed. When he fell back among the pillows with glasses skewed, shirt awry, he looked so defenceless. I realized it was all a façade. I took them from him, and he was helpless before me. I touched him, asking if he wanted me. Si, he said weakly, and we stripped off our clothes, turned off the light, and proceeded to squeak the springs on the narrow twin bed.
Waldo was wildly holding me, grabbing my hair, grunting my name, Mau-rin, Mau-rin, Mau-rin. I burst into tears, realizing that he was trying so hard to be civilized about it all. we had unleashed more than what we had bargained for. He wanted no long drawn out goodbye scenes, but he got it anyway. I wasn't about to be cheated of that.
Waldo is one of those rare man who can get it up a second time, replete with a second orgasm. We were on round two, when poor Herman Berlandt banged on the door, wanting to go to bed (we were roommates). It was more like a comedy of errors, we were caught inflagrante delicto, madly scrambling for our clothes, grabbing all the wrong ones by mistake. Tossing them to each other, And I kept saying, Give us five minutes! Give us five minutes! As poor old Herman grumbled in the hallway.
I answered the door with as much dignity as I could, with my sweater inside out and backwards, wearing little more than it, and my jeans, I couldn't find my underwear. Herman shuffled off to bed grumbling. It was a long night for him. Being stuck out in the corridor while we dallied didn't help.
As I walked Waldo to the elevator, I couldn't believe how calm and dignified he seemed, as if nothing untoward had happened when I opened the door, while I looked fully the part of a wild ravaged woman, my hair was a frothy Medusine mantle of passionate embraces. Does he do this sort of thing often?
Waldo stepped into the elevator facing me, and repeated, No tears, no goodbyes. The mirrored walls of the elevator reflected my face, and my tragic response, so that I could see myself simultaneously as he saw me. For once, I was wildly beautiful, standing barefoot in that hotel hall, with a crushed tuberose dangling from my ear, in the gardenia-scented night.
And Waldo was carefully stepping back into his Parisian mode. I was the wild Celt who stirred his blood one midsummer's eve, but now it was time to leave.Rejoin the world. He did leave me his address. And I did write it down. But I never expected to hear from him again.
Apparently Waldo called at Charles McGeehan's flat a few days ago, now the shoe on the other foot. He leaves his wife in Paris to sneak off and call his lover who waits for him in Amsterdam. But I never received that message that he called me until afterwards. I wonder how he and Charles got on over the phone? Waldo's spoken English is almost nonexistent. And I'm not sure Charles even speaks French. Dutch, yes.
I send my second letter to Waldo yesterday with my new address and number. So far, though Charles gave him my new number, there was no call. Every time the phone downstairs rings, I think it's him. But the upstairs phone remains deathly silent. By tomorrow, or rather today, he should have received my letter. Then round two begins—meaning where do we go from here? Or is there nothing more? Did the calliope music stop?
I am stirring up his life a bit, I think. Perhaps he has gotten too comfortable in his bourgeois existence, teaching the history of history at the Sorbonne. A man dressed in varying shades of grey. In a sense, I'm from his world, the New World, even if he left it in 1973. Waldo is a French citizen having lived in Paris nearly 25 years. That's nearly half of his life, but he still calls himself Chilean.
I had to simultaneously translate a conversationfrom Robert Dorsman (Breyten Breytenbach's translator), to Waldo. Luckily, I knew enough about Waldo to fill in the missing gaps. It was funny, because while I was being Waldo's ad hoc translator, he waited expectantly, trusting me to unlock the veiled the prison of language, as did Robert. Their combined energy focused their attention on me like a laser, as if I possessed a rare thing—with my poor Spanish. I got so nervous, I became tongue-tied. But we were among friends. Not like with Dmitri Prigov.
Several times I had explained and translated something that was said in English to Waldo, but that was in private. This was different, a public forum. I literally was the only other Spanish-speaking person in the entire room.
Of course, they could've used French with another person as an intermediary, so communication wasn't impossible. But I thrived in that moment, I was a linguistic bridge between two people. How many times has it been done for me, the gift of translation? It's not easy to do. And when you get out of synch, you wind up speaking the wrong language to both parties.
More than once, I caught Breyten looking appraisingly over at us, perhaps listening in. At that point. I no longer felt like an imposter, I was truly one of the group and I belong here.
Earlier Waldo and I were at the magazine table, and I was trying to explain something to him, intent on my language skills, how our bodies, and faces move differently in other idioms. When we speak Spanish, we move closer into the circle. In English we are at arms-length. At this point, it was obvious to all, there was more than between us than a passing flirtation.
Breyten's publisher, Francis Galloway, from Durban, came over, and said, You two look like a French painting. And then I wondered how we looked to the others in the room, carrying out a clandestine relationship in a language that only we understood. Is Waldo's wife French? Did I awaken the younger man from South America, and not the Parisian sophistocate?
He says I am O'Brien, Rojas-Serrano, I am Basque, I am Spanish, I am Mapuche Lincoyán, Aracuña (a tribal leader?). He is Chilean, born in in Concepción,
Waldo's father, a university professor, was executed, while he was in Paris giving a reading. The military coup of September 11, 1973 forced him into exile. He never returned to his homeland, and now his mother is dead. What else was there to do but to flee the country of his birth? In this, the Irish blood in him, and the Spanish blood, returned home to Europe, but what of the Indio? In Paris?
Have I, with my wild irish blood, pierced his heart, that poor weakened heart? Every day he lives on the other side of his heart attack, rescued from death, he's not exactly on borrowed time, but has a revitalized awareness of time, who he is, and where he is going.
One of the few things he said to me in English was, I don't care about money. In contrast to what? Reviewing his life? Or a general statement. And applecart I disrupted? I wonder if he will write of me. Or remember me. He gives me a signed copy of his book, Poesía continua. Yes, it does.
Another dream fragment comes resurfacing as I write these lines, I dreamed about my writing these very same lines, and analyzing his character etc. or having another chance to compare himself to my study of him. There is always more to come, contrary to what we might think. And I remember telling him of the dreams, and he asked, How can you tell the dreams and reality apart? Perhaps the dream is real and reality is just the dream.
In Neruda's Book of Questions, the first page I opened to was:
42
Who was she who made love to you
in your dream, while you slept?
Where do the things in dreams go?
Do they pass to the dreams of others?
And does the father who lives in your dreams
die again when you awaken?
In dreams, do plants blossom
and their solemn fruit ripening?
Quien era aquella que te amo
en el sueño, cuando dormias?
Donde van las cosas del sueño?
Se van al sueno de los otros?
Y el padre que vive en los sueños
vuelve a morir cuando despiertas?
Florecen las plantas del sueño
y maduran sus graves frutos?
tr. William O'Daly, 1991
Copper Canyon Press
And I still haven't written about Breyten Breytenbach, and his praise for me, and my work. I didn't know Afrikaans, so I transliterated his work, and he said it was more spot on, that what the eminent translators, including Miroslav Holub, and Edoardo Sanguineti, came up with, how, when he hugged me goodbye, I blushed like a schoolgirl.
Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove and I were definitely on the outskirts of that eminent circle, as none of us speak Afrikaans. So we coffee-klatched it a bit. However, I was determined to get something and treated it like a CPITS writing assignment, Juan Felipe Herrera once gave me making fake translations of Rilke. Francis Galloway, of Van Schaik Publishers, South Africa, wanted to use my translations in an upcoming collection of Breytenbach's.
Nor have I recorded Zein al-Abidine Fouad's extraordinary story working among the outcast women of Egypt who worked in the garbage pits, and how he brought guerilla theater to them, and changed a society. I was so caught up in living in within the moment, I never got a chance to record the event itself. My plate was so full so to speak. Perhaps photos will help to jog my memory, later, and give me reason to write about the many poets I met.
I also have a cryptic note about Irish short story writer, Seán Ó Faoláin, who died in 1991, and Homero Aradjis, I don't know what it means. Forever lost. Perhaps Seamus was urging me to read his work about the Easter Uprising. Or perhaps Homero was telling me to look up something. As it turns out Waldo was friends with Raúl Ruiz, Ken Bullock's friend. Small world. He and Ruiz were part of La Cofradía de los Caballeros Antiguo in Chile.
There's always that feeling of life slipping away, out from under you. No matter what you choose to record, or not record it at all. Fleeting memories, not important in and of themselves, a collection of disparate lives during a a brief moment in time. Poetry was our timeline.
This was a June 22 journal entry that was later transcribed, hence the jumbled format. I may untangle it later.
7/9/96
added and revised for clarity
Monday, July 8, 1996
Amsterdam, journal: seeking light 7/8
Yesterday I met with Paul Evans at the Café Winkler, but it was closed and I was late, having miscalculated the distance. I am sitting in the sun on court Prinsenstraat, having left my new address with Marcel Koops. I was going to invite him to dinner last night, but there was no answer. So I left a message with Vins as well.
Paul was more entertaining, he got my new number from Charles McGeehan. And so we met up yesterday afternoon. I was so happy to see him that I'm feeling a bit scandalized, especially since I took a couple of days to write a long passionate letter to Waldo, half in Spanish, my first Spanish love letter, inviting him to come visit. But hey, he's married and life goes on in the streets of Amsterdam. I certainly prefer the views of Westerpaark and the Jordaan to the industrial area where I now live.
Paul and I went out to the Soundgarden, and he rode me on the back of his bicycle, sidesaddle. I found his face haunting me last night. The way he looks at me so intently is a bit unnerving. His eyes follow me, even in sleep.
Last night I banished his image from my eyes, saying, I don't want to fall in love with a poor young Welsh poet and translator living on the dole in Amsterdam. I'm trying to strike the matronly older sister approach, and nothing untoward has happened. I've only met him three times, but somehow we're we've covered a lot of ground.
And what of Waldo Rojas, snug in his petit bourgeois existence in Paris with the wife and position at the Sorbonne. A man not crazy in love enough to come when I call, for what I want is a man crazy enough to chase me through Europe, or at least through the streets of Amsterdam.
The glass sausage tourist boats patrol the canals, the narrow-eyed tourists categorize with commercial eyes, the inner vulva of the city. They've come to the right place to spend their guilders. A glass boat with a banquet table set with shining crystal and silver amid the snowfields of Irish linen, and where are the guests? The menu: tourists under glass.
Paul and I sit on Marnixkade in the Jordaan district, watching the ducks and mudhens. He notes that I'm hyperactive. And I tell him there are times when I break down and don't even answer the phone. He doesn't know it's because I'm nervous, afraid of the silence that fall between us like an ax to sever this tenuous connection, afraid of where it might go, afraid of where it might go. Foolish, and afraid of being vulnerable.
I sent on a canal bench where no one knows me, writing on the absurdities of love, knowing full well that Edwin Drummond might be waiting for me upon my return, and I'm not sure if I want him. Second time around? I don't think so.
The woman at the petticoat shop lets me have a turtleneck sweater, a scarf and two antique nighties for only 15 guilders because I'm such a good customer. The shawl perfectly matches my jacket. I bought it there in 1993 and she actually recognized it. It's a cold summer here this year, and I want my longjohns to sit in the sun that does not warm the skin.
Paul has lived here for six years, when he isn't mooning over an ex-girlfriend or two. Am I to be added to that list?
As for poetry, he is a purist, having read the modern poets. He can quote at length any poem. And he writes and measured beats, he knows the syllabic structure, while I can't even diagram a line, as he so aptly notes. He queries me how can you write in iambics when you don't even know how to measure a line?
I answer, I physically walk my poetry, I speak English, my body knows the rhythm of language.
He said, I wanted to know what's happening first, that's why I studied structure. Of course, structure is nothing without the emotion of the poem. He pays very careful attention to his craft, his poems are beautiful, and they take my breath away.
I tell him gull is a Cornish word and we have a Celtaholic attack, deciding that everyone who writes poetry is a Celt, regardless of their racial background. I tell him that poet is a maker of truth in the various Celtic languages, but it means liar in the Germanic languages. There you have it.
We talk of prosody and whether or not it's possible to lie within a poem. Sometimes the lie within a poem points to a greater truth. We don't mean the lie within the poem is a lie, but the construct of a poem itself is a lie. In this manner, three hours pass, what's to be the outcome?
We make tentative plans to meet at the Winston kingdom tonight. He's to make a chapbook of the readers to be out in a fortnight. And I am caught up in his accent, unfamiliar, but not quite, and the words that I might not use. He says I hee-ard and I answer I usen't to, or amn't I. Our little Celtic works pepper the English syntax of the enemy.
Paul grew up in a village of 8000, in the Rhondda Valley, a former coal mining valley in Wales, and spent most of his time hill-walking in the forests and vales of Wales, somewhat like me. I still live in the country, while he has traded the Welsh countryside for the low lands, low.
I tell him about Irish mythology, and he tells me of Gaulish history, how Caesar slaughtered an entire Helvetii tribe. Men, women, children, 40,000 of them, and later, another 80,000. We agree that the Roman Celtic genocide predates the English attempts.
Paul talks about the first Gaulish group in Britain, the ginger-haired Goidelic speakers. I counter with the Celt-Iberian migrations. And we we argue over P Celtic and Q Celtic languages.
I hold out my long hair, saying, Look at us, we could pass for cousins in a policeline. We're dark-haired Celts, but our hair, look at our hair, it's fire red in the sunlight, even though it's dark. He confesses to having an Irish grandmother. I say aha. I have many ginger-haired cousins.
I ask, What does this all mean, the British are quick to appropriate us if we become famous. Take Joyce, Francis Bacon, or even Samuel Beckett—which leads us on a lively chase to Catullus and Virgil. Celts writing in the tongue of the oppressors.
This is where the life of all poets as being Celts comes in, he says. I ask if I'm born in the US, and you're born in Wales, and if we become known as writers in Amsterdam, who will claim us, the British, the Dutch? To whom to whom do we belong to and owe allegiance, as poets. Ancestry and nationality. We are poets of the world.
I walk home along Prinsengracht observing the beautiful light. When I came upon the Amstel River and the Magere Brug, the skinny bridge made famous by Van Gogh, on Kerkstraat, I thought to myself, you have to earn this view to really appreciate it, and walking this far I really did earn the view. My payment was exquisite light trapped on water.
And I thought to myself as I peered down Utrechtstraat, Vins is right, this city does have its hold upon me. What does it mean? I recognize the buildings and the light from my dreams all right, this mythical city, I dreamed of it long before I ever visited here. Was I a Sephardic Jewish refugee hidden here in a past life, a factory worker, or a street worker? Poet.
Waldo calls me at Charles' house, and I'm surprised to hear the news.
Sunday, July 7, 1996
Amsterdam Journal: Sarphatistraat 7/7
7/7 1996 Amsterdam, Sarphatistraat
Ah, what I've always dreamed about, a balcony with full morning sun. Sunday morning, little traffic. A sea of rucksacks and well-wheeled luggage clatters over the cobblestones like the hooves of cart horses. The next wave of tourists from Japan has arrived.
Ah, what I've always dreamed about, a balcony with full morning sun. Sunday morning, little traffic. A sea of rucksacks and well-wheeled luggage clatters over the cobblestones like the hooves of cart horses. The next wave of tourists from Japan has arrived.
I'm house/cat-sitting at Dave Hansen's flat, a few doors down from Adam and Eve Avenue on the F17 tram line, a low-budget hotel, of course.
First sunny day in Amsterdam. What to do?
Somewhere someone is whistling a Nat King Cole song, a full deep-throated whistle. Okay to listen to outdoors that is. Not like Herman Berlant's thin reedy trill that drives me crazy within seconds. On my own, shall I wander through this wonderland alone? Play Misty for Me becomes my instructions for the day. After a shower, I find the sun has nearly abandoned me again.
I was awaken by cramps at 7 AM, not enough sleep. I worked on a letter to Waldo Rojas in Spanish most of the night. It takes so long to write a letter in a language not my own, when I have to look up every fifth word for spelling.
Herman commented about a woman who learned in several languages by having lovers from different countries.Yes, well, one is motivated in a different way than in school.
As I mended my flowered dress, I got my first phone call from a Welsh poet Paul Evans, wanting to go out for coffee at the Café Winkler at 2 PM. I'm going mad from sirens and trams, the incessant city noises are so irritating. Sarphatistraat, at the intersection of three different tramlines is noisy. And the woodpigeons are eating the cat food.
At Charles McGeehan's house, it was quiet, but living in that chaos was more than I could bear. I am glad to be out of that place.
Sunshine to the east, Stornes clouds to the west. Seagulls over the Amstel River portend a storm, or so they say. Paul tells me that gull is a Cornish word. His lilt is so different than the Irish, but definitely related. He didn't grow up speaking Welsh and so he's not got all the cadence.
A sudden squall turns the wheel of the day into night.
Sunday, June 30, 1996
Poetry International article, Audacious tongues
AUDACIOUS TONGUES: THE HEART OF TRANSLATION
Poetry is what gets lost in translation
—Robert Frost
As you die/ you meet the light/ of before creation
—Bert Schierbeek
“Sometimes poetry is literally a matter of life and death,” said Martin Mooij, founder and shy godfather of Poetry International in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. A central focus of the 27-year-old literary organization is to liberate poets incarcerated by oppressive governments due to his or her literary work. The annual Poetry International Award “to distinguish an imprisoned poet, was established in 1979 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Poetry International,” said Mooij.
At the 1996 festival, exiled South African writer and political prisoner Breyten Breytenbach, who received the Poetry International Award in 1981, was also the recipient of this year’s translation Vertaalproject where world-class poets participating in the festival translate a selected poet during the annual two-week event. Breytenbach is the only poet to receive both honors.
Like many of the poets chosen for the Poetry International Award, Breytenbach lives in exile, borderless, without a country, having only his mother tongue to sustain the roots of his art and culture. We began our translation workshop honoring those imprisoned poets—Breytenbach painting the name of the latest recipient of the 18th Poetry International Award, Iraqi poet, Adnam Abbas Salman al-Sayegh, on the Poetry Wall mural on the corner of Niewe Binnenweg and Gaffelstraat in Rotterdam. It is hoped he’ll be released from prison to collect his award.
Executive director Mooij explained, “The Poetry International Award began as a fluke. I'd published some Turkish children's books, and I mentioned the name of an imprisoned poet, Nevzat Çelik.” Mooij said he was merely wondering aloud what had happened to the Turkish poet. Surveying Kruisplein from the squat, modern post-war De Doelen building in Rotterdam, Mooij explained, “The editor promised to write to a government official, and in 1987. . . the poet was set free!”
Mooij continued, “We cooperate closely with PEN International, and the Index on Censorship.” Without the political pressure and media exposure wielded under the auspices of the Poetry International Award, the voices of world-class poets might not be with us today—
Poetry is what gets lost in translation
—Robert Frost
As you die/ you meet the light/ of before creation
—Bert Schierbeek
“Sometimes poetry is literally a matter of life and death,” said Martin Mooij, founder and shy godfather of Poetry International in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. A central focus of the 27-year-old literary organization is to liberate poets incarcerated by oppressive governments due to his or her literary work. The annual Poetry International Award “to distinguish an imprisoned poet, was established in 1979 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Poetry International,” said Mooij.
At the 1996 festival, exiled South African writer and political prisoner Breyten Breytenbach, who received the Poetry International Award in 1981, was also the recipient of this year’s translation Vertaalproject where world-class poets participating in the festival translate a selected poet during the annual two-week event. Breytenbach is the only poet to receive both honors.
Like many of the poets chosen for the Poetry International Award, Breytenbach lives in exile, borderless, without a country, having only his mother tongue to sustain the roots of his art and culture. We began our translation workshop honoring those imprisoned poets—Breytenbach painting the name of the latest recipient of the 18th Poetry International Award, Iraqi poet, Adnam Abbas Salman al-Sayegh, on the Poetry Wall mural on the corner of Niewe Binnenweg and Gaffelstraat in Rotterdam. It is hoped he’ll be released from prison to collect his award.
Executive director Mooij explained, “The Poetry International Award began as a fluke. I'd published some Turkish children's books, and I mentioned the name of an imprisoned poet, Nevzat Çelik.” Mooij said he was merely wondering aloud what had happened to the Turkish poet. Surveying Kruisplein from the squat, modern post-war De Doelen building in Rotterdam, Mooij explained, “The editor promised to write to a government official, and in 1987. . . the poet was set free!”
Mooij continued, “We cooperate closely with PEN International, and the Index on Censorship.” Without the political pressure and media exposure wielded under the auspices of the Poetry International Award, the voices of world-class poets might not be with us today—
Friday, June 21, 1996
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